When coaching beginners, youngsters, and anyone else where retention is an important consideration we want to design sessions that leave them happy and wanting to come back for more. Motivation is important for committed teams of more senior players too, though. We want them just as eager to come back. That’s something we should keep in mind when planning our practices and training sessions.
Start with the finish
I previously wrote about building practice from the finish. In that case I talked about thinking first about the last exercise you wanted in your session, then working backwards so you have a progression toward it. When thinking in terms of having players eager to come back for the next session, a similar mentality is appropriate.
There is what’s known as a serial-position effect which tells us we remember the last part of a sequence best. Psychologists call this the recency effect. What this means to us coaches is that if we want our players to think positively about our training sessions we should end them on something they will enjoy or otherwise find fulfilling.
Flipping back to the start
The other thing the serial-position effect tells us people remember best is the first part of a sequence. This is the primacy effect. This tell us that we should make sure the first thing we do in a practice session is engaging.
The muddle in the middle
So if the end and the beginning are best remembered after the fact by players, what should we do with the middle part? Obviously, you do what you need to do. If we follow the psychology, though, we realize this is the part of the session where you can put in the less intense, less exciting parts. Need to slow things down or lower the intensity to do more teaching? This is the section in which to do it.
Understanding their motivation
Before I leave you to go out and structure your next practice based on these principles, there’s one last important consideration. You need to have a good grasp of what your players find engaging and fulfilling. These thoughts from a former player of mine provide one player’s thoughts to that end. You need to think about your own group of players, though.
In my experience, competition tends to motivate male players (Kathy DeBoer backs this up). Many female athletes, however, like to feel they’ve had a good workout. This is a very general perspective, though. Level of play and type of team are influencing factors. It’s important that you, as the coach, understand what gets your players’ juices flowing most.
Back in 2014 I spent about 10 days at German woman’s club SC Potsdam during their preseason. Their coach at that time was Alberto Salomoni. Alberto shared the following on Facebook once. I believe it’s a translation from Italian.
“…. those who do sport know that you can not always win. The exception is to always win. The normal thing is the alternation of victory and defeat. I always said that i was proud of the team that won two World Championships and two European Championships, but i am equally proud of the team that lost the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992. I am equally proud for one reason: because they knew how to lose. As we lost we did not say the referee was guilty, we did not have luck, one player, the coach or the manager were guilty. We said the opponents was better then us. Stop.
We built a mentality with the team, fighting what we call “the culture of the alibis”. What is an alibi? An alibi is to explain to someone, thing that i cannot do. Not because i am not able, but because there are always other reasons that have nothing to do with me or with my behavior/attitude. We are not the dream team, we are a team that dreams. Our dream is to win the Olympic Games and we will do everything for win it. If we will not win, we will not consider ourselves as loser. We will know that we failed a goal.
To failed a goal it does not mean that we are in the shit of the history of sport. This is very important especially for young people. Young people have to try to win in sport as much as possible. But don´t believe to people that say that the world is divided between winners and losers. In my opinion the world is divided especially between good and bad persons. This is the most important lesson. Then between bad persons are winners…unfortunately. And between good persons are unfortunately losers…”
Julio Velasco, “Il laureato” 1995
One day, hopefully we can get Velasco to do a Volleyball Coaching Wizards interview, as he is one of the true legendary coaches in our sport. I had the opportunity to see him present at the 2015 High Performance Coaches Clinic. As his comments above indicate, he’s got some really deep insights into coaching. Mark Lebedew shared another.
So, do you and/or your players get caught up in “alibis”?
I should note, Velasco’s comments remind me of something fellow legend John Wooden has talked about. He said in Wooden on Leadership that he was more proud of a team doing it’s absolute best than of winning a championship.
The term “reversion to the mean” or “regression to the mean” may sound complicated, but it really isn’t. In statistics the term mean is the same as saying average. Reversion or regression in this context just indicates moving back to. Put it all together and you get moving back to average. Pretty straightforward, right?
Why is this important for you to understand as a coach?
Because it speaks to how we react to players under- or over-performing. Even more, it speaks to the cause we link to the effect of a player doing better or worse in the future.
Let me use the following graph to explain.
What you see above is a fairly typical bell curve. It indicates the likelihood of something. In this case, let’s think in terms of a volleyball player’s performance. The horizontal axis is performance from very bad to very good. The vertical axis is probability, from low to high. As you move along the bell curve line you get the odds the player performs at a given level. The odds are low that they perform either very poorly or very well, while the odds are relatively high that they perform somewhere around their average.
Here’s where the reversion or regression part comes in.
Look at the red X. That indicates a pretty bad performance, right? Notice I put a green arrow pointing to the right next to the X. Why? Because, all else being equal, chances are the player will do better in their next opportunity.
Similarly, you’ll see that I put a red arrow pointing left next to the green check mark at a pretty good performance point. Odds are the player won’t be as good next time.
Flip that around. If the player just did very well and is probably not going to do as well next time, does it make sense to get overly excited about it?
Here’s a video where John Kessel from USA Volleyball talks about this using a basketball analogy.
So chances are what we say or do is not the cause that leads to the effect of the player doing better or worse next time.
All else not equal?
You’ll note that I said expectations of future performance were, all else equal, that they’d be somewhere around the average. That “all else equal” bit is important and is part of the side of coaching that’s likely more art than science. How you react to a player’s performance has to be linked to whether there is an underlying cause or not. If there is an underlying cause, then what you’re seeing actually reflects the player operating with a different performance distribution than their usual one.
Let’s say a player is sick, as an easy example. If a player is not feeling well then you will think of their expectations in terms of a “performance when sick” curve rather than the general one we’ve been talking about up to now. It features a distribution somewhat left of the usual one. Average performance in this case is probably going to be at a level that would be considered poor by the players’ normal standards.
There are, of course, lots of possible reasons why a player’s performance distribution curve could be temporarily shifted left of where it usually is. Part of your job as a coach is to try to find a way to get it shifted back. That’s not realistic with a sick or injured player, but if it’s one who’s distracted, lacking motivation, or something like that, then it’s something you can address.
From the opposite perspective, maybe a player performs better when mom is at the match. Their performance curve when she’s in attendance is to the right of where you normally see it. From a coaching perspective, you should then be looking at how you can make that shift permanent – aside from assuring Mom’s at every match, of course.
Coach induced shifts
If a player is just having an off day with no real cause, you could actually make things worse by yelling at or punishing them. If it negatively impacts their mood, focus, etc. then you just became the source of the kind of left shift in their performance distribution I talked about above. The same could possibly be true if you excessively praise a player for a good performance. They might start feeling the pressure of expectations.
There are, of course, players who do better after some sharp words or when they know Coach is happy with how they’ve done. This is where knowing your players becomes extremely important.
Starters vs. Subs
It’s worth noting that generally speaking starters are the players with a higher mean level of performance. On average, they perform better than the non-starters. That’s why they are starters. This then ties in with the question of substitutions if a starter is under-performing or the team isn’t doing well.
I should note that players don’t all have the same performance distribution shape. Here’s an example of three different distributions with the same average.
Notice you have the one we’ve been using up to now, which is the one with the 2nd highest peak. You can also see a higher peaked, but more narrow distribution. That indicates a very consistent performer. The last one is wider and flatter, which is what you’d see from a player with very wide performance swings. They can be exceedingly good, but also extremely poor.
Here’s something else worth looking at.
In this case we have players with different averages. The better one has that narrow, tall distribution of the very consistent player. The one with the lower average has a broader range of performance. Generally speaking, the one with the higher average will outperform the other. We can see, though, that there is a little part of the other player’s distribution that goes further to the right. That means sometimes, though not often, they will be the better player of the two.
Raising the mean over time
At the end of the video above John talks briefly about how the job of the coach is the raise a player’s (and team’s) average performance. This simple graph is a representative of that.
You can see in the diagram how the distributions progressively shift to the right. Remember, the horizontal access is performance, so this shows someone getting better over time. In fact, if you look at the right-most curve it does not overlap at all with the left-most curve. That’s a situation where on their worst day a player will do better now than they could ever have done in their initial situation. Think about an 18 year-old player compared to their 14 year-old self. Naturally, the rightward shifts in the performance distribution become smaller as the player gains mastery and experience.
Our job as coaches is, through training and other developmental work, to keep the player’s mean performance rising. How we most effectively do that is the subject of other conversations.
Timeouts
Mark Lebedew and others have provided research into the effectiveness of timeouts. Basically, they find little or none (sideout percentages after timeouts are basically the same as their average). This is another area of coaching where reversion to the mean is a possible explanation for what we think we see. And of course there’s also the question of confirmation bias, but that’s a different subject.
Note: If you want to learn more about the concept of reversion to the mean and other things related to how we humans incorrectly link cause and effect and otherwise trip ourselves up in our interpretation of things, Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow is a good resource.
How do you create pressure situations in your practice?
That’s a question coaches ponder a lot. Especially when they see their team crumble in intense match situations.
The fact of the matter, though, is that there are different types of pressure. Some are mainly individual, while others are more team.
Individual pressure
In the case of individual pressure, we’re talking about a situation where one player must execute. That could be at the service line. It could be in serve reception. Or it could be as a hitter. These are situations where the individual player feels the pressure to perform well. Actually, it’s probably more a “not screwing up” type of pressure in terms of their self-talk, but that’s a different subject.
Creating individual pressure requires putting a player in a position where they have to execute. There’s an example of this in John Cook’s book, Dream Like a Champion. In it he describes a hitter vs. defense game where one attacker must win a game against a full defense. If they lose, they play again. They repeat the game until the player wins.
Now, that’s an example of individual pressure in a very individualized situation. There are also ways to create individual pressure in a more team situation. The run-and-serve drill is an example of this from a serving perspective. If we think of serve reception, though, we can create a situation where one player receives every ball. Their team cannot execute the offense if they cannot provide a good pass. Alternatively, flip things around and say that only a specific hitter can score.
Team pressure
While individual pressure is about putting the spotlight on a specific player (or position), team pressure is about the collective. This is about the team needing to come back from behind, or perhaps to close out a set when ahead. It’s about them staying focused and connected when the pressure is on, and not falling victim to fear and doubt.
One interesting game you can play from this perspective is 25 or reset. I’ve also seen it referred to as “slip and slide”. Basically, if a team gets to 24 and does not score they have to reset back to wherever you started the score (e.g. 19). This combines the pressure to close a team out with the drive to keep fighting if you’re the losing team.
On a smaller scale, wash games are little pressure situations. The team must, for example, win two rallies in a row. That increases the pressure on the second ball – for both sides.
Consequences
A lot of coaches use some kind of punishment for losing to create pressure, like sprints. I’m not a fan of this, as I’ve discussed. Further, research suggests it actually may not improve motivation. If the desire to win is intrinsic, then losing should be enough of a punishment. You don’t need anything else. If your players aren’t naturally competitive, then you need to tie something they care about in terms of playing the game to winning. That, though, is a different topic of discussion.
Similarly, if a player cares at all about the quality of their play, then failing to execute at an individual level will leave them feeling disappointed. Why, then, is anything extra required? If your players are not worried about their quality of play, then you may have some other problems to address before worrying about how they do under pressure.
It took me several months, but I eventually finished reading The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallway. The women’s soccer coach at Midwestern State loaned it to me. He uses it quite a bit with his team. The reason I took so long was that I read it in small doses rather than sitting down for long reads. I probably should have just read it in one go. After all, it’s a short book (134 pages).
The fact that I had not read the book already was a source of shock and sadness to one of my coaching friends. I suggest you not make the same mistake. It was recommended during my CAP III course.
I personally think the measure of any good non-fiction book is how much it makes you think. By that standard, Inner Game is a great offering. Yes, it’s a book focused on tennis. And yes, that does mean at times the discussion is not overly useful for volleyball coaches. Broadly speaking, though, the concepts and ideas translate easily from sport to sport.
Inner Game was written primarily for players, but is easily translatable to coaching. It talks a lot about player thought processes. In particular, a big focus is on getting the conscious mind out of the way. Doing so allows the parts of us where performance and learning actually take place to do their thing. A big part of this is removing judgement from the equation.
We all have players who think too much about their technique. It is usually to the detriment of their performance. The problem is we coaches exacerbate things at times. This is the result of how we provide feedback and technical instruction. I definitely thought of the concepts of internal vs. external feedback while reading the book.
There are some good sections on focus and concentration in the book. I also really like the discussion of competition. If you struggle to express its merits to your athletes, I definitely recommend that section.
Here’s the bottom line. If you haven’t already, read The Inner Game of Tennis. It will stimulate all kinds of thoughts about your coaching methods. That’s a good thing!
An email came in from a coach working with a group of players. It deals with the question of how to handle a situation where effort and playing caliber don’t match.
I have two young and two older experienced hitters. The older players don’t give their all. They do what they must, but without the involvement. When we have a match, they play very well, with very good effect, and they can win a point under pressure.
The young players don’t understand why they are a reserve players if they play the as well as the older ones in training (a lot of times better). Unfortunately, in matches the young players make more mistakes and don’t have stable form (sometimes they can play amazing volleyball, but sometimes they can do simple mistakes). They were the most important players in the youth club and they don’t understand that in the senior league it is different.
Have you ever had similar problem in your career? What would you do, if you were me?
I’ll summarize the situation this way. We have two experienced players who go through the motions in practice, but are clearly the best come match time. We then have two young players who work very hard in practice, but are not yet consistent performers in matches.
To my mind there is a question of priorities here. The reference at the end about “senior league” makes me think competition is the priority for this particular team. That means putting the best team on the court for each match is what it’s about.
To my mind there are two ways to try to handle this sort of situation.
The younger players
The first thing we have to do is to make sure the younger players who aren’t playing understand the team’s priority – winning. They further need to understand why the more experienced players are the starters – fewer errors, more consistent performance, etc. The younger players may not like the situation, but at least they will understand the logic.
Explaining things is not enough, though. You also need to provide those players with a path toward increased playing time. Where do they need to improve to push the experienced players? What do they need to do to make those improvements? Give them hope and steps they can take to move toward their goal.
The experienced players
It obviously isn’t any fun when some of those best players realize they will start no matter what and don’t bother to give full effort in training. The challenge is to find ways to motivate them to change that behavior. What is it they can target as a reason to push themselves in training?
Ideally, their motivation is simply to make the team the best it possibly can be. If the players are motivated by the collective good, then the coach’s job is to show them how better training by those players will help achieve that goal.
Unfortunately, some players have more selfish motivates. Maybe they want to earn some honors or recognition. Maybe they want a better contract or to move to a bigger club. You have to find out where their motivation is and try to appeal to that.
Short-term/long-term
Linked in with all of this is the time frame you are working in. Are you just concerned with this season? If so, then you are probably going to have keep picking the more experienced players for the starting lineup. If, however, you have the ability to think longer term, maybe you can find some opportunities to bench the experienced players from time to time. That would give the younger players valuable experience and show the experienced ones there are others looking to take their positions.
Those are some thoughts I had on the situation. I’d love to hear what others have done in a similar circumstance, or would do. Leave comment below and share your thoughts and/or experience.
One of the disadvantages of having a former player in the broadcast business is that sometimes you get thrown under the bus – intentionally or otherwise. The American setter I had at Svedala, Camryn Irwin, is in that arena now. She also sometimes featured as a guest on The Net Live. She did the intro and outro audio for the Volleyball Coaching Wizards podcast as a favor to me back when we started it.
A player’s recollection
One such episode was December 12, 2016. About an hour in, a discussion of block vs. game-like training developed. There were interesting perspectives shared by a combination of men’s and women’s players and coaches. Along the way, Cam cast me in a negative light.
She didn’t actually say, “John Forman … “. Instead, it was more “my coach in Sweden …”. I doubt most people who listen to the show have any idea that’s me. They would have to find out where Cam played in Sweden and then probably dig around to learn that I was the coach for that team. I’m guessing most American volleyball people won’t do that work.
But back to what she said. The conversation got into the subject of playing a lot in practice. I’m not going discuss the skill acquisition value of block vs. random and all that here, because that wasn’t Cam’s focus. If you want to get into it, you can start with this post. Cam talked instead about practice intensity and the potential impact on player fatigue.
Basically, what she said was at Svedala I just wanted to play all the time in training and the players felt like they needed more “drill” time to bring down the physical demands. She talked about meeting with the coach (me) to discuss it. The way she talked about it on the show was to say “We can’t just play for an hour and a half.” The implication was that they would physically break down.
Let’s put the question of whether 90 minutes of game play in practice is too high an intensity to the side for now. Maybe that’s a question for another article.
Instead I want to look at Cam’s recollection of things and compare it to my own.
A coach’s recollection
First, I remember the “We want more drills” request mainly from a skill acquisition perspective (in part a motivation for this post). It was less about training intensity.
Second, we never just played. Well, maybe the very first session. Check out my log entries for that season to see. Yes, we played a lot – especially small-sided games. I almost never had the bodies for 6 v 6. Those rare days we could play 6 v 6 (guest players) we did use the bulk of the session to do so because it would have been foolish not to. And the players were always very excited to do so. Every practice, though, included non-game activities. There was target serving, passing, various peppers, and defense drills mixed in at different points.
Third, even when we did do game play I tried to move players around to keep their workload balanced. For example, I wanted the six-rotation players getting equal back row and front row work.
Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, I was generous with time off. We started with 10 players, and quickly dropped to 9. That means only two back-ups to the first team – a setter and an OH. Knowing the starters would have a heavy load, I always looked for opportunities to give the team breaks. We didn’t usually train on Thursday, so if we didn’t play on the weekend I sometimes (maybe always in-season) gave them Friday off for an extra long weekend. I know I also gave them off at least one Monday after we played on Saturday. Plus, they got 10 days completely off over the holidays. This is all on top of going lighter the days after matches and cutting things off if they looked tired.
So from my perspective I tried to not physically overwork them.
Reconciling the two perspectives
It is worth sharing something Cam related to the team at one point during the season. She often talked with players from other teams after matches as there were several Americans in the league. One of them was apparently in awe of the types of plays our team made during games – plays no one else made. Cam attributed that, at the time, to us playing a lot in training. So clearly there was a recognition on her end of the value of making practice game-like.
So why the difference in recollection?
Maybe in the moment during the TNL discussion Cam didn’t have a chance to really think back on the season. Or maybe the time off didn’t really register as you might expect.This sort of thing can happen to players. For example, a player can complete a practice and think they should have passed more balls, forgetting that they passed a bunch of them in the games or in drills that were not “passing” drills. It’s a question of the perspective on the activity (or lack thereof). We coaches are subject to this as well.
Maybe because of other stuff going on for her (like coaching the club’s youth players) Cam had a different perspective on time off than mine. She also had to deal with a back injury, which forced some additional work on her part. Perhaps that factors in to her recollections as well.
For what it’s worth, my player-coach relationship with Camryn was a positive one. I don’t think she holds any ill will toward me. She was just a player with a player’s perspective and I was a coach with a coach’s perspective. I don’t take her comments from TNL personally, even if at the time there was a bit of an “Ouch!” response. 🙂
Were the players overworked?
The team definitely struggled at times during the first weeks of the second half of the season. By that point we only had 8 players, the only back-up being a setter. I was already paring back training time. I can remember talking with the team about how we’d look to do that, but how we’d still need to keep the intensity up as much as possible in that shorter time. They needed to keep challenging each other to continue progressing.
At the same time their weight training regime had recycled. Might the combination of the two been too much? Conversely, did I give them too much time off over the holidays? These are among the things I’ve thought about as potentially contributing to a couple of poor January performances. Unfortunately, I was let go at the start of February (season runs through April), so I have no way to know how the physical side of things might played out long-term.
The lesson
Players are individuals with their own inherent biases and perspectives. It’s inevitable that they see and remember things differently than you do as a coach. Many a coach has been surprised/embarrassed/mortified at the things players remember. It comes with the territory. We want to do our best to not teach what we don’t want learned, but we have a very different view point from our players. Accept it. Try to understand their perspective. Do your best to learn when you come across an example of divergent recollection.
There’s a lot of talk about the level of privilege among modern athletes. Anyone who came up as a player 20 years ago must think current players are seriously spoiled. As one of the Volleyball Coaching Wizards I interviewed said, the older players were happy just to get a new pair of shoes each year.
Obviously, the degree to which players nowadays are spoiled or not, pampered to or not, depends a great deal on the level of play and the resources of the organization for which they compete (or the amount their parents are willing the spend). The team I coached at Svedala, for example, got the basics. The club did not provide the players nearly the gear and support in the form of trainers, etc. as most college players in the US get these days. This is despite being a professional team.
But I’m not here to talk about that stuff. I want to instead discuss the degree to which players are invested in their teams and the programs that surround them.
I recently thought about the structure of university level volleyball in the U.K. That is an entirely club-based system. By that I mean teams are not varsity in the way those of us in the U.S. think about it with the school running this. Instead, they are clubs which are run by the students involved. They are much like club sports at colleges and universities in the States. Yes, there are varying degrees of involvement and oversight from school to school. Overall, though, the club membership is responsible for the direction the program takes and much of the day-to-day administration.
The result of all this is that club members are – to my mind – more invested in how the program does. This is both in terms of performance on-court and what they do outside the gym (club growth, community service, etc.). This leads me to wonder ….
Would athletes in other structures be more invested if they were more involved in the off-court parts of their programs?
I’m thinking primarily here of school programs (college/university or even high school), but the same idea could potentially be addressed in a more professional club context. We sometimes talk about the need to have players feel like they are part of the process of determining how they train and/or play. This would simply take that same idea and apply it to the more administrative side of things.
Obviously, there are things which will have to be done by the coaching staff for one reason or another. For example, NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from recruiting. There are plenty of things they can help out with, though. Making travel arrangements. Doing scheduling. Setting up community service activities. The list goes on.
As an added bonus, if we players help out with that kind of stuff we can have less administrative staff. That means lower costs. 😉
Also, the admin experience wouldn’t hurt in terms of the athletes developing useful job market skills.
Just something to think about. Feel free to tear the idea to shreds in the comment section below. 🙂
Mark at the At Home on the Court blog penned the Is Kobe really competitive? post. In it he presents us with a question. Is an overarching desire to win sufficient to be considered truly competitive? That may sound a bit strange, so let me explain.
It comes down to a player’s commitment to winning. Will they do anything required to win? And by anything required I mean perhaps sacrificing their own personal desires for the greater good. We would probably call these types of people real team players, but do we consider them real competitors?
To quote Mark;
“…I would argue that I have actually met very, very few people who are actually competitive, people who would really do anything to win. If you are prepared to do anything to win, you will work with others and you won’t take credit. “
We talked about this sort of idea in the MSU Volleyball office one day. It wasn’t so much in terms of competitiveness, but more broadly in the context of pursuit of team goals.
For a team to reach its objectives everyone needs to be on board with them. Everyone also needs to prioritize those objectives. Necessarily, prioritizing the team ahead of the self means you probably have to make sacrifices along the way.
Now, when we talk about sacrifices in this context we often speak of players not getting the playing time they want or having to play a different position or role in the team than they’d prefer. Let me provide you with a different example.
During the 2013-14 season the University of Exeter women I coached were on a mission. They wanted to reach Final 8s, played in Edinburgh that year. Everyone was totally committed and we ended up reaching that objective (and more).
A few weeks after the season the team came together to do a few training sessions ahead of playing in a regional tournament together. After one of them I was walking and talking with the team’s captain. One of the players on the team was someone who commonly expressed strong opinions that could rub people the wrong way at times. The captain told me during that walk that she had a reminder this particular “quirk” that evening. She said it was something she forgot about during the season because the focus was on the team and its objectives.
In other words, the captain had sacrificed her own desires to disagree, argue, or otherwise be made upset or feeling in conflict with this other player. Being a cohesive team was more important to her than any interpersonal issue. In fact, it was so much of a higher priority that the lack of response at potential conflict points, or simply avoiding them, had become unconscious.
Was my captain a special player? To be sure! She was captain for a reason. That’s not to say, though, that other players in the team weren’t making similar types of sacrifices to help maintain team harmony. I’m sure all of them were on some level or another.
The point is that group of players put the team’s mission ahead of any personal agenda of their own. This is what we look for, is it not? When expressed in terms of the objective of winning, then to Mark’s point, this is the ultimate expression of competitiveness.
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