Coaching Volleyball

I don’t know the percentage of professional volleyball teams that have parents of the players attending training sessions. My guess is it’s not very high, though I’m sure in some places and at some levels it’s more frequent than at others. Sweden may be one of those places. Certainly, it was true in my case at Svedala.

To be fair, I coached at what is basically a local community club. We had the professional level team competing in the Elitserie, the top level of Swedish volleyball. We also had a 2nd team playing in Division 1 south, the second level of volleyball in Sweden. Although there’s no league age restriction, our 2nd team was effectively a Juniors squad based on their ages. Below that we had actual Juniors level teams, and then down to some really little ones – well south of U12s. Overall, there was something like 100 club members.

My own team featured two players whose families lived in town. A couple of players were originally from up north, while the rest were from other parts of southern Sweden. And of course I had three Americans. It’s the parents of the two local players who periodically turned up to training sessions – and boy did they enjoy themselves!

In training one Tuesday night I could hear at least the two moms laughing uproariously.

Yes, they were laughing at the team. No, this wasn’t the first time.

To be fair, it wasn’t ridiculing type laughter. That sort of thing means ejection from my gym. Rather, this was genuine comedic laughter at what they saw and heard from the players on the court.

I’m not talking slap-stick type stuff here. Yeah, there’s some of that. The team was pretty loose. They worked hard, but they had fun as well. Invariably, that led to some funny things happening. More than that, though, I think is the sound track that went along with it all. A couple of my louder, more talkative players were also the source of some funny comments and reactions mid-rally.

Back in May of 2014, I coached the Exeter University women in the South West Championship tournament. It’s an event which brings together club teams of all levels from across the South West of England. That means squads from the South West regional league (SWVA) – which my team played in and took 3rd – as well as teams from NVL Divisions 1, 2, and 3.

A good case could be made that year’s field for the tournament was a bit weaker than the prior year. In 2013 I coached the tournament champions, Devon Ladies. They had played NVL1, and we beat our league champs in the tournament final. There was one other NVL1 team in the competition as well that year. In 2014 there was only a single NVL1 squad, a pair from NVL2, with the remaining 9 from either NVL3 or SWVA. One team was a group of players from a mixture of mostly lower levels brought together just for the Championship.

Format

The tournament format featured 20-minute timed games. One timeout per team was allowed, with no timeouts or subs inside the last 5 minutes. The winning team got 3 points. In the case of a draw, both got 2 points. If the losing team was within 25% of the score of the winner, they got 1 point. All teams played each others in a big round-robin – 11 total sets in this case – over two days. The top four teams advanced to the semifinals, which was also a 20-minute match. Come the final, however, it was best of 3.

The Team

The team I had available featured most of the first team from the BUCS season. That included our starting setter, one middle, both outside hitters, and our opposite. We also had our second team setter, as well as a middle and an outside from that team.

We had two trainings the week before the tournament. Neither of them featured all of the tournament squad. Before that, the players hadn’t done anything significant volleyball-wise since BUCS Final 8s. That was about 2 months before. Naturally, that meant while the team would generally play its usual style, they weren’t going to be up to quite the level they were at during the season. And of course it was important for me to rotate the playing time around. As a result, we wouldn’t consistently have perhaps the 100% best line-up.

Expectations

All things considered, I figured we’d be a mid-table finisher. Maybe with a lot of luck and some really good performances we’d be able to sneak into the semifinals, but we weren’t going to do much more than put up a good fight against the top contenders. Our strength throughout the year was strong defense, effective serving to keep teams off balance, and smart play which keeps hitting and other errors to a minimum. We’d basically played to our strengths, since we didn’t have the size or the type of hitters to take control of the match at the net.

As it turns out, we finished 7th – tied on match points for 6th, but with fewer points scored during play. In fact, were were only a single point behind the 5th place team. We beat all the other SWVA teams we’d beaten during the season with very little trouble. We also beat one of the NVL3 teams on the last point of the match, and lost to another NVL3 squad similarly on the last play. The match against the mixed team was a draw. We were well up, but got stuck in a rotation for a long string of points.

The NVL1 and NVL2 teams handled us without too much trouble. We came close to getting bonus points from them, but fell short by a single point in two cases. Our other loss was to the SWVA champs. That was a quite strong team which ended up winning the tournament. We did get a bonus point out of that match, though.

The results

As it turns out, 7th was a perfect finish given that we really didn’t have a shot at the semis. You see, the 5th and 6th place teams had to work the semifinals. By finishing 7th we got to head for home early!

The funny thing is we lost our last game on a service error. Had that serve been in and we won the rally – or had the horn come just a couple seconds sooner, ending the contest in a draw – we’d have finished in 6th. The tournament director joked to me afterwards about the serve being missed on purpose. 🙂

Of course, if just a point here or there in some of our other matches had fallen a different way we could have been as high as 5th. We were above all the teams we’d beaten during the SWVA season, as we should have been, and were right in line with the NVL3 teams. Only the top 4 teams in the competition (there was an 8 point difference between 4th and 5th place) were clearly better than us, which makes sense. While you’d always like to finish as high as possible, and certainly it would have been nice to end in the top half, I’m happy to have finished in a tight 5th-7th cluster (it was 3 points back to 8th).

Have you ever coached from a position of fear?

If you’ve ever coached a team in a meaningful competition, my guess is there were definitely some doubts in your head in at least the early goings. I’m not just talking about being nervous about the outcome. That’s a natural function of caring. I’m referring to being concerned about your ability to coach the team effectively. Maybe you felt that when you first started coaching. Maybe you felt it when you moved to a higher level of coaching.

My own experience

In my case, the instance of fear which stands out most in my mind was during my very first time coaching a team all by myself. At that point, my coaching experience had been limited to helping out with my high school team many years before. I had just returned to volleyball after grad school and had yet to begin coaching collegiate and club volleyball. I took on a team of high school aged boys. They were taking part in an annual Summer state tournament where six regions competed in a 3-day event. I had the team from tryouts through competition.

Tryouts weren’t all that demanding as I basically had to take all the guys who showed up. Weekly trainings were a challenge because of missing players. At least, though, they gave me the opportunity to assess the team and come up with judgements about strengths and weaknesses and style of play. That had to be adjusted just before the tournament due to an injury. Fortunately, I had the options to deal with it (see Problem Solving – Setting out of the middle).

Tournament time

I’d never seen this tournament before, meaning I didn’t really know the level of play, so I didn’t know where the team was at on a relative basis. I figured things out pretty quickly, though, once play began. And that’s where the fear came in.

In looking at the competition – including the defending champions who we played first of all – I realized in short order that my group of players was at least as good as any of the others. That put the fear in my head that the only reason the team might not perform to its capability would be because I messed up somehow.

Flipping that around to a more proactive mindset, that meant I needed to make sure I did everything I could to put the guys in a position to succeed. This primarily meant having the right line-up since there wasn’t a lot else in my control at that stage.

Recovering from a mistake

I definitely didn’t have the line-up right to start the tournament and realized it quickly. We went 1-3 in the four sets (two matches of two sets) we played the first day. It was a frustrating experience because we could easily have been 4-0. I made one line-up adjustment at the start of the second day – flipping two players in the rotation. Again, we had a frustrating match that ended 1-1, after which I had a meeting with the team that lead to one more line-up change, changing my second OH.

From that point on, we didn’t lose a single set. We went 4-0 in the rest of our pool play to take 3rd place, then swept through the semis and the finals 2-0 on the last day of the event. We won the gold medal in a really competitive match with loud support from the other teams (we were playing the defending champs, who everyone hated). My voice was completely shot from having to shout to be heard over the three days, but it was a welcome pain. 🙂

I guess my fears were unfounded. My experience over the years has tended to back that up, I suppose. I’ve only coached one more team to a tournament championship since then (though assistant coached two league winners), but I’ve definitely had teams that have done quite well given their relative talent level.

Still, at times I do have that old nagging concern about being not good enough. Perhaps I always will. If so, it will be something to drive me to keep getting better at my craft.

This reminds me of something from Frank Herbert’s book Dune:

LITANY AGAINST FEAR

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Sorry to let my inner geek out here, but I’ve always liked that piece. Fear is the coach killer if we can’t turn it around into a positive.