Volleyball Coaching Life-The First Day

In the locker room…

There are shrieks of greeting the familiar

There are the silences of greeting the unfamiliar

Music leak from earpods, in sych with the players heartbeats and feeding the butterflies in their stomachs.

Brand new kneepads liberated from the wrappings, knowing that smell will never come back after the first practice.

Socks are put on with care with the memories of long ago blisters.

Hair is tied back into a tight and practical ponytail.

Arm sleeves and wrist bands are placed just so.

Fingers are taped for maximum karma.

Shoes are tied and retied, never reaching the sweet spot between too tight and not tight enough.

Newbies have eyes like saucers, absorbing the new. Fearing the worst, hoping for the best.

Veterans watching the newbies, reading them.

Observing the strength, looking for cracks and the light that inevitably shines through them.

The freshmen taking deep breaths.

The seniors also taking deep breaths.

Both are embarking on a new path.

One anticipating and dreading the first.

One anticipating and dreading the last.

In the gym…

Coaches huddle and debate.

Reviewing the practice plans that have been bled, sweated, and cried over. Its content sear indelibly in their minds.

Plans that started as a thought on a coffee shop napkin and evolved into something with a logic and chronology all its own.

Plans that had extracted a pound of flesh from each coach.

Managers are sweeping the floor for the hundredth time because the previous 99 times were just not good enough.

Nets are tightened to the point of breaking.

Air compressors are whining their distinctive tone, filling each volleyball to a rock-hard consistency.

Pressures are checked and rechecked.

Water stations are filled, complete, and ready.

Silent sentinels for what is to come. Good and bad.

It is the start of the Fall volleyball season, for the tiniest tots to the most seasoned and grizzled collegians, and everyone in between.

No skeptics or cynics are allowed in the gym.

Everyone is 0-0.

Everyone has the chance to go undefeated.

Everyone has the chance to go winless.

And everything in between.

Everyone believes.

Coaches hope for progress and revelation.

Player hope for progress and revelation.

Never mind the drama, the challenges, the practices, the matches, the conflicts.

Always believing in becoming and being the best.

As the players enter the gym…

Some charge in excitedly.

Some saunter in nonchalantly.

Some creep in hesitantly.

Some enter while taking such deep breath that they might pass out.

The sound of chatter is loud, energetic, fearful, hopeful, equanimous, and everything else.

Coaches watch their teams…

They feel their own butterflies grow into Mothra.

“This is it,” they think.

This is us, from now until the end of the season.

We will learn together.

We will suffer together.

We will exult together.

We will love together.

We will bicker together.

We will live and die together.

Coaches watching each other.

Players watching the coaches.

Coaches and players bound together in anticipating and dreading of the unknown.

Then it is time. One coach breaks out of their trance.

The whistle blows…

Book Review-The Book of Joe By Joe Maddon and Tom Verducci

Sports memoirs fall into many general categories, this one however, tries to fit into too many categories at once. As I read the book, there are times when it feels like it is trying too much, and then there are times when it hits the right spot at the right time. I don’t know whether to ascribe the success of the book to holding my attention to Joe Maddon’s story or to Tom Verducci’s writing and organization. Regardless, I enjoyed the book.

Joe Maddon became famous first as the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, a miracle worker who stopped the downward spiral of the team’s fortunes using his own unique philosophy. He reached the pinnacle of a major league manager when he managed the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series, the first and only one in 108 years. But he was unceremoniously replaced a few years later because he would not submit to front office interference. He returned to his roots, the California Angels, as manager, but he lasted only a few more seasons as the landscape of baseball managing changed completely. It is a stunning lesson in how quickly the center of gravity in professional sports management shifts and renders the celebrated expendable.

The Book of Joe tries to be a memoir first, it provides reminiscences of the meaningful factors in Joe Maddon’s life; it is also organized in chapters that are titled with the Maddonisms, those familiar sayings that made Maddon famous, which are then structured into a business how-to book; finally, it tries to be a reportage of how the Moneyball mindset, which had pervaded major league sports, has gone so far in the other direction, thereby cheating us of the essential elements of the reasons why we love sports. The last point is the slow developing theme that becomes the focus showing us the reason why Joe Maddon is no longer managing in the MLB. The book makes it clear that this situation is the epitome of irony since Maddon was one of the very first rebels who used and relied on statistical analysis for his decision making. The accounts of why and where he tends to rely on statistics is interesting to me, as I have my own opinions about the usage of statistics. I am not a luddite to the ways of statistical data, but as an engineer who has had to use statistical process control and the six sigma methods, I know where the limitations are when applying statistics to endeavors which are intimately coupled with human decisions, such as sports.

The threefold intent of the book is something that is very difficult to pull off. While I felt that the stories of Joe Maddon’s upbringing and his experiences within baseball were interesting, I also felt that some of the stories seemed forced because the authors were trying to wedge the stories into the other two intentions: as lessons and as means of explaining why he acted and reacted to the quant dominated front office regimes. I will admit that I was most interested in getting into Maddon’s head and trying to determine the magic of his managing successes. The book showed a significant part of the behind the curtains aspects of his decision making. I also appreciated Maddon’s loyalty to those who had shaped his insights and his instincts as a manager. He delved into the personas who had influenced his growth as a manager; most importantly, he was clear in giving us the reason’s why they had such influence over his experiences and how he uses those lessons on a daily basis in his managerial life.

It is his statement of his philosophy through the chapter titles that captured my interest the most. His ideas, while not entirely original, have been presented in a cogent and matter of fact manner; indeed, I have been inspired to write some articles on Maddon’s themes.

Not all the chapters are gems, but they are interesting enough to  keep me interested as I learned new ideas as well as being reminded of what I had known previously; that was worth the price of the book.

The underlying theme throughout the book is an interesting discussion of the reality in sports. Ever since the publication of Michael Lewis Money Ball ;  coaches and managers, both professional and amateur, have been inspired to change the way they coach and manage, often  with an urgency to use statistics to improve their decisions; those old guard who based their decision making on intuitions and gut feel have been displaced by quants or stat heads, the resulting revolution has swung the pendulum completely to the other end of the spectrum, where humanity and experiences has been relegated to the scrap heap and all the decision makers are drinking the Moneyball kool-aid. Indeed, there is nothing more dogmatic and inflexible as someone who was at one time on the outside, someone who was an innovator and had original ideas. So it is that all humanity and experience have been denigrated to the point of extinction in coaching and managing.

Maddon and Verducci use Maddon’s story to illustrate that point. Whereas Maddon was an early adopter and innovator in using statistics, the expanded front office of today have decided to justify the expenses of their own existence. Coaching and managing has become a top-down exercise in ego for the general manager. The crux of the problem is that statistics do not capture human nature nor the uncertainties that are a large essential part of sports. The  reliance on just statistics to make decisions is as foolhardy and deceptive,  as much as just using gut feels and intuitions.

As Dr. Edward Deming, one of the foremost proponents of statistics in manufacturing stated in point 11 of his 14 points for Total Quality Management: Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management. (American Society of Quality-Deming's 14 Points 2023) Management needs to understand that players are not cattle, and each individual player responds differently from someone else. This is the artistry of coaching and managing, being able to understand the players and the games artfully. Maddon’s story of how the front office dictated his choices in using the pitchers and bullpen sound staggeringly and sadly like managing by quota that is practiced in the global industry. I gained quite a bit of insight from this book, as I am a coach, I read the book with the intention of juxtaposing my own coaching experiences with how Maddon managed the various baseball teams in his career, this practice made me think about the dynamics of decision making that is involved in coaching and the pitfalls of putting my thought process on auto pilot or disengaging my own ability to think critically and feeling comfortable in a rut. The best recommendation I can make about The Book of Joe is that I will continually be consulting with the lessons from the book for a long time. This is saying quite a bit about a former Cubs manager for someone who is a Cardinals fan.

References

American Society of Quality-Deming's 14 Points. 2023. https://asq.org/quality-resources/total-quality-management/deming-points (accessed August 10, 2023).