Volleyball Coaching Life-On Form

An ongoing debate on the importance of form in coaching volleyball caught my attention. Form is something that is emphasized by many coaches, most of them from the traditional school of thought. Their reasoning for emphasizing form is based on the belief that being able to unconsciously hold one’s form will benefit the player while unconsciously performing the skill. The belief is that the proper form is important because the form puts the body in the best position to perform the skill.

Form came about in sports through direct result feedback. People created the idea of form through years of playing experience, mentally correlating the form with which they performed the skills with the desired results. These forms were amended and corrected over the years after the physiological and kinesthetics sciences were used to debunk myths and create new forms. Obviously, we are still in that process. 

Those who do not believe in form points to the fact that the perfect form does not exist, that every single play is a new and different situation, so the practice of miming a canonical form is not generally transferable to game action since the practicing of form relies on repetitions without performing the entire skill continuously. They also believe the teaching of  form requires one to isolates discrete snapshots of continuous sequences of movements that should be linked together; another objection is that form will not help the player make decisions during game play.

Both camps seem to agree that repetitions are the key, but with one emphasizing static, predestined movements and the other emphasizing dynamic, random movements as the means to accruing repetitions. One thinks that many reps with the same form will translate to dynamic and effective game play, while the other think that exposing the player to as many different situations will translate to consistent game play.

I am not a neuroscientist, but I am interested in exploring the literature on  effective learning as I am teaching on a collegiate level. I do have is a background in research, so I dug into the existing literature meant for the layman while also trying not to spiral into the abyss with the available overabundance of references which may or may not be up to date.

I started by reading  books written for the layman by specialists on neurosciences. I wanted to know how decision making and problem solving are done and how to teach people to learn. I was coming at it from both a teaching and coaching perspective. Same but different.

One idea that was mentioned and repeated is the idea of proprioception, sometimes referred to as the sixth sense. From Physio-pedia:

Proprioception (sense of proprioception) is an important bodily neuromuscular sense. It falls under our "sixth sense", more commonly known as somatosensation.

Proprioception is critical for meaningful interactions with our surrounding environment. Proprioception helps with the planning of movements, sport performance, playing a musical instrument and ultimately helping us avoid an injury.

An intact sense of proprioception is crucial to learning a new skill. During the learning of any new skill, (sport performance or an artistic activity, for example) it is usually necessary to become familiar with some proprioceptive tasks specific to that activity… The bottom line remains that our sense of proprioception is important to train and develop, as it allows us to interact with our environments without the dependence on visual feedback (for example, reaching for a cup on the top shelve, without looking at the cup). (Physiopedia contributors 2020 )

Proprioception seems akin to the System 1 response that Kahneman wrote about in Thinking Fast and Slow. (Kahneman 2013).  It is the unconscious response by a body to a situation, such as in playing a sport. The question that follows is: how can a body’s neurological responses be trained to respond effectively while using System 1?

Indeed, motor learning is associated with systematic changes to proprioception, that is, proprioception can be considered to be a part of motor learning, a part that is essential in training sports skills.

The question then is: how does the motor system work neurologically? What is the best way to train the body to respond effectively in System 1? How do we teach the player to problem solve in the System 2 way (slow, deliberate, and mentally loaded) and have it translated in an accurate  System 1 way (fast, reactive, and automated)?  The transition from using System 2 to reactive decision making in System 1 is the mystery.

In Scott Grafton’s book, Physical Intelligence (Grafton 2020) he provides an answer. Scott Grafton is the Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UCSB, his area of research is in Cognition, Perception, and Cognitive Neuroscience. He is also the director of the UCSB Imaging Center. https://psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/scott-grafton

The book was written to explain the neurological process that the body uses to respond when physically challenged, Grafton goes into the neurological system based upon his own research results that are in the literature, which saves me from digging into the granularity and most importantly, interprets them as a neurological researcher, thereby saving me from coming up with naïve and unreasonable conclusions. In  Chapter 5 : Pulling Strings, Grafton describes the neurological processes employed to make immediate decisions.

My paraphrase of the chapter is as follows:

A key idea  is the “Motor equivalence problem”. There are an infinite number of combinations of different neurons firing in the brain to enable the same movement; that is, there are no unique computational methods to solve the motor equivalency problem: the brain does not generate a unique set of commands to move the muscles in a desired action without other rules or guidelines.  So how does the body make decision on a neuron firing level to execute the commands to make the body not only move, but move in a coordinated and effective way?

The answer is that nature solves the motor equivalency problem by designing the motor system to generates the actions that are needed to accomplish these movements, the motor system does this without consciously using the brain. The brain uses the active short-term memory to process all the different options it is presented by the senses, but the short-term memory capacity of the brain is limited. If we present the brain with too many distinct options of movement patterns, the short-term memory becomes overloaded and the resulting response time would be too slow; having limited number of distinct movement patterns helps the execution, while too many distinct options  which uses the brain slows down the execution. 

The question then becomes: how does the motor system operate without using short-term memory? The answer is that the motor system actuates the movement by creating a “basis set”, a neuron firing template for movements so that the motor system does not need to call up distinct patterns for each motor neuron firing actuation through the brain — having a one-to-one mapping between distinct patterns for each action would overwhelm the short-term memory. The motor system uses the basis set to create all the original and complicated firing patterns for the affected neurons.  Each member of the basis set is called “muscle synergy”. Each time a muscle synergy is created based on the basis set ; it too becomes a part of the basis set. This is the design principle used to simplify the task of the complex control of the muscles.

In simple terms, new movements can be built from referencing the basis sets of old movements and reusing them to create new neuron firing patterns which creates and actuates new movements. This explains why experts are better at using existing muscle synergies for new purposes than non-experts, because they have more established muscle synergies to use and they are more adept at managing their existing synergies.

The motor cortex manages all the  muscle synergies, and the organizing principle is a clean one-to-one mapping between cortical map of the body and the nerves connected to each muscle, these cortical maps do not exist in the brain, they exist in the nervous system. The motor cortex is optimized to make all muscle movements, whether they are built from existing muscle synergies or by creating new patterns. Other brain areas are also recruited to give instructions to motor cortex.

The  basis sets give the motor system a formidable database to call upon when needed and are placed in long-term memory through repetition, and since long-term memory is limitless as compared to short-term memory, it poses no loading stress to the decision-making process.

The question then becomes: how do we gain those basis sets? How do we create both more as well as more sophisticated muscle synergies to be placed in long-term memory? Indeed, does training form help create effective basis sets?

To look for an answer, I consulted one of the best books I have read on learning. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s seminal book Make it Stick (Brown 2014).

Make It Stick lays out some foundational beliefs, again, paraphrasing the original source:

·       Foundation of prior knowledge-In order to learn, one needs to have prior knowledge, i.e. a basis set.

·       Learning is deeper if it is effortful.

·       We are poor judges of when we are learning and when we are not.

·       Retrieval practices—recalling from memory— is more effective for learning long term.

·       Spacing or interleaving practices produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application. Interleaving means practicing many different skills repeatedly in short intervals while layering different skill practices in repeaedt practice sessions.

·       Elaboration-process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting with what you already know.

These beliefs align very closely with the neurological model from Grafton. The best way to build the basis sets and create muscle synergies is to maximize the opportunities for the players to retrieve the basis sets and giving them more chances to create muscle synergies.  But the most effective way of learning is to make the retrieval practice effortful by challenging the player in real time; interleave the practice sessions by practicing different skills alternately rather than in one continuous session; and giving the players opportunities to elaborate so that they can connect the new skills with what they already know.

The following questions then arises:

·       How do we start? Where does the initial basis set come from?

·       How often must we retrieve the basis set from long term memory to “imprint” the basis set?

·       How do we make each retrieval practice more effortful as the players begin to accrue useful and meaningful basis sets from muscle synergies?

·       How long should the interleaved  practice sessions last? How much time do we leave between the interleaved sessions?

Most of these questions are subjective, but the key question is the first one because I believe that form is key to creating an initial basis set.

As I started to think about how the practices will look as the players progress through the skill levels, or as their basis sets increase through creating more synergies, I begin to segregate the practices into different levels. 

The first level is the beginner’s level, where we need to establish some base fundamental basis set. The assumption is that there are no previous basis sets to call upon and that any repetition is a new repetition. This is the level where the importance of form becomes evident. Until the player can establish a fundamental database of basis sets, there needs to be feedback to the player about the skill that they are acquiring, i.e., whether what they are learning is useful as an initial basis set for future use.

Canonical forms are part of the toolbox that can be used to create good initial basis sets for a beginner. It is a good place to start. The teaching of form as practiced by most coaches involve block training. Getting the players constant and consistent repetitions of the same motions. The question is then: how many repetitions does it take to imprint a basis set on the long-term memory? 20 repetitions? 100 repetitions? 10,000 repetitions? Or is the answer dependent on the person doing the repetitions, subject to their prior knowledge, their prior experience with their ability to control their bodies, and their experience with athletics? This question lingers over the entire process of learning a new skill and the training regimen applied to the player and the team. I will return to this later.

Once the player has acquired a good initial basis set, the challenge is to make the player go through the effortful retrieval process so that they can continue to build their basis sets through creating new muscle synergies by continuously recruiting the existing but growing basis sets. 

The critical part that form plays in this context is that creativity and the ability to improvise can only exist if and only if the person trying to be creative or improvise has existing knowledge; there is no sense in trying to create and improvise if there is no baseline knowledge. In other words, creativity, and the ability to improvise can only happen IF the player has the basis sets and muscle synergies to call upon to allow their motor system to react effectively.

How do we answer the third question above: how do we put the players through effortful practices?  In accordance with Make It Stick, we must use spacing and interleaving practices to add effort and retrieval opportunities. This seems like what people would call random practice, but it is not completely random. There are still elements of controlled repetitions built into the practice.

According to Doug Lemov, this is what he calls serial practice. Doug Lemov is well known as a teaching guru, having started the Teach Like a Champion website https://teachlikeachampion.com/ which emphasizes intentional curriculum creation, a systematic pedagogy, and specific goals to help teacher teach. He is also a soccer dad and coach, so he became interested in the overlap between teaching and coaching, which is where his book on teaching for coaches: Coaches Guide to Teaching (Lemov 2020) came from. https://www.coachsguidetoteaching.com/

Lemov prefers this sequence: Blocked→Serial→Random. Starting the teaching of the initial basis sets with blocked training, progressing through serial, and then moving on to random as a part of creating effortful retrieval practices for the player. There must be a progression to initiating the beginning mind, those without any basis sets in their long-term memory, and allowing their beginner’s neurological system to evolve into the experienced neurological system.

The blocked versus random debate has gone on for a long time, with the adherents to only random practices often citing the motto: let the game teach the game or the game is the best teacher. Lemov’s response to that is on pages 42-43 of Chapter 1 of the book:

·       The game is excellent for setting the stage for teaching and giving players experience in a perception rich environment.

·       The game gives players constant varying context.

·       The game builds engagement, focus, and competitive spirit.

·       The game allows the players make decisions and learn on the fly.

But letting the game teach the game does not mean:

·       Letting the players learn only by accruing experience without context; that is, coaches must always guide, instruct, or explain.

·       That the game is the only way to learn, and training can be conducted in an environment that is  devoid of an intentional curriculum, a systematic pedagogy, and specific goals.

Lemov’s sequence coalesces well with my own experience in teaching beginners, a well-structured progression is optimal for teaching the basic skills. The problem arises when a coach adheres to only block practices—it abandons the effortful retrieval belief; and the completely random practice abandons the belief that the person trying to be creative or improvise must have existing knowledge. A natural evolution of  practice design must be instituted to gain optimal learning results.

To answer the second question above:  How often must we retrieve the basis set memories to “imprint” the basis set in our long-term memory? Do we completely abandon the block training after we have established a baseline set of skills? Do we assume that the initial set of retrieval practice is sufficient to “imprint” the skill in long-term memory? I believe that it is player dependent, as such, I do also believe that returning to block training, particularly regarding form. Some may need it, some may not, but we must serve the needs to all the players. The key is not to over rely upon the initial retrieval imprinting as sufficient.

There are several very successful programs in volleyball history that are built on pure block training. Many coaches who believe in only block training cite those programs as proof that block training is  the “right” way to train. I believe that it is not so much the long duration block drilling that consistently built the basis set, I believe that it is the consistent and repeated retrieval which comes from practicing the forms in every practice that trained the motor system; it was maximum basis set retrieval opportunities rather than the sheer number of repetitions that created the deep basis set: it isn’t about the repetitions, it is about the retrieval. 

An interesting chart from Prof. Damian Farrow’s presentation on YouTube piqued my interest and resolved the discussion on the dichotomy of Blocked versus Random in my mind. (Figure 1 below). I apologize for the resolution of the figure as it is a screen capture.

Dr. Damian Farrow currently holds a joint appointment as Professor of Sport Science within the Victoria University Institute of Sport, Exercise, and Active Living (ISEAL), and the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS).  In his talk titled: Lecture 5: Not All Practice is the Same, Prof. Farrow shows a continuum of skill practice approaches, (second row of the chart).

 

Figure 1 Chart of evolution of practices modes. Used with Permission from Prof. Damian Farrow. (Farrow n.d.)

·       Constant practice: Repeat the same skill in the same manner on each repetition.

·       Blocked practice: 2 or more skills practiced in blocks.

·       Variable practice: Vary the one skill.

·       Random practice: 2 or more skills randomly interspersed across practice.

·       Differential practice: Varying one skill every practice repetition.

While his definition does not fall strictly within the categories that we define as block or random, the chart demonstrates once again that defining practice approaches in a binary manner severely restricts the way we train players, and it also limits the opportunities to give players exposure to the variations that are essential in game situations.

In summary, form is a necessary tool to create the initial basis set to initiate the player om acquiring the skills required for the game of volleyball. These basis sets will be recruited to create muscle synergies for System 1 responses; these muscle synergies are  then made a part of the basis set.  The extensive basis set creates a rich sense of proprioception for the athlete to call upon, which allows them to react unconsciously to the speed and action of the game.  The act of retrieval is the key to imprinting the basis sets into the limitless long-term memory in order to avoid overloading the short-term memory during the critical decision-making points during game play. Rapid progressive transitions between different training modes are used to give players effortful retrieval opportunities, which serves to both imprint the basis sets in the motor system and help create more and better muscle synergies in response varying situations and conditions.

So that is my belief until someone can convince me otherwise. These readings came about as I was following Coach Vern Gambetta and his recommended list of readings. Every book that I read and cited here came from his lists.

References

Brown, Peter C. ,Roediger III, Henry L. , McDaniel,Mark A. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Canbridge MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

Farrow, Damian. "Lecture 5: Not All Practice is the Same 1." Sydney, n.d.

Grafton, Scott. Physical Intelligence. New York: Pantheon Books, 2020.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. NYC: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Lemov, Doug. The Coaches Guide to Teaching. Clearwater, FL: John Catt Educational Ltd., 2020.

Physiopedia contributors. Proprioception. May 6, 2020 . https://www.physio-pedia.com/index.php?title=Proprioception&oldid=236870 (accessed September 23, 2021).

 

 

 

An Appreciation of Karch Kiraly

It has been a week since the volleyball USWNT won gold at the Tokyo Olympics, I have been thinking about it and asking the Why? What? And How? Questions.

First thought is that the Olympics is a special and unique competition which demands specific and unique behavior and training from the entire team.  This is the premise of the essay, and the basis for my appreciation for the work that Karch Kiraly has done over his terms as the head coach of the USWNT.

First a caveat, I have followed Karch’s coaching moves for the last nine years with interest but from afar. I have also followed  the scant information that was shared with us by the broadcasters and various other sources over the years and during the Olympic coverage. My perception of the situations comes from those spotty bits of information, and my own observations and interpretations of those tidbits. I am not privy to all the decisions for the NT staff nor their thought process.  I therefore acknowledge that this is an exercise in conjecture and hypothesizing, but it is a good mental exercise for me and I am sharing this as a conversation starter for anyone else who has done this exercise, as I am sure many have. In any case, my conjecture and hypothesis are no better or worse than anyone else’.

Winning the gold medal in the Olympics has been a long quest for the USA women’s, starting with the 1980 boycott team, who gave us so much hope and expectations. The intervening years have shown us how hard it is to compete on the biggest global stage with the highest level of volleyball competition. It would therefore seem be a validation of Karch’s coaching methods and decisions, but that assumption propagates the myth that only the tangible results matter in the assessment of a coach’s ability and his or her methods. The real problem is that we would not know if a different combination of players could have gotten the job done as well.  Indeed, that is a moot point because there is no way to test the hypothesis.

 

One of the terms used by Annie Dukes in her book Thinking in Bets (Dukes 2018) is the term Resulting, which is defined as  Judging the quality of decisions based on the results. The fallacy is that a win is a result of the coach’s skills while a loss is a result of  random chance, neither claim can or should be made.

 

There are however, many indirect and empirical evidence that I saw which I included in my thinking about the decisions and methodologies from the NT coaching staff.

One set of evidence lies in our observation of how the team played, the way the team held together in the face of challenges, the way that the team improved their play as they advanced through the bracket.

The team was able to survive the onslaught of bad luck: the sensational rookie right-side Jordan Thompson and the starting setter Jordyn Poulter both go out with injuries just as the team is in the middle of pool play. This team steps up together: the designated backups not only steps in  to bring the team a needed win, but they also excel in their own way; same with the outside hitter position, when Michelle Bartsch-Hackley struggled in either the offense or passing phase of the game, Kelsey Robinson steps in and plays up to the standards of the starters. What was mostly unnoticeable is that the rest of the team steps up in their performances doing the intangible to make the team play better.

This team performance reminds me of the term  antifragile, a term coined by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. In short, antifragile is defined as the  following:

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. (Taleb 2012)

As laid out above, antifragile is much beyond just grit and resilience. Antifragility is much more than just surviving the challenges, it is  transcending the challenges and gaining advantage over the initial situation prior to the challenge.

The phenomenon is well studied in medicine, where for example Wolff's law describes how bones grow stronger due to external load. Hormesis is an example of mild antifragility, where the stressor is a poisonous substance and the antifragile becomes better overall from a small dose of the stressor. This is different from robustness or resilience in that the antifragile system improves with, not withstands, stressors, where the stressors are neither too large or small. The larger point, according to Taleb, is that depriving systems of vital stressors is not necessarily a good thing and can be downright harmful. (Anonymous 2021)

Indeed, this is what I saw the team do: as the team advanced further into the bracket play, their performance improved with each challenge; the once moribund middle attack came alive during the playoffs as both Poulter and Hancock ran the middles on slides and 31’s; the dashed expectations from Thompson’s injury was revived with inspired performances from Annie Drews. More importantly, the team played more cohesively and almost all facets of the USA game came alive.

Theoretically, the quality of the opponents should increase with each match won in this kind of competition, yet this team played better as they advanced in the competition, they played with more energy and executed the game plan better, and made the winning appear easier with each succeeding step towards the gold medal.

My impression was that the team was not just playing as they knew how to play, but they were improvising, adapting, and overcoming the challenges thrown their way. They direct their considerable communal volleyball IQ towards creating better opportunities gaining advantages rather than just solving problems, they were jamming. This team played as the embodiment of the ideal team: executing out-of-system as well if not better than they were in-system. The decisions were mostly good, and when the decisions did not work out, the team left it behind them and played better for the next point.  One way to characterize the team’s play is to say that the team was in a collective “flow”.

We talk about being in the “zone”, in a “flow”, or in wu-wei, but those terms apply mostly to the individual, it is rare to speak of a team being in the “flow”. It opens up in my mind the idea of a team performance while in a collective “flow”.

Indeed, we witnessed some great examples of team play during the USA matches. Everyone doing their job while also covering for their teammates intuitively when necessary. It was everyone having each other’s back. The difference however, is that this kind of selflessness happened throughout the two weeks tournament, subconsciously, consistently, unquestioningly, and in a very matter of fact manner.  It was, to me, a demonstration of the very best of team play and everyone aiming for the same goal. All egos were checked at the door.

This kind of performance is rare, especially at this level of play during this level of pressure competition. We need to realize that we witnessed the living embodiment of what we all so dearly desire. A very large parts of the credit needs to go to the game plan formulated by the coaching staff, the data compiled and analyzed by the statistical staff, and the superhuman efforts put forth by the medical staff to keep the players healthy and to heal those who are injured. Indeed, team play in its deepest meaning is a matter of more than just the players playing as a team on the court, but the coordination of the interacting parts of the whole team, not just the players. This kind of effort takes an inordinate amount of coordination, effort, commitment, and singularity of vision. Of course, much of the credit should go to the head coach, but it goes much further than that, it goes to the kind of culture and ethos that surrounds the team, which reflects the vision of the head coach.

Which brings us to the most talked about aspect of the Karch Kiraly coaching legacies. It is a legacy, whether Karch likes it or not.

We have heard various bits and pieces about the kind of culture that Karch has built around the women’s national team. A more contemporary approach towards redefining the relationship between the coaches and staff who support and make things possible and the players, who willingly put themselves on the line and play. The idea isn’t really new, I have heard of college programs whose approach to culture building are similar, but to implement this idea in the Olympics where the payoff is in a two-week tournament rather than over a season is to experiment on a grand scale, with the added constraint of performing in a bubble, and rarely practice in a consistent time frame with the entire team.

My first clue that things are different came with  the reports that Karch had employed a tool from corporate America, the 360 review, in his process of communicating with the players and giving them feedback from their peers.  The concept is to have the person under review facing their peers, and people above and below them in the hierarchy. This is usually employed with those who are in the senior managerial positions, such as CEOs and presidents. The theory is to give them the good and the bad in a neutral environment employing neutral languages and having the reviewer laying out their case in facts. In my experience, very few people who are being reviewed react well, mainly because their egos get in the way and they react defensively to the criticism, even as they are neutral.

My first reaction to this development was: “oh, dear god, what have you done?” I don’t know how these exercises worked out, whether it helped or hurt the cause, but I had to give credit to Karch for having the courage to try the method, it gave me the clue that he was open-minded and was willing to try things that are outside of his comfort zone.

During the Olympics we heard the announcers talk about the Leadership Council that Karch implemented. Again, I have very few details, but what I have heard I liked: a player’s council is given the responsibility to make some decisions. The most salient decision involves the council deciding to bring on Sue Enquist, the former UCLA softball coach as the performance coach. I believe she was the key to establish the #12Strong motto, but more importantly, she was the one to implement the mental preparations necessary to execute that motto. This is yet another instance of having the courage to be exposed to new ideas, think critically about them and implementing them in service to executing a process towards a goal.

To me, the significant fact is that Karch willingly ceded control on various aspects of the team culture to the players, allowing them to make the decisions, trusting them to make the right decisions ,and more importantly trusting them to know what is best for building the culture that is best suited to their ethos which is aligned with the ultimate goal: to compete for the gold at the Olympics.

How is this so important? In 1984, Toyota and GM formed a joint venture named NUMMI in Fremont California. At that point, the employees at the Fremont plant were "considered the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States” .  The purpose of the joint venture was for GM to get access to quality small car manufacturing and an opportunity to learn about the Toyota Production System, The Toyota Way, a series of lean manufacturing and management philosophies that had made the company a leader in the automotive manufacturing and production industry. It was an eye-opening experience for both management and labor. One of the first things Toyota did was the install a rope pull at every station in the plant, which allowed any worker to stop the assembly line at anytime at any point. Some of the older workers broke out in tears when they learned of the rope pulls. GM had never trusted them enough to allow them to stop the line if something is wrong. The philosophy was always to keep the line moving and they will fix any problems at the end of the assembly line. This very small instance of trust in their work force made the workers understand the level of trust that management had in them and the responsibility that the management was willing to cede to the workers. (Anonymous, NUMMI 2021)

Trust is a powerful thing. I see the leadership council as a part of building trust with the players, to give them responsibility for owning their goals and Olympic dreams and for Karch to demonstrate trust.

Implementing the culture is one thing, getting player to believe is quite another. If the NBC reports are to be believed, the Sydney edition of the USWNT had cohesion problems and the USA Softball team saw enough of an issue to meet with the volleyball team to try to keep their eyes on the prize. It is never a good thing when the internal team conflicts become so noticeable that an American team from another sport felt compelled to step in. Culture and ethos may seem like buzzwords, but they are amorphous yet real mental frameworks that any organization must not only agree upon but actively work to establish in order to be successful. This was the kind of historical challenge for the NT head coach.

We are not privy to WHAT he did or HOW he did it, but we are witnesses to the culture in display. Once again, this is not to say that the end justifies the means, that the gold medal redeems all the decisions about the culture. Examining the atmosphere around the team from our perch at home, paying close attention to not only what the teams says when interviewed, but the body language and the signs of being committed from every player during time outs and pre and post set conferences.

Skin in the game is a phrase made popular by renowned investor Warren Buffett referring to a situation in which high-ranking insiders use their own money to buy stock in the company they are running.

As I was observing these players, they played like they had skin in the game. This is remarkable to me in that even though each of the players on the 12 person Olympic roster were all members of highly successful college and professional teams — they understand the concept of having skin in the game in that context. They are also the Alpha women on their respective teams, they are the best of a very small subset of the best volleyball players, which means that they have high levels of confidence in their own abilities, but the meaning of having skin in the game changes when your role on a team change, your perspective changes and your perception of your roles changes as your ego may play a bigger role in your commitment, or how much skin you have in the game.

During Annie Drews’ interview after she stepped into the starting lineup in place of Jordan Thompson and excelled in her performance, she was asked by Heather Cox about what made it possible for her to perform at such a high level as she stepped into the match cold. She responded that one of the things the team asked from the coaches (players taking responsibility) was to have role clarity. Everyone got that part of the message, but the second part of what she said was meaningful to me: “whether you liked it or not”. The implication here is important. The coaches gave the players defined roles for the fourteen-day tournament, and the players took the responsibility of working within those constraints and accepted their roles willingly while keeping their egos checked at the door. A lot to ask from the 23 alphas who were on the larger list of players being considered for the final Olympic team. All are top players at the top of their games, all merited consideration for the final 12 spots.

The skin in the game was also illustrated in what we saw empirically in the behavior and demeanor of all the players who are on the court and more significantly, from those who are not on the court.

In the ubiquitous shot of the bench during the actions all six players were engaged, which is what was expected at all levels of competition. It is more telling when we look at the interaction between those who are coming off the courts and those who are on the bench during time outs and changeovers. Perhaps it is the case where I saw what I wanted to see, but I saw the players taking care of each other, being the eyes and ears of those who are on the court. I especially noticed the interaction between Thompson and Drews, it was the personification of great teammates. Thompson was more excited for Drews, who was playing in her place, than Drews.

Perhaps I am reading too much into the interactions after the final Larson kill hit the floor, but the display of emotions was especially revealing. Winning solves many problems, and we do need to take that into account, but the celebration was so very joyous, amongst the dog pile of players on the court and the coaches group hug. The emotions from Karch were different from his usual stoic manners. The displays of emotions and joy was unconstrained and relentless. Small moments stood out: the camera shot of Karch and Micah Hancock having a moment in the chaos of the celebration; Karch and Haleigh Washington screaming: “Gold medalists!” in front of the NBC cameras; Jordan Larson, tearful in her joy and her teammates mobbing her. They were pictures of joy and immense relief which we often see after a team wins, but I choose to believe that these moments are signs that a culture was established and propagated through many years of hard work and putting the vision out in front of the players and coaxing them to believe.

One reminder from the announcers was particularly poignant was that the 23 players that was on the team all had an extra year to prepare during the pandemic, which meant that they all had to practice and stay in shape on their own, quarantined from one another. This compounds the difficulty of creating a team culture, a collective ethos amongst 23 alphas. All the athletes who participated in Tokyo had to debate whether they wanted to put in another year of effort, all had to postpone any plans. It was a test of just how much skin they had in the game. I also believe that it was an opportunity to develop antifragility. Taking situations that no one had any control over and taking advantage of the serendipity.

In a usual year, these players are all overseas playing for their professional teams, the pandemic curtailed much of that activity. Most were stuck at home, working on their own, but the national team staff never stopped engaging them by any means necessary. I believe, but I don’t know, that this enforced separation gave the space for the players to be away from their hectic schedules and more importantly to devote time towards building their trust in each other as well as the coaches, after all, they had nothing else to do and this was their focus. I am not saying that we should lock away all of our player candidates for the 2024 Paris Olympics to replicate this cohesiveness, that would be resulting on my part. It is just an interesting element to ponder.

As I thought about Karch’s legacy in this gold medal winning campaign,  I made the connection between  the leadership that surrounds the USWNT with the leadership structure described in General Stanley McChrystal’s recent book Leaders: Myth and Reality (McChrystal, Eggers and Mangone 2018). The following illustration appeared at the end of the book.

Figure 1: Comparison of myth and reality in leadership.

The top of the figure illustrates the common and linear perception of leadership, where a single leader is credited with driving the accomplishment of the desired result. The leader, through formulaic application of checklists and pre-ordained actions drive the followers towards a successful result, while paying no heed to the context of each situation.

General McChrystal discusses the three myths of leadership that comes from that top illustration,  myths that we assume implicitly when we discuss leadership:

·       The Formulaic Myth

o   Leadership can be made into a checklist.

o   Leadership is not contextual.

·       The Attribution Myth

o   We have tunnel vision regarding the leader, creating a leader cult around the personality.

o   We neglect the people surround the individual “leader”.

·       The Results Myth

o   The results of specific situations justify identifying someone as the leader.

o   Only results matter in defining the leader.

 

The bottom of the figure is how Gen. McChrystal sees leadership, as defined by the interaction of the leader, the followers, and the context of the environment and situations. He puts leadership in the middle of a triangle with leaders, followers, and context defining the three corners of the triangle. As Gen. McChrystal defines it,

Leadership is a complex system of relationships between leaders and followers, in a particular context, that provides meaning to its members.

The keys that Gen. McChrystal emphasizes in the illustration are (McChrystal, Eggers and Mangone 2018):

1.     Leadership is contextual and dynamic, and therefore need to be constantly modulated, not boiled down to a formula.

2.     Leadership is more an emergent property of a complex system with rich feedback, and less a one-directional process enacted by the leader.

3.     The leader is vitally important to leadership, but not for the reasons we usually ascribe. It is often more about the symbolism, meaning that the future potential leaders hold for their system, and less about the result they produce.

I had that model fresh in my mind as I thought about Karch and the entire Olympic campaign.

In this case, the obvious leader is Karch Kiraly, yet I would also place the players as leaders in ad hoc situations. Even as the McChrystal model of leadership disabuse us of the three myths of leadership. I am appreciative of the amount of humility, vision, learner’s mind, and adaptability of Karch’s philosophy towards building this team as a means to Olympic success.

While some may read this a mindless paean to the man, I think of it as a recognition of doing what he thinks is best, being fearless in his pursuit of implementation of his vision, and being equally fearless in adapting to change when the context changes.

Works Cited

Anonymous. "Antifragile." Wikipedia. August 14, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book) (accessed August 15, 2021).

—. "NUMMI." Wikipedia. July 29, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI (accessed August 15, 2021).

Dukes, Annie. Thinking in Bets. New York: Penguin, 2018.

McChrystal, Stanley, Jeff Eggers, and Jason Mangone. Leaders: Myth and Reality. New York City: Penguin, 2018.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder . NYC: Random House, 2012.