Volleyball Fan Life-What Does Volleyball Do Now?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/sports/ncaabasketball/womens-final-four-tv-deal.html?unlocked_article_code=oWUwHFfI_nODWDgv5bkfPoInnLqIT6bS6Y1SRUY_VGzpBpDi6KJtbueEKWDJXFM-Php4WYe_Yupw0vpNr7YCgvzUQru0HaGcKrjjIH7HpgTTUD0GcwY5h1UIA0Xo5pMABCBQkQB4OUmXeYM2JcGDG7J48g_L3DKvrw1lJ6LncVX11-U-sDni9E2GAZ1ALGy_iqwfmmMoxRQ5FqiCIGIXjVLxy01YlRq2qXx2euBRDJT3W4UeEsQIhD-ZNCV9Z8wU_Yrt0_ZNRoJzBOORGWl1EcHT79yX2hUakyGfZFmvSTegF3byJSknZ349G8y4_tdA-o8WLCI3oyUBzyhbeRz5-Tlm8GpktlCy5-SD98hGIyw&smid=url-share

Sorry for the long link. It is a gift link to a New York Times article titled: Women’s Sports Are Raking in Investments. The Final Four Shows Why. Posted on the Sunday of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Finals between LSU and Iowa.

I read the article with excitement, a bit of jealousy, and more than a little melancholy. As the author gushes about Women’s College Basketball’s moment of attention, he predicts a healthy and lucrative future for the sport. Excitement because this is another step towards the acceptance of women’s sports. Jealousy because I kept thinking: why not volleyball? I am very biased, but I think women’s volleyball is a much more exciting game than women’s basketball. Melancholy because I remember all the time, effort, and resources that we have poured into finding that moment for volleyball and it is still relegated to second class citizenry.

Thinking about the differences between women’s basketball and volleyball, I made a list. It is by no means comprehensive.

What women’s basketball has in its favor, in no order, other than the bullets came into my mind extemporaneously:

·       At this moment is WBB history, the college game is exciting, with exciting teams, with transcendent stars populating both the coaching and playing ranks. The NIL deals are also helping the collegiate stars become more popular.

o   Collegiate volleyball players are also beneficiaries of the NIL. What I don’t know are the actual numbers: the amount of money and the percentage of the total number of players who are benefiting from the NIL. How significant are the numbers for both categories?

·       WBB has a viable professional league. As the article make clear,

o   it is backed by the mighty NBA. Indeed, the teams were initially co-located and owned by the NBA franchise.

o   it had a less than auspicious start, like most startups,

o   it gives women’s basketball players a way to play in the US, even though many still play overseas to pay the bills,

·       WBB plays in the Winter.

o   In competition with MBB, but far away from the College Football juggernaut,

·       WBB can be directly compared with MBB, a juggernaut in its own right.

o   Which has a one-on-one comparison for Title IX purposes, i.e. much more visible. For example, when the Oregon basketball player Sedona Prince called out the NCAA for the paltry weight room allotted the women’s tournament, it focused attention on the NCAA when everyone is covering the parallel men’s tournament. No one likes to be called out publicly and changes were studied and implemented.

·       There are certainly rules variations for the collegiate, US Basketball, and FIBA rules. I am not an expert, but my observation is that the variations are relatively minor as compared to the volleyball rules variations.

What does volleyball have in its favor:

·       We have three professional leagues:

o   Athletes Unlimited, a known quantity, with an organizational structure that asks the fans to adapt to their rules. This structure is very player centric, but it also does not reward loyalty to teams.

o   League One Volleyball (LOVB), a nascent league. The Salient difference is that the franchises are partnered or own outright junior volleyball clubs, ostensibly to leverage the junior volleyball bonanza with the professional teams.

o   Professional Volleyball League (PVL), yet another nascent league, based more on the traditional structure of the sports league. Contrary to the other two leagues the teams are owned by independent owners.

·       Many universities make women’s volleyball the flagship Fall women’s sport, focusing campus attention on the sport.

·       USA Volleyball National Team won its first gold medal in the 2020 Olympic games, after many years of ups and downs.

In this time of WCBB upsurge, I am reminded of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The understanding that this was the moment for the United States to put women’s sports squarely in the middle of the general public’s radar screen. Of the major team sports, basketball, softball, and soccer leveraged their medals into lucrative opportunities, and more importantly, attention. Twenty seven years later some of those sports are still benefitting for their efforts for relevance in the American sporting landscape, as the article makes clear. Pro leagues were started and they went through their evolution, with differing successes, living though the ebb ad flow of anything new.

We have focused a lot of attention on the establishment of a professional volleyball league. The history of professional volleyball leagues is well documented, Indeed, one hopes that the founders of the three professional leagues have studied the history and learned from the past. Given the histories of the professional leagues in the other sports, it makes me wonder about how important having a professional leagues can help a sport gaining traction in the minds of the general public. The benefit of a local pro league is self-explanatory:

·       It gives collegiate players a chance to stay home and play, if not make a sustainable living.

o   The question is, would the domesticate league help the upper echelon players improve themselves in preparation for the international game?

o   If the answer to the previous question is no, would there be a segmentation of players where those who have hopes of playing for the national team play overseas only?

o   Referencing the recent interviews with American professional volleyball players on VolleyballMag.com, life in a foreign country, working in a foreign country is not homogenously grand, there are many obstacles and challenges.

o   Can the players make a living without having to go overseas to make a sustainable living? Will the domesticate league just be a supplement to their overseas salary?

·       It will put the sport of volleyball in center, we hope, of the very cluttered sports landscape.

o   We have also been focused on the idea of televising the matches as the springboard to popularity. Yet, that belief also minimizes the number of broadcast technologies available and the various modes of payment for access to the broadcast. The broadcast media has undergone a massive sea change

§  Will people watch?

§  How often will people watch?

§  Will people watch consistently?

§  Are people willing to pay for the programming. Many paid for the streaming services during the Olympics and European seasons, are they willing to pay for access to the domestic league? How much?

·       The real question is: whether there is a causal relationship between having a professional league and the popularity of a sport? Or is it just a correlational relationship?

o   Soccer and volleyball are the most popular sports for junior club sports. But neither has enjoyed the kind of moment that basketball is enjoying outside of the Olympic quadrennials, and for soccer, the Women’s World Cup quadrennials.

o   I am not saying that we should not pursue the goal of fielding a stable and sustainable domestic professional league. What I question is whether we are using the Field of Dreams fantasy as reality: Will they come if we built it?

We can look upon this explosive moment of popularity for WCBB for lessons and try to spot trends, which is the wont of all humans: make connections, draw analogies, create powerful metaphors. But what kind of connections, analogies, and metaphors? How real are they? Or are we just indulging in wishful thinking without any tangible and hopeful truths to back up our conjectures?

The title of this shallow exploration is What Does Volleyball Do Now? What can we do? This WCBB moment just made the Women’s Collegiate basketball the 800-pound gorilla in the room. What is volleyball’s game plan? What is our response to this challenge? Is there a cohesive element to volleyball organizations? Or are the independent volleyball entities dallying around with internecine childhood games?

We had a possible transcendent moment, when the USA National Team won the gold in 2021, with a courageous and improbable performance. Yet I did not see a concerted effort to leverage that gold medal to promote the sport to the public. We had legitimate stars on that squad to promote the sport: Jordan Larson, Jordan Thompson, Annie Drews, etc. But outside of a few immediate post-Olympic events, silence. Yet another missed opportunity, in my humble opinion. One can use the pandemic as an excuse: the NGB’s financial situation post pandemic was challenging, the fear of the spread of COVID was still palpable. But they also held an Olympics under the same conditions. In recent years, the USAV has turned their board makeup towards the sports business end of corporate governance, in the hopes of leveraging that know-how in turning this Titanic around. And yet.

I am hoping that this can motivate discussions amongst those of us who love the sport and have put in many years of work and faith towards advancing the sport. Contrary to my initial assertion that the successes of the WCBB is an 800 pound gorilla in the women’s sporting space, I hope that this is a chance for volleyball fans and entities to coalesce around our sport and take on this challenge. Inside the box, outside the box, doing away with the box, but always thinking critically and working together.

What does volleyball do now?

 

 

 

Volleyball Coaching Life-Watching the Women’s CBB Final 4

 I don't usually watch the NCAA Women's Basketball Final Four. I watched the Iowa Vs South Carolina game mainly because of the publicity that Caitlin Clark and the South Carolina Gamecocks have garnered for the tournament. Both have brought the game to an excellence that is remarkable; it was a well-played and hard-fought battle.

But it is what happened after the game that made me think. I first thought about the difference I observed because of the women centered leadership and the difference that it made how I perceived the game. Caitlin Clark had a 41 point night, and she had a hand in all of her team's points in the fourth quarter, whether as points scored or as an assist. Her play and the way her game flowed were eye opening and she certainly deserved all the accolades that she is getting and will get in the future. Yet, when she was interviewed by  Holly Rowe of ESPN, she happily deflected the attention that Rowe tried to focus on her individual accomplishments to her teammates. She framed the night in a way that any coach wants to hear from their players and she did it naturally; no false modesty and no pretentions. She emphasized that the success of the team came from her team; they seem like, first and foremost, a team that loved each other unconditionally and they lived and died as a team. Holly Rowe, to her great credit, did not pursue her original line of questions.

As for Dawn Staley, she was obviously disappointed. Her team was the defending national champion, and they had a 42 game-winning streak. She is a great coach and trains her team to play at a very high level. South Carolina also has a team ethos for success, they played  and sacrificed for each other. They just ran into a buzzsaw that's named Iowa. The remarkable thing about Coach Staley’s responses was that she did not flinch when faced with the questions, she did delve into what went wrong; reporters had to ask, because even with South Carolina’s body of work, the reporters had to ask what went wrong. Coach Staley answered those questions, but she also told the press that she had to get back into the locker room because she had to go take care of her team, talk to those individuals who will no longer for the South Carolina Gamecocks because their time with the team is has run out. This is something that we don't hear too much of in sports. Post game press conferences focus on what the teams did or did not do, and on their successes and mistakes. But her focus, even at the end of a loss, was on her players. It was vital to her  to rush away to address her player’s mental welfare post loss ahead of everything else.

I am very sure that most coaches do go through that process internally. I am sure that there are many great coaches who think line Coach Staley. Very few think in terms of these players who were just becoming adults and how they were handling what might be the biggest and most public failure in their lives up to this point. Even if it seems natural to only focus on the failure, is that the right thing to do? Should we not be more concerned about the human beings that we are coaching rather than the results? Collegiate sports are highly competitive, obviously, especially revenue generating sports. The reality is highly competitive and highly volatile for the coaches and their jobs. For a coach to say right now my main concern is my players, especially in that arena with that amount of attention, that is remarkable to me.

The two observations seem to align  with the trite saying: women bond to battle while men battle to bond; that the relationships between players and coaches plays a more significant role in the successes of the teams than we are led to believe. Although the reason I believe the saying is trite is because it is so true. The relationship between players and coaches is a large part of the bonding. It is a natural part of the team experience to build that symbiotic relationship for athletes and coaches. The process of creating a team ethos is an infinitely iterative process of using competition to build relationships and conversely, building relationships to foster competition. In the aftermath of Title IX, I believe that the divide employed by that saying has eroded away and the two conditional statements has become a single biconditional statement which affects everyone: people battle to bond and bond to battle.  

Returning to my original thought: were the two observations I perceived an example of the difference women leadership can make? I don’t know. In my experience with very limited data and considering my completely subjective observations, I believe there is something to it. Although I have no tangible proof.

Consider a broader scope of inquiry, is it possible that the difference in the team culture cultivated by the coaches is the reason for the successes of their teams? Is the difference due to the fact that we have coaches who are more empathetic?

Empathy, as the ability to actually feel what another person is feeling — literally “walk a mile in their shoes” — it goes beyond sympathy, which is  a simple expression of concern for another person’s misfortune.

Even though I have known empathetic men coaches and completely unempathetic women coaches; they are small samples which offers counterexamples to the generalization about men and women. Do those counterexamples completely negate the original hypothesis that women leadership is the difference in what I perceived? I don’t know. I do know that I want to believe in my original hypothesis.

Is empathy a salient characteristic of teams that are led by women, as the head coach of Iowa is also a woman? Is it that empathetic culture which explains how Caitlin Clark is so team oriented? Or is it that she was so empathetic that she thrives in a familiar and welcoming culture? Which raises another question: is the team culture a necessary part of winning? Or turning that question around: is winning a fortunate byproduct of building an empathetic human centered culture?

Winning and losing is the basis of all sporting activities. Coaches do all that they can to prepare the players, they teach and prepare them for the necessary requirements to win tactically, technically, strategically, and physically. Should they also do so personally? Coaches absolutely want to win, but should they put their personal relationship, their mutual trust with their players in the competitive context? Should the coach-player relationship be transactive? Is winning the driving force for their relationship with their players or their teams?

I have seen many coach-player relationships become something that is transactional: I will build a personal relationship with you, if and only if, you do as I say and help us win; with winning taking precedence over the personal relationship. This is my personal observation over years of coaching. I have seen that transactional relationship happen with junior club coaches, with high school coaches, and with college coaches. My caveat is that my perception is exactly that, perceptions; I am not privy to the behind-the-scenes relationships between players and coaches, I can only surmise through my own observations, all based on decisions made and without context.

I have observed coaches make decisions for the benefit of their team results rather than what is best for the player.  Is that the right approach? Is that the wrong approach? For the team? For the individuals?

In terms of my observations of Caitlin Clark and Dawn Staley, we are essentially asking the which came first, the chicken or the egg question: is winning a function of established culture? Or is culture a function of winning? In the short term, do you, as a coach, do what is best for your culture and your relationships with your players and expect success? Or do you lead the team to get the best results at that moment and hope the culture and relationships thrive?

Just some extemporaneous wanderings.