Looking back on 2024 and ahead to 2025

Happy New Year once again!

Here’s my annual review of the year gone by and look forward to the year ahead.

Job

I’m now about 19 months into my role with Volleyball England as Strategic Manager for Talent. In other words, overseer of all things related to the England national teams – Indoor and Beach. After spending most of 2023 developing the overarching vision and 5-year plan, 2024 was much more about implementation. The three main areas of focus are improved coaching, more/better competition, and an upgraded athlete experience.

There isn’t the space here to talk about everything that’s gone on in those areas over the last 12 months. What I can say is that much of the work has been aimed at building foundations and transitioning to new ways of working. Some areas have seen significant changes already. Others not as much yet, but with plans developing.

The other part of what I do at VE is act as Indoor Performance Director (we also have someone who covers Beach). If you’ve followed my log entries, you’ll have a sense of what I’ve done at Volleyball England in that role. Lots of running of planning and running camps!

Travel & Education

My one real travel event of 2023 was going to Lisbon to spend about a week with the club Benfica. My contact with the staff there goes back to 2020 (further back for at least one coach). It was my first trip to Portugal. Aside from nearly going blind on a sunny day near the seaside (stupidly forgot my sunglasses that day), it was thoroughly enjoyable.

I did have it in mind to attend the AVCA Convention. They didn’t select the session I proposed to deliver with the VE Beach Performance Director, though, so it never happened.

A big developmental piece for me in 2023 was starting to use AI in a meaningful way. That’s something I further progressed in 2024. I’m not going to claim to have it mastered, or anything like that. It has become a very useful tool for me, however.

On the book front, there were a few quite good titles on my list last year. One was The Culture System by JP Nerbun. Another was Learning To Be an “Ecological” Coach by Rob Gray. And while I mainly consumed Developmental To Division I: Strength And Conditioning For The Volleyball Athlete by Missy Mitchell-McBeth for purposes other than my own education, I definitely picked up some new knowledge doing so.

I also listened to The Score Takes Care of Itself and The Leadership Secrets of Nick Sabin. While I didn’t get around to posting reviews about them, both were good coaching perspectives – especially, I think, in terms of a coach’s personal development and progression.

Content

There were 57 new posts to the blog last year. That’s down a bit from 2023, but I made up for the reduced blog output elsewhere.

My new college volleyball recruiting book is one major source of separate content. I published that in the Summer. It also represents my first foray into audiobooks. Admittedly, I mean AI narrated rather than me doing it or having someone else do so. Still, it’s another way to get content to people in a way they want to consume it.

I also took on two new courses last hear. One was a redevelopment of a prior course on practice planning. The other was a new one on managing things around matches. That came out of survey results indicating it was something people wanted to get better at.

Finally, I dipped back into the NCAA data for a new report. This one looks at the change in ball-handling errors after the rule change to mostly eliminate double calls on 2nd contact.

Site traffic

The site hit 3 million lifetime page views in early December. Overall, though, it was a down year for traffic. By quite a bit.

For the year as a whole, 2024 page views were down about 20% from 2023. Every month saw less traffic than it did the year before, with March being the only one where the drop was less than 10%.

Dig in to the numbers and you’ll find that it’s a fall off in traffic from social media that’s the difference. Visitors coming from search (Google, etc.) – which has always been the single largest part of traffic to the site – were basically flat. Visitors from social media – the #2 source – were down better than 40% in 2024 compared to 2023, though the engagement levels of those who did come to the site were up by about 70%.

This is very interesting because the Coaching Volleyball group on Facebook, grew by something like 50% last year, hitting over 108,000 members. You’d think that would help lift traffic to the blog, especially since I share content there. Not so much apparently. I’ll speak to this more below.

Anyway, here are last year’s most viewed posts.

1. Volleyball Set Diagram
2. Volleyball Try-Out Drill Ideas
3. How to teach the overhand serve to volleyball beginners
4. Whose ball? Seam responsibilities
5. Volleyball hitter coverage strategy
6. Pin hitter in volleyball – what is it?
7. Ice-breaking and bonding games
8. Putting together a starting line-up
9. Volleyball tryouts for high school teams – some ideas
10. Setting up your starting rotation: 5-1

And here is where readers come from.

The top 5 countries remained the same from 2023, though visitors from Canada were up about 13% and Australians up about 8%, while the others were down.

What’s notable is Poland at #6 when it wasn’t even on the list in 2023. Germany and India are both carryovers, but dropped down a notch and swapped places. Sweden is the other new arrival for 2024, with France and Italy the two countries bumped out.

Looking ahead to the new year

The big thing on my list for 2025 is to get a new membership community launched and running. The framework is in place. Just need to put some finishing touches on things before it’s ready to go.

This community idea has been on my mind for a while. Seeing just how much of a stranglehold the Facebook algorithm has on what the Coaching Volleyball group sees, though, really pushed it from a potentially interesting concept to something I need to do.

As I write this, I’m looking at the last 28 days of posts to the group. There are 117. Of that 117, only 7 got views in excess of 10% of the group’s members. A post with 114 comments and 129 reactions was seen by fewer than 5% of members! That’s just not right.

So I want to build something where there’s no system deciding who gets to see what. One that organizes content and discussions better. And also one where members can have more of a say in how things work.

Look for more on this in the weeks to come.