This is a periodic update in my role as Indoor Performance Director for Volleyball England. I laid out the high level priorities under which I’m operating in my initial post.
Here’s what’s been happening since my last update, and what’s coming up in the next couple months. It’s been an intense period of time as we’re dealing with staffing changes and are working on restructuring how we operate to hopefully do things more productively and effectively.
Senior Women’s Head Coach change
Probably the biggest headline of the last few months is that the England Senior/U22 Women’s Head Coach stepped down. We have replaced her with an interim head coach for the time being, and will do a search for a permanent replacement in due course.
Senior Men in Iceland
Sticking with the Seniors, our Men’s team traveled to Iceland a few weeks ago to play a triangular with them and the Faroe Islands. Both opponents are taking part in the CEV Silver League this season. We want to get ourselves to the financial point where we too can play in the Silver League, so this was an opportunity to test ourselves against teams at that level.
The guys had a productive weekend, playing both of their opponents twice. They beat Faroe each time, but lost to Iceland in both instances. The matches were competitive, though, with the first one finishing 3-2.
April Juniors camp
In April we ran our latest national team camp for the juniors. The major new thing we did was cardiac screening for the athletes. This is something we’re now making mandatory on a regular basis for all our national team and pathway athletes as part of improving both our efforts around athlete welfare and proper governance. We also did physical testing (jumping and speed).
The thing I was quite pleased with, though, was the depth of feedback the coaches gave to each athlete. That’s been something we’ve been working on for a year now. Still a ways to go to get to where we need to be ultimately (e.g. individual development plans), but we’re making good progress.
Indoor/Beach conflicts
We’re into the time of year where there are inevitable clashes between Beach and Indoor events. The biggest that we’ve been working through is around athletes eligible to represent England at the U20 level in Beach in a zonal tournament we’re hosting (which is a Euro qualifier) as well as at the U22 level in Indoor at Euro qualification. For the women those events overlap, and for the men there’s only about a week in between. Realistically, you can’t play both.
This is something we’re going to have to deal with on a regular basis. Our best athletes tend to play both disciplines. We’ve got some thoughts in mind around how to reduce uncertainty, though. Even more so now that we’ve got a new 12-month covered beach facility being developed.
Upcoming
I mentioned the U22 qualifier above. That will be the biggest thing on the calendar over the next three months. The Women play first in Slovakia the first week of July, with Poland and Isreal as the other teams in the pool. The men go to Italy about a week later, where they’ll be joined by Denmark and Ukraine in their group. Tough challenges for both, to be sure.
Denmark will also be an opponent for the Senior Men when they once more participate in the Nordic Cup in early August. The Danes will host. Sweden and Norway also featured in the event last year. I’m not sure who all will be in it this time around.
On the Juniors front, we’re sending a group of U19s to Croatia in mid-July for the Global Challenge. This will be our first time going to this event, though we’ve had individual players and staff attend with other teams before.
In late August we’ll have our next big juniors camp. That will be to determine selection for our U17 and U19 zonal championships squads (tournaments in October).
Finally, over the weekend we got word that FIVB has approved our request for funding to do some national team coach training. This is the same type of funding we received last year to bring Jim Stone over to present at a symposium. We’ll be looking at what we can do this year to build on that.
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