Final day! If you haven’t seen them already, here are my updates from Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Why World Cup?

Programming for the convention started at noon Eastern on Sunday. That should have been perfect. The World Cup final started at 10:00. And for a good while it looked like Argentina was going to win it in regulation. Then the French went and messed it up by tying things up and taking it to extra time. So much for that first convention session!

Scouting from A-Z: Reviewing Film and Presenting to Athletes

This session was in the day’s second time slot and presented by Todd Dagenais from Central Florida. It was one of the live seminars. Basically, Todd and his assistant laid out how they set up a scouting report and how they structure their week leading up to playing. One of his more meaningful comments was that he doesn’t expect the players to know every detail from the report (we he keeps to about a page). He just wants them to know the major themes.

Unfortunately, that was the only session of the day that actually started streaming on-time. The rest didn’t, so I had to go back and watch them after the recordings were posted to the event portal. That being the case, I decided to circle back to what I missed because of the soccer.

Competing at an Elite Level with Limited Resources

I thought this might be an interesting follow-up to the Learning Lab session I did the other day. The main thrust of the discussion was about looking at resources you have on campus that could be used in support of your program.

Serving and Defensive Systems to Maximize Your Strengths vs. Opponents’ Weaknesses

The men’s and women’s coach from Missouri S&T ran this one. It too was a seminar session. There was a little overlap with the earlier scouting session, but not a ton. This one tended to be more geared toward lower level coaches with a lot of more specific discussion of setting up blocking and defensive schemes. Also, serving strategy.

Closing Session: An Athlete’s Perspective of Coaches – What Helps and What Hurts

So this session never streamed in its time slot. And the recording wasn’t posted as of 24 hours later, as I post this, so I didn’t get to see it. It’s one I was quite interested in seeing, so definitely some disappointment there.

And thus did the convention end with a bit of a dud. I went back later to catch up on sessions I didn’t catch during the “live” event. Here’s the post on that.

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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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