My third day at the AVCA Convention was a pretty big one (see Day 1 and Day 2).

It started with attending the early morning “Super Session”. That combined five 15-minute presentations with recognition of coaches reaching victory milestones. One of the latter was 1900! The presentations included Chris McGown talking back row attacks in women’s volleyball, Christa Dietzen talking about wearable tech for health management, Terry Pettit on skill vs. talent, Roberta Kraus talking about converting threat into confidence, and Giovanni Guidetti sharing why he coaches so much. They were all good sessions.

Actually, I was shaking my head during Guidetti’s presentation. It was very entertaining, but he shared some things that were in my own presentation later on! I was glad he only talked for 15 minutes. 🙂

After that I sat in a on a session about performance statistics at different levels. The figures were interesting, but I found the overall presentation went off too often into coaching methods.

Next up was my own presentation. I had no idea how it was going to go. The slides I prepared could have been too few or too many. All in all, I think it went well. The guy running the room told me the attendance was something like 233. No bad, especially up against the All-America awards banquet. And no one left until we reached the Q&A period. Even then it was only a couple.

After that I went to Guidetti’s presentation on the Dutch Women’s National Team’s Olympic build up and experience. This was part of the pre-convention programming. It had to be done on Friday because of Guidetti’s travel requirements. He talked about taking over the program a couple years back, and the qualification process. Of course he also talked about the Rio Games. He shared quite a lot of statistics on all facets of play, which was interesting.

Guidetti also did an on-court presentation after that. It was on blocking and defense. I wanted to attend, but I got caught up talking to some people. The other MSU assistant went, though. He takes lots of notes! 🙂

The last seminar for me was one on developing your coaching philosophy. I mainly went to see Bill Neville and Sue Gozansky. They ran the session as part of CAP. You can see my own coaching philosophy, as it currently stands.

The rest of the day was mainly about networking. I connected with some folks I know and met some new ones. Among the latter was Avital Selinger. He is son of the legendary Arie Selinger and an accomplished coach in his own right.

Things wrapped up on Saturday.

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John Forman
John Forman

John is currently the Talent Strategy Manager (oversees the national teams) and Indoor Performance Director for Volleyball England, as well as Global Director for Volleyball for Nation Academy. His volleyball coaching experience includes all three NCAA divisions, plus Junior College, in the US; university and club teams in the UK; professional coaching in Sweden; and both coaching and club management at the Juniors level. He's also been a visiting coach at national team, professional club, and juniors programs in several countries. Learn more on his bio page.

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