Alex Porter joins me for this episode. Alex is the head coach for the volleyball performance program at the University of Essex in England. His teams have won a national championship and multiple cup competitions. He was with me on two of the original Coaching Conversations discussions. One was Coaching in the UK with Audrey Cooper and Simon Loftus. The other was Playing Opportunities in the UK where a pair of his former Essex players joined us to share their perspectives.
This talk kind of flips around the topic of that second Conversation in that we talk about the recruiting process from the coaching perspective. Alex does a lot of his recruiting without being able to see his prospective future players live in-person. As such, he’s got a lot of experience with what many of us have had to shift to thanks to COVID – or have to deal with simply because we lack the budget (and/or time) for extensive recruiting travel.
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Alex mentioned the Worklife podcast by Adam Grant. That’s under the TED umbrella. You can find out more about it here.
I mentioned Beth Launiere’s book Stop Competing and Start Winning in the discussion. You can see my review of that book, and also listen to this episode of the MasterCoaches Weekly Buzz to hear more about it from Beth herself.
Alex mentioned four services he uses to recruit international players. They are:
- TeamGleas
- Tiebreak Sports and Scholarships
- BIP (Briny It Promotions) – Nick and Tony
- Study Abroad Play Sport (Guimond & Vukovic)
As the process to be recruited to play volleyball at a UK university isn’t massively different than it is in the US (aside from many fewer rules!) a great resource is my book The College Volleyball Recruiting Playbook. It actually has a chapter on this specific topic.
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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.
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