It is difficult to explain and justify to someone who has not been bitten by the coaching bug. Rather than explaining, I will try to demonstrate through some vignettes of those things that made me addicted to coaching. In many ways it is closely related to my love of teaching, but even though coaching and teaching both involve getting people to learn — hopefully showing them how to better learn on their own — the two milieus are unique in their own ways. This is about my experiences as a youth coach, and the rewards that I get in return for my efforts. Believe me when I say that I get more out of coaching than the players get out of me. The vast majority of the reward is intrinsic, which may explain the incredulity of the outsiders looking in.

A caveat: these stories are all from my own memories, so I can only vouch for what I remember, as filtered through my own rose-tinted lenses.

This troll doll is one of my most treasured possessions, for a very sentimental reason, it may not seem like much, but it means the world to me.

Let me explain.

I was still playing rec league hack ball when I moved to St. Louis. I set, because no one else wanted to set, or actually no one else wanted to get shat upon when the sets were unhittable. I am too short to be effective in the front row — non-existent block at five feet and change, coupled with a negative vertical — my role was defined for me in the back row. Since I was just another below average passer, my only shot at playing was to set. I had no delusions of grandeur as a setter, but I knew I could always blame the passers if I couldn’t get to the pass in time.

It was then that I met a fellow player named Vince, I had taken the CAP I class when I lived in Austin TX — back when there were CAP classes. I took the CAP class with the intention of learning more about volleyball so that I can improve my own desultory and less than stellar volleyball game. When Vince heard about the CAP experience, he very enthusiastically recruited me to help him with the junior’s team that he was coaching. Not knowing any better and wanting to feed my own obsession with volleyball I agreed.

There were two teams at the fourteen-and-under age at the club. Vince head coached the second team and Tom coached the first team. The levels for the two teams were similar, mainly because they practiced together since there is a dearth of gym time, so they had the same practices and under the same intensity. The main difference was that the players on the first team were more experienced than those on the second team. I happily attended every practice and about every local tournament for both teams since I was the only assistant coach available to both teams. Tom and Vince trusted me enough that I was able to work with all the players — mostly with setters — and there were no bruised egos; they planned and conducted the practices and all I did was hit balls and worked the players on their skills and techniques. Tom was the more fiery and intense of the two head coaches; let’s just say that he had the attention of players on both teams, while Vince was much more laid back and go-with-the-flow coach. The tournaments that the teams competed in were mostly local and regional tournaments, there were a few travel tournaments thrown in so that the teams were exposed to some different teams. The goal for the season was to qualify for the GJNC, which was to take place ironically, in Orlando, FL.

One day, Tom approached me to ask me if I could take the team to Louisville KY for a tournament; mind you I had never “officially” sat in the big chair at tournaments before. I usually worked individually with players as they came off the court or were getting ready to enter the match. I had never made out a lineup or planned strategy. My low-level adult playing experience fit the fourteen-and-under playing level well, so I sounded like I knew what I was doing — or at least I faked it well enough to pass for being knowledgeable. This was a big ask, Tom had another obligation and the second team had their own tournament to attend. I suspect that Tom wanted to put me in the hot seat to see whether I was head coach material in preparation for the following season. I agreed. I was both excited and not a little bit trepidatious.

The tournament was hosted by KIVA in their facility, OVVC. It wasn’t a huge convention center tournament; those didn’t become vogue until much later. It was my first time at the OVVC, and it was eye opening for me as I couldn’t believe that there were dedicated volleyball only facilities, it was like heaven, but it wasn’t Iowa.

Honestly, I don’t remember much of the tournament, it was only a two-day tournament. The only coaching I did was pretty much the same thing I did as an assistant on the bench. I did go over what I would do with the lineups if someone were hurt or was ineffective, I hadn’t developed a sense of strategy or tactics, I hadn’t learned about spinning the dial for better matchups. I was also a clueless engineer talking to a bunch of fourteen-year-olds, so they were spared any dramatic win-one-for-the-Gipper speeches. I am sure that team would have busted a gut laughing if I tried to pull something like that out of my empty bag of tricks. All I did was give minimal feedback and try to stay out of their way.

Some salient memories are: I had caught a ride with the family of one of the middles. The parents and the players were happy to have me; they were all very welcoming and the players all behaved throughout the weekend. I was not foolish enough to think that it was because of me, there was definitely a substitute teacher vibe going on. It was a new experience with a different person in charge, I don’t know if they expected me to be more lenient, but they never tested the boundaries. We must have played quite well because we played in the finals on Sunday afternoon. This was an exceptionally good fourteen’s team, well prepared and well taught, so it wasn’t like I had much to do with their performance that weekend, I was just the new voice. I was just worrying about not mucking it up.

One of the key things that I worried about was whether I had to up ref at all during the tournament; I needn’t have worried because the players took care of all the officiating because the club took pride in training the players on officiating.

The crowd and the other teams that had filled the building during the weekend had emptied out of the facility early Sunday afternoon with just the players and parents of three teams left for the final match, it was on one of the first two courts at the front of the OVVC. I also remember that the final match was closely fought, with lots of lead changes.

One thing I need to mention is just how committed these parents are to the team. They have been at this facility for both days of the weekend, being rambunctious and cheering enthusiastically, all the while knowing that we had a long drive back to St. Louis after the match. These parents have bonded throughout the early season; they have their routines developed and refined down to the tiniest detail, were well practiced in their cheering, and have also developed a sophisticated understanding about volleyball.

As the match evolved, the parents of both teams became more vociferous, and you can see some parental tempers flaring. This was something that I had not anticipated: telling parents to calm down and behave themselves. As the pressure built and the parents reacted to the pressure, I was nervously eyeing the bleachers and wondering whether, if, and when I needed to step in to calm our crowd down.

I needn’t have wondered. As the crowd’s agitation reached a fever pitch, the team, every one of the fourteen-year-olds, turned to face the bleachers and yelled: “shut up” to their parents. The crowd immediately quieted down, with many of the parents sheepishly sitting down. Crisis averted and I didn’t do a damned thing. Life was good.

I don’t remember whether we won the final match, and I don’t care that I don’t remember. It was about as perfect of first-time head coaching experience as I could have asked. Everyone was friendly and welcoming to this interloper, the team responded to my coaching, we reached the finals, I was able to visit a brand-new city, even though I spent all my time in the OVVC facility, I would not have traded it for any other experience.

What about the little troll doll? This was a gift from the players; the team presented this doll to me during the team dinner on Saturday night. They had all written their numbers on the little visor, which had smudged and faded over the years, although you can still make out some of the numbers. I don’t remember my reaction at the time, I knew I was very touched, what I wanted to do was cry because of their thoughtfulness and showing me their appreciation as I navigated an unfamiliar and potentially stressful situation, but the macho head coach shouldn’t be showing his emotions, so I quietly and lovingly put the troll in my bag.

What they don’t know is that their token has a significant meaning in my mind. I have carried it around with me for thirty-two years. It is one of the first nick knacks that I unpack when I move to a new home. I recall those smiling faces when I look at the troll, it is a reminder of the first significant step that I took to become a coach. Those two fourteen’s teams were my ideal introduction to youth sports coaching, their impact on my journey through the coaching ranks are immeasurable because I don’t know how I would have fared if this initial foray into coaching volleyball was a disaster. I owe these players a huge debt of gratitude for setting the path towards coaching for over thirty years. I also remember both Tom and Vince’s kindness and confidence in me, and I appreciate their trust in me those thirty some years ago.

Why do I coach? A part of the answer comes from what these players showed me. These fourteen-year-olds who have gone on to have successes on and off the volleyball courts; many of them have become mothers and wives, and most importantly, many have also jumped into the cult of coaching with both feet. Some of them still stay in touch with me through social media and by what I can see, they are all exceptional humans. Having the pleasure of experiencing their own coaching journey to coach the next generation is a special experience and a point of pride for me.

This is why the little Troll is so special in my mind, it reminds me of that far ago weekend in Louisville and those players and parents.

This is #WhyICoach.

The meaning and nature of the drill evolved over the years for me as I learned from other coaches when I observed them conducting the same drill in their own style while emphasizing different aspects of the drill. I didn’t take copious amounts of notes as I observed but some memories of the different aspects of the drill stayed with me. The current incarnation of The Pit that I run is a combination of all the versions of the drill from those coaches I have learned from over the years as well from my own improvisations.

The Basics

The coach initiates balls to players who are defending “The Pit” or the defensive back court. The coach can do whatever they want: hit hard, tip, roll shot, or send the ball into the corners of the back court by any means necessary.

The intent is to make the players play every ball that is initiated. The drill can end with the player completing a previously agreed upon goal, whether it is numerical goal, a quality goal, or a time goal.

Running the Drill

The set up is having a player or players in the back court and the coach in the front court by the net. The coach can move along the net to get different angles on the defenders. Ideally, there should be an infinite supply of volleyballs in as many carts as possible. There should be a hander handing the volleyballs to the coach — ideally the hander is facing the net so that they are not seeing the action on the court because they could become mesmerized by the drill action and slow down the supplying the balls to the coach. It would also be beneficial if there was someone expediting the handing of the balls to the hander. In the meantime, the rest of the team should be shagging the volleyballs after they have been played while filling up the other ball carts so that the empty carts can be swapped out as they are emptied. The other players should also be situated along the sidelines and keeping a vigilant eye on the balls that end up just sitting on the court and keeping extraneous balls off the court so that the players in the drill do not get hurt accidentally.

Initial Manifestation for Beginning Coaches

Many novice coaches start off thinking only about teaching the players to dig hard driven balls. Often times, the drills evolve into a stamina competition between the coach and the player; most of the time ending with the coach completely wiped out by expending maximum energy for a short period of time because they are swinging as hard as they can as quickly as they can at the player; in the meantime, the player is just slightly winded because they didn’t have to do much except to shuffle a few steps to the ball to better align their platform to the hard driven ball. The motivation behind this thought process is that the coach is going to cure the players from their fear of the hard driven ball. It has been my experience that while the thinking behind the motivation is sound, most players lose their fear of the hard driven ball quickly once they are able to dig a hard driven ball straight up; that is when that fear of the ball turns into confidence if not outright arrogance because they had just proven themselves intrinsically.

Some coaches dislike the Pit because they only see the initial manifestation from beginning coaches as just macho posturing, but being able to dig a hard driven ball is just one dimension of the utility of this drill.

Variations

There are numerous variations to The Pit, with each variation changing the rules of the drill. These variations can be used as a progression to increase the difficulty of the drill for the players to negotiate. If the variations are intelligently concatenated, progressions lead the player from the novice level of experience and understanding to more advanced levels. The idea is to ramp up the amount of knowledge that the players store in their long-term memory and which are the foundations of knowledge that the players use to connect and consolidate into a coherent set of neuronal bases that are easily recalled into the working memory when the players start putting their background knowledge together. This act of connecting and consolidating creates the basis for the player’s ability to improvise and react extemporaneously. Progressions are standard ways to train the novice and to give them wherewithal to fill up their empty long-term memory with useful memories.

Another perspective is to view the process of improving through progressions as a manifestation and practice of the Constraint Led Approach to training. The variations in how the drill is executed is a way for the coach to manipulate two out of the three constraint types of CLA. The three CLA constraints are:

Performer (Organism) Individual characteristics of the athlete — height, strength, fitness, psychology, experience, skill level. In this case, we are applying the idea of expertise reversal effect by creating variations to meet the needs of the player as they improve from the novice level.

Task The rules, goals, and equipment of the activity — field size, number of players, scoring rules, ball size. The rules, goals, number of players, and scoring rules constraints are manipulated to change the challenges to the players so that they can stretch their comfort zone.

Environment External conditions — surface type, weather, crowd noise, lighting, opposition. There are no differences introduced in environmental constraints, although there are times when the dimensions of the active area of the drill are challenged.

The Pit is not a perfect fit for the CLA definition because it does not meet the first core principles of the ideal CLA approach. In the case of the Pit, the practice environment does not mirror the demands of real competition, it is an abstracted and generalized version of the game of volleyball, I am not too concerned because I feel that the Pit drill is beneficial in the way that outweighs the concerns of not being game-like.

As for the other core principles of CLA: athletes do learn to perceive and act on “opportunities for action” in their environment. The coach shapes the environment, so the right affordances become visible. The Pit creates non-linear learning opportunities — progress isn’t smooth, explorations of possible and plausible solutions to situations are variable and “messy”. Finally, it is the athlete is at the center of the problem-solving process, the learning process is ad hoc and inexact. The drill conditions are custom designed to motivate the athlete to discover adaptable and robust solutions, which translates to adaptable and robust skills.

This is a list of variations that I have used, listed in no specific order.

• Timed period in the Pit. This timed aspect can be used to initially give the novice players an easy goal to achieve while giving them early success. This can also add additional pressure to overcome when combined with other variations while doing the drill.

• Total Number of Reps. Another easy goal for the players to focus on initially. It allows the players to develop patience and an ability to endure the pressure. This can also be combined with the timing variation, touch as many volleyballs in a given time without adding a quality dimension to touching every volleyball.

• Total Number of Quality Reps. This adds the quality factor into the mix. This can be used by itself in a myriad of ways: dig to inside the court, dig to front row, or dig to target. It can be used in combination with the previous two combinations: dig to any one of previous quality measures within a finite number of reps, or within a given time period.

• Total Continuous Reps. The simplest incarnation is to touch ten, fifteen, or twenty consecutive balls without missing one. Missing a ball means that the drill resets to zero. This puts the player under stress and is a way to develop resilience and teaches them to push through fatigue, both physical and mental.

• Total Continuous Quality Reps. Same principle as the previous variation, except that there is a quality component that was listed previously: dig to inside the court, dig to front row, or dig to target.

Nuances

There are numerous nuances that can incorporated into the execution of the drill since the Pit is a coach initiated and controlled drill. It is my experience that many coaches don’t always take advantage of the fact they are in control of the drill: the pace of the drill, where the volleyballs are located by the coach, how and whether to attack how the players are defending the court, how to force the players cover the whole court, and how to force the players to communicate nonverbally.

• If the player is good at digging the straight on hard driven ball but won’t budge to hit ball on either side of their bodies. Hit the ball just out of their reach so that they must defend the hit nonlinearly, taking a number of strides to catch up with the ball and having to turn their bodies to play the body outside of midline.

• If the player easily gives up on balls that are reachable. Many players will give up on balls that are more than a few steps away from them, convinced that they can’t get a good play on the ball; this is often manifested by the two or three half-hearted steps toward the ball and the body language signals: that is just too far away, I can’t get to it! This is when the Total Continuous Reps variation is deployed. Constant resetting to zero on the reps count is the incentive for the player.

• If the player refuses to play any ball that is not within the defined court boundaries. This is a corollary of the previous nuance. The players are convinced that any ball that goes beyond the court boundaries is naturally out. Of course, their reasoning discounts the event of a block touch. Throwing the ball to the next court and catching them mid stutter step, explaining the fallacy of their assumption, calling them out on it, and then recycling the play is a way to nudge them to making the play on every ball regardless of where it is.

• Non-communicative players. The constraint can be skewed to introduce coach-on-two, my favorite variation on the Pit, or coach-on-three. I don’t like to add more players than three because it reduces the amount of court that the players need to cover. Going through the variations listed above, the players must necessarily depend on each other to meet the stated goal, which is the point of playing a team game. This nuance forces the players to communicate with one another: who is responsible for specific zones on the court, who is responsible for chasing the balls that are outside of the court boundaries, who is responsible for the short balls and the tips, how to avoid running into each other during the heat of the drill, when and how to adjust to the when to throw the predetermined tactic out the window etc. Eventually, as the players become more knowledgeable and experienced, they will learn the other player’s playing preferences: which player is quick, which player is a step slow, which player is overthinking, which player plays the midline hits better than the outside of midline hits, which players are more relentless than the other, and so on. That is when communications become less verbal, more intuitive, and instinctive. Unfortunately, novice players will need to learn to communicate the only way that they can conceive of communicating, which is verbal. As they become more attuned to each other, the necessity of verbal communications decreases, and they learn each other’s tendencies and become better at “reading” each other. The coach reinforces the need for communication by being accurate with their arm swings, hitting between players, hitting to the gaps that the players leave in the defense, hitting balls that are at a height that both players can dig so that the players must decide who gets the ball.

What the Pit Does Not Do.

• Teach the Players to Read the arms and shoulders of the hitter. Unless the players are very novice and the coaches exaggerate their hip, shoulder, and arm movement to expose the players to the swing mechanics. Usually, during the heat of the drill the coach’s swings happen too fast for the player to break down the swings to learn the hitter’s tendency.

• Teach the Players that their Defense is Completely Deterministic and Predictable. Much like live game action, the uncertain factor dominates the Pit drill, so that it is impossible to predict and anticipate what the coach does next, this drill helps the players to react instantaneously to the unanticipated change in the game action. What is does do is to teach the players in the Pit to react to the unexpected events happening on the court by having the necessary experience and knowledge base to improvise some defensive action in response.

• Teach the players how to play in a complete Defense, which includes the Block. For a defender, the block is their friend, it takes away areas on the court that are covered by a good block so the probability of getting a play on the ball is better in a real game. Similarly, the drill doesn’t teach the players how to play with a bad or incomplete block, which then introduces another uncertainty.

Critical Factors

• Swing Accuracy is Imperative. I learned this the hard way. The coach needs to learn to put the ball just out of reach of the player, but not too far away. You want to entice the player to believe that they can reach and dig the ball if they move a little faster or take bigger steps; you don’t want to hit it so far away as to frustrate them, unless you are trying to make a point about their own perceive limits.

• Never Hit Hard to their faces. This may seem to be an easy decision, but I have had quite a few swings get away from me. You assume that the players could react fast enough to deflect the ball in time, and you would be wrong. I have not broken any noses, I have accidentally administered quite a few facials in my time, it’s not anything to be proud of even though the players usually take it in stride and joke about it. I usually feel bad about it. Doing this as a regular part of the training is nonsensical because the swinging takes place on the same side as the defense and not at the net, so there is slightly more reaction time in the actual game.

There is joy when a player or players completes their Pit or coach-on-one or coach-on-two. The confidence that the players gain from completing the drill is unequaled. There is relief from having completed the drill, but there is also disbelief that they were actually able to accomplish something that they did not believe they could accomplish. In time, the confidence concatenates and multiplies in the player; many players begin to actually enjoy the drill because of the adrenaline rush that comes from being successful at something that is difficult.

The funny thing is that there have been instances of former players asking to run the drill after they have moved on, they just wanted to relive the rush and to prove to themselves that they had done this successfully and that they could still do it.

The most memorable instance was when we had a combined last practice and graduation celebration for the eighteen’s team and one of the graduates specifically asked me to do the Pit with her. One of the coaches who had graduated a few years before her asked to be included, so we did coach-on-two for old times sake. Yeah, it makes me all verklempt.

It is difficult to explain and justify to someone who has not been bitten by the coaching bug. Rather than explaining, I will try to demonstrate through some vignettes of those things that made me addicted to coaching. In many ways it is closely related to my love of teaching, but even though coaching and teaching both involve getting people to learn — hopefully showing them how to better learn on their own — the two milieus are unique in their own ways. This is about my experiences as a youth coach, and the rewards that I get in return for my efforts. Believe me when I say that I get more out of coaching than the players get out of me. The vast majority of the reward is intrinsic, which may explain the incredulity of the outsiders looking in.

A caveat: these stories are all from my own memories, so I can only vouch for what I remember, as filtered through my own rose-tinted lenses.

One of many rewards when it comes to coaching is that one meets the acquaintance of stellar human beings, except that you meet them as they are breaking through the protective cocoon of childhood while maturing into their adult selves after having their characters shaped and formed by their parents, families, society, and the environment around them. Seeing their budding persona is akin to looking deep into the crystal ball for clues to the kind of adult that they have the potential of becoming. This is the story of a 17’s team but especially Colleen and Emily and their bond.

Colleen and Emily were BFFs before they came to play on our 17’s team, indeed, they have known each other since they were knee high to a grasshopper. They learned to play volleyball while playing in their parochial leagues together. They also attended the same Catholic high school, and of course they were volleyball teammates in high school. These two, along with a third member of the triumvirate, Kim, who is a year older, had an ongoing game of never-ending three-person pepper game since they were just beginning to learn how to play volleyball. This was a sign of how dedicated and passionate they were about the sport of volleyball. This never-ending pepper game obviously impressed all the coaches in our club, even though we made light of their obsession with the simple pepper game; the truth was that we were just as passionate and single-minded about volleyball as they were, it made them one of us, be it good or bad.

Colleen was a ball-control left side, not physically dominant but had a great swing and volleyball IQ. She played all her club career with one of the oldest and most established clubs in town. I think I may have coached against her team, although I don’t remember. Ball-control was the basis of her game, throw any kind of serve at her or put any kind of hitter against her and she will handle it coolly and calmly. The passes and digs came up so softly and accurately that they made her coaches cry tears of joy. On top of all that she always said hello, was always polite, she always makes eye contact when speaking to you, was always respectful even during the heat of battle. The only exception to her politeness was when she was dismantling an opponent.

One of the stories about Colleen and her proclivity for being eager to please is that my friend Santiago, who coached the 17’s team, made his players do a barrel roll during practices if they missed a dig. So, when Colleen missed a dig because she was out of her defensive position during a tense match in a qualifier, Santiago stood on the sideline and pointed to the correct position that Colleen was supposed to be defending. Mistaking Santiago’s intent, Colleen did a roll on the court. Well, Santiago busted out laughing, the entire team were laughing so hard they couldn’t catch their breath, the opposing team thought that the team was off their rockers. Colleen was oblivious to the humor of the situation, but then again that’s Colleen.

Emily played for me on the last team I coached for my old club before I started this club. She was one of two setters for that team; I ran a 6-2 offense because both setters were both height-challenged, I substituted taller players when the setting position rotated to the front row. We were successful, the right-side blockers protected our backrow defenders, and both setters ran the offense for us. As with all things, people couldn’t leave well enough alone, the other setter and her parents made a public scene in the downtime during one of the tournaments and complained loudly and bitterly about her role as a 6-2 setter, which they assert was keeping her from getting more playing time, claiming that was going to affect her role on the high school team; even though this was true for both setters. Emily came to me in her quiet way after the drama was over and offered to sit more so that the other setter had a chance to play some 5-1. This was the kind of kid Emily was. Her offer surprised me and she impressed me with her kindness and team-first attitude.

Even though Emily was incredibly quiet, she didn’t have to raise her voice to communicate; because she had the respect of everyone on every team she played on. She worked harder than anyone else because she knew that her lack of height in a tall person’s game was a challenge than she needed to overcome, and the best way was to do so was to outwork everyone. She worked even harder when she joined our 17’s team because that team was loaded with physical players —most of the players ended up playing college ball at some levels — so Emily accepted her role while keeping her mouth shut and outworked everyone. The other players on that team knew it and respected her integrity and work ethic. This tacit acknowledgement of her silent leadership became a self-regulating mechanism, the team knew what they needed to do to help her play her role without her pointing out the obvious, and they did it without fail.

It is one thing to be BFFs on a surface social level, but it is quite another to be committed to a friend when the chips are down. This memory flooded into my mind when I started to focus my effort to remember and document all the events involving those players that I have had the good fortune to interact with, those players who had impacted me with their actions.

As a part of our club practice, club-wide conditioning practices were mandatory every week. The emphasis was on volleyball game movements to improve agility, endurance, and flexibility. We didn’t have access to a weight room nor to cardio equipment, so the workouts were limited. During the warmups of one of the conditioning practices, I heard a blood curdling scream. Emily had hurt her knee, the distraught look on her face told the whole story and it gutted me, all the coaches knew instinctively that this was a severe injury, we all had the sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs.

Upon her return to practice the next week, we found out that we had lost Emily for the rest of the season, but true to form she was working to rehab her knee to return to play at Junior Nationals, but it seemed like a bridge too far. Forever a true team player, Emily still came to every practice and tournament to be there for her teammates. By the time nationals came, she was well enough to practice serving, so Santiago produced a scheme where we can get Emily to serve at nationals, but she was not well enough to play defense as she is wont to do. The team practiced what each player’s role was when Emily served and stepped in for her so that she can stay in her out of the way corner of the court, they practiced situational options: where the blockers needed to be, which defender had to cover more court, who had to cover the widened seams between players, what happens if there is a gap in the block while there was more court to cover, and what happens if the ball ends up heading towards the corner where Emily was hiding. Of course, Colleen was a key part of what made this scheme work; she stepped up to take charge of leading the team defense as well as yelling at Emily so that she is not tempted to go and play a ball and risk further hurting herself. I do remember that they managed to pull it off, I don’t remember how many times Santiago called for the serving sub. All I know is that I saw them practice and I saw them execute it at least once. I was proud of these kids pulling it all together for their teammates, I was proud of Colleen having the sense of urgency and stepping up to take charge, I was proud of Emily for getting herself back in shape to at least perform this small role, I was proud of my friend Santiago for thinking up this solution.

Playing at nationals is the culmination of many hours of practice, it takes many moving parts to be coordinated and coming together serendipitously, it takes a group of individuals to sacrifice their own selfish interests in deference to the collective best. This group pulled together as teammates to execute together as a team; but most importantly, at least to me, they stepped up to overcome a challenge for their friend and teammate. They were more than teammates, they met the most stringent challenge of all, they showed that they were on their way to becoming the best of humans.

Here we are, almost thirty years later and I still remember, however fuzzy that memory is, that moment. Everyone on that team has moved on beyond the college game, some having played at very high levels college volleyball, while others played at levels that they wanted to play at. They have all graduated from college, many have married and started families, and many have kids that are now playing club sports, that thought always sends shots of shivers up my spine.

Colleen went on to matriculate at Washington University in St. Louis and is a PT. She has a family herself, four kids at last count. She also ended up collecting a Division III national championship ring at WashU.

Emily went on to matriculate at Notre Dame, joining her triples pepper partner Kim, but she focused on her studies there and did not play volleyball. She received her medical degree after graduating from Dartmouth medical school. Santiago and I met up with her in Seattle a few years ago when we were in town for the Women’s Division I National Championship and she was there doing her medical residency. She is now back home working as an internist and teaches medicine as a professor of medicine.

The thing that stood out with this story for me is that the topic of conversation does not just surround the game of volleyball — even though volleyball is what drew us all together — it is what the game of volleyball reveals about the person that is there all along and the role that the game of volleyball nurtures that potentially good human into a spectacular human.

It is difficult to explain and justify to someone who has not been bitten by the coaching bug. Rather than explaining, I will try to demonstrate through some vignettes of those things that made me addicted to coaching. In many ways it is closely related to my love of teaching, but even though coaching and teaching both involve getting people to learn — hopefully showing them how to better learn on their own — the two milieus are unique in their own ways. This is about my experiences as a youth coach, and the rewards that I get in return for my efforts. Believe me when I say that I get more out of coaching than the players get out of me. The vast majority of the reward is intrinsic, which may explain the incredulity of the outsiders looking in.

A caveat: these stories are all from my own memories, so I can only vouch for what I remember, as filtered through my own rose-tinted lenses.

Anna

Anna was a player that I had coached as an eighth grader in parochial school. A friend had asked me to do it to help him build his high school varsity program. She was a shy and skinny kid, she didn’t say much to me in the beginning of the season, but she came out of her shell towards the middle of the season.

After the parochial season, she tried out for my club’s 14’s team and made it, along with many of her schoolmates from that parochial team. Even though I was not coaching that team — my friend Kris coached that team — I saw a lot of them, mainly because I wanted to stay involved with those players because they were great kids and parents.

We had club wide training for officiating, unless the team was playing in tournaments that hired paid officials, the players or coaches were required to R1 and R2. We usually used the training time to figure out who could handle being an up ref and it was up to the head coach to decide. I left it up to the coaches. I left it up to Kris to decide and didn’t give it much thought. Some coaches would take the reins and R1 themselves and take the brunt of the pressure for the players, but we had decided that this was a part of the club volleyball experience and it was a great way for the players to exercise their maturity. Kris played for an old school coach in club, so she and I agreed that she was the one to work with all her players on the officiating part of their volleyball playing experience. She provided the scaffolding, the confidence, the patience to build up each one of her players to overcome their fears and trepidation and meet their responsibilities.

Near the beginning of the season, this team was playing in a local tournament, which meant no paid officials. The players were all aflutter about having to officiate as a team. Kris had set up a schedule for all the players to distribute the officiating load as equally as possible.

The tournament was halfway through by the time I arrived at the high school. Kris’ team was officiating. I looked up and Anna was the R1, blowing her whistle confidently, making her hand signals, and running the match. I was so used to the process that I didn’t think that any of this was out of the ordinary, just another tournament for the 14’s.

I heard my name called and there was Anna’s mother running up to me. She pointed at her daughter proudly and said: “do you see that? Can you believe it?” I, of course, being oblivious, asked what was wrong. She said something along the line of: “that’s my Anna up there, my shy and timid Anna, she is officiating! She is so comfortable and so confident! I can’t believe she is the same kid. She could not have done this without tears just three months ago.” She looked like she was on the verge of tears herself. She then said something that struck me: “you all made this happen, you gave her the confidence to do this today, thank you.” I didn’t know what to say of course, I mumbled my thanks and went to tell Kris, after all it was Kris who trained the team up, it was Kris who worked with Anna and the rest of the team, and it was Kris who prepared them to meet the challenge.

That was the first time that I had ever had a parent thank me for something that I took for granted and thought of as a natural part of playing club volleyball.

Anna went on to graduate from an academically rigorous private school and followed up graduating from a prestigious university. After working for a while, she is now happily married and a mother with two baby boys.

This is not to say that her present happy life is due to her having had to up ref at a small volleyball tournament that no one remembers. It is to say, that a fourteen-year-old, given support, good advice, understanding, and occasionally a soft shoulder to cry on, can overcome her natural fear of doing what she did not ever want to do; all because she knew she owed it to her teammates, she knew that she had to take her responsibility to the team seriously. This knowledge gave her reason to overcome her aversion to doing the uncomfortable and the unfamiliar, to take charge of her fears. It is the realization that she is a part of a greater whole and the acceptance of her responsibility to that greater whole that is the most powerful part of why we do what we must do.

Ava

I had a chance to work with Ava’s two older sisters, one played for me and I worked with the other sister when she played for another team within our club.

When I started to coach Ava, I neglected to realize that each player is different, being sisters doesn’t mean that they respond in the same way to my coaching or react similarly under similar circumstances. Ava was the shortest of the sisters, so she had been relegated to the defensive specialist role at the beginning of every club season. The mistake that I, and many of her coaches made was that we assumed that she fit the mold that her sisters inhabited; what we neglected was that Ava was Ava, it is a mistake to categorize her by who her sisters are. Ava is an original.

I played her as a DS, but she was effective enough as a hitter that I used Ava as an undersized outside because I was confident using her on the court for six rotations.

We were playing at KIVA’s Bluegrass Tournament in Louisville Kentucky. This was the first big convention center tournament of the season. It was early enough that I was still trying to learn more about my players, gauging their personalities and learning their thought processes. This was on the last day of the competition, and we were faring well enough — not in gold but also not in the mauve division.

I forget whether it was a ricochet touch off a block or whether the opposing hitter hit a great shot off of one of our defenders. Ava was playing middle back in a perimeter defense when she charged off the court to play the ball. A slight pause here, I am one of those coaches who love defense, I spend a lot of time training my players on how to go to the ground quickly, efficiently, effectively, all to avoid getting hurt. Ava threw all that training to the wind and did what came naturally for her: go after the ball like a bat out of hell and get the ball up. The result was spectacularly ugly, she ended up splattering on the court, fortunately she did not break anything, but she did everything short of breaking something. I rushed to her, her team rushed to her, her mom rushed to her, the parents from her team rushed to her, and the parents from the opposing team rushed to her. The officials gave us some time to figure out a sub, because there was no way she was going to come back to play because she was so banged up and in too much pain. This was when one of the opposing team’s parents brought over ice, ice bags, and medical kit; she said: “anyone who plays like that deserves all of everything.” She did not come back to the match. I don’t even remember whether we won or lost, that didn’t matter anymore. I was too stunned to think straight.

Ava came back to practice the following week, except for some wincing, she didn’t complain at all, just went about doing her thing. I was talking to her mom a few years later, and she told me that Ava was the daughter that she doesn’t worry about, because Ava will always aggressively figure it out.

Ava is now a senior in college, happily looking forward to the day when she is no longer a student. True to form, she attacked her high school and college careers with aggression because Ava doesn’t have a slow gear. Every once in a while I get a notification from social media telling me about Ava’s prolific lineup of activities: the internships, the leadership positions, the recognitions, and the fearlessness that is her trademark attitude.

Ava personifies one thing that I always tell my players: play the ball, don’t let the ball play you, take charge; similarly, attack life, don’t let life attack you, take charge. Concomitantly, it is also wise to ask for forgiveness, not permission, some advice one of my bosses told me when I started working for him.

I titled this article Tough Kids because these two, in my mind and experience, exemplify the opposite ends of what I believe to be the essence of grit and resilience. One is intrinsically focused, having the ability to discipline our minds to do what we really don’t want to do, even though we are emotionally fearful of committing ourselves to do what is right. The other is extrinsically focused, having the ability to act and react instantaneously without reservations, to ignore the conscious recognition that this will result in pain, a lot of pain; but do it regardless of the potential for excruciating pain. Same mental resolve but manifesting itself in different

The first impression I had was of the Rich Ruohonen, 54-year-old personal injury lawyer from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, an alternate on the U.S. men’s curling team who had been trying to make it to the Olympics for forty years. He officially reached the milestone when he threw his first stone for USA in a losing cause, but the important part is that he was present, he took part, he is an Olympian, which resonates with the Olympic creed:

The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

The story struck me as a long-time wannabe but never was, it gave a jolt of optimism: you mean there is a chance? But then all my joints screamed bloody murder.

https://abcnews.com/GMA/Living/curler-rich-ruohonen-makes-history-oldest-us-winter/story?id=130114068

Two athletes made impressions on me, not as competitors, not because they won, they did, but what they did in the delirious moments after winning. They went to collect their kids to share that moment with them. They demonstrated to the world that winning a gold medal isn’t the only thing. It is an important thing, but not the only thing. More on that later.

Francesca Lollobrigida won the three thousand meters speed skating event on her 35th birthday, which was the lead off event of these Olympics, and she became the first Italian woman to win the Olympic gold medal at that distance, setting a new Olympic record in the process. She also won the gold medal in the five thousand meters speed skating event later. That wasn’t what stood out, what stood out was that she promptly looked for her two-year-old son and spoke of sharing that experience with him when he grows up.

The other mommy story that made an impression was Elana Meyers Taylor’s story a 41 year old bobsledder who won her first gold Olympic medal in the monobob competition. That gold was the coda for her career of excellence, after three silver and two bronze medals at the previous four Olympic Games. Once again, what caught my attention was not her winning run, what caught my attention was the video of her with her two children, both deaf, signing to them in ASL: “mommy won!” This was when the dam burst and I completely lost. The important thing was not that she won gold, the important thing was everything about how she did it: being a world class athlete while also caring for her two children, who she clearly cherished, and her first thought was to share her moment with them. Never having been a parent — which probably won’t change, ever — I recalled my experiences as a coach. I remember basking in the pride and love emanating from the my players’ parents, knowing the sacrifices that they had made, the weekends spent in meat locker cold convention centers away from other members of the family after having driven the interminable car trips to yet another city that they will never truly experience, just for their children. Maybe it is because of my accumulated experience coaching, but I was particularly touched by those two women and their desire to share with the people who are the most important in their lives.

I am usually not a figure skating fan. Part of my lack of enthusiasm is because of the hype that the sport has consistently generated from the press and with the general public. In addition, I was always averse to sports that are adjudicated based on subjective scoring. This was before one of my high school classmates changed my mind about the sport, she was a figure skater that competed nationally and watching the sport partially through her vision helped me learn to appreciate the sport.

The USA had a very strong team going in, the biggest hype surrounded Ilia Malinin, the “Quad God,” this was usually a moniker would turn me off immediately, especially as it was a name he gave himself. The thing that turned it around for me was his early falter during the short program in the team competition, a sense of: I told you so, came over me, yet his spectacular return in the long program of the team competition caught my attention because of the kind of mental discipline that it took to reverse the initial setback is impressive. I ended up rooting for him. Unfortunately, he faltered again in his free skate portion of the individual competition, he defining moment fumbled. As a coach, I empathize with the mental turmoil that he was undergoing. I was also very curious as to how he was going to respond in the aftermath in preparation for the next quad. It is something I preach to my players: it isn’t what happened, it is how you deal with it intrinsically, that is the lesson that needs to be learned from any activity that demands the participant be vulnerable publicly, whether they perform well or not; that is the ultimate litmus test of whether the coach and the athlete succeeded: what are you going to do; how are you going to respond to errors, mistakes, serendipity, randomness in the long term. The response is what intrinsically determines who you are. I will be keeping an eye on Malinin in the future. That last statement is as much a surprise to me as it will be for my friends who know me.

Staying with figure skating, but moving to one of the women’s favorites, Amber Glenn. I knew nothing about her, but her character stood out to me. It was the sum total of what she did in the face of pressure and adversity, which was to conduct herself in the best way that she could, she was the epitome of what we all wish our players would behave in the face of criticism, both warranted and unwarranted. She fell in her short program, which dropped her to thirteenth in the pecking order, yet she blew the doors of the competition to temporarily reach the top of the heap, she eventually finished fifth place in the competition when she could have just folded up her tent and gone home, but she fought, tooth and nail. This is the kind of fighting spirit that all coaches desire from their pupils: be disciplined, go for it all, not let failure define you, don’t let the bastards win, learn from your mistakes, and be fearless. She embodied all that, even though she knew that the chances of her being on the podium were slim and none. I don’t know if she plays volleyball, but I want her on my team.

Staying with figure skating, the eventual gold medalist, Alyssa Liu, a mere 20-year-old who has the growth mindset up to the hilt. It is true, she won the gold medal, so what kind of character does she have to show that would impress me. Stories abound about her having won as a thirteen year old, retired at sixteen, and coming back on her own terms at eighteen; stories of how she fired her Tiger dad and coach when she came back, very maturely telling him what she wants, all done professionally and without rancor, dear old dad was rink side cheering her on during the gold medal performance.

The moist important utterance from Alyssa Liu was the following: “A medal?” Liu chuckles. “I don’t need a medal. I just need to be here, and I just need to be present. And I need people to see what I do next.” The collected media were shocked; this was so contrary to the testosterone-soaked definition of competition as propagated by the mass media. It has always bothered me when the media prefer to use hackneyed and clichéd analogies of war from competition: this is a competition, no one will die, they may be disappointed, but it is not the end of the world. What Alyssa Liu is refreshing and subtle. She is not allowing the result to define what she does and how she does it. She, along with the other competitors give their best, every time, without reservations. They don’t do it with a shiny golden trinket in sight, they do it to fulfill their intrinsic need to prove themselves to themselves, not for approval and certainly not for the ignominious artifice of a metric, even though this is necessarily how competitions are judged.

The Bhagavad Gita offers a liberating philosophy: “Focus on your duty, not the outcome.” This is known as Karma Yoga, is a core teaching of Bhagavad Gita. The idea is to give our best in action — while remaining unattached to success or failure.

A favorite adage from the world of statistics that I have often used is Goodhart’s law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. My interpretation is that any observed statistical regularity (a metric, a placing, an arbitrary placement made definitive) will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. The medals, placing, and standings are important, but they are not important because they are an end, they are a metric, a measure of where competitors are from where they want to be intrinsically. If the medal or being number one at that place and point in time is the be all and end all for the athlete, should they not just retire at that point in their careers? Or is it just a means to an end, the end being the best intrinsically?

A viral moment came when the free-style skier Eileen Gu was asked a question by John Weaver of Agence France-Presse, questioning whether she viewed her Milano-Cortina results as “two silvers gained or two gold lost.” The clip has gone viral because of Gu’s response.

Gu’s response encapsulates the athlete’s mindset: “The two medals lost situation, to be quite frank with you, I think is kind of a ridiculous perspective to take.” She is saying that she did the best that she could, not under any circumstances but under the most trying of circumstances: the Olympic. She had the performance she had, and she put it up against the best of the best, and obviously someone else’s best beat her best on that day, at that time. It doesn’t mean she was a slacker or deliberately underperformed. Reference Goodhart’s law and the Karma Yoga, from Bhagavad Gita.

John Weaver defended his question: “Top athletes in all sports have a fierce winning mentality, and it’s fascinating to gauge their reactions when they just miss out,” he said. “I was surprised by the tone of her reaction, but I thought it was a fair question, and she gave a robust response.” Which demonstrates that he doesn’t understand high level competition, sports, and top-level performance from the athlete’s perspective. He is not alone, because the initial supposition from the general public is that athletes compete for trinkets and baubles, whereas they intrinsically compete to measure themselves, against their past performances and against other competitors. The trinkets and baubles are a marker of where they are, how far they need to go, and how far they can go. We keep scores to help us figure out what we need to work on in practice. Something to also keep in mind is that trinkets and baubles are never enough to motivate the athletes to work as hard and endure as much pain as they do. This is a lesson that many coaches and parents don’t understand. The players are less likely to force themselves to train and persist for extrinsic rewards, they are more likely to force themselves to train and persist for the intrinsic and personal rewards. This misunderstanding on the part of the adults in youth sports explains the preponderance of participation trophies and dubious recognitions that litter the youth sports landscape.

Finally, my most important impression from a 10,000 ft view, is the sportsmanship that permeates these Winter Olympics, as they do in all the Olympics, despite the corruption and profit making that has plagued international sports historically. It may be that it has always been this way, and I have just not noticed. Sportsmanship that exemplifies the nature of competition and the Olympic spirit, even as professionalization has made the lives of the Olympics better, is alive. Baron de Coubertin’s creed seems to be alive and well.

The instance of an Italian cross-country coach loaning a French skier a pole after the skier lost one of his poles at a crucial point in the race.

Chole Kim celebrating her teenage Korean protégé’s gold medal, which was over Kim.

Alyssa Liu celebrating with Japan’s 17-year-old Nakai Ami on finding out that she had earned her first Olympic medal, a bronze.

Amber Glenn blocking the camera in a bid for privacy for Sakamoto Kaori when the latter was devastated after finding out she had dropped from first place in the competition.

There are innumerable instances of this kind of human gestures, gestures that give the lie to the war analogies, that effectively negates the kill or be killed ethos as espoused by those who just don’t understand competition. The truth is that everyone who has competed understands that your competition is the best ally you have in reaching for being your best. Steel sharpens steel. An athlete cannot hope to reach their intrinsic goals without competing against the best, and vice versa.

As a coach working with the youth, I may be looking for the positives while watching the Olympics. I want to find the positives in the two weeks in February. I want to validate all that I have ever believed in that is good in sports. I found them and despite my usual skepticism and cynicism, I believe in what I observed and I am inspired to translate those lessons to my coaching and teaching.

One caveat, I understand that I am not witnessing the real Olympics, I don’t have boots on the ground. I am only seeing the games through the prism of NBC’s coverage, selectively filtered and curated. My impressions and observations are subject to their skewed vision. I wish I could observe all human interactions and sportsmanship that actually happened, the small gestures amongst all the competition that did not warrant having a camera and crew documenting the moments. I think that I can be relatively assured that there are much more of the good, the inspirational, and the small instances that will buttress my impressions than not. Currently, in this time and space, I hope I am right.

I, unfortunately, have made resolutions continually for many years; indeed, one can say that I am remarkably successful at failing in my resolutions. Every resolution I have made over the years has met an ignominious end.

There are quite a few traps embedded in this decision to make resolutions. Unfortunately, they all converge to ensure the resolutions are set up to fail.

This decision is usually made on the spur of the moment, post holiday and under pressure, therefore very little forethought is given to the resolution, what are the course of action that are necessary which make the resolution successful, what would success look like at the completion of the resolution, what are the termination condition for a successful resolution, and who is the ultimate arbiter of whether the resolution is successful. The last question: who is the ultimate arbiter of whether the resolution is successful is the most important one. Usually, the answer is the person who creates the resolution, they are usually the only one whose opinion matters. They are also the ones who ultimately control the circumstances underlying the challenges presented by the resolution. They could also game the circumstances to ensure that they succeed — which is, in certain perspective, not a horrible thing to do — but then again, why jump through these hoops of making and working to meet the resolution if the outcome is pre-emptively gamed to be successful?

On the other hand, there are some who goes to the opposite extreme: they are unforgiving with themselves that no matter what they did, it wasn’t enough to meet their self-assigned resolution, no matter how lenient.

How the person decides the state of the resolution as time slips by is actually a reflection of their state of mind and telegraphs any ulterior motives that they may have. Some sees making resolutions as an opportunity to virtue signal, to advertise to the people closest to them of their own self-professed virtues, which many times translates to a dramatic case of nemesism: frustration, anger, or aggression directed inward, toward oneself and one’s way of living. Regardless of whether the nemesism is a preordained and orchestrated demonstration of virtue signaling or whether the nemesism is an expression of one’s inner turmoil, the result is drama that cries to be the center of attention.

We will take this nemesism and redirect it towards our own perceived lack of will-power, discipline, resolve, and many other self-prescribed mental deficiencies, it is an understandable human response, but it is also misdirected and damaging to who we are and who we wish to be. This impulse to self-flagellate makes it even more insidious when we take a deeper dive into how we arrived at these resolutions.

Resolutions are decisions that are made extemporaneously and based on the accumulation of memories, mostly negative — because that is how our subconscious works — and the biased snapshots of our observation at that instant and in that place. The biased past and fleeting present are never accurate basis for prediction of future reality. We are biased as observers because we have skin in the game, we are emotionally committed to a perspective that does not represent the entire reality, simply different perspectives of reality. We are thus making resolutions based on our own biased opinions of ourselves — which is our prerogative of course — but it amounts to lying to ourselves. But why should we care about basing our resolutions on incomplete picture of our reality? If it does not hurt anyone else, what does it matter?

It does matter, because an extemporaneous, emotionally fraught, decision made under limited perspective — even though it is not very different from how we make everyday decisions — means that we are taking the most easily available and expedient option and bypassing the most difficult route: changing habits and permanently changing behavior. We are so interested in revolutionarily changing ourselves by taking drastic and ill-considered actions, yet we are not committed to permanently and evolutionarily changing ourselves.

I often envy people who make resolutions because of their good intentions and optimism. Being the age that I am, I have become more skeptical if not completely cynical of my ability to make those lifelong changes instantaneously. Indeed, I am getting better at adapting to changing my habits by taking my time because I highly doubt that the snapshot of my life in this place at this moment in time is representative of who I am or who I will be; I don’t believe that my long-term future will be forever predicted by what I see in front of me at the present.

My present clarity will fade, blur, and eventually disappear over time. My view of who I am and who I might become will ameliorate because I will be changed, the people around me will be changed, the circumstances that surrounds me will be changed, and the world will be changed. While I may have the best intentions to make resolutions at this time and in this place, it is foolhardy to believe that I have serendipitously stumble upon a definitive solution to all my worldly and otherworldly ills.

I can be a defeatist and vow never to improve myself with the advancement of time, but that is counter to my own humanity. It does not matter what the time scale of advancement is — it could be as short as microseconds and as long as a lifetime — being hopeful and curious about how we will turn out as we grow up is essential to our evolution to be valuable human beings. We need to, however, be ever cognizant of our own evolution and growth to work toward getting better, more moral, and virtuous in all aspects of life.

The difference between cynicism and optimism, nihilism, and an idealism, being an overly constrained defeatist and a under constrained metaphorical bull in a China shop is to realize that there is no need to permanently reside at the extremes, the range of philosophical and emotional positions is a continuum. The possible positions are all dependent upon how we critically dissect and analyze; and we need to realize that it is us who decide on whichever position in the continuum we reside. We decide through our past — experiences and knowledge, emotions — and where we are in the present. Our future is unknowable and unpredictable, rather than wasting our energies predicting the unknowable, we need to make the best well rounded decision and execute and accept the consequences of our decisions — good and bad — while being nimble and flexible enough to adjust along the way. The past tells us where we were, it does not predict the future. We do this by taking a long-term view and changing our habits rather than making resolutions.

Taking stock of our past and present is a natural habit for humans. It is good habit to be aspirational and to hope but extrapolating and prognosticating a deterministic future based upon who we were and who we are now into who we hope to become is superstition and an illusory exercise in futility. Not a good habit to get into and contrary to what we ultimately aspire to.

That is my story and I am sticking with it.

The term work-life balance has become a ubiquitous buzzword amongst those who are working in the modern work culture. It is a relatively new term that seems to get thrown around ubiquitously whenever conversations turn to work related stress. It is the term that many workers use to explain the reason for their malaise as well as blame for all that ails their life. It is a versatile phrase; and in my estimation, it is a misapplied phrase.

The governing underlying assumption is that work and life can be defined as being uncoupled from one another. Another tacit assumption is that work and life have opposing purposes and are not compatible existentially, which is typical of our world view and habits — we have placed our means of existence as being opposite in purpose to our existence. This is a curious development from our cognitive perspective; it could be interpreted as a declaration of war against ourselves.

Is this dichotomy a natural and necessary result of our societal and cultural evolution in response to the call our survival instincts? Or did we artificially create this dichotomy as a reaction to the antagonistic relationship between employers and employees, management and labor, the haves and the have-nots in the present ethos which characterizes our society and culture?

What made this dichotomous work-life definition for our state of existence an accepted norm in our present society?

Life is lived subconsciously; it is our human nature doing human things — breath. live, eat, sleep without giving the living a thought; it is what we make of the elements of living: family, friendship, curiosity, passion, pleasures, pains, as well as all the other requisite things that we need to do to survive another day. Work is also inextricably intertwined with our lives, because to live is to work, and to work is to live.

What is work? How do we define it? How do we perceive it? Is work only the part of life that we are obligated to do to feed ourselves?

What is life? Is life what is left after work has been extracted from the best of us? Is life our reward for working? Or is it something else altogether?

At the beginning of human existence, life is work and work is life. There wasn’t any separation between life and work because time was measured relative to the sun’s cycles and humans worked until work was finished or when the sun set.

Hunter-gatherers had to work to eat, no work and you starve to death, pretty simple. They worked as long as necessary to hunt and gather enough food for themselves, their families, and for their tribes. When humans evolved into an agrarian society, work and life were still inextricably intertwined; the fields needed to be worked to prepare for the planting, crops needed to be planted and cared for. Farmers started work when the sun rose and worked for as long as necessary, or until the sun sets. They did not keep a schedule that was neatly divided into work and life compartments.

It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that work, and life were cleaved into two separate entities. Factories needed to produce on a schedule to meet the commercial market demands, the demands dictated that factory schedules had to be set in stone, the factory schedule determined the workers’ schedule. The fuzzy line between work and life in the factory worker’s schedules became un-fuzzy and clearly defined. In time, work dominated life as the industrial economy boomed and the factory schedule dominated life in our society. Every bit of work was squeezed out of the factories, which translates to the workers having just enough time to eat, sleep, and recover enough to start all over again; this is not to say that the workers were disagreeable with this bargain with the devil, they were making more than what they would have if they had stayed on the farm. The unintended consequence of this agreement is the havoc wreaked upon the worker’s work and life.

Fast forward to the present day, work and life are separated, everyone is accustomed to having the two entities artificially separated so that everyone forgets that work and life were once connected in the past.

Which brings us back to the fundamental questions: what IS it about work in the modern era that creates such a debilitating burden on workers that it necessitates workers to mentally separate work from life so that the workers can maintain balance in their mental and emotional life?

How did we get here?

The present work environment is so integrated with the work and life dichotomy that it feels like a natural part of our existence. A greater reason for this tacit acceptance comes from the purely transactional relationship that we have accepted as a part of work. The workers receive financial stability and safety in exchange for work, but that financial stability and safety is very much subject to the zero-sum relationship between management and labor. In exchange, management get the best effort of the labor — the best of their physical, mental, and intellectual selves — in exchange for a part of the profits.

This relationship between the management and labor is necessarily hierarchical, effectively diminishing any possible collaborative possibilities within the enterprise.

There are components essential to the complex process of conducting business that need to be accommodated. These components are not pleasant to navigate, but they are the price that needs to be paid to successfully conduct business. Both management and labor grudgingly accept them; it is the necessary price to pay for getting the work done.

Unfortunately, there are also other, extraneous, components of the complex process of conducting business that have been added, which are extraneous but are assumed to be essential to conducting business. These extraneous components are — in the final assessment — not only not value added, but present major obstacles.

One major extraneous component can be traced to the former GE CEO Jack Welch. His infamous rank-and-yank performance assessment program is ubiquitous in almost all commercial enterprises and in almost all industries. Indeed, General Electric had abandoned this system in its original form many years ago, but the rank-and-yank system still exists in uncountable permutations throughout the business world. Rather than encouraging collaboration, this rank-and-yank system spurs antagonism between the rank-and-file and the management. It is equivalent to the Hunger Game for everyone within the business structure.

Another extraneous component is the regimented and hierarchical management structure. By itself, the hierarchical structure is accepted as a necessary evil to smooth the operation of conducting business; the defining difference between the companies is how the hierarchical management structure manifests itself in each company. The companies that I have worked for have — consciously and subconsciously — pitted senior management, middle management, and workers against one another. Once again, antagonism is dominant ethos when collaboration should be encouraged. A major part of this prevailing mindset is the idea that steady downward pressure — the belief that excrement flows downwards — is the sole form of psychological “motivation.” This hierarchical management structure naturally motivates upper management to micromanage middle management, while middle management is naturally motivated to micromanage workers. There is also an upward pressure from the rank-and-file workers to push back on the micromanaging from the middle management, which is condoned if not encouraged by upper management. The middle management is pressured in both directions, this is so that senior management is insulated from the rank-and-file employees; senior management treats the middle management as a buffer from upward demands of the rank-and-file employees, senior management is able to distract the rank-and-file employees by pointing the finger at middle management.

The hierarchical management structure also creates the antagonistic meeting culture through micromanagement, a culture that consumes time while also failing meet purposes. This meeting culture in any company — no matter the size — hold no one accountable and injects obfuscation and finger pointing. The meeting culture serves to stroke the egos of the person who organizes the meeting — usually the most senior manager attending the meeting. It is a physical manifestation of middle management ego and hubris. Any meetings with benevolent intentions are torpedoed before the meeting has begun because of: groupthink, acquiescence to the ranking manager or brown nosing; and recognition that very few of the people in any management tiers understand the business.

These extraneous components are unnecessary, they extract a pound of flesh on the workers’ psyche, they are the root cause for the invention of the concept of the work-life balance. These extraneous components are way for management to justify their existence, disguise their purpose, exercise their egos and hubris, and to pretend that they have the answers to life, the Universe, and everything.

There is a Chinese fable of a locally famous painter whose specialty was painting snakes. One day a master painter of renown asked to watch him paint snakes. The locally famous painter was excited to show his abilities in front of an acknowledged master; in fact, he was so excited that he started to paint legs and feet on his immaculately painted snakes, adding extraneous legs and feet to what was already perfect. (畫蛇添足) It is one view of the extraneous components.

Insidiously, the extraneous components are disguised as necessary for the business process; indeed, this is part of the obfuscation plan: convince workers that the extraneous are inevitable and convince them to accept the extraneous components.

Why does this obfuscation work? Are the workers so gullible as to believe in the obfuscation? Do the workers not know that they are being taken advantage of?

The answer lie in our optimism and our core belief in caring about being quality humans doing quality work, and embodying the idea of Quality as explored by the author Robert Pirsig in the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (Pirsig, 1975).

The intrinsic belief in doing quality work manifests itself in persistence and obstinacy that drives people, this determination gives us purpose. Some have called this pride of workmanship while others call it being a professional. This characteristic has existed throughout history in all human endeavors, regardless of the historical eras. We have inherited this legacy and carried it to modern society. This is the reason that people dedicate their lives to mastering the specific art that they practice — regardless of what that art is. They are committed to being the best, to embody Quality.

It is this intrinsic characteristic that many times evokes a passion and curiosity that transcends the human’s extrinsic need for economic sustenance, status, glory, or fame. While extrinsic motivation are important and ever present, this intrinsic characteristic is much more meaningful to most people. This is not to say that humans aren’t occasionally tempted by the extrinsic, but the intrinsic passion and curiosity is the greater part of their motivation, work is more than just a means to put bread on the table.

This intrinsic characteristic is why people are willing to partake in the miasma that is the modern work environment. This is why people willingly put the blinders on when they grudgingly deal with the extraneous detritus of modern management practices. Pride in the work is an instinct for all humans; it is how we are wired. This pride in performing with Quality always has the advantage over the equally natural disgust over the soul sucking effects of being in the extraneous muck of modern management.

The denizens at the top of the hierarchical management structure knows that they can manipulate the worker’s instinct to work with Quality. This is how they get people to consistently push beyond their limits: they appeal to people’s instinct to care and to do Quality work.

In short, the top of the hierarchical management structure takes advantage of the worker’s instincts towards performing with pride to entice them to accept the extraneous management detritus. The management weaves a phantasmagorical myth that extraneous components of the modern work culture is necessary and normal, while continuously increasing the psychic and emotional pressure on the workers, which necessitates the invention of the concept of work-life balance.

Once the concept of work-life balance has been invented, the root cause of the problem has never been identified. HR and management pretend to be at a loss and implement superficial solutions that treat only the symptoms because they know they own and created this monster, they don’t want to identify themselves as the root cause, and they don’t want to lose the advantage over the workers.

Even more perversely, when the consequences of their tactic boomerangs back in the form of increased health cost, low morale, potential mental illness, reduced productivity, and deteriorating performances; they place the responsibility for resolving the problems on the victims of their malevolence, completely ignoring their own Machiavellian machinations. They proudly fly the banner of work-life balance high on their flagpole, with the motivation not intended to ameliorate the problem because the results of the work-life balance crisis is exactly what they want: getting more performance out of less investing in the human capital. The preferred result for flying the flag is cosmetic, for showing a kind worker-centered public face, controlling the wellness cost of their health insurance, and extending the phantasmagorical myth that they have perpetrated, a myth that has worked quite well. The mental health of the workers are not the center of focus; cost cutting is.

The frustrating part is that this work-life balance paradigm is deeply anchored in the modern work environment. Even the best-intentioned management proposed solutions are suspect because they will not resolve the root-cause issue, they will only address the superficial symptoms.

In my cynical mind, the only thing my friend can do is to survive by doing what he needs to do to preserve his well-being, the corporate overlords be damned. Do what needs to be done to look out for yourself and while awaiting retirement because as our PhD advisor once told us: no matter what you do, no one is going to put a statue of you in front of the corporate headquarters. In other words, don’t think the company will do you any favors, no matter how productive and loyal you are.

The work-life fissure in individual lives will only disappear when the worker bees takes care of themselves first.

Sorry, this is not meant to be a happy ending.

References

Pirsig, R. (1975). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. NYC: Bantam Books.

My friend Alexis Lebedew posed this question on the Volleyball Coaches and Trainers Facebook page recently. As I thought about the simple and quick answer he was undoubtedly looking for, my mind wandered, as it inevitably does when a topic begins to interest me. So, with apologies to Alexis, I am answering but not answering his direct question with this essay. He should be used to my wanderings by now.

These lessons that I am listing, somewhat extemporaneously, are not earth-shattering; some are subtle realizations while other realizations have changed my perspectives drastically and deeply affected my coaching philosophy and how I coach.

The bolded phrases are the dumbass things that I believed implicitly until I had my DOH! moment.

Philosophically…

The best way to become a reasonable coach and fill in the huge gaps in coaching knowledge is if I bought enough drill and introductory books, invested in infinite number of seminars, or accumulated all the wisdom that I can get my hands on. The scorched earth policy.

When I started coaching, I was more than an interested fan of volleyball but much less than a cognoscente of volleyball playing and coaching. I had been a below average adult rec league player due to my athletic inability. Indeed, I started coaching to improve my playing, which I now know was asking for too much.

I was fearful that my limited playing prowess was a barrier to effective coaching; how could I teach HOW if I didn’t KNOW how? I tried to make up for my shortcomings by doing what I knew how to do: research the hell out of the subject, learn the “orthodox” way of playing and coaching, and directly apply it to my coaching. This had gotten me through my academic and professional life, so it was a path that I knew well.

I attended both players and coaches’ clinics, I bought every book that I could find about coaching. I was “coached” by some of the best, one weekend clinic at a time.

I tirelessly experimented with drills from the clinics and the drill books, I sprung them on my unsuspecting players without considering whether what I was doing made any sense: pedagogically, physiologically, cognitively, behaviorally. I was treading water, so I grasped at everything. I employed all the great drills that I had cribbed from the great coaches that I had assiduously collected without giving thought to the level of my players, a really dumb thing to ignore. There were many times when I ended drills frustrated with fourteen-year-olds who can’t execute like college players. It never dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, my bunch of scrappy 14-year-olds cannot execute like top college teams after just a few weeks of running these really cool drills incessantly, without purpose, without explanation, without forethought, without feedback, but with plenty of fear, ignorance, and limited vision thrown in.

One of the first lessons that I ignored is the Expertise Reversal Effect:

The expertise reversal effect refers to the reversal of the effectiveness of instructional techniques on learners with differing levels of prior knowledge. The primary recommendation that stems from the expertise reversal effect is that instructional design methods need to be adjusted as learners acquire more knowledge in a specific domain. Expertise is described as “the ability to perform fluently in a specific class of tasks. (From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expertise_reversal_effect)

This is one of the reasons that when I start a season with a new team, I get tempted to call some of my former players and apologize for what I had put them through and for being the dumbass that I was.

Corollary 1: a mixture of great ideas and concepts collected haphazardously will naturally coalesce into a uniform and systematic coaching/teaching philosophy. Collect them and they will all fit together seamlessly. (Build it and it will all fit together?)

I had collected so many ideas, insights, and pedagogical tools that confused me. As I started to connect the purposes for each thing that I had learned I became even more confused because all the cool ideas never fit together in logically consistent way. Contradictions seemed to crop up everywhere; I was playing whack-a-mole with all conflicting purposes.

It wasn’t until I identified and settled on A point of view and unique perspective — MY point of view and unique perspective — that my arsenal of tools started to do real work. I allowed myself to tweak all those ideas and concepts to fit my point of view through my own unique perspective. This is when I put together a holistic and consistent philosophy that pull together all the several aspects of coaching: physical, technical, intellectual, psychological, emotional, and tactical.

Corollary 2: Once I have a cogent philosophy, I am done, this is the hill that I will die on. There is no further need to change, ever. The physical, technical, intellectual, psychological, emotional, and tactical requirements of volleyball never change.

The only constant in life is change because circumstances change with time, the game changes with time, technology changes with time, people’s thoughts change with time, stimulations and circumstances change with time, and people’s responses to stimulation and circumstances change with time.

One way to view a philosophy as a snapshot of reality is seen through the perspective of your sensory and ideological prism; it is valid point of view to pivot around, at that point in time, but the circumstances can change instantaneously. Any operating philosophy must be adaptive to circumstances.

Corollary 3: Having a flexible philosophy means accepting and integrating every trendy gimmick and trick that is popular.

If that is the case, we will never have a working philosophy that would last a mere week, let alone a season.

Thomas S. Kuhn, in his revolutionary work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970), outlined the process by which the sciences progress through changes, going from what he termed “normal sciences” to “paradigms”, to dealing with “anomalies” that contradicts “normal sciences”, and to the steps to incorporate the anomalies into new paradigms. The process involves strict adherence to proof, either through quantitative experiments or qualitative experiences. The paradigm shift in the sciences usually takes years if not decades to be accepted.

Fortunately for coaches, the changes in coaching philosophies shouldn’t usually take as long, but the standards of proof for proving the efficacy of sports pedagogy are not as strict as for the sciences.

All that is to say that the way I decide whether I am changing my philosophy does not take years or decades, indeed it is much to the detriment of my players and teams if I took too long to adjust my philosophy; conversely, if I chased after every trend that appears on the volleyball horizon, I would not have a philosophy to speak of, and I would confuse myself and my team.

What I had learned to do is to take the time-honored scientific tradition of testing on a small scale, monitor the results, adjust the circumstances around the testing to see what happens. In other words, in the best sense of the definition of the phrase: FAFO.

Or in the words of Samuel Beckett. Keep trying, keep failing, keep failing better. Concomitant to this, there is the following.

Losing is the ultimate determination of a coach’s abilities.

It may seem trite and not original, but as a neophyte coach, I let losing destroy me, and much to my shame, I blamed my players as much as myself. I delved into my player’s physical, intellectual, psychological, and temperamental makeup to find that one thing that could solve my problem. I was never able to find it because that one thing does not exist, many interactive things exist and they all affect each other. There is a good bit of fixed mindset there, as I subscribed to the belief that it couldn’t be my coaching because I read all the right books, attended all the right seminars, listened to all the podcasts, and did everything I could to follow the orthodoxy, I still lost. A lot. What I did not bother to do was to fail better.

Practically…

Imposing impossible targets on the players builds character, which the players can and will recall and implement during difficult matches, while under pressure.

There were other times when I ran drills with terminating targets which were impossible and made the drills drag on interminably. I rationalized that I was teaching persistence and patience along with whichever skill I was training with that particular drill. As the drills dragged on, our frustrations grew and our patience became shorter. As my players adapted to checking out mentally after the first few hundred unsuccessful reps, my anger fed my ego and expanded my hubris. How dare they not perform this drill as I had carefully designed it!

As with any normal humans, players need to experience small victories over arbitrary targets, that is how they stay interested and more importantly, this is how they are led to Holy Grail, in progression. This is also aligned with the learning neuroscience: giving the learners steady and deliberately progressive targets to create curiosity and encourage continuous attention.

If more reps mean more learning, infinite reps mean infinite learning.

I also ran drills without ending as I had not given thought to what I wanted my players to learn from the exercise; we drilled with no purpose in mind. I believed in the myth that any long and difficult practice without end meant that the infinite number of reps meant infinite improvement.

Infinite reps just means that the player’s attention span will decrease exponentially with the number of reps, and they become emotionally fatigued, which is more difficult to overcome than physical fatigue.

Humans are completely predictable; they will never surprise you. Especially inexperienced and unknowledgeable humans.

When I coach novices, whether they are just young or if they are just inexperienced, or both, they always surprise me. The lesson of not knowing what they don’t know is challenging for the players and for the coach. They will always produce a new way to not execute a skill effectively and to err in such a way that I have no ready solution. This is where the novice level coaches earn their keep and learn to make stuff up to meet the specific problems presented by the players.

Treating everyone equally is the best way to ensure that you are meeting your players’ needs and your collective team needs.

Former Green Bay defensive lineman Henry Jordan on Lombardi’s version of equality: “He treats us all the same. Like dogs.”

Here is a shocking revelation: people are different, they have different needs, and they expect their needs to be met differently.

As a neophyte coach, I tried to treat all my players equally, which I found out is impossible to do. Some players need someone to have confidence in them, some players need to be pushed steadily, some players need a kick in their butts once in a while, some players needs a shoulder to cry on or for someone to wipe away tears, some players are self-starters, some players need someone to be in their ears all the time, some players need to be left alone until they decide when they need the help, some players need someone to take time to explain it to them verbally, some players need someone to show them visually; we are all different and we need to be treated differently but fairly. The key to coaching them all effectively is to understand how the players differ, understand what needs to be done with each one, and then blend all the different ways to treat each individual as they need to be treated into an integrated team environment. It. Is. Hard. As. Hell.

This is not an argument for “learning style” pedagogy, it serves a more pragmatic and self-serving purpose for the coach. It is figuring out HOW to coach the whole team while also improving the performance of each individual.

It took me a long time to figure this out, and I have failed many times over the years because I carried the mantra of treating the players equally for a long time, it took a few decades of coaching to figure this out. Once again, I want to personally apologize to my early players.

Coach your system to the players as if they are all robots and expect them to be able to execute the same way regardless of their talents, physical attributes, athletic ability, and cognitive acuity. Individuality is an excuse. Hammering a square peg into a round hole is the only way to do it.

My friend Matt had a situation when his team was to compete at a qualifier and for one reason and another he only had six players for the first day. He was not happy. His exceptionally good Libero was one of the six, but he had to play her all six rotations. He devised a scheme where the Libero would drop back to pass and play defense even when she rotated to the front row, and one of the back row players was sent to the front row with the setter instructed to not set her; that player was also told to just down ball over if she ended up getting set. The crazy part was that none of their opponents nor the officials even noticed the switch. If I remember correctly, the players practiced this for a week before the tournament and it went off without a hitch, it was a bold kluge for one day of one tournament.

Matt’s team did what they had to do and they survived, but what about changing the system so much for the season and disrupting the coaches’ philosophy and making the systemic change which impacts on the coach’s comfort zone? This tests whether the coach means it when they spout out the growth mindset mantra to the team. This tests whether they are willing to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

I had always played either a 5-1 or 6-2 offense and a perimeter defense. I also put my rotation in the setter push middle configuration. I don’t do these things blindly. In my coaching experience, the other coaches that had previously coached the players that I had inherited made those choices, and the system was an integral part of my coaching philosophy, so I never bothered to change. It was also much easier to use systems that my players were accustomed to because it meant that I didn’t have to spend practice time going over any new system, thus giving me more practice time for developing other things.

Since I was acquainted with the nuances of the systems, my reactions in my bench coaching became automatic.

This doesn’t mean that I was not tempted.

During my time in St. Louis, Rich Luenneman was coaching at Washington University in St. Louis, and he was an ardent proselytizer for the Rover defense, he tried mightily to spread the gospel to every coach that came into his sphere of influence. I watched his Bears team run that defense to perfection. It performed as he had promised, he had convinced and converted his players who had only played perimeter defense in high school and club into Rover defenders. In his fourteen years at WashU he coached them to three Division III national championships, but he could not convert me to the Rover. Maybe it was because I had a fixed mindset at that time, this was well before I was willing to experiment. The defense just did not fit into my philosophy of how a defense should operate, but I was tempted.

A few years later, the middle-middle defense was all the rage. The mantra was that if the USA national team was running the middle-middle, it must be the best defense to deploy. This time I saw some benefit to the defense when my teams were facing higher level competition, so I used the middle-middle situationally, depending on who we were playing. It was a pragmatic hybrid of perimeter and middle-middle. I didn’t completely chug the Kool-Aid, but I was persuaded to use it when I thought it was best for my team.

Fast forward many years and the club director at the club I was coaching brought in his own defense. The club director is Ernie Gilbert and I will just call it Ernie’s defense for lack of an accurate name that describes the defense. People in the Midwest will know it since Ernie has been around the midwestern volleyball scene a long time. I was more curious than set in my ways at this point in my coaching experience. I would like to think that I have adopted a growth mindset by this point in my life’s journey. After losing to Ernie’s teams in scrimmages because my team just could not commit to cover tips, I asked Ernie to teach me his defense. He even ran my practices and taught my teams some of the nuances of the defense, he also enlightened us on some of the situational adjustments we needed to make to effectively run this defense. In the end, I enjoyed running Ernie’s defense because it confused and flummoxed the opposition since all they knew were the standard defenses: perimeter, Rover, or middle-middle defenses, and understood how to beat those systems. The tricky part was to get the players to buy in and change their intrinsic response to situations and flow together naturally. This defense fit the kind of players I had on my team well and we were effective.

A few years before this, I received the gift of three experienced and tall middles to commit to my team coupled with extremely good passers. I had always coached shorter teams, and the middle situation was always a matter of serendipity. I would cobble together a lineup with two middles, usually a legitimate middle if I am lucky, and someone who was better served as a right side. Most of the time I had to beg outsides to give the middle position a try, or platooning a number of players at the second middle situation, promising them chances at hitting left or right side as incentive.

I decided to try a tri-middle offense with this fortuitous circumstance. To be fair, it isn’t that drastic of an execution change, but it forced the middles to play different roles, and it forced me to change the well-practiced decision-making rut that had guided me for many years. I had to think about the rotation and the unfamiliar choices presented by each situation. I made my head hurt, but in a terrific way. I loved it, I don’t know how the players felt about it, but they didn’t quit the team.

The best way for players to learn is to be coached in ways that are the easiest for the coach to coach.

This is my latest realization. I had paid attention to how others communicated and taught their players. I have observed numerous coaches over numerous practices at all levels, especially when I was fortunate enough to spend time in a college gym. Different coaches have their way of getting their points across and their practices stem directly from what they believe to be the best way for them to teach rather than the best way for their players to learn.

I had not noticed this for many years, until I dug into my research on how to be a better teacher. I discovered that the latest education research has demonstrated that effective learning is best served by incorporating the latest results from neuroscience; that knowing how humans can best learn is fundamental to improving learning and retention. (Lemov, Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students On The Path to College 2010) (Lemov, The Coaches Guide to Teaching 2020) (Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better 2012) (Martin 2024).

This was a change in my mindset. Rather than unilaterally pursuing the coach’s prerogative in shaping the learning experience through the coach’s agenda, the emphasis and perspective is shifted to the learner’s perspective. The center to the learning experience is based on what the learners need to learn best.

Dealing with the great unknown…

Life, and sports, are deterministic and predictable.

Acatalepsy (Noun):

1: an ancient Skeptic doctrine that human knowledge amounts only to probability and never to certainty 2: real or apparent impossibility of arriving at certain knowledge or full comprehension

My engineering training gave me a set of skills and intrinsic beliefs that are useful for my use as a teacher/coach. Unfortunately, it also gave me a mindset that readily discounts uncertainties and randomness. Engineers depend on a strict belief in the laws of nature; that paradigm rules our thinking. The amount of uncertainties that need to be accounted for in STEM is minimal as compared to the world of sports. The difference is that in STEM the constraints and structure of the problem to be solved are better established than in sports and the amount of human influence on the problem resolution is also mostly accountable; whereas in sports, human participants injects randomness into the game environment, i.e. the constraints and structures for sports are both ambiguous and amorphous. The amount of uncertainties in sports is further magnified by the close interaction between the elements in the game, not the least of which is human interactions. The interplay of players, coaches, and officials are inextricably intertwined.

Once again, a growth mindset is called for, one that not only accepts life’s uncertainties, but also believes in the paradigm that the best way to deal with uncertainties is to be antifragile: taking the view that uncertainties is an opportunity rather than a hinderance, that the uncertainties can be exploited to be advantages; it is being prepared intellectually and emotionally adaptive to unknown situations rather than generating a database of contingency solutions to finite number of situations in hopes that the uncertainty will somehow fall in line with one of the contingency solutions.

The difference between the two mindsets is that belief in the latter tend to handcuff the coach’s response because they would endlessly go over the available contingencies they had in memory and they are committed to finding the solution amongst all the contingencies they have available; whereas the former mindset allows the coach to have the mental freedom to draw analogies and make connections amongst the situations and contingencies that they had already experienced and they are casting a broader vision on how to resolve the situation by improvising a solution which serves to give the advantage to the improviser. It is applying the Marine Corp motto: Adapt, improvise, and overcome.

The scorched earth approach to taking every playing data available and squeezing every bit of meaning and nuance from the data will completely eliminate uncertainty.

Using statistics will only explain what is happening at that point and time, descriptive statistics are enormously powerful, but it does not completely eliminate uncertainty.

A better strategy is to learn to use statistics and not be used by statistics. Knowledge gained through statistics will reduce the amount of extraneous uncertainties, but uncertainties will not disappear completely no matter the amount of data that is taken nor the amount of interpretation through inference that people impose on the statistics. It certainly will not make the future predictable nor deterministic, there are just too many uncertainties to account for.

Match statistics show what is happening or what has just happened. There numbers cannot be argued, except with the how or who collected the numbers. It is when connections are made between the numbers, when the human proclivity to make connections and attempts to explain what happened through statistics that coaches often lead themselves down the erroneous path. The combination of logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and simplistic interpretation of descriptive statistics are a lethal combination. The best way to avoid misinterpretations that could lead to bad decisions is to have visual evidence that supports the conjecture bourn of simplistic practice of inferential statistics, although visual evidence could also be misinterpreted, but it is better than not having visual evidence.

Finally…

I doubt this is what my friend had asked for, but the effort of putting my thoughts through the filter of his question allowed me to organize my thoughts. I am sure that this is not a complete list of personal insights that I have accumulated over the years. Nor am I under the delusion that everything on the list is original, right, or insightful. It is what I believe, until I have definitive evidence that will impact my thoughts.

Works Cited

Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition. Chicago IL: University of Chicago.

Lemov, D. (2010). Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students On The Path to College. San Francisco: Jossy-Bass Teacher.

Lemov, D. (2020). The Coaches Guide to Teaching. Clearwater, FL: John Catt Educational Ltd.

Lemov, D., Woolway, E., & Yezzi, K. (2012). Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass.

Martin, H. R. (2024). How Do We Learn? A Scientific Approach to Learning and Teaching (Evidence-Based Education). Hoboken NJ: Jossey-Boss.

I received some heartfelt responses from many, and I felt that I had not adequately told my story. I decided to edit the speech to better present my thoughts on this volunteer journey through IEEE IAS, here is the version that resulted. I hope it retains the extemporaneous feel of the speech while also more adequately express my thoughts.

Here is a video of the original speech, courtesy of Prof. Andy Knight at University of Calgary.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9ctqxhmsvffvhavn8qds7/ECCE-2025-Luncheon-Speech-PW.MOV?rlkey=9fjtd6az2n0ykx548aaipldk7&dl=0

Thank you very much for this award, I am forever humbled and grateful.

I would like to first thank my nominator, Dr. Tomy Sebastian, Prof. Radu Bojoi, the awards committee chair for the IAS, the executive board of the IEEE IAS for considering my nomination, my colleagues and friends from the IEEE IAS who had shown me great love and support through the years, with a special shoutout to the Electric Machinery Committee, my home committee within the IEEE IAS.

It has been six years since I last attended an ECCE conference; as I entered the convention center yesterday, I once again felt the pull of the ECCE community welcoming me back into the fold, it felt like home. The reason I have been away for so long is because I am the primary care giver for my mother, who had just turned one hundred on October 6.

I want to give you the arc of my involvement in the IEEE IAS, I believe my personal journey and experience with the IEEE, and IAS in particular, is illustrative of the power and the importance of a technical community; most importantly, of the comradery intrinsic in an organization as diverse and special as the IEEE IAS.

My father, a lifelong IEEE member, advised me after I had decided to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an electrical engineering major, to join the IEEE as soon as possible, that if I wished to accomplish anything within electrical engineering, I must join the professional society for electrical engineering, the IEEE. I took heed and I signed up to be an IEEE member during the second week of my freshmen year at the University of Illinois. I spent the first week of my freshmen year doing what 18-year-olds think going to college means: partaking in consuming much adult beverages.

Fast forward to my gradual school days, I call it gradual school because the pace of my progress through post graduate studies was indeed quite gradual. My advisor Prof. Teddy Pȕttgen and Prof. Tom Habetler encouraged me to submit a paper to the IEEE IAS Annual Meeting, which was accepted, much to my surprise and delight — the impostor syndrome had already worked its magic. It was the 1990 edition of the IAS AM, held in Seattle Washington. It was there that I faced the well-known gauntlet presented by the elder statesmen of the Electric Machines Committee: John Oldencamp and Herb Johnson. They were the gatekeepers for the EMC. Fortunately, they were both exceedingly kind and took it easy on me, a scared gradual student presenting at a major technical conference for the very first time. I had seen their modus operandi firsthand, and I was quite relieved that I had passed the gauntlet. It was after the talk that my friend Prof. Rene Spee put his arm around my shoulders and said: you’re in! He meant that I had survived the gauntlet; but to this day, I take it to mean that I had gained ascension into the rarified air of being a member of the EMC, since this is my story, I am sticking with it. It was a proud moment and it was also the realization that I had joined the people that I had fanboyed over as a gradual student, they were my heroes and role models. The perspective that these same people are now colleagues overwhelmed me. As it turned out, many of them would become mentors and trusted friends, even though I still fanboy to this day. As a newbie though, I was tempted to blurt out: I have read your papers, followed your work, and I even understood some of them! The membership in this group was both reassuring and nerve wracking, as the self-imposed pressure to uphold the excellence set by the community was both incessant and inspirational.

It was while I was working at the Emerson Motor Company after I graduated that I was able to volunteer for the IEEE IAS, to give back to the community that had welcomed me. My boss at Emerson was Jerry Lloyd, a stalwart of the EMC and IEEE IAS; during one of the EMC meetings, Jerry stood over me as the EMC secretary asked for volunteers for the session organizers, their task was to organize the following year’s meeting sessions, and Jerry loudly volunteered me for one of those organizer posts. I gulped and took the responsibility, not knowing what the job was, nor how I was supposed to fulfill that responsibility. This was before electronic submission sites and virtual handling of the papers, I had to disseminate each paper as submitted in brown envelopes by snail mail, distribute the copies amongst the volunteer reviewers, collect the results, nag the reviewers if necessary, adjudicate the decision, notify the authors of the decisions, identify a theme for the session, and put the papers in logical theme order and notify the technical programs committee. Luckily for me, Jerry not only volunteered me, but he also gave me time during work hours to work on this task, it meant that much to him. One of the many lessons I learned during this initial experience was to volunteer to be the session chair rather than the session organizer.

As I became more ingrained into the rhythm, or lack thereof, in an all-volunteer organization, I was approached by Dr. Bruno Lequesne to serve as the secretary of the EMC, an eight year term commitment: the secretary cycles through to the vice chair office for two years after serving as the secretary for two years, and then cycle to the chairperson office for two years. Finally, as the past chair for two years. In my eight years, I learned the ins and outs of dealing with conference programming and publications process flow for the EMC. It was an education that was unique and eye opening.

Just as I thought I was done with my EMC duties, Dr. Tomy Sebastian approached me to be the Publicity chair for the nascent 2009 Energy Conversion Conference and Exposition (ECCE). When I told Tomy that I knew nothing about publicity, he, in the more genteel and kind parlance of the day as compared to FAFO: learn how by doing, mess up, and re-do. One thing that made a distinct impression was how hard everyone — especially the Technical Programs Committee: Tom Jahn’s Dave Perrault, and Brian Welchko — worked to maintain the balance that Tomy required: there is no PELS, there is no IAS, there is just ECCE. That motto was critical to the establishment of the initial ECCE and all the subsequent ECCE conferences.

After the initial success of the ECCE, Prof. Tom Habetler once again came into the arc of my story by asking me to be the co-chair of the Technical Program Committee along with Prof. John Shen. Note that there were only two of us stepping into the impossibly large shoes of the inaugural triumvirate. We followed their process, considered and compared all the papers in all tracks fairly and equally, even though we placed great value on the suggestions of the track chairs, which made the difficult decisions between accepting and rejecting papers.

Dr. Sebatian then asked me once again to be the general chair of the 2013 edition of the ECCE conference; the conference was in my blood at this point. I had the good fortune of having a stellar group of volunteers serve as the organizing committee. The following year, I rotated to be the chair of the steering committee for ECCE. It was then that I formed an informal group of past organizing chairs of the ECCE to advise and inform the upcoming chairs of our lessons learned and to serve as touchstone for their decisions since the ECCE is a unique conference. This informal group had no agenda, no portfolio, our sole purpose was to serve as sounding board and give the general chair the value of our experience, because we were all committed.

A few years ago, Prof. Andy Knight asked me to take on my next role within IEEE IAS as the ScholarOne administrator, as Louie Powell was retiring from this role. In time, I learned about the publications part of the IEEE IAS. In that role I had the good fortune of interfacing with a succession of publication chairs: Andy Knight, Ayman EL-Refaie, and Leon Tolbert; as well as Editors-in Chiefs: Tom Nondahl, David Durocher, and Kashem Muttagi; but the man who had who had saved my butt innumerable times is Louie Powell, he mentored me in the black arts of ScholarOne, and I am forever grateful.

The reason I chose going through the arc of my involvement with the IEEE IAS is to simply to demonstrate a path to those who are contemplating becoming involved in the IEEE IAS. As you can see, my experience within the IEEE IAS benefited me much more than I could have hoped. I hope that I will be able to benefit the society that has shaped my professional life.

We are engineers, as such, we seek execution, we seek to fulfill our duties, and we seek to shoulder responsibilities.

We don’t seek fame; we don’t seek recognition. Even though I will always treasure this recognition today, I will also always value the experience that I have gained from working for my electrical engineering community and especially for my colleagues. This is the least I can do to repay the debt that I owed the society that has meant so much in my professional life.

We do this work because we are a part of the greater community of fellow engineers who have become colleagues and friends. We pursue this volunteerism for our shared passion for the application of the electrical engineering art to industry, we occupy a space that is defined by seeking the answers to the questions: what if we applied the theoretical to the practical, and what do those solutions look like in real, functioning applications.

How we do it matters. There is a concept in Chinese Taoist philosophy called Wu-Wei (無為), which means Trying Not to Try. My interpretation of Wu-Wei manifests itself as the following.

We do our work with our heads down.

We do it humbly.

We do it effectively.

We do it efficiently.

We do it boldly.

Thank you.

Indeed, these feelings are not new, for I have been inspired to write about these men previously.

https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-marty.html

Some background. I grew up through my formative years as my family traveled around the world with my father’s job, my teenage years were spent in Littleton Colorado for the longest stint of six years. Since this was the longest period of stability that I had ever known in my life, I was perfectly happy to keep my talents, such as they are, in Colorado when it was time select the lucky institution of higher learning for my next step, but my parents had other thoughts. Their other thought involved the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. I reluctantly visited the campus and ended up falling in love with the ethos of the university, the rhythm and pace of the Midwest, but the corn fields took a bit of getting used to. I happily chose to matriculate in the bucolic Midwest rather than in the majestic Rocky Mountains; what was I thinking! There were days when I rued my decision, particularly when my high school mates regaled me with their exploits carving through the pristine powder of the Rockies.

Since I had neglected to turn in my housing form until well after all the regular dorm rooms had been spoken for, I was fated to spend the better part of my first semester of my first year in college living in temporary housing. I shared the floor lounge of Allen Hall Second Floor North with three others. For an only child who was used to having his own space and solitude, the arrangement was less than ideal. It was also not a living arrangement that encouraged scholastic achievements, but then again, scholastic achievements weren’t even close to being the number one goal in my teenage mind. Drinking copious amounts of beer and making friends were one and two on my list. It was under these circumstances that my Blood Brothers emerged out of the late evening smoke and mist of the student bars.

I have always maintained that the people who survived New Student Week with you are great candidates for being lifelong friends, I come by this piece of wisdom from my experience with my Blood Brothers. Indeed, forty-six years after we first laid eyes on one another, we not only remained friends, but tightly bound friends. Loyalty? Absolutely. Comradery? Indubitably. Fraternity? Unquestioned. We did not need the artificial structure of an organization fronted by Greek letters be fraternal, in fact we are much closer without having the Greek trappings.

The strength of our bonds comes from more than just having survived an epic week of debauchery as teenagers. When others brag about my Blood Brothers to others, most are jealous of our connection. I assert that the uniqueness of our relationship rises above all other friendships initiated by the trials and tribulations of a bunch of testosterones fueled dumbasses surviving college while looking for two things, the second being alcohol.

This core group of my Blood Brothers have been parts of each other’s lives through forty-six years; first jobs, gradual schools, career changes, the ebb and flow of personal relationships, breakups, marriages, the birth and raising of children, and the trials and tribulations of living in an unkind reality. There have been innumerable challenges for all of us throughout our forty-six years together, my Blood Brothers been present for one another during the good and the bad, but rather than just dispensing thoughts and prayers, we have been actively involved in each other’s lives. We have shepherded one another through the adulting adventure and helping each other learn to deal with the attendant Scylla and Charybdis that life threw in our paths. We had helped each other to navigate the troubled and turbulent seas of the bad as well as smooth sailing through calm waves of the good. We don’t offer meaningless symbolic gestures; we were present, always present. We stayed present until we were no longer needed, and then we disappeared just as quickly as we appeared. We did not need to be told or asked. We knew.

The inner morality and goodness of my Blood Brothers have been proven through our forty-six years together; these are the necessary and critical qualities that connect us. We have been witnesses to each other’s personal principles shine through the prisms of varying circumstances and we have firsthand experience of what those personal principles mean and how these personal principles say about each one of us. This is a lesson taught to me by my parents, because of their own examples. They had always tried to meet my friends, to observe my friends’ personal principles to make sure that I only associated with people with morality and high character, people who are selfless and generous, people who are moral — regardless of their religious beliefs — and most critically, how they live their personal principles and not just proclaim their good intentions; that they walked the walk and not just talked the talk. I feel I have won the lottery with my Blood Brothers.

Are you jealous yet? You should be. We are the best, even though we can often be dumbasses, but it is because we are such dumbasses which makes us as close as we are. Anyone who is as big of a dumbass as I am, while also willing to put up with my own dumbassery must be someone to be treasured.

So why am I writing this epistolary paean bragging on my Blood Brothers?

I am writing to figure out my beliefs regarding my advancing age, the advancing ages of my Blood Brothers, and how all of that interacts with my emotions, it is all too complex and interrelated to suss out just within my mind.

The first step is to acknowledge whether we are old or not as young as we once were. Beyond that acknowledgement of the conscious reality, the real gauntlet is to acknowledge the subconscious and fallacious fantasy that we are as young as we believe ourselves to be, while that seems pessimistic, the fantasy is always defeated by the real aches and pains. My Blood Brothers will forever be eighteen in my mind’s eye: indefatigable, undefeatable, and immortal; but the fact is that we will all turn sixty-five in 2026.

The signs of our oncoming decrepitude have been evident for many years because of how the nature of our conversations has evolved over the years: while we continually and unsuccessfully regale all the spouses and children, our captive audience, with incessant repetitions of the old stories of our daring-do, the conversation has shifted from what we were experiencing and doing in our lives to talking about the next generation — those snot nosed children that so dominated our conversations in what seemed like only yesterday — are now young men and women, they are no longer mini-me’s, but are mature and intellectual equals.

Another conversational subject has also turned towards the previous generation: our recalcitrant parents who now depend on us as we had depended on them. As Bonnie Raitt so presciently observed:

I see my folks are getting on
And I watch their bodies change
I know they see the same in me
And it makes us both feel strange
No matter how you tell yourself
It’s what we all go through
Those lines are pretty hard to take
When they’re staring back at you

We have indeed become our parents, and they have become us; we grown to become responsible adults, while they have regressed to be dependent children. This is the ultimate revenge for all the trouble, worry, and upheavals that we had inflicted on them just scant decades ago.

Fortunately, our conversational subjects have not turned to bowel movements or why the damned neighbor kids are always on our lawns, yet. We have evolved to become anxious about and have striven to become internet experts on Medicare and social security just as we used to strive to be experts about inane song lyrics and what used to be important to us at times that seemed both so close and yet so far away.

As my mind became inured to the undeniable fact of my advancing chronological age, I became mindful of the state of my body and my mind. My perspective has evolved, at least I hope that it has, and I have come to the acceptance of the reality that my physical aging is concomitant with my cognitive aging.

Reality was driven home when two of my Blood Brothers had warning shots fired across their bows: they had both suffered health emergencies a week apart, even though both are doing as well as can be expected as they are both still wholly with us and unencumbered by physical limitations. We were incredibly lucky.

My initial reaction was dictated by the transient circumstances of the emergencies. The sudden shock and unexpectedness of the news hit with a mixture of disbelief, devastation, anger, and helplessness. This is the insidiously dark undertow that permeates throughout our existence — the ever present, ever threatening, seemingly inescapable uncertainties that will strike at any time. A Black Swan is no longer a Black Swan once it happens, it becomes reality that needs to be dealt with consciously.

The myriads of thoughts which are all fraught with emotions ran the gamut from the selfish: “but they are my age!” to questions about what I can do to ameliorate the impact on my Brothers and their loved ones.

Unfortunately, health emergencies are not new, we have had to weather real life dealing life cards from the bottom of the deck, but the previous trials and tribulations happened when we were younger, less fragile, less vulnerable, and less pessimistic. Our outlook was more optimistic as we looked expectantly into the future, depending on the uncertainty of the unknown to assuage our fears and avoid thinking into the distant future; because we always kick the can down the road when we don’t want to deal with the alternative.

This time the reality is much more dire, this time our perspective is of someone who is on the precipice of filing for Medicare rather than someone who is old but not as old as someone on the precipice of filing for Medicare. The incessant drone of: not only are you not as young as you were nor thought you were, is ringing loudly and clearly. There is the perverse irony that even as we realize we are not young anymore, the fact that these emergencies happened when it did — while we had all believed that we all had much more life to live — made us realize that chronological age is not a predictor of mortality; indeed, genetics, environment, past behavioral sins, and sheer serendipity play greater roles in predicting the longevity of life that chronological age. The sword of Damocles is hanging on a wisp of the spider’s delicate webbing, waiting on serendipity to decide on whether the webbing will hold or break.

Honestly, I am still processing all the possibilities that life had thrown at me through the two unexpected happenstances. All innate fears and pessimism that reality had evoked are overwhelming rationality and logic. At this point of my cognitive processing, none of the lessons from stoicism: amor fati, memento mori, and control dichotomy does anything to assuage our fears and anxieties in the short term.

The question is: what to do? The immediate reaction is to do what we, my Blood Brothers and I, have always done: to be present, unasked, and remain present until we are not needed; to be of use for our Blood Brother and their families; to face the unknown together while not being able to predict the future, but to be present regardless.

It may seem to be cold comfort in the moment, but the persistence and consistency of stepping forward is powerful, and it is all we have, for the moment.

Love to my Blood Brothers, and the Blood Sisters that they were lucky enough to have chosen them for mates. You all have outkicked your coverage, I think you all know that.

USAV, in its role as the National Governing Body (NGB) for volleyball, has recently published these rules changes.

Typically, the announcement was released without explanation as to why these rules were warranted nor why these rules were deemed necessary. We can only guess: why the changes were made, why it was necessary to make these changes now, and how these changes will affect the game in the future.

My own extemporaneous riffing on the reasons and plausible explanations for these rule changes from both narrow and broad viewpoints follows, as filtered through my experience as a club coach, as a lifelong volleyball observer, as an educator, and as a fan. My thoughts are also filtered through my understanding of the purposes of a National Governing Body (NGB). My personal perspective in that regard is limited; I am just speculating as a long-time member and an interested observer from afar on the operations of an NGB since the USAV’s decisions affect my own volleyball activities and passions.

My friend Alexis Lebedew observed that from his viewpoint there are two purposes for any sport: participation and performance. Participation means getting the general population to increase their participation in the sport, to spectate, play, and support volleyball. Performance means preparing and training the top-level players, a small percentage of the volleyball playing population, to compete at the highest global level of a sport; to compete at the Olympic level and all the FIVB sponsored competitions leading up to the Olympics. As with all things, there are unintended consequences from the NGB’s decisions that do not directly impact the immediate state of either purpose but could indirectly impact the trajectory of future volleyball development in both participation and performance.

To begin, the Libero designation rule is straightforward; it is clarification for the operation of the matches.

The screening rule was a long time coming, as coaches and players on all levels have complained about the ambiguity and inconsistencies associated with the calling and non-calling of the screen. This rule change makes the interpretation just a little more well defined, even though it is still ambiguous enough to be subject to interpretation. Some will be happy that an attempt was made, while others will complain that it is not enough. It is all in the eye of the beholder.

There was a time that I, as a developmental coach, believed in the strict enforcement of the double call for the setter. I wanted the doubles to be enforced assiduously, although my interpretation was not as stringent as some would have it, and I never argued using the number of the ball rotations as the standard when I coached. I believed that the strict enforcement of the doubles call was a necessary negative reinforcement to help coaches to convince developing setters to use the proper techniques when playing in competition. I wanted to use the officials to define good and bad sets to my setters. In some ways that is still a good feedback mechanism for the novices since they needed reminders about their setting skills through judgement calls in competition, yet I came to realize that using official judgment calls to reinforce my coaching is far too indirect and not as effective as I believed; the inconsistency of the official’s interpretations and the impossibility of uniform judgements had a lot to do with my change of heart. I also realized that I have a more direct impact on how my setters set than occasionally having my setter’s bad technique exposed through the officials. I had fallen for the slippery slope fallacy: the player will not develop good technique unless they are called in matches; conversely, I also believed that not calling doubles in competition will perpetuate the player’s bad technique. The instances of a player with bad techniques being called out in competition are miniscule compared to the times that I can correct the bad technique in practice; I faced the reality that it is my responsibility to correct bad technique. One thing that never occurred to me then is that if the player’s setting is so unacceptable, then they would not be setting in competition, unless absolutely necessary.

In view of the participation purpose, the liberalized doubles calls keep the game moving forward at all levels, minimizing breaks in game action at all levels. Continuous gameplay encourages novices to keep playing without stopping at every questionable play. At the same time, the performance purpose is also met because imperfect technique also leads to inaccurate setting, which results in ineffective offenses, it is a self-correcting mechanism. Between relentless coaching and the player’s need to deliver wins, proper technique will eventually win out as the players begin to compete at higher levels of competition. Of course, I will always complain under my breath, but it will stay checked, at least, I hope.

As with the doubles rule, I had preconceived notions about the substitution rules as well.

Some pertinent facts.

All of women’s collegiate volleyball teams had gone to 15-subs a few years ago: NCAA, NJCAA, etc. NAIA is unique in that they had infinite subs per set. I once watched Lindenwood University and Graceland University compete many years ago with that rule. It was a spectacle, and not a happy one. At the end of the match, with Graceland behind, Stew McDole of Graceland subbed all six positions at every dead ball, trying to stop Lindenwood, much to the frustration of the Lindenwood coach, Ron Young, to say nothing of the poor scorekeeper. It certainly dragged out the last set of the match, but it did not forestall the inevitable, and that was my introduction to the NAIA unlimited subs.

Interestingly, men’s collegiate volleyball plays by the international 6-sub rule, they are clearly aligned with the FIVB rules for high performance competition.

USAV juniors’ rule, for all genders, was at 12-subs until this recent change. Everyone playing under USAV rules will now be playing with 15-subs.

The consensus of the first responses from my club coaching colleagues is one of relief. The consensus amongst the club coaches is that this rule allows club coaches to give more players playing time. There are many assumptions that go into this reaction that I find curious.

Three more subs per set really does not add more playing opportunities. Playing opportunities during a set ebbs and flows with the set score. If each team is only able to score one or two points with their service, the lineups will rotate through a rotation of six positions quickly if the coaches use the front row/back row platooning tactic. Even if there are longer scoring runs, front row/back row platooning of subs won’t help either team because they would be stuck in their rotation, unless the coaches decide to break away from their regular platooning substitution patterns and put in a sub to either solve a problem or give the bench player playing time because they are so far ahead or so far behind, more on that later.

Doing some math.

· Based on a per rotation substitution, substituting the libero for front row players does not count against the substitution limits, so leaving that discussion alone.

· While running a six-two offense, with back row setters, there are two substitutions per rotation, setters for opposite players substitution. If the coach decides to use a front row for back row player for both pin hitters, the total number of substitutions is four substitutions per rotation. There would be 12-substitutions used after three rotations, the three extra substitutions mean that the coach must decide which player they need to leave for the rest of the set. If it were a war of side outs, the score would be 18-18 after the three complete rotations.

· If the team is operating under a five-one, with a DS coming in for the Opposite, and the two pin hitters substituted out for back row specialists, there would be three substitutions per rotation. Assuming the same type of close sets, i.e., continuous side outs, the set would be 24-24 after four rotations. If the rest of the set follows the same game flow with the same back and forth, the coach would have to make decisions about which players stay in and which ones need to be subbed out with the three extra substitutions to finish out the set, which would go past the 25-point limit.

· Indeed, we expect the set scores to progress differently from the worst-case scenarios, but if there are long run of points on both sides while the score stays close, would the coaches change their team’s makeup to give someone on the bench playing time? In the case of the six-two, the coach would go twelve deep on the roster and ten deep running the five-one (Including the Libero.) If the coach had more players on the bench, chances are good that those players had not earned a defined role on that roster, which is why they are not in the regular substitution pattern in the first place. Even if this coach had the intent of giving the bench players playing time, would the coach do so if doing so could jeopardize the team’s chances of winning? The best opportunity for such altruism happens when the team is being blown out or is blowing out their opponent, same as always.

· Philosophically, would the spot substitutions which depend on the score, i.e., only playing the end of the bench players when there is a blowout be considered providing quality playing time for the bench players, or would it be considered charity time?

Another consideration is that getting more playing time for the bench also depends on how many players are on the bench. Many teams have ten players on the roster, but there are teams that have much more than ten because of the nature of the club season, i.e. not every player can make every tournament on the calendar, coaches hedge their bets so that they are able to at least field a workable lineup for every tournament. It is the coach’s decision to add those players, so if they say that they are creating playing time opportunities for the bench player, they are only seeking relief on the problem that they created themselves.

Some clubs are more likely to field large rosters because of the cost of the junior club season, especially those clubs that set their ambition on qualifying and competing at the GJNC, they will attend as many travel tournaments as the parents can afford and they schedule as many practices as possible to prepare for those tournaments, which in turn escalates the per player cost each season. Some teams will take on bigger rosters to ameliorate the per player cost by spreading out the incidental costs amongst more players. This is once again a choice for the team and the club, which exacerbates the lack of playing time issue, an issue they created themselves.

There was a time when travel volleyball was a luxury, when there were a dearth of clubs and those players who do not make the rosters of competitive clubs end up not playing travel ball and end up playing in clubs that only play in local tournaments. This becomes a participation problem for volleyball: how to get as many developing players as possible to play, and play at a level that is most beneficial for the player’s development? In today’s landscape, where there is a preponderance of clubs, the differentiation is whether a player makes a “competitive” club (extensive travel schedule) or a “developmental” club (local schedule), and whether the player chooses to play for the “competitive” club or a “developmental” club. The “competitive” clubs are usually pursuing a GJNC berth, they are more likely to stockpile players on their rosters as a hedge against not having enough players to attend important tournaments. Depending on the teams, clubs, and regions, those players who are at the end of the benches can fall into an extremely broad spectrum of abilities, physical talents, and experiences. In other words, they range from being able to step immediately into the void on the starting lineup with no loss of performance, to being inserted only as a spot substitute in specific circumstances, and everything in between.

This brings up the discussion about whether it is better for a weaker player to be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond. Not all circumstances are the same, some players gain more confidence starting for a “developmental” team because they can have more playing time with and against players who are closer to their skill level. This allows them to build their skills and confidence throughout the season; while others may benefit from practicing and being around better players in a more competitive environment, there is no magic formula. The decision as to which option to take is fraught with emotions and usually selfish motives, to say nothing of the parent’s expectations.

There is a third purpose that is in my mind when thinking about the efficacy of the 15-sub rule in addition to participation and performance, which is learning. In addition to participation and performance purposes, I believe that any discussion of the 15-sub rule should include whether the rule benefits the development of the players, this has ramifications across the landscape from the novice to the expert players.

The inevitable question that comes up in my mind is whether that “extra” playing time is quality playing time. Is the end of the bench players getting significant quality time on the court that will benefit their future volleyball development, or is the playing time from the 15-sub rule just charity time dispensed expediently to appease angry parents? Do the parents who are paying for the experience know the difference? Do the players, either starters or bench players, know the difference? An important secondary question that is concomitant with the quality of playing time is whether the coaches — conscious or subconsciously — are training those bench players to be prepared to step into the court and contribute in the future, or are they just training them to step into a strictly limited role which has no bearing on their overall improvement as a volleyball player? Further, if these players are so far behind the rest of the team as to only warrant cursory playing time to appease the player and the parents, how did these players make the roster?

I believe the purpose of club volleyball and the crux of the responsibility of club coaches, at its most fundamental, is to prepare and train players to play volleyball, to be the best all-around volleyball player possible, to train the player to be proficient to play beyond their club career if they choose, and to enjoy the lifelong sport of volleyball at any level of competition for those who choose not play beyond their club careers. Is the evolution of American volleyball as driven by the 15-substitution rules creating club players that are only proficient as half of a complete player: either as a front row player or a backrow player? Is this the club experience that players and families expect to receive for their club dues? Are they being deceived? Are they willingly deceiving themselves because of their eagerness to be associated with a strong team and club?

The reality of junior volleyball is that the sport evolving towards being a specialist sport, even as every junior coach and club director vows and preaches the gospel of delaying specialization for as long as possible. This reality is driven by the by using the 15-sub rule a la the college game,; it is easier for colleges to recruit and implement the front row/back row platooning model; indeed, that is the stated intent of the implementation of the 15-sub rule in the collegiate ranks: to encourage specialization.

Does the implementation of the 15-sub rule encourage club coaches to go down the primrose path of the platooning reality that is college volleyball? Or would the club coaches work harder at giving the non-starter more and quality playing time? Does the addition of three more substitutions open up the opportunities for playing time for the end of the bench players?

The de facto emphasis of the business of club volleyball today, whether the clubs admit it or not, is to land college scholarships, it is their main advertising and marketing strategy: to appeal to the players and parents desire to play in college because that is what sells. This is a natural emphasis; we want the players to excel and progress to reach their top potential; but is this the only emphasis for many of the players who play club volleyball? I don’t think this is the reality. Should club coaches constrain and customize the educational experience of club volleyball to cater to churning out specialists rather than generalists for the purpose of being more attractive to college coaches? Which roles will best serve these players? Why do the rest of the participation level players, adults and juniors alike, have to develop along the same trajectory as that of the top collegiate performance level? Does a volleyball landscape which only consists of specialists make sense? How does this impact the non-collegiate playing population of volleyball players?

One fundamental and philosophical question is whether the USAV, in its role as the NGB, should promote the participation of all players, adults and juniors, as specialists or generalists? In adopting the 15-sub rule, USAV has come down fully on the side of promoting specialization amongst all the players. The NCAA adopted the 15-sub rule in 2012 with the specified intent of promoting specialization amongst the collegiate players. The NCAA made the decision which reflects the consensus of the college coaches because they, the college coaches, must compete with the best players on the court or they could lose their jobs, and employing specialists is the path of least resistance to accomplishing that goal. This is not to pass judgement on the college coaches; they are pursuing a strategy that makes the most sense for their level of competition. Their purpose is to win; it is not to develop players from the ground up. They want to do what is most expedient for them.

I recently had a conversation with one of my former club players, she had played on the DIII level but decided to focus on her studies a few years into her college career. She graduated, found a job, and decided to get back in shape to play again because she missed the game. She was excited to be finally playing again, but she made a comment that got me thinking: she said that when she played in college, she was never allowed to serve receive, her coaches tolerated her defense in the back row because they needed her to attack in the backrow, but she was kept as far away from serve receive as possible. Now that she was playing as an adult, she was expected to competently receive serve because she is paying for her adult volleyball activities, and she was not going to pay that kind of money and not play six rotations. Most adult league teams field teams with the bare minimum of players on the roster, enough to be able to play tournaments but not so many players as to cut into anyone’s playing time. Adult teams usually won’t have serving specialists, and if they can afford to play with seven on their roster, they would, so the 15-sub is wasted for many adult teams.

Her story made me think about the participation factor for adult volleyball. When I started coaching the regional commissioner for my home region — an avid adult player — complained about the plummeting number of adult players who are registered with the USAV as compared to juniors, because junior registrations were going through a boom. I expected the adult numbers to rise again as the junior players who had fed the boom to transition into playing as adult players. I don’t know what the numbers are now, but a small sampling of my players from the years that I coached tells me that most of those players are not playing as adults, which made me feel like I have failed them and the game.

To be fair, the game itself is self-selective to favor position specialization: middles, setters, DS’s, and pin hitters; but there also used to be ancient dinosaurs roaming the volleyball landscape called six-rotation middles, generalists; I have also seen collegiate players trade jerseys between sets to flip their positions from pin-hitter to Libero and vice versa, they can do that because they are generalists; and I have seen a DS set her team to a national championship, again a generalist. Being a generalist capable of excelling in all facets of the game may not garner focused accolades as a specialist specializing in only one facet of a multi-faceted set of volleyball skills. Having generalists who are adaptable and multi-faceted gives a definite advantage to the team. Generalists give a team more options and allow the team to improvise and create something that falls into the vast intangible and uncertain part of life. The full phrase from William Shakespeare sums it up: "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."

Will American volleyball develop into something akin to American football? With offensive and defensive platooning at every dead ball? Will the next set of rules be to adopt the NAIA substitution rule to encourage participation?

These questions are not new of course, but they are interesting questions to ponder as we navigate this path onward.

A truism that has been passed on amongst the volleyball cognoscenti is the perception of how international level pin hitters who can both terminate and excel as a primary passer at the international level under the USA developmental system The truism is that the USA pins on the women’s team lacks experience with the 6-sub rule because they are always competing under the 12-sub rule during while playing collegiate competition, which is the highest level of competition before entering the USA pipeline for high level performance competition. It is believed that playing at this level while still under participation motivated rules like the 12-substitution rule stymies player development in the international game. Many are of the opinion that USA pipeline, which resolutely and necessarily goes through the collegiate competition experience, is burdened because the potential pins aren’t exposed to the international level serves early enough in their development to learn to handle international service pressure until after their collegiate careers. While on the men’s side, the belief is that the USA men’s pins are better prepared because the men’s collegiate game uses 6-sub rule. There was much gnashing of teeth when the NCAA women’s rules committee adopted the 15-sub rule, the assumption was that the increase of three subs was going to exacerbate the development of international level pins in the USA women’s gyms.

I had accepted that explanation for a long time, as such the recent declaration by the USAV that calls for all levels of competition to change to 15-subs appealed to the slippery slope fallacy once again in my subconscious and rang alarm bells. It was obvious to me that the change was geared towards enhancing the participation levels for the NGB, but how will this impact the way our development programs produce performance pin hitters? Would the extension of the number of substitutions by three put the USA development of pin hitters on the road to perdition?

The USA has not had a run of horrible pin players by any stretch of imagination, our success in the past few Olympics is testament to that. So where did the impression of USA having struggles training high level performance pin hitters come from?

I am not sure, but the optics from the Olympic coverage and other international competition has always zeroed in on Team USA’s struggles with running an effective and unpredictable offense, which requires quality first touches, especially from the pin hitters as the opposing servers always target them. Another impression is that the top college players have always been encouraged by the USA national team coaches to see their fortunes on the top professional teams to gain experience as a primary passer to complement their terminating ability. Another impression is that the cognoscenti has always faulted the national team coaches for emphasizing primary passing over terminating ability, which stands to reason.

How did the USA have such successes at the top of performance level competition internationally?

One explanation/conjecture comes from the large population theory that having a large population of volleyball playing athletes gives the USA a decidedly better probability of producing a more and better talent pool to choose from. This is congruent with the idea that countries like China and Russia, who also have a large volleyball playing population base, can field competitive volleyball teams. The boom in the number of junior girls participating in volleyball in the USA in the last 20 years means giving us an even larger and deeper pool of potential athletes to choose from. Does the larger and deeper pool of talent completely explain our successes in producing competitive terminating pin hitters who can also pass? If so, the question then becomes: how does the number of substitutions used in the development level of competition affect the passing skills of the top performance level of athletes later in their playing careers? Will the broad expansion of the 15-sub rule in the developmental and participatory realm of USA volleyball erode the advantage the USA has due to the larger and deeper talent pool?

The rest of the world, as my international coaching friends tell me, have the same substitution rules in the participation level, 12-subs, until now. Developmental teams have 12-subs, senior level performance teams play with 6-subs. What determines which developing players are funneled to senior levels of competition for high performance competition and which developing players continue to compete at the participation level of competition? How do the other countries develop their players?

I asked around and the answer was, true to form: there is no uniform way of selection and development; there are as many developmental systems as there are countries, some are clearly defined, most are operating in an open loop: try it and find out, the key difference, it seems, is that no other country has the strict club/high school/college/national team pipeline structure that the USA employs. Some countries, by virtue of their past, still retain certain vestiges of the old Soviet system: centralized decision making and structured feeder teams from sports schools to the national development program, although those systems have de-evolved since the dissolution of the state sponsored centralized sports systems.

Some countries are more organized while many countries have very loose player development efforts which are community funded rather than family funded as in the USA model. The top players are sifted, evaluated, and are allowed to compete at the levels that will get the players the best, most effective, and the most useful playing experience without strictly segregating the players by age; although the FIVB international competitions are divided by age: U19, U21, and U23 for example. The sifting processes for different countries are different as well, with some countries having very regimented selection processes while others do not. The players who show potential in other countries are promoted to face better competition without regard to their age. It was noted that the Chinese senior level team at the most recent VNL had 16-year-olds playing. Fans on social media wondered why the USA doesn’t have similar phenoms playing on the senior teams?

Being confused about what to believe as I was, I started to step back and re-examine my original belief about the impact of the substitution rules to the development of primary passing pin hitters. Stepping back in this case means applying what I know about learning theory to the training model to see if the conjecture that going to 15-subs will inexorably condemn the USA way of training high performance pin hitters in the international competition to failure.

The learning theory basis that I applied:

· Learning involves repeatedly retrieving existing experience and knowledge from long-term memory. The long-term memories are augmented and improved through being fed by the working memory. The contributions of the working memories are made permanent parts of the long-term memory by continuously cycling experiences from the working memory into the long-term memory. The more often experiences from working memory and cycled into the long-term memory, and then retrieved for application, the more likely those memories become permanent and reside at the top of the long-term memory for future use.

· In terms of sports movements, these memories take the form of subconscious neuronal connections already existing in the long-term memory, i.e., experiences are encoded in the neurons. Which, when recalled, are used to create new neuronal connections based on existing neuronal connections for each new and different situation. The creation of new neuronal connections is what allows improvisation to solve new problems.

· The learning process is progressive, the neuronal patterns are built on previous neuronal patterns, patterns that are created by successively progressing with increasing difficulty.

· The most expedient learning process incorporates progressively new and more challenging situations that are deliberately more difficult for the learner, the progression is created to challenge the learner’s abilities and experiences and to force improvisation and creativity. The challenge progressions force the player to experience far transfer, which expands their knowledge and experiences already in the long-term memory.

· Sports have naturally coupled relationships; in volleyball, the service game and the passing game are tightly coupled, just as attacking and blocking are tightly coupled. This implies that passing gets better when the player is learning to pass more difficult serves; conversely, servers get better when they are serving better passers. This is true for practices as well as in competition.

How would the 15-sub rule that is implemented for general participation segment of competition in the USAV affect this learning process?

My conjecture is that as players are trained, the levels of their passing skills improve with the level of the services that they must pass. Which we all know. Playing with 12-substitutions or 15-substititions in matches that they play does not necessarily have direct impact on their ability to pass, but the number of substitutions does have an impact on whether the passers are being left in the competition to experience the challenges long enough to progress their learning and gaining enough applicable experience with the difficult serves. As players evolve through their development cycle, they need to continuously experience more difficult serves. Changing rules on the number of substitutions used during a set does not directly affect the kind of serves the player’s experience, or does it?

To continue my conjecturing, I came to the conclusion that the 15-sub would be most directly impactful on passer development if and only if the coaches who are taking advantage of 15-sub rule to adopt the same strategy as college volleyball since they have been using the 15-sub rule since 2012; i.e. employing the front row/back row platooning system to fully take advantage of all the substitutions. It is proven strategy for winning matches at the collegiate level: it puts the players who are best at what they do in the positions that best help the team in situations that optimize the team’s performance. The players who are strong attackers are substituted out for backrow specialists or are hidden in the service formation if they are needed to attack from the backrow, the consequence is that this strategy also minimizes the opportunities of the strong attackers but weak passers to experience passing progressively more challenging serves.

The crux of whether my conjecture comes true lies in whether club and high school coaches who employ this strategy when competing and more importantly, whether they will de-emphasize serve receiving training during practice as well as for competition for the front row attackers in deference to providing more serve receive training for the serve receive specialists because they are going to be counted on to shoulder the passing load since the attackers passing load is minimized.

Will we see more developmental teams employ the double substitution platooning tactic to improve their chances of winning at an early age? In other words, will the developmental coaches choose expediency, winning more, over learning? Does the double substitution platooning tactic become the reality for most of our younger developmental and participatory teams? How do the decreasing opportunities for strong attackers to gain experience and knowledge to serve receive affect their ability handle progressively more difficult serves when they advance to the point of playing internationally?

This assumes of course, that the developmental coaches are not employing this tactic presently, but that they will adopt the platooning system because they think they have the necessary amount of substitutions to make it work now.

Could this happen? Absolutely, because many clubs are focused on qualifying for the GJNC and they need to win to accomplish this.

Is this plausible? I think the answer is yes.

Is this probable? I don’t know.

Would this happen? I don’t know. The present trend in junior volleyball is skewing that way, but my crystal ball is always murky.

To be honest, I don’t know if my thought experiment proved anything. I did convince myself against the belief that the rule change itself will be an unmitigated disaster. It could still happen, but is it probable? Too early to tell because we don’t have enough data or experience with the rule, it was just implemented. We can only extrapolate the college volleyball experience downward to the broader participatory playing population, but the context between college volleyball and club volleyball is quite different, the level of athletes and purpose for playing the game is different. It is the emphasis on using platooning at novice levels of athletes and competition which will further the erosion of developing generalists that is worrying.

I had intended to apply learning theory to drive the argument into reductio ad absurdum to make the case for that the 15-subs rule in the broader context of participatory competition means disaster for training our highest level of athletes, but I was not getting the absurdum part. Which made me rethink my initial stance. The conclusion that I came to is that my initial conjecture about the 15-sub rule could still come true, but that depends on developmental coaches at the participation levels adopting the strategies from the college game.

Then again, the population demographics factor in the discussions about primary passers may be more dominant than the effect of the new rule, i.e. the sheer amount of viable athletes within the talent pool in the USA could continue to overcome the conjectured difficulties that may arise through the adoption of platooning.

Reiterating the other questions raised, which I feel is more important from a learning perspective:

· Will the developmental level teams evolve to only train volleyball specialists rather than generalists?

· Will the parents of developmental players buy into the belief that their money is well spent if their children become specialists (half players) rather than generalists (complete players)?

· Will the front row/backrow platooning be the norm for the developmental teams, even as young as 10-year-olds?

I don’t know. We shall see in the next few years, probably in a decade or so, after those athletes who are used to the 12-sub rule exit the cycle.

Thanks for reading my meanderings.

As I was reliving the distant memories of my past life during my short walk, it was difficult not to be caught up in the revelry of a simpler and halcyon time, thinking about the fresh faced students walking with me, their heads bopping to the music on their iPods and their minds struggling with the sensory overloads that had already overwhelmed them.

Recalling those days long gone made me recall what had happened in my life in twenty-twenty hindsight, comparing my teenage perspective with my curmudgeonly perspective of today. It was difficult to keep the rose-colored glasses off during this occasion of emotional revery since this time meant so much to me. As a self-appointed curmudgeon, I adapted a certain level of skepticism and I have tried mightily to remain objective about my youthful decisions, as I know those decisions have shaped my life. I tried not to overly burden my thoughts with memories of specific moments and decision with the thought: this is where I fucked up my life, but that is an easy conclusion to come to. To be clear, this is a post-mortem, as I am too young for that. It is an ad hoc summary of the wisdom that I had learned in the time since that fateful Autumn Day through the school of hard knocks, wisdom that I am eager to pass on to my eighteen-year-old self. Whether my eighteen-year-old self would have listened is another story altogether. I doubt it.

I arrived in Champaign-Urbana about two weeks before the start of classes. I moved into Allen Hall, my home base for the next two years of my life, during New Student week, about a week prior to the first day of class. In that short span of time on campus, I settled into a temporary dorm room, which was the lounge that was pressed into service as I was delinquent in getting my dorm request in early enough. This unplanned and unintended bit of irresponsibility set the course for my college career and for the rest of my life, as I met cabal of lifelong friends on that Allen Two North floor. I don’t know about anyone else, but the friends who shared the trials and tribulations of New Student week will always have stories on you, stories that could potentially derail a political career in the future, whether you end up being lifelong friends or not.

It was the perfect week, I lived the life of a college student as imagined by an eighteen-year-old: no responsibilities, time to devote to my Dionysian tendencies — the drinking age being eighteen had everything to do with that. My teenage dreams were further fed by the fact that I was surrounded by massive number of people who were of the same age, indulging in the same carefree college experience at the same time, we fed off each other. Wine, women, and song were the key experiences to be garnered. Unfortunately, the mating rituals of the undergraduates were a mystery to me as I was inordinately shy, there was, however, always beer. This should have been the foreshadowing of what was to come, as if it were the first chapter of a classic sturm und drang novel.

Monday morning came much too soon. I don’t remember if I approached the first day of classes dutifully, as I was brought up to do, or whether I tried to extend the new student week party for just a few more hours Sunday night.

I had an 8 AM rhetoric class. Not just any rhetoric, but rhetoric for engineers. I still don’t understand the special distinction of that class that was meant specifically for the engineers, but it just didn’t feel right, as if engineers were literally illiterate. I remember sitting drowsily in the class as the TA arrived, clutching his cup of coffee and his anti-engineer attitude with equal fervor. His opening words to the room full of future engineers are lost to time, but his antipathy has stayed with me for over forty years. In fact, I was as antagonistic as he was since I took the attitude that I was not a native writer of English and the fact that I, as a non-native speaker and writer of the language, was not in remedial rhetoric for engineers (I am pretty sure this was a class that did not exist, but no matter), was a motivator to just fly under the radar and survive. I didn’t become interested in communicating through writing until much later in life.

My next class was at 10AM, a large lecture for Physics 106, a class that is usually taken during the Spring semester of freshmen year for engineers because the Physics class required Calculus I, differential calculus. I was able to take this class the first semester of my freshman year because I had scored a three in the AP Calculus BC exam. Scoring a three out of a possible five was no great feat, AP Calculus in high school was a year long cram session, designed to optimize the number of students who can “pass” the class by beating the exam. I was sufficiently prepared to beat the system, but I missed all the nuances and intricacies of higher mathematics because I was focused on passing the exam. The three I received gave me placement AND credit for the first two semesters of Calculus, which meant that I had to take third semester calculus, a requirement for all engineers. More on that later.

After taking some time to pump coffee into my sleep addled brain after rhetoric, I sauntered over to what I thought was the Loomis Physics Lab building. I stood in front of the building that was clearly marked in gigantic letters: Loomis Lab, with my handy dandy campus map so that I could not make out any reference point. I did what all red-blooded males were trained not to do: to ask for directions. A harried graduate student looking type was rushing by and I asked: can you tell me where Loomis is. He slowed his pace, stopped, and told me that I was in the wrong place and then proceeded to show me, in great detail in my handy dandy map how to get there. He sent me to the Armory, which was in the diametrically opposite direction of Loomis, and it took me and my lard butt twenty minutes to walk there. I missed the initial physics lecture after having walked to the Armory, asked for directions for a second time, and doubled back. I hope my direction giver was able to regale his fellow graduate students over adult libations with how he fooled a naïve freshman. I also hope that he failed his orals miserably.

First Wisdom: Map out where your classes are before the first day of class. FAFO is not a good way to go through life.

Second Wisdom: Look up and read the signs, stupid.

Third Wisdom: Always ask directions but always verify.

Corollary to the Third Wisdom: Check for the devious smirk on the face on the direction giver.

My other two classes had more complicated wisdoms.

In my haste to prepare myself for an engineering career, a career that is based on my imagination since I had no clue about what engineers do or how to prepare for the challenges of engineering, even though my father had been a damned good engineer. It was an ambiguous and undefined mirage for us, as many freshman engineering majors will attest to, if they are honest. I had eschewed the life sciences in my high school years because I was queasy about dealing with living lab experiments; I did not take biology in high school even though my favorite science teacher taught it. I took physics and AP Physics, even though the physics teacher for both classes was less than a stellar teacher, everyone knew it. I also managed to consciously avoid high school chemistry because I didn’t particularly care for the topic nor the teacher teaching the class. I got my comeuppance when I reached the hallowed halls of engineering at Illinois because chemistry was one of those pesky engineering requirements. I was told early on that I would need to take Chem 100, a remedial chemistry course before I could take the officially required Chem 101. The remedial Chem 100 was, to me, an anathema because I would not get credit for taking it, it does not count for my expected degree. Being mindful that this lack of credit towards graduation was costing my parents money, I decided to take a chance and try to get placed into Chem 101. I took the placement test, did well enough to get into Chem 101, and proceeded to wait for half the semester to get into a recitation section. I was told to sit in on a section that fitted my schedule and to attend the massive lectures that was part lecture and part entertainment as the professor was known to be quite the showman, demonstrating chemical reactions etc. I did very little of both.

Fourth Wisdom: Avoiding the difficult because you didn’t “like” the teacher or the class is idiotic.

There were two psychological factors weighing on me at the time, the first is the impostor syndrome: since I didn’t have a “home” section, I felt like an intruder in any section that I was squatting, my decision was to make myself invisible, which made a bad decision even worse. The second set of factors involved arrogance and hubris. High school was easy to navigate, the teachers and counselors identified me as amongst those who played the grades game well, as their pedagogy had dictated, and my preparation for high school was good enough for me to slide by. I always did the work, and I was always able to get the correct answers more often than not. It was “learning” by rote, I did what was expected and they gave me what was expected. What was missing was curiosity, passion, and an ability to explore and think broadly. I thought I had figured it out as I always did in high school. Unfortunately, I was surrounded by people who had what I did not have: curiosity, passion, and the ability to explore and think broadly; more importantly, I did not have any study habits to speak of. I did the assignments, and I memorized what I thought I needed to memorize, that always got me through to the goal: to make good grades. My goose was cooked by the time I was assigned to a permanent recitation section. The D I made in Chem 101 put me under the Mendoza line, although I still had hope.

Fifth Wisdom: Monkey see, monkey do will get you through high school, and even a small part of undergraduate, but not gradual school, except maybe if you were trying to become an MBA from the diploma mills.

The hope was in the Calculus III class, the sophomore level class that I took as a freshman. Mathematics was my passion; it was my raison d’etre. I wore the crown of being a freshman in a class full of sophomore as my cloak of invincibility.

I was thinking: I was in the top ten percent of my graduating class of 576 students; yes, I still remember, pathetic if you really thought about it, but it resonated with my arrogance at the time. Even though I barely survived high school Calculus, I thought this was my ace in the hole. I minimized the fact that I only received a three in the AP Calculus BC exam and spun it as: I received a three in the harder of the two AP Calculus exams, therefore I must be badass in mathematics. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental difference between never learning calculus in all of its abstract glory and only learning how to use the tools just to pass the exams, especially when the rest of the class had learned the nuances of the abstraction through the school of hard knocks in their freshmen year and had developed consistent study habits from that school of hard knocks.

Sixth Wisdom: Hubris and arrogance, no matter what your credentials and accomplishments, will destroy you every time.

Corollary A to Seventh Wisdom: You shit does indeed stink, learn to deal with it.

Corollary B to Seventh Wisdom: No matter how smart you think you are, there will always be smarter people; many times they are much smarter, more curious, and work much harder at understanding the subject because they are curious.

As it became obvious that I was barely treading water in Calculus III, I did what had always worked for me before: tried to shoehorn an entire semester’s worth of knowledge in enforced and arduous sessions of “cramming.” This was a method made famous by the film The Paper Chase, when law students locked themselves away in a hotel room for days to study for their finals. The film insinuated that fictional cram sessions brought success, it didn’t work with Calculus III, my goose was cooked.

Seventh Wisdom: Putting your nose to the grindstone working the tools given in class without understanding why we use those tools, nor extending your thinking beyond what was taught in class is the dumbest way to do anything, it might sometimes work, but not every time, and it never works when you want it to work.

Eighth Wisdom: Learning works best with understanding the fundamental structure of what you are trying to learn, there is a system of thinking behind doing things a certain way, the magic is learning those reasons, assessing your own understanding, creating your own structure based on your understanding, assiduously revising your structure as you progress, and get to work.

Corollary A to Eighth Wisdom: Don’t stop at what you think you know and what you don’t know. Figure out those unknown things that you didn’t even know that you didn’t know. The reward comes when what you didn’t know that you knew reveals itself, it’s like a surprise gift.

Corollary B to Eighth Wisdom: There is no such thing as a magic elixir or a tipping point for knowledge. Learning is a continuum, not a collection of discrete points of revelation. If you are waiting for the Eureka moment to manifest itself, you will miss the nature of learning.

I ended up under the Mendoza line for good. Three C’s and a D put me on academic probation. Imagine that, me of the top 10% of my graduating class fame, who did they think they were? I found out about the results from my disastrous semester when I came home from a ski trip with my high school friends and my parents showed me the grades. This was the beginning of the end of my fantasy college experience as imagined by an eighteen-year-old. I played catch up the rest of my undergraduate career. I ended up going to summer school that freshman year to try to boost my GPA. I took two philosophy classes and an economics class in hopes of making up for my knucklehead first semester. I think I got an A and a B in the philosophy classes and an A in economics. The A from the economics class came because the first half of the class was spent on explaining the derivative, without actually employing calculus, I lucked out. I also spent an inordinate amount of time learning about Empiricists and Rationalists in philosophy. I became obsessed with philosophy, I even deliberately put myself under the same apocryphal circumstances as Rene Descarte supposedly wrote his Six Meditations; locking myself in the air-conditioned dorm room while studying and reading the Six Meditations. I dug deep because I was curious. Most importantly, I also did not need the class to satisfy my humanities credit for engineering; I already received placement and credit with my AP US History test scores from high school. Not surprisingly, that was the highest AP score that I brought to college. It was curiosity, not a mercenary need for credits that motivated me.

Ninth Wisdom: Nothing motivates better than curiosity; not the mercenary desire for status, money, or credentials; not the yearning for happiness, although the joy derived from pursuing curiosity is pretty damned close; not the satisfaction of knowing that you are doing exactly what is expected of you. In the end, societal acceptance for conforming to societal expectations was mostly a demotivator.

Tenth Wisdom: There is always tomorrow.

I graduated undergraduate with a mediocre GPA, but not so mediocre as to not being accepted for gradual school; even as I had to claw my way back from that very eventful first semester, which had started with such imaginary promise.

So that is my remembrance of my first day of college, augmented by all the history that followed and twenty-twenty hindsight. I am not sure my eighteen-year-old self would put aside his hormones and thirst for libations long enough to listen, I certainly hope so, but my younger self has always been a dumbass, not like I am now, all full of gravitas and maturity.

The teaser for the article explained the intent of the author:

Mathematics is a powerful tool. But increasingly, mathematic models are being mistaken for reality.

From fitness trackers to large language models, we're increasingly ruled by systems that quantify without understanding.

…. novelist and essayist Joanna Kavenna explores the rise of cyber-Pythagoreanism—the belief that reality can be captured through numbers — and argues that when we mistake data for truth, we risk replacing the real world with algorithmic fiction.

“Reality is ignored in favour of algorithmic fictions, which are mistaken for objective facts,” argues Kavenna.

The article piqued my imagination and I started to abstract the idea to those subjects that I am the most familiar with: engineering and sports. You are invited now to my Chautauqua.

Humans are by nature, wary of uncertainty while reality is by nature infinitely uncertain; because humans cannot change reality, we subconsciously substitute our perception of reality as reality in our minds. We create a mental model of reality from the information that we gain from our senses. Since we are dependent on our senses for our survival, we implicitly believe our perception of reality to be the truth, because we are unable to understand reality otherwise.

Humans are also great story tellers; we create narratives from our perceptions of reality and then we conveniently convince ourselves that these narratives are indeed the reality that is around us. This is also known as the narrative fallacy because it is a narrative emanating from our imagination after having been populated by our perceptions. Even those who are conscious of our proclivity to self-deceive through our perceptions and belief in our narratives will inevitably and subconsciously fall into the trap.

This concept is not new; Plato’s allegory of the Cave addresses the idea directly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave).

In the allegory, Plato describes people who have spent their entire lives chained by their necks and ankles in front of an inner wall with a view of the empty outer wall of the cave. They observe shadows projected onto the outer wall by objects carried behind the inner wall by people who are invisible to the chained “prisoners” and who walk along the inner wall with a fire behind them, creating the shadows on the inner wall in front of the prisoners. The "sign bearers" pronounce the names of the objects, the sounds of which are reflected near the shadows and are understood by the prisoners as if they were coming from the shadows themselves.

Only the shadows and sounds are the prisoners' reality, which are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent distorted and blurred copies of reality we can perceive through our senses, while the objects under the Sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason. Three higher levels exist: natural science; deductive mathematics, geometry, and logic; and the theory of forms.

According to Kavena, the modern incarnation of the Plato’s Cave allegory substitutes the projected shadows with the mathematical models; we have come to believe that the derived mathematical models are reality, rather than a representation of reality.

Why would we opt for creating models, mathematical or otherwise? I thought about those questions in terms of the two subjects I have chosen: the purpose for both is the same: to create models that can predict the long-term future and anticipate the short-term results.

In certain cases, mathematical models are close enough to reality for our purposes, i.e. the difference between the mathematical models and reality is close enough; while in most cases the gaps between mathematical models and reality are so large so that if they are used to predict the long-term future and anticipate the short-term future, these results are consistently misleading because they do not reflect the actual state of reality.

In engineering, the purpose is to create, analyze, and implement processes and products for applications. The purpose of being able to predict the long-term future is to enable the revolutionary advancement of the body of knowledge through using what we already know as the foundation of the new explorations; while the purpose of anticipating the short-term future is to enable the evolutionary and incremental development of new processes and products based on previously implemented and verified processes and products. Mathematical models are relied upon as factual replication of reality, encompassing what we know about reality through our understanding of nature to predict how previously never attempted designs will act and react. Additionally, mathematical models are used in analysis to resolve the difference between the mathematical model and the performance results, whether it is to troubleshoot errant results that deviate from what is anticipated or to correct glitches in the mathematical model to bring the model in line with reality.

In sports, the purpose is to use mathematical models to anticipate short-term human performances under competitive situations so that informed decisions can be made in comparing players, deciding on who should play and who should sit. There is also a desire in sports to predict, in the long term, how contests between teams would turn out. Fantasy leagues and sports book businesses have long been trying to use mathematical models to make long-term predictions. The accuracy of the long-term predictions has been dodgy at best and mythological at worst.

Since the “realities” that are modelled are very different between the two subjects, the varying successes in accomplishing the purposes of predicting and anticipating are expected.

The first question that needs to be asked, and not answered definitively, is: What is reality? That question can and has been explored throughout history in a philosophical framework. Limiting the meaning of reality in the context of the two subjects significantly narrows the focus and limits the discussion options.

What we do know is that reality is uncertain and to make matters more complex, the sources of uncertainty are uncertain and indeterminate for both subjects. Reality is usually experienced in the open loop, i.e., there is a significant amount of unpredictability when we experience reality. Which is exactly why it is impossible for us to fathom the depth and breadth of reality. We can base our conception of reality on what we know and what we perceive, but that is highly dependent on the fidelity of our perception of reality and whether our perceptions apply directly to the specific situation that we are navigating.

Reality can be incredibly simple, or it can be infinitely complex. The problem is that at times reality may seem straightforward when seen through our perceptions, which in our minds, simplicity triggers linear thinking, this could be a detriment in how we create our conception of reality through our perception because our perceptions are not reliable and more often than not, reality turns out to be considerably more complex than our ability to perceive. Indeed, reality can involve many dimensions and independent variables that are subtly coupled and interrelated. These complex interrelationships feeds back upon one another which affect how reality behaves. How much of these interrelationships affect how reality acts and reacts increases the complexity of our task: to be able to predict reality. (Forrester 1968) (Meadows 2008)

Reality in engineering is both dictated and constrained by structures that are superimposed on reality by nature: the physical laws as we understand them. Fortunately, reality in engineering is also associated with a preponderance of detailed legacy knowledge that is derived from prior experience, and substantiation of the laws of nature through those experiences. We have created paradigms within the sciences through a structure that roughly follows Thomas S. Kuhn’s essay (Kuhn 1970): the paradigms resulting from our definition of normal sciences, the appearances of anomalies which challenges the paradigms of normal sciences, and the creation of new paradigms which satisfactorily includes the anomalies in the new candidate paradigm. When sufficient empirical proof of new paradigms warrants the shifting of the old paradigm, the new paradigms are accepted and become the new normal science.

The reality in sports does not have a deterministic foundational structure that is equivalent to the foundational structure that buttresses engineering. The laws of nature do not play a role in the sports reality, outside how nature affects the playing of the sport: gravity, aerodynamics, et. al. The laws of nature do not directly impact on the desired purpose of sports: to anticipate human performance in competitive situations, to make the best decision while under specific situations, and to provide factual basis for anticipating individual human performances for comparison.

What the sports realities involve is the laws of human nature rather than the laws of nature, game actions are predicated upon how each person involved in the game acts and reacts both in general and in specific situations. While it is possible to anticipate human performance in the short-term, this is what coaches and players strive to do in training — to attain some level of consistency. Unfortunately, the individual variations due to human nature can never approach the same level of predictability as the laws of nature.

Even though the purpose of using mathematical models for both engineering and sports to represent reality are identical: having the ability to accurately and precisely anticipate short-term performance; what differentiates the two subjects drastically are the differences in the nature of the realities, those differences also drastically affect how mathematical models are derived and the ability of the mathematical models to meet the purposes.

One way to think of reality and the derived models is to recall the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant)

a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. … The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.

The lesson? It is impossible to completely comprehend reality through just our senses; we can only draw boundaries around reality and comprehend that partitioned bit of reality to our best ability; and those boundaries define the viability of the models for meeting the purposes.

In engineering, the robustness of the structures — the certainties afforded by the laws of nature, the a priori knowledge and experiences accrued over time, and the testing and verification of the mathematical models enhance the mathematical model’s ability to anticipate in the short-term future because there is less variability present in the mathematical model as compared to reality. This increase in the level of certainty in the mathematical model allows the engineer to create new processes and products using prior designs, which are based on prior experience and empirical evidence. It saves the engineer from having to reinvent the wheel every time they are charged with creating something new. In addition, having a robust mathematical model gives the engineers the tools to resolve many differences between the anticipated performance of proposed new design versus the experimental testing performed on the new designs.

An advantage afforded by the laws of nature is that those laws that dictate the mathematical model are also constraints imposed on the model. The laws of nature thus serve two purposes: it defines both the mathematical model and the boundaries of the mathematical model of reality. There are instances, however, when those constraints tend to over constrain the mathematical model to such a point that it hampers the purpose anticipating the long-term future. It is because the mathematical model is so dependent on the accumulation of prior knowledge that the mathematical model is unable to approximate a reality that has not been experienced and asked to extrapolate beyond the bounds of the prior knowledge. In engineering, the mathematical model had been met with an anomaly and the mathematical model needs to be adjusted to anticipate the long-term future.

In sports, while the purpose is also to anticipate performance, the desired anticipation capability is in a much broader context. The performance to be anticipated in sports is human performance as players are competing with other players’ performances while playing the game. While the mathematical model is also based on experience and data, the lack of the established laws of nature as foundational structure not only hampers the model building but also leads to less accuracy and predictability.

Mathematical models in sports are based on statistics, mostly game statistics. (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/stats-for-spikes-termination-scoring) Descriptive statistics are invaluable in many ways: they describe the reality of the sporting contest in inviolate numbers, which gives the user a well-defined representation of what is happening during the competition, even though the accuracy of the representation is dependent on how the data is collected. Statistical data can be considered to be deterministic if the data taking process is unbiased and consistent. Statistics also shed light on the veracity of the perceptions of the participants: coaches, players, and officials. The caveat regarding the deterministic nature of the termination statistical data is that intermediate actions that proceed from dead ball to dead ball sequences are missing. Sports action is a chain of events which are linked by causal relationships, one action leads to another. This is why sports are often modelled using conditional probabilities in the form of Markov chains. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/03/stats-for-spikes-markov-chains.html) If any of the events are not recorded, which often are not, the statistical data set is incomplete, the representation of reality is also incomplete. This is not to say that incomplete data has been a showstopper, it is just that this incompleteness leads to ambiguities and lack of clarity in the meaning of the statistics, which become amplified exponentially when decisions are made in the absence of the data.

Even though engineering models also use statistical analysis to augment the laws of nature, the engineering mathematical model is anchored and constrained on the laws of nature, and the statistical analysis is used for verification purposes, i.e., to account for the uncertainties in the measurement and verification process.

Ever since Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball, the sporting world has built analytics capabilities at every level of competition. The upsurge in analytics tools and personnel in the ranks of sports team personnel has been staggering. The insight gained has been impressive, the increased anticipability of player performance achieved through analytics has shone new light on player abilities, although it has not been as deterministic as the engineering mathematical model. This can be attributable to factors that make engineering mathematical models less susceptible to uncertainty: scientific laws governing modeling and constraining, accuracy and precision of measurement, and experimental verification.

The sports mathematical model is mostly descriptive: what happened in games and what happened in a cluster of games. It gave the sports world a clearer picture of reality at that point and time. The accrual of consistent statistical data also allows limited inferencing ability, but just short-term inferences because the nature of sports statistics may or may not meet the criteria for accurate deployment of statistical inferencing. The amount of data collected is usually not enough to meet the criteria for statistical inference, the statistics being termination point statistics cause the statistically based models to be missing vast amounts of data that cannot be collected, or if they could, tend to be subjective in nature.

Unlike engineering mathematical models, the sports statistically based mathematical model does not automatically include the naturally occurring constraints which come from the laws of nature that is the basis of engineering mathematical models. This is an important omission because the constraints serve to limit the size of the mathematical models by excluding implausible solution spaces.

The question is: why did sports analytics succeed so spectacularly given their apparent shortcomings? My conjecture is that since there had not been any mathematical model to speak of, and a severe lack of confidence and understanding of statistics in general, decisions were made at the critical levels by gut feel and the eye test, neither had been numerically verified. What analytics did was to eliminate the uncertainties associated with heuristics and rules of thumb which also obviated myths and erroneous beliefs; unfortunately, other sources of uncertainties remained within the statistically based mathematical models.

Drawing an analogy with gambling; analytics served the same role as the players counting cards while playing, it leveled the playing field between the house and the player, but the player did not gain an overwhelming advantage over the house, it just seemed that way.

Verification is a mandatory activity before deploying engineering mathematical models. It is concomitant with the creation of the mathematical model. There are two levels of verification: simulation and experimental testing. The computer simulation step does not verify the accuracy of the model with reality; it does verify whether the mathematical model performs as it is derived and whether the mathematical model strictly follows the laws of nature that are built into the mathematical model. As simulation software has evolved to be faster and more accurate, some have made the procedural leap of faith to conclude that simulation can be just as good if not better than experimental verification, as experiments also introduces uncertainties as a part of the data measurement process; it is also not economically viable to constantly test and verify the mathematical model at every step of the process, simulations thus serves the purpose of checking the verity of the mathematical model. What is ignored is that the simulation results are only as accurate as the mathematical model itself. If there exists unmodelled dynamics that is integral to how reality acts and reacts, the simulation results will be inaccurate, reference the parable of the elephant and the blind men; it is probable that the composite descriptions from all the blind men have significant gaps in their perception of the elephant as compared to reality.

There is an apocryphal anecdote from my gradual school days regarding the early development of adaptive pilot systems on fighter jets. The adage that describes the problem was: adapt and learn or crash and burn. Many test pilots had to eject and crash their planes while testing these adaptive systems because the adaptive system models failed to include the unmodelled dynamics that is a part of the airplane dynamics so that even though live pilots can adjust and overcome the missing dynamics, the adaptive autopilot systems were not able to learn in time to solve the unmodelled dynamics problem, they crashed and burned.

After the mathematical model has been verified as being accurate to the laws of nature governing reality as we understand reality, the experimental testing phase is deployed to determine whether the mathematical model had faithfully duplicated reality, within the acceptable limits of uncertainty as determined by statistical analysis. If the disagreement between the computed results from the mathematical model is greater than a computed limit, two sets of action should be initiated: re-examining the simulation results for any loss of accuracy and the lack of accuracy of the mathematical models as compared to reality. This involves the painstaking and prolonged labor of granularly tracking the propagation of errors through the entire experimental testing procedure. The resulting action ranges from duplicating the testing procedure to track down the source of experimental error to challenging the accuracy of the mathematical models as their anticipated information is compared to empirical data, and everything in between.

As stated before, the human element dramatically increased the uncertainty factor in the sports mathematical modelling, the lack of solid guardrails like the laws of nature also increases uncertainties and decreases mathematical constraints that engineering mathematical models do not have to reckon with. The measurement aspect in sports is also subject to uncertainties, much as the measurement aspects increase the uncertainties in the engineering context — even though new statistics have been generated that are more informative, they are still lacking the accuracy and precision that the engineering measurements enjoy.

In essence, there are no such thing as experimental verification of statistically based mathematical models in sports. There is no meaningful and broad means of verifying statistical models to assess the predictability of the mathematical model. Even as more sets of data are generated because more games are being played and reams of data are taken, the uncertainty of the sports mathematical model will always hamper the attempts at predicting the long-term future; it is impossible to integrate finite number of data sets into the mathematical model when the goal is to gain the ability to predict infinitely into the future.

Mathematical models in sports are dependent on probabilities, which account for the large variations and uncertainties in the calculation of the performance metric. The probability functions, while informative about the measured variables, will also propagate the uncertainties and variations onto the mathematical model.

The statistically based sports mathematical model can only reflect what had happened in history, the models are descriptive, not necessarily inferential. This means that the statistical models are not suitable for prediction in the long-term, there are strict requirements placed on the statistical models to qualify them for application as inferential statistics. Many have used statistically based mathematical models inferentially to try to gain short-term anticipability, with varying degrees of success. As the narrative of Moneyball can attest, there are many instances of success in using analytics to uncover underlying trends in performance metrics, many performance metrics have revealed the hidden values of many players that would have been obfuscated because of the gutfeel and eye test methods of evaluating players. I wonder, however, whether the important revelation is the value of analytics or the lack of value of gutfeel and eye test methods?

Parenthetically, Joanna Kavena cited the flood of AI into our landscape as her main motivation to discuss the use of mathematical models to replace reality. Indeed, the advent of the readily available AI engines is forcibly and perhaps inevitably replacing our preferred shadows on the cave walls with replacing human perception-based shadows with AI based shadows on the cave walls.

I have a rudimentary and shallow understanding of how the present-day form of AI operates after having read some general public directed books on the subject (Gary Marcus 2006) (Mitchell 2019), so I am willing to learn from those who are better versed in the technology, but I dip my toe into the speculations about AI.

One thing that stands out is that the AI engines that have been foisted upon us are not Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) engines, they are Large Language Model (LLM) based engines. What does that mean? LLM engines employ massive training databases to achieve their capacity to rapidly and overwhelmingly churn out information that pertains to the user prompts. The speed of the LLM engines and the breadth, and depth of the LLM engine results are impressive, but the LLM does not possess the human ability to accept plausible information and reject implausible information. The LLM engines regurgitates what it has “learned” from the massive databases that was used to train the LLM. The sheer amount of information presented in a short time is truly a time saver, but all that information cannot and should not be accepted without scrutiny as the LLM engines tend to hallucinate and present non-existing information as true information. These hallucinations are embedded in the large set of information as factual representation of reality, camouflaging its fictional nature. It is for that reason that I am weary of its potential for misinformation. Yet, I do not wish to be left behind and be thought of as a Luddite, I have devoted my life to the advancement of technology, so being a Luddite is contrary to my training and indoctrination. Once again, I draw on the blind men and the elephant parable to illustrate the point: if reality is not accurately portrayed in the perception (LLM training data), then the mathematical model does not represent reality.

I view the LLM based engines as yet another law of nature based mathematical model, subject to the same rigorous scrutiny and verification as any other mathematical models. The main difference is that the models are difficult to verify because the output space is so large and the potential of hallucinations being included in the information creates more work to rigorously determine the LLM model’s agreement to reality.

In the engineering context, since the mathematical model is based on the laws of nature and is strictly constrained by what we already know and have verified with testing against reality, the application of LLM models to engineering mathematical models is seemingly less problematic.

In the sports context, since the mathematical model is so fraught with uncertainties and potential errors when used to draw inferences to begin with, the potential use of LLM models is seemingly futile at the present. I can’t speak for the future.

Finally, as the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence Marvin Minsky once observed: Easy things are hard. Which can be interpreted as: things that are seemingly easy to execute in human experiences are hard to implement in AI because of our human blind spot, the amount of common sense, subconscious abilities to apply our experiences, and deep understanding of the heuristic knowledge that we possess which are needed to do the simple things. Much of those capabilities are considered to be so trivial that we fail to recognize them as critical. This is not to say that AI is a dead end, on the contrary, the development of the idea which germinated in Dartmouth in 1956 has come a long way, but at this stage, what is needed is AGI and not LLM.

This is the end of my Chautauqua on my thought on Kavena’s article as it applies in my two playgrounds. As always, I am open to discussions and civilized conversations with knowledgeable people.

References

Forrester, Jay Wright. Principles of Systems. Waltham MA: Pegassus Communications, 1968.

Gary Marcus, Ernest Davis. Rebooting AI Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust. New York City: Pantheon Books, 2006.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems A Primer. NYC: Chelsea Green, 2008.

Mitchell, Melanie. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. NYC: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019.

As I learned about SPC, I was eager to apply the methodology to volleyball because the philosophy behind SPC seems to be ideal for coaches to use to take their team’s pulse through their team’s statistical performances over time. The most basic and easily applicable tool from all the SPC arsenals is the control chart.

What foolow is a short historical synopsis of SPC, this is my appended history and description of SPC of what is in Wikipedia, any mistake is all mine. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_process_control)

Statistical Process Control (SPC) or Statistical Quality Control (SQC) is the application of statistical methods to monitor and control the quality of a production process. This helps to ensure that the process operates efficiently, producing more specification-conforming products with less waste scrap. The process can be a single component or a series of interconnected components. The SPC was the brainchild of Walter A. Shewhart at Bell Laboratories in the early 1920s. Shewhart developed the control chart in 1924 and the concept of a state of statistical control.

W. Edwards Deming invited Shewhart to speak at the Graduate School of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and served as the editor of Shewhart's book Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (1939), which was the result of that lecture. Deming was the architect of the quality control short courses that trained American industry in the new techniques during WWII, but the lessons were ignored by American industry because American industry was booming post war, and the management did not worry about quality, just volume.

The US government introduced and helped educate post-World War II Japanese industry by sending Deming to Japan during the Allied Occupation. He met with the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) to introduce SPC methods to Japanese industry, and to assist the Japanese economy to recover from the devastation of the War.

The Japanese manufacturers integrated SPC into their manufacturing process and implemented quality improvements on their manufacturing.

Ironically, the Japanese industry introduced SPC methods back to American industry when the Japanese manufacturing excellence gained renown globally. The SPC idea also evolved and spawned several other quality improvement methods based on the SPC ideas that became ubiquitous in the manufacturing world: Six Sigma, Total Quality Control (TQC), et. al.

There are several assumptions associated with SPC that have been integrated into the way we think about complex systems, i.e., systems that are composed of many components, with each component functionally related to other components of the system.

· A process/system is more than the sum of the parts; the process consists of numerous components. The process is a system.

· The process/system can also be a sub-system of a larger and more complex system.

· The components making up the system are interconnected and interdependent, i.e., the system acts in a nonlinear manner.

· Many times, the process/system is treated as a black box because the process/system cannot be understood or modelled by just measuring the input and output of the process/system, i.e., the relationship between input and output is not scalable, or linear.

· Intermediate variables can also serve to change the trajectory of the process, i.e., these control variables can affect system performance, if we can get access to them.

But.

· Not all variables are measurable; these unmeasurable variables could possibly be critical to monitoring and understanding the process/system flow.

· Not all variables are control variables.

· Not all variables are controllable.

The abstract idea of a complex system sounds suspiciously like a sports team playing the game.

A “system” is an abstraction that is applied to the process that is being measured and monitored. In the case of volleyball statistics, the “system” can be defined as a player, or it can be defined as all the players participating in team play. This is important because of the nature of sports statistics; they can be objective termination statistics — point scoring statistics — or subjective evaluation statistics — ranking of the pass, as an example. Since the action in sports do not reside only in those statistics that we can measure, the statistics that we measure do not factor in all the impact of the intermediate actions, which also introduces variability to the system performance that cannot be accounted for objectively within the statistics that we can measure; this is problematic when coaches are trying to evaluate their players — individually or together.

There are other sources of variability, the resistance that the opponent presents to the team under assessment is also highly variable; as such, the performance statistics will also be highly variable and dependent on the opponent. Other sources of variability are: the emotional and physical states of the teams at a specific point in time for both the team that is being assessed and the opposing team, the playing environment, the officiating thresholds that is applied during the contest, the emotional and physical states of the officials at a specific point in time, the consistency of the data taking process, et. al.

All that variability is built into the statistical measurement practices, and since the practice of keeping statistics is performed in terms of averages, the salient sources of variability are smoothed out. Additionally, the rules governing the interpretation of the control chart will also take those sources of variability into account.

A control chart is the simplest, most ubiquitous, and — in my mind at least — the most promising SPC tool that can be applied to volleyball statistics. This is because the control chart does not involve specialized statistics that is unfamiliar or unintuitive to coaches; it is instead a way to look at the accrued statistics already taken by the coaches as a matter of assessing the team performance over time (see Figure 1). The control chart analysis gives the coaching staff a chance to examine team performance over a time period (the pre-season, the conference season, etc.) to assess and identify trends in the team’s performance. The performance statistics are presented visually so that the coaches are not otherwise overwhelmed with processing the data in their working memory. Coaches already examine these statistics over time, but presenting the data visually is much simpler to comprehend and gives the coaches a chance to interpret the data from a broader perspective.

The dashes on the horizontal axis represent each event for which a data point is available, a chronological progression is assumed as the numbers are incremented from left to right. In the case of volleyball, each event represents a match or even a set, although using set data can lead to confusion when analyzing the control chart, as they will show up in the interpretation of the special cause rules.

The vertical axis is the statistic associated with each event. The average is the arithmetic mean (or simply mean or average) of a list of numbers, is the sum of all the numbers divided by their count n.

To calculate the upper control limit (UCL) and lower control limit (LCL), the mean is augmented by the standard deviation of the entire series. The standard deviation is the square root of the variance of the data series, and the variance is defined simply as

Figure 1: A Control chart. https://deming.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Control-Chart-v2.png

In manufacturing, the control chart is used to monitor the performance of machines and processes. Statistics are taken of many variables that monitor the production of a process, whether they consist of a single or in a complex system made up of many machines.

If we want to use the same method to monitor a sports team, there is a tacitly accepted assumption that a team, made up of many autonomous human beings, can be treated as a system. One salient problem with using the control chart to examine the performance statistics is that human actions and reactions are more variable than machines, the behavior of the measured performances over time are also more variable in the control chart analysis. This variability is also visible in the control chart, which indicate that team performances are more susceptible to wider variations; but some of the wider variations have meaning while others are just a function of natural human behavior, it gives the coaches analyzing the control chart more leeway in interpreting the trends, as will be seen when discussing the common and special cause rules. This human proclivity to be more variable needs to be kept in mind even though the analysis tool for the control chart, by its nature, can account for some of those variabilities.

Any set of volleyball statistics can be plotted as a control chart.

Every termination statistic can be examined with the control chart. (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/stats-for-spikes-termination-scoring?utm_source=publication-search): attacking, serving, reception, blocking, digs etc.

Sometime coaches assign quality grades to the intermediate actions, such statistics as service quality, first touch quality, set quality, etc. They are fair games as well, except that the quality grades assessment must be consistent to avoid introducing more variability because of the subjectivity in grading.

There are two main groupings of the variations that are represented in the control chart: common cause and special cause. The explanation of the difference between the two can be found in the following reference. https://www.isixsigma.com/control-charts/common-cause-vs-special-cause-variation-whats-the-difference/

It is important to understand the differences between these two variations because the differences determine whether and how issues need to be adjusted with the process/system.

Common cause variation is the kind of variation that is part of a stable process. These are variations that are natural to a process/system, are quantifiable, and expected; they are predictable, ongoing, and consistent. Major changes rather than cursory adjustments must be made to change the process/system trajectory because the process/system has settled into a steady state behavior or rhythm.

In the volleyball context, the statistics measure, whether it is passing grades, or termination stats like kill percentage will vary in between the control limits, UCL and LCL. The variations seen in the statistical behavior variation with time account for the variation in the opponent resistance, the mental and physical states of the teams competing, the playing environment, the officiating thresholds that are applied, and the consistency of the data taking process.

Since common cause variations are always present, they are measured to establish a baseline for comparison. These types of variations also fit easily within the control limits of a control chart. The identifying characteristic of common cause variation on the control chart is its random pattern of variation and its adherence to the control limits. The system is termed as being in control when all the variations that appear are common cause points.

An in-control system tells the coach that their team is performing without excessive variations, the team’s performance has settled into a steady state, and the team is acting and reacting predictably to predictable challenges during competition; that is, the resistance from opponents and circumstances are within the team’s capabilities.

The downside of being in-control is that if the in-control system performance metric does not meet the expectations necessary to compete against familiar opponents: if the coaches have a predetermined threshold for the performance metric, that performance metric cannot be improved without imposing major changes to the system. For example, if the control chart is applied to first touch quality point, where a pass is rated a 3 for a pass that allows the setter to set to all hitters, a 2 for a pass that allows the setter to only set the pin hitters, a 1 for a pass that allows the setter to only set the backrow hitter or if the hitter can only freeball or down ball to the opponent, and a 0 for a pass that is an error. The heuristic that is usually applied is to correlate an average passing quality metric of 2.4 with being successful; but, if the first touch quality point for the in-control team is 1.5, significant changes must happen to the serve receive system to improve that number; the changes can range from changing formations, changing primary passers, changing serve receive patterns, etc. The key lesson for the in-control system is that nothing will change if they just keep doing what they are doing.

https://www.spcforexcel.com/knowledge/control-chart-basics/control-chart-rules-interpretation#control-chart-review

Special cause variations are unexpected variations that significantly affect a process/system. It is also known as “assignable cause” because the special cause that manifests itself in the control chart can be assigned to specific reasons. These variations are unusual, are not readily explainable, are not previously known, nor can they be anticipated. They are the result of a specific change that has occurred in the system, which results in the process/system being out of statistical control. These specific changes can take the form of changes in the challenges posed by the opponent and changes within the process/changes. The difference is important, but the result is the same since the teams can only control what they can control and not control what they cannot control: the process/system must adapt to the changes in the resistance that the opponents present or adapt to changes that had crept into their own process/system.

Special cause variations are due to a specific defect in the process/system that MAY be identifiable and reparable. Referring to the first ball passing example, a special cause analysis can be attributed to a team’s inability to pass short serves, or deal with float serves.

Contrary to the common cause variations, special cause variations on a control chart are identifiable by their non-random patterns and out-of-control points.

There are eight specific patterns on the control chart which can be called special causes.

Zone A is defined as the zone between

and

, or between

and

.

Zone B is defined as the zone between

and

or between

and

Zone C is defined as the zone between

and

Rule 1: Beyond limits. One or more points beyond the control limits

Rule 2: Zone A. 2 out of 3 consecutive points in Zone A or beyond

Rule 3: Zone B. 4 out of 5 consecutive points in Zone B or beyond

Rule 4: Zone C. 7 or more consecutive points on one side of the average (in Zone C or beyond).

Rules 1 (points beyond the control limits) and 2 (zone A test) represent sudden, large shifts from the average. These are often fleeting – a one-time occurrence of a special cause – like if a team of ten-year-olds played the national team for Rule 1 and if that same ten-year-old team played a series of matches with the national team for Rule 2. Note that Rule 2 specifies 2 out of 3 consecutive points in Zone A, meaning the variations are close to the control limits, meaning that 2 of the 3 points recorded are triple that of the standard deviation σ of the process/system measured steady state capability.

Figure 2 Rules 1-4 for special causes. https://www.spcforexcel.com/files/images/control-charts-rules-pics/rules-1-4.png

Rules 3 (4 out of 5 consecutive points in Zone B) and 4 (7 or more consecutive points are in Zone C) represent smaller shifts that are sustained over time. The key is that the shifts are maintained over time — at least over a longer period than Rules 1 and 2, that is, having more consecutive points residing in the narrower neighborhoods of interest. Given that human actions in sports are much more variable than automated machines that the control chart is intended to monitor, Rules 3 and 4 may be ignored unless the coach has specific reasons for suspecting that these small variations are appearing. The first consideration is to examine the scale of the standard deviation, if the σ is a small percentage of the mean, this could indicate that the system is unresponsive and stagnating. The downside of that is that the process/system may not be capable of responding to extraordinary challenges from the opponent, but some coaches prefer that their process/system is more predictable and less prone to variation.

It is a part of a coach’s human nature to want the system (the team) to behave deterministically or minimize surprises. Coaches will often take action to minimize the variations — reducing the σ — deeming all variations detrimental. This is a sign that the coach grossly misunderstands statistics because randomness and variation are a part of the natural order, especially when the system consists of humans interacting in real time. Randomness and variation are not only to be expected but are necessary for a dynamic and responsive process/system, especially in sports.

Rules 1, 2: Large shifts from the average.

Rules 3, 4: Small shifts from the average.

Figure 3 Rules 5 and 6.https://www.spcforexcel.com/files/images/control-charts-rules-pics/rules-5-6.png

Rule 5: Trend. 7 consecutive points trending up or trending down.

Rule 6: Mixture. 8 consecutive points with no points in Zone C.

Figure 3 shows Rules 5 and 6. Rule 5 (7 consecutive points trending up or trending down) represents a process/system that is adjusting or changing. Trends can indicate that the team/system in the process of integrating new skills or techniques while competing; players learning new things while performing in matches will always struggle, especially early in the learning process. It is important and insightful to monitor the trending to see if the trend continues beyond the seven consecutive points and whether a reversal of the trend occurs, indicating that the team/system have learned and adequately integrated the changes into their knowledge base: they have switched from thinking and learning mode to playing mode, to the exclusion of overthinking.

Rule 6 (mixture, 8 consecutive points bouncing above and below Zone C) occurs when there is more than one system present. For example, if the coach is playing different lineups but is keeping the statistics in a single control chart. This practice presumes that both lineups are performing at the same average while one lineup is operating at a different average than the other lineup. The giveaway is the alternation of the data in Zone B

without having any data in Zone C

Figure 4 Rules 7 and 8. https://www.spcforexcel.com/files/images/control-charts-rules-pics/rules-7-8.png

Rule 7:nStratification. 15 consecutive points in Zone C.

Rule 8: Over-Control. 14 consecutive points alternating up and down.

Figure 4 shows rules 7 and 8. Rule 7 (stratification), which also occurs when the statistics of multiple lineups are combined, the calculated average for different lineups is grouped into one, which causes the plot to vary in this way. This can lead to the data “hugging” the average — all the points in zone C with no points beyond zone C. Rule 8 (over-control) is often due to over adjustment. This is often called “tampering” with the system/process. Adjusting a lineup or changing the way the team is playing while it is in statistical control actually increases the process/system variation, that is the price of making changes, which we are all willing to do if the intent is to improve team performance, increasing win and decreasing losses. But, if a coach is manipulating the team/process solely to meet performance metric goals, they are violating Goodhart’s Law, which I have discussed before. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/07/stats-for-spikes-goodharts-law-and.html) Briefly, Goodhart’s Law is: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” It manifests itself in the saw-tooth pattern from Rule 8.

While it may seem common sense to use specific metric values as target, it focuses attention on meeting the target of a single dimension of a multidimensional task. The reason for monitoring the single dimensional metric is to assess that part of a vast complex process/system performance; by focusing on a single dimension and making it the goal is losing sight of the forest because of one tree. In mathematical terms, local optimizations (isolated view of a single part or action) are the priority over global optimization (broad view of the combined process/system).

Given the length of the volleyball season, it may be a long time before the trends begin to make itself visible. One practice to implement is to use initial practice stats or scrimmage stats to get the statistical timeline started. The problem is that practices and scrimmages are different from match play, but using these statistics is akin to priming the pump, so to speak. Coaches can choose to keep those statistics in the seasonal timeline as the season evolves, or they can choose to retire those startup statistics as they get more match statistics.

The two key statistics used for the control chart: the mean and standard deviation will also vary as the season evolves. It is useful to track their variations during the season to assess how the team performance in those statistical categories is evolving. There may be times when there are significant breakpoints in the mean and standard deviations which mark changes in the way the process/system has changed in their performance.

The control chart is a relatively simple tool to use, any spreadsheet program can be used to handle the plotting and calculation tasks, many software has built in statistical functions that will plot the control chart with UCL and LCL. It is a tool that examines team performance in specific categories as the season progresses, the insight that the control chart offers is dependent on the trends illustrated in the charts.

As with everything in life, the interpretation of the control chart rules is dependent on the interpreter. As I had stated earlier, this is a tool intended to monitor machines and automated processes, which are not as variable as humans, particularly humans that are working together as a team; it is therefore important to allow greater variations, σ, with the process/system statistics and with the interpretations of the special cause rules because it is very easy to become overly alarmed by the control chart and try to control what does not need to be adjusted. On the other hand, the control chart does illustrate the kind and amplitude of variations that exists in a process/system. It is up to the coaches by using their experiences and knowledge to decide whether they should intervene in a meaningful way. The advantage of the control chart is that it gives the coach a tool to either reinforce or refute their coaching instincts over a greater range of performances as marked by time, which gives the coach a picture of how the team is developing.

I hope this is useful.

Perspicacity (perspicacious): of acute mental vision or discernment : keen

The official definition is short and ambiguous because the concept of perspicacity is also ambiguous. The acuity of someone’s vision and discernment is impossible to measure, as is the idea of keenness.

I propose my own definition of perspicacity that is more specific and dependent on the context of what happens cognitively during playing volleyball.

Perspicacity is:

· Acuity in all the senses, not just one. The learner needs to develop all their senses and use them to gather as much information from as many sensory inputs as possible.

· Adroitness in processing sensory information and connecting the results to related neuronal patterns stored in long-term memory.

· Quickness in recalling the neuronal patterns from the working memory to the working memory for executing the motor commands if the situation is already known and resident in long-term memory.

· Flexibility in adapting the existing neuronal patterns to the new and unfamiliar situation and creating new neuronal patterns for execution.

· Precise execution.

· Autonomous and rapid self-adjustment based on sensory feedback from the results.

Perspicacity is important for the players because it enables them to play uninhibitedly because they have attained a level of understanding and knowledge that frees them from doubt and fear. The steps listed above are also a challenge to coaches because they are steps in the learning processes that cannot be measured. Most measurable volleyball statistics are based on the results of an action: kills, first-touch quality, errors. The inception of a point is observed and the results of the player’s actions after the point is over are also measured; but there is no way of measuring all the cognitive steps that go on in the player’s minds between the inception and results. It is what is between those two points which is critical to understanding the reason that the player did what they did. We cannot gain insight into whether the players understood what the coach is teaching, gauge whether they understood the internal logic of the game, observe whether they are using all the sensory inputs that are available to them, know whether they are able to integrate and connect the sensory information they receive to a viable piece of experience, and understand whether they had executed reasonably in response to the situation.

Two volleyball scenarios in particular made me think of the connection between the difficulty in preparing the players for those scenarios with perspicacity in players: communications in serve receive and reading the opponent to defend.

First scenario, communications in serve receive.

The familiar refrain of: “TALK!” is incessant in volleyball gyms. The admonition becomes particularly urgent if the team is not receiving well, it is as if the urgency of repeating the “TALK!” mantra has some kind of magical powers that will resolve the problems on the court. What the mantra focuses on is singular sensory input: verbal communications, while ignoring all other sensory inputs. By placing the focus on verbal communications, it also pulls attention away from all the other dimensionalities that are at work at the same time. Singular focus also ignores the internal process inherent in how decisions are made, which are unmeasurable and unobservable by anyone except for the players.

There has been extensive debate and arguments by many coaches on whether talking as the panacea for bad serve receive, ignoring the fact that higher levels of players don’t depend on: “TALK!” much, or at all. There are many problems with the mantra.

· It is just one sensory input.

· The verbal cue is also single dimensional since the verbal cues are limited to: mine, yours, long, short, etc. One dimensions out of many.

· Because of its single dimensionality, the verbal cue also forces the player to focus on the single piece of information, thus ignoring or de-emphasizing the other pieces of information that they have at their disposal.

What other pieces of information? Mostly visual cues, they tend to have more information necessary for the players than the verbal cues.

· Cues, visual and otherwise, from:

o The server

o The serve trajectory and speed.

o Teammates and their movements to either take the ball or not.

o The player’s court position in relation to their teammates.

o The setter’s speed and route to the net.

· Knowledge and game understanding accrued through experience pertaining to situations similar to the present situation as determined by the sensory cues.

· Knowledge and understanding of teammates first reaction in similar situations and how to anticipate their reactions.

Ideally the team strives to act, react, and execute as one, but especially in serve receive because it is the first touch to start the sequence of attacking. All the players on the court need to synchronize with one another, that takes perspicacity as I had defined above.

The second scenario is “reading.” I had outlined what I believe to be the cognitive sequencing that defines “reading” in the following article. (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/volleyball-coaching-life-on-the-nature ). Here is the pertinent section on “reading.”

I think of the “read” as an automatic and subconscious action taken in response to physical cues the player observes and gathers from the opponent, these cues are “tells” which gives away the opposing player’s intentions which should trigger the player’s ability to predict and anticipate the opponent’s next move. Many players and coaches associate the “read” to a singular neural action; whereas there is complex sequence of sub-processes that our nervous system undertakes to complete the “read,” these sub-processes are all parts of the overall decision-making that are embodied in the phrase ‘reading.” People lump these sub-processes together for the convenience and simplicity of being able to reference a single concept when referring to “reading,” lumping all the sub-processes together into one label also helps us ease the cognitive load on our working memory. Unfortunately, this simplification ignores the salient connections between the sub-processes that need to be made which leads to the cumulative process that is the “read.”

In my rudimentary understanding and interpretation of the cognitive processes, this is my crude break down of “reading” into the desired sequence of sub-processes:

1. Recognizing that a playing motion sequence — the “tell” — demonstrated by the opponent as meaningful.

2. Associating the meaningful motion sequence with known situational results from observations and experiences in our long-term memory.

3. Connecting the known and remembered situational results through neuronal connections with existing neuron basis sets of either sequences of motions to counter the situational result if we are defending; or sequences of motions to aid the situational result to succeed if we are attacking.

4. Recalling and executing the required measures from our long-term memory through more neuronal connections to activate and enact the desired movements.

5. Physically performing the required movements.

When people simplify the “read” to a singular all-encompassing concept, they usually only recognize sub-processes 1 and 2 in the break down into sub-processes as being necessary to successfully complete the “read” because sub-processes 3-5 to be automatic and natural because those neuronal connections are tacitly assumed to already exist. Sub-process 3 is the critical connection for a successful “read, it is rarely learned or taught for many reasons: the player lack the experience to make the connection on their own, while they also assume that sub-processes 3, 4, and 5 are automatic after sub-processes 1 and 2, as they are taught by their coaches. Teaching the “read” is difficult because all the sub-processes on my crude list are at the subconscious neuronal level and not on a conscious thinking level. They need to be on the subconscious level because if the players were thinking their way through the process they would never succeed since their execution be too slow. Examined in another way, the “read” is best when it is an anticipatory and predictive cognitive process rather than just a conscious reactive process. The line between anticipatory and reactive is a very thin one. The trick is to create an environment where the players can train their neurons to cross that threshold between reacting and anticipating on their own when making athletic decisions.

This is quite similar to the serve receive scenario, except that the reaction time for the defender is much shorter than that for the serve receiver because the attack comes from net and the serve comes from the endline. The cognitive process is identical.

Both scenarios require the player to the same process: synthesize the sensory information, recall and connect the circumstances of the situation with knowledge and experience existing in long term memory, translate the connection with action, and execute the action. These steps require rapidly firing synapses that are unencumbered by thinking, indeed even reacting to the moment of truth is too slow. What is required is anticipating the action before the moment of truth. This is where the perspicacity of the players is so important. They need to be able to anticipate and execute, but not just execute, but execute accurately and precisely. This is a high level of expectation.

The questions are:

· Can we teach players to be perspicacious?

· Is perspicacity a matter of nature (natural talent) or nurture (developed and taught)?

· If it is a matter of nurture, how do we teach this?

I cannot speak to nature and nurture arguments, but I am an optimist when it comes to learning, so I start with the assumption that perspicacity can be taught.

There are many facets for effective learning and there are numerous resources, I will list them at the end of the article for your reference. My discussions here are focused on how I believe perspicacity can be taught.

The framework that is at the center of the discussion is the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), its main architect is John Sweller, but my reference for CLT is a booklet from Oliver Lovell titled Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory in Action. (Lovell, 2020) It is at the center of many teaching and learning methods that I have read, it is the center of my own pedagogy. Here is my recitation of the initial concepts of CLT as delineated by Lovell. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/02/learning-and-teaching-cognitive-load.html)

A key idea that needs to be kept in mind is the expert reversal effect. It is the basis of Guadagnoli and Lee’s paper on optimal challenge point (Guadagnoli, 2004). In short, the idea is that experts should learn new skills quickly because they have the most knowledge in their long-term memory, they have the most experience to call upon to improvise solutions, and they have the most practice in solving difficult problems, whereas the novices don’t have any of the three advantages. As expected, novices will have the most difficulty in learning new skills such as perspicacity, the optimal challenge points for novices are very different from the optimal challenge points for experts.

It is a challenge to guide players to learn to be perspicacious because the coach needs to be perspicacious to teach perspicacity. They need to respond dynamically to the players, especially novice players, as the players work through the process of adaptation and improvisation autodidactically while having little or no prior knowledge or experience, which can only happen through the coach’s guidance.

Here are some ideas, although not specific to teaching perspicacity, the approach allows space and time for the players to develop perspicacity on their own, which is the most expedient way, and probably the only way.

· Coaches need to be open to all dimensions of sensory information from the players, much beyond just verbal communications and visual observations.

· Coaches need to be emotionally intelligent to sense player resistance and acceptance.

· Coaches need to develop clear and precise non-verbal communication skills.

· In communicating verbally, do not just ask: “did you see X?” Ask: “what did you see?” and then ask: “did you see X?” If they do not, follow up with questions that broaden and narrow the range of vision to understand where their visual range is when they watch.

· Instead of asking: “what did you do?” or “why did you do?” , ask: “what could have been done differently?”

· Guide rather than tell, although there will be times to tell, but mostly lead the players through the thinking process by asking questions and getting them to understand your process of analysis and synthesis.

· Keeping in mind that there is expert reversal effect, there needs to be desirable difficulty built into the guiding. There is where the artistry resides — pushing the players to expand their thought process to solve difficult situations but not so difficult as to frustrate them and cause them to give up.

· Inserting desirable difficulties creates opportunities for the players to be creative and original, something that they remember much more vividly because they were the ones who struggled with the situation.

· Present visual and verbal information together whenever possible; the human brain is adept at processing visual and verbal information in parallel; indeed, presenting them together means that the visual and verbal buttresses each other so that the memory will recall the missing information when reminded by the presence of the other.

· Teachers/coaches have a tendency to present a topic just once and assume that the knowledge is naturally ingrained in the student/players’ long-term memory from a single lesson. It is better to keep the lesson short but also consistently return to the lesson over time and spacing the visits out so that they have opportunities to forget and retrieve the solutions.

· Progressively increases the desirable difficulty of the situation each time.

· Plan for the players to teach each other their own solutions to the situational cases so that they can understand different perspectives, encourage them to analyze each other’s ideas. This broadens their understanding and teaches them to think critically, which is also a hallmark of perspicacity.

Even though the procedure outlined is general and reflects much of my personal pedagogy, it can be readily applied to guiding the players toward developing perspicacity on their own.

At least I hope so.

References

Ericsson, A. (2020). Anders Ericsson: Dismantling the 10,000 Hour Rule. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from The Good Life Project: https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/anders-ericsson/

Guadagnoli, M. a. (2004, June). Challenge Point: a Framework for Conceptualizing the Effects of Various Practice Conditions in Motor Learning. Journal of Motor Behavior, pp. 212-224.

Lovell, O. (2020). Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory in Action. Melton: John Catt Educational Ltd.

Martin, H. R. (2024). How Do We Learn: A Scientific Approach to Learning and Teaching (Evidence Based Education). Hoboken NJ: Jossy-Bass A Wiley Brand.

In Abstractions and Generalizations I: Background and Thinking (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/abstractions-and-generalizations), I explained why I wanted to research the human abilities to abstract and generalize: I wanted to take advantage of this natural human habit to abstract and generalize as a tool to help us make better decisions. We humans always subconsciously and automatically abstract common details from our perceptions, experiences, and existing knowledge to create narrative that we can understand. Indeed, in Alan Watts’ tome on Zen Buddhism The Way of Zen, (Watts, 1957), he describes abstraction as: “…a necessity for communication, which enables us to represent our experiences with simple and ready-made “grasps” of the mind.”

This habit is how we can aggregate experiences and knowledge to convert them into useful heuristics to apply when we make decisions. My intention is to explore how to better use our abstraction and generalization habits to make better decisions, even though the extemporaneous factor is lost.

Our abstraction and generalization habit, however, is performed with the subconscious System 1, as explained by Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman, 2013), as such, our proclivity is to over abstract and overgeneralize because the subconscious System 1 responds instantaneously, subconsciously, and without constraint because the conscious System 2 is not actively engaged to guide our abstraction and generalization. As a result, the unconstrained abstraction and generalization can vary erratically and come to erroneous conclusions.

Ironically, this subconscious habit of ignoring the facts and constraints while abstracting and generalizing is exactly what many believe inspires our creativity and ingenuity; the lack of constraints from System 2 liberates our creative urges from being overly risk-averse, which permits us to take greater risks and think more broadly when abstracting and generalizing, which injects serendipity into our thoughts. The downside of this cognitive emancipation is that many of the original and creative ideas that we generate are often infeasible, unrealistic, and not applicable. These ideas are mixed with feasible, realistic, and applicable solutions in a large mishmash of plausible solutions. To make them useful to our purposes, these solutions need to be vetted deliberately by consciously engaging System 2 to bring the solutions back to reality. We end up spending copious amounts of time sifting through the large amount of generated solutions to uncover the feasible solutions. The crux of the argument for using the constrained abstraction and generalization approach is to generate a smaller number of applicable solutions, to obtain pragmatic, less uncertain, lower reward, and lower risk results that could be applicable to the question and meets the stated purpose and contexts.

We have the luxury to choose to operate between the two extremes by iterating and selectively adjusting the levels of abstraction and generalization as guided by the potential solutions’ ability to meet the purpose. The constrained approach is reversing the thought process from the unconstrained approach; whereas the unconstrained approach generates a large number of imaginative solutions which need to be sorted; the constrained approach hews closer to the purpose and context and generates less, but more feasible, solutions.

Having a large number of plausible solutions in the solution space could be overwhelming as they all need to be vetted and filtered, whereas having a much smaller solution space allows us to better consider the nuances of the solutions and it is easier to loosen the constraints, which causes the bottleneck. Any solution that results from the tightly constrained approach are not the only possible solutions; if the tightly constrained approach results in no solutions because the constraints are too limiting, the constraints can be adjusted — loosened and tightened — to tune the solutions, the stated purposes can also be revisited to guide the exploration of possible solutions.

Another human factor that affects the fidelity of the solutions is outlined in Chapter 9 of Kahneman’s book (Kahneman, 2013), titled Answering an Easier Question, Kahneman describes our unconscious tendency to answer the questions that are easier to answer rather than the question that we set out to answer. The tendency is to accept solutions that results from unconstrained abstraction and generalization exercise which answers the easier question rather than the original desired question. The amount of unknown variables that accompanies the results from unconstrained abstraction and generalization — depending on the circumstances — could be complicating and will distract from the specified purpose and answer the easier questions just so we can make the decision making easier.

The two books by the mathematician Eugenia Cheng, (Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics , 2016) and (Cheng, The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of Math, Category Theory, and Life, 2022), qualitatively outlined the purpose and process of mathematics, and explained the methodology employed by mathematicians to create structures and procedures which allows them to be creative while also being strictly constrained so that the results are logical. Abstraction and generalization are two of the tools wielded by theoretical mathematicians to advance a field that exists primarily in the mind. The veracity of the mathematician’s conjectures must be verified by their fellow mathematicians through using rigorous proofs. The proofs are debated over by other mathematicians while using the same logic that the proposer used in their proofs, but the standard of proof is never debated. In other words, there is no such thing as close-enough, it is either proven, proven while being subjected to more constraints and modifications, or disproven by consensus. This kind of certainty in providing proof is welcome change from the wildly variable generalization humans use daily.

Another way to look at abstractions in mathematics is to see each abstraction as a separate facet of reality, each abstraction can be thought of as examining the specific reality from different points of view, a different context. The mathematician can accrue as many context-dependent perspectives on the specific real-life situation as possible to help the mathematicians gain understanding of the many perspectives on reality; indeed, reality can be interpreted and imagined as the summation of all the different facets. This point of view is akin to the parable of the eight blind men trying to describe an elephant as they are each examining just a single part of the elephant.

The direct question is: why choose abstraction and generalization practices of mathematics as the model for everyday decision making? Indeed, it seems to be an overkill to model decision making on something so specific as mathematics. There are several good reasons. This is probably a case of over constraining, but the good news about over constraining is that we are always at liberty to loosen the constraints.

As Cheng states: mathematics is an abstraction of real life; it is an idealization of the reality that we must live in; which is why reality is the inception point of the illustration. Indeed, life ( the reality) is quite different from mathematics (the idealization), mainly because:

· Life is real, mathematics is not real.

o Mathematics is the idealization of what is real, what we see, what we know, and what we perceive.

o Q: What can we do with our non-mathematical reality and idealize what is real, what we see, what we know, and what we perceive?

· Life is hard, mathematics is easy.

o This is because mathematics strictly follows logic, whereas life does not. Life is full of intuition, interpretation, leaps of faith, and uncertainties.

o Q: How can we replace mathematical logic with something that is not on the same level as mathematical logic, but serviceable?

· Life is not rational. Mathematics is always rational by definition.

o If mathematics turns out to be not rational, then it is not mathematics.

o Q: This is where our non-mathematical reality falls far short of mathematics, what if we can use our pre-determined purpose to rationalize and define our reduced and understandable perceptions of reality.

The natural question then is why do I want to try using mathematical abstraction and generalization as a model to help us alleviate our difficulties with reality? What can we accomplish with applying mathematical abstraction and generalization? What gap could be bridged?

· What makes reality difficult to understand is that we are human and do not deal well with the complexity of reality with our limited working memory. Our intuitions are not strong enough to adequately deal with realities.

o Mathematics helps humans construct and understand arguments that are too difficult for our intuition by reducing them and pruning away unnecessary details.

o Q: Can we use mathematical abstraction and generalization to understand arguments that are too difficult for our intuition by reducing them via applying a purpose, pruning away unnecessary details, and constructing a simpler and equivalent question?

· Humans struggle with ambiguity, and the realities of life are full of ambiguities.

o Mathematics is applied to eliminate ambiguities.

o Q: Can we use mathematical abstraction and generalization thinking in conjunction with specifically stated purposes to eliminate ambiguities?

· Reality is made up of many dimensions and details and humans don’t have the wherewithal to deal with all the dimensions and details in all their nuances.

o Mathematics cuts corners, answers questions by grouping similar questions together by showing that they are, in essence, the same questions.

o Q: Can we use mathematical abstraction and generalization thinking with specifically stated purposes to cut unnecessary corners, answers questions by grouping similar questions together by showing that they are, in essence, the same questions?

· Humans lose track of all the details when delving into granularities as our focus becomes narrow and we concentrate on the small picture.

o Mathematic abstractions take broad views, turning minute details into broad concepts.

o Q: Can we use mathematical abstraction and generalization thinking coupled with specifically stated purposes to take broader views, to turn minute details into broad concepts?

What follows is my interpretation of the mathematical abstraction and generalization process, as I gleaned the ideas from my readings of Cheng’s books. I take full responsibility for the errors in interpretation.

The figure below is how I envisioned the flow diagram of an application of the rigors of mathematical abstraction and generalization to general decision making. It is obviously not definitive; it is just a starting point for discussions.

Starting from the left side of the block diagram, we start with reality. It is complex, hard to understand, and irrational. The next box over is a collection of the reality as we perceive it. Our perceptions are dependent on context, which means that they represent different facets of reality. The word context designates specific factors to be accounted for in the snapshot of reality that is used for abstraction as well as for generalization.

Context is the circumstances of the situation being abstracted: such factors as the initial and boundary conditions constraining the situation, the time scales and time lags that are inherent in the situation, the central elements involved in the situation, and the total number of elements.

The next set of boxes : general purpose, abstraction, and the removal of details and ambiguities boxes make up the abstraction stage. The combined intent of all three is to:

· Strip away irrelevant details.

· Help us make connections between different contexts.

o Connections allow us to collect all the facets of the context examined and find common points.

· Helps us use the connections and draw analogies because we are cognitively predisposed to them.

o Analogies being the connections between the known and unknown.

o Analogies allow us to explore and create new and more abstract concepts.

o Analogies make us more comfortable with new abstract concepts because the new concepts are rooted in being analogous to known experiences and knowledge that we trust.

o Analogies also need to be specific and in detail.

The driving force for abstraction and generalization in mathematics is the purpose, as it will be for this exercise in analogizing the intended abstraction and generalization methodology to the mathematical abstraction and generalization methodology . The purpose defines the boundaries, whether the results are acceptable, whether the exercise should be reiterated with different constraints, and when the abstraction and generation should be stopped because the purpose has been met.

The purpose shows up in two boxes above both the abstraction and generalization boxes, it is the focal point of the argument supporting the process; the purpose is the key to creating the supporting structures and guard rails to prevent the process from unintentionally veering away unchecked because of feature creep or as our attention wanders. The definition of the purpose is critical for the abstraction stage; the purpose needs to be concisely and precisely defined and detailed to provide strict guardrails to prevent the tendency to depend strictly on intuition.

A note of caution, human intuitions are based on unverified and unverifiable beliefs, depending on just the intuition for abstraction can result in results that misleads. Although oftentimes we are forced to use intuition in case there is not enough information nor enough time to collect the information.

The general purpose is applied to the abstraction stage to keep the process from evolving into something that is not intended. The second purpose guides and focuses on the generalization stage so that the generalization result is channeled towards specific and detailed purposes.

A reminder that the methods and framework used to guide the abstractions are important, more important than the reality that we are abstracting from, the methods and frameworks should be flexible enough to pare away the unnecessary details while still retaining the components of reality that are necessary to meet the stated purpose. The bottom box in the abstraction stage are the tools that allow experimentation to happen; they are the details of reality that we choose to remove or retain so that the abstraction meets the purpose.

It is also important to experiment with the level of abstractions, playing with the contexts and the details, so that the right level of abstraction is selected to meet the purpose. This could be a highly iterative process, iterating between the abstraction and the Concept stage in the middle of the diagram.

Each experiment with the level of abstraction is:

· Not about right or wrong.

· Not about the absolute truth.

· About the chosen contexts and what makes them fit into the chosen purpose.\

· Results that are more abstract do not mean that they are less relevant, or even more difficult.

· The abstraction results need to fit the purpose.

In the end, the check list for the abstraction result must:

· Make sure the abstraction works as intended.

· Refine the abstractions so that they work as intended.

· Develop new theories from the abstractions.

The two boxes in the middle of the diagram are labeled “Concept” and “Logic.” These two boxes comprise the checking portion for the process. The concept stage is the result from the abstraction stage, after having been checked against the purpose and been stripped of the unnecessary details. The “clean” concept is then tested by the “Logic,” this is where it gets ambiguous and amorphous.

In mathematics, “Logic” is the ultimate measure of the concept; mathematical logic is applied to the concept to determine whether the concept can be proven true or false. This is how mathematicians decide whether the concept is correct according to mathematical logic, if it is, the concept is in the generalization stage, and can be generalized into a simple, easy to understand, and rational simplification of the complex, hard to understand, and irrational reality.

In mathematics, logic and abstraction are related:

· Logic builds rigorous arguments.

· Abstraction makes sure that the logic can be rigorous.

· Abstraction → Rigor → Logic → Math

There is nothing in the non-mathematical realms that serves the same role as “logic” in mathematics. There is nothing that can absolutely prove the truth of any hypothetical as “logic” does in mathematics. In the sciences, the hypotheses are checked and proven by empirical and experimental means; in engineering, the conjectures are checked by experimenting with prototypes, or more recently, with simulations — which is still somewhat controversial; but there is nothing which absolutely verifies any new ideas conceptually without empirical evidence. In the social sciences, empiricism is also the determiner of the veracity of any hypothesis or conjecture. Copious amounts of experiments are conducted with the requisite number of test subjects and examined closely with statistical tools to determine whether the hypothesis or conjectures are true or not. In those instances, it is possible to divide the “proof” into segments to preserve those parts that are “true” and those that are “false.” This is where the iteration between “concept” and “abstraction” naturally happens, and the idea of adjusting the levels of abstraction comes into play so that the concept passes the purpose and “logic” tests.

In this instance, the abstraction stage applies induction to the contextual views of reality and generates the “concept,” as the generalization stage takes the “concept” after having been proven by “logic” and applies deduction to generate ideas; ideas that needs to be verified by empirical investigations. The question then is: what should be the “logic” that we apply to the “concept” to ensure that the post generalization ideas are valid and are provable empirically?

In the STEM world, the existing paradigm governing the sciences can serve as the “logic” as well as the established physical laws, while the choice of applying the existing paradigm as the counterpart to “logic” is solid, the existing paradigm is always subject to “paradigm shifts”, which fits structure of the scientific revolutions that Thomas S. Kuhn outlined in his exploration of the scientific process, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Kuhn, 1970). “Paradigm shifts” are the result of the adjustment or revision of paradigm to incorporate anomalies that consistently results from the empirical verification.

The existing paradigm can also be applied in the social sciences as the “logic,” but it results in more iterations and is dependent on variability of existing population studies, which makes it much more statistically dependent. It is certainly not as robust as being dependent on the physical laws, but the dependence on population studies is not a showstopper.

It became clear that the process needs to be iterative because of the choice of using existing paradigms in place of “logic”, which means that the abstraction and “concept” stages need to be iterated many times as the levels of abstractions are repeatedly adjusted to meet both the purpose and the “logic”. This is indeed how abstraction and generalization work in reality, numerous iterations are necessary as the levels of abstractions are adjusted and then attempted verification by empirical means.

Finally, the “concept,” after having been vetted by “logic” can be generalized, and the concepts can be deduced into broadly applicable ideas. The purpose of the results of generalization is to make a concept general by starting with a seed situation, modifying the situation to make it more applicable generally, creating rules that are due to the situations as imposed by the guiding and focusing purpose, and breaking rules to test the strengths and boundaries of the existing constraints and assumptions.

Some things to keep in mind while generalizing:

· The goal is to add dimensionality to ideas, not to make the generalization more real.

· Use generalization to relax conditions:

o To make the “concept” more flexible and variable, i.e., to incorporate as much of the necessary contexts as possible without veering astray.

o To not increase the coverage of the generalization.

o To turn the analogies from abstraction into real ideas

Experiments can be conducted by ignoring some outlying constraints temporarily to focus on the maximum population to see what results and then study both the central concept and the outliers together to see what results.

This proposed methodology is too pedantic and cumbersome for making instantaneous decisions, the process takes considerable amount of effort. The structure of the process needs to be tested before it can be streamlined. In other words, this idea for creating an abstraction and generalization needs to be abstracted and generalized by putting it into practice.

This is how the idea of using synthesis and analysis to test this process of abstraction and generalization came to mind. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/07/volleyball-coaching-life-synthesis-and.html

Synthesis is defined in many ways:

· the composition or combination of parts or elements to form a whole.

· the combining of often diverse conceptions into a coherent whole

Similarly, analysis is defined as:

· detailed examination of anything complex to understand its nature or to determine its essential features.

· a thorough study: separation of a whole into its component parts

The next step is to test the process based on the mathematical abstraction and generalization method in both Synthesis and Analysis mode.

I will be thinking about applications that are in milieus that are familiar.

· Evolution of electric machine development.

· Volleyball drill development.

The analysis mode is the easier of the two, it entails investigating accepted applications by identifying the parts by going backwards through the process:

· Identifying the results of generalization and identifying the purpose and “logic.”

· Identifying the features of the applications that are left after the abstraction and generalization process.

· Comparing reality as we see them through the different contexts and the applications after the abstraction and generalization.

· Identifying those details that have been abstracted away and determining whether the elimination of those details was necessary and deciding whether more or less details needed to be abstracted away.

The synthesis mode is the most challenging and the most useful application of the process. This is to generate new ideas through the process while adhering to the stated purposes and applying “logic.”

This should be challenging. Stay tuned.

References

Cheng, E. (2016). How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics . Basic Books.

Cheng, E. (2022). The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of Math, Category Theory, and Life. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking Fast and Slow. New York City: Farrar, Strau, and Giroux.

Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Watts, A. (1957). The Way of Zen. NYC: Random House.

The links to a few of my remembrances are at the end of this essay for your perusal, if you are so inclined.

As I was taking my shower this morning, I thought about Father’s Day and about my own lack of opportunity to be a father. The chances of my becoming a father at this stage of my life are slim and none. Over the years, as I have observed my friends explore and experience the evolution of their fatherhood, there is a small twinge of envy as I see second hand, their transformation from being absolutely useless to becoming so comfortable in their role that they can unapologetically spew dad jokes without thinking. Even as I miss the emotional roller coaster through the joys and pains of fatherhood, I realized as life proceeded chronologically that being a father is probably not an experience that is destined to be central to my life. Of course, what the hell do I know, I never had the opportunity to put myself out there and expose myself to the responsibilities of being a father. It is a regret in my life, but it is not an obsession.

Looking back on my life, at what I have done, at what had inspired me, and at what had motivated me; an amateur psychologist might readily surmise that I had put some of the nurturing and caring instinct that is natural in fatherhood into my teaching and coaching. It didn’t start out that way.

I started teaching laboratory classes while I was a gradual student. I looked at the situation as a natural part of doing a gradual degree, it was how I supported myself. I remembered my own experiences as a student while dealing with TAs and I was psychologically prepared to do battle with my students. In time, however, I came to enjoy my interaction with my students. Since I was close in age to them, I became more or less a big brother to them, advising them about certain classes and professors, advising them about the different tracks that they are pursuing, and advising them about the pitfalls that are awaiting them in the future. I wouldn’t say that I became friends with too many of them, but I did become friendly with them. It occurred to me that this was my destiny, to be a source of reference, a voice of reason if not a source of wisdom. I enjoyed teaching, I enjoyed knowing things and passing on my knowledge to those that came after me, and most importantly, I enjoyed watching my students succeed, hoping that I had played a part in their development. This was Why I teach.

When I decided to go into industry after my doctoral studies, that avenue for my pedagogic urges became shut to me. Which is when coaching volleyball entered my life. I wouldn’t say that it was a deliberate decision: to replace the classroom interaction with students in their twenties with dealing with pubescent girls; to replace the formal and structured environment of the classroom and interactions with career-oriented undergrads with fast paced and unstructured environment of the gym and interactions with hormone filled teenagers. It was only a replacement of convenience.

I have always said that with the beginning of every volleyball season and every initiation of a new group of players, I get the urge to reach back and contact the players from the first teams that I had coached and apologize to them for all the boneheaded decisions I had made and the communication faux pas that I had committed. Fortunately, I have been able to keep in touch with many of them so I can at least admit my faults to them. There had been more than once in those early coaching days where I was standing dumbfounded in the middle of a team huddle as some of the girls sobbed uncontrollably over what I had said and done while my female assistant is punching me saying: you can’t f***ing say that to girls! Oops.

Fortunately, I am a quick study, I was aware of the magic of Louise Penny’s wisdom even before I had read her books. The four lifelong, humbling, and magical mottos are always useful: "I don't know. I need help. I'm sorry. I was wrong.” —Still Life by Louise Penny

As time moved on, I grew as a coach, and as I grew, I learned to appreciate my players as people. I learned of their foibles, their struggles, their senses of humor — whether warped or delightful, their familial obligations and responsibilities, and their angst. There were and are angst aplenty, both real and imagined. The point is that it doesn’t matter if the angsts were imagined in my estimation, they are real to them, and I needed to learn to help them assuage and resolve them. The inclination to solve problems is something that being an engineer had inculcated in my psyche. At first it was a part of coaching: to resolve an issue so that team performance — winning or losing — can be salvaged or improved upon; but the need to help my players with their very human lives superseded the needs of winning and losing, it became an integrated part of my coaching psyche. The evolution occurred quickly because I quickly grew to like and appreciate my players for who they are: unformed, goofy, and barely fathomable people in the process of figuring out who they are, who they are not, what is right, and what is wrong. This was probably the greatest revelation to this stereotypical engineer whose life revolved around discipline and rigid structures. These teenagers softened my mien and altered my perspective on life because of who they are, which in turn allowed me to realize that I would be proud to call them my students and my friends later in life.

In today’s vernacular, I started to lean into the role of being more than a teacher or a coach. Although that is an inadequate description. I would rather say that leaning in beyond the traditional approach is exactly the role that teachers and coaches should play, we are entrusted with the psyche and the very pliable minds of these pre-adults to shape and mold as we see fit. This is where parts of my paternal instincts came to grow and burgeon.

Given the topic of the essay, I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I sought to usurp the role of the father in their lives, that I thought of myself as their father, or a father figure, or even a surrogate father. I never had to change diapers, stay up all night because they were ill, I was never a target of projectile vomiting, or any other unsavory circumstances that is de rigueur with the responsibilities of the father. I have, however, counseled my players on their own emotions both on and off court, talked them down from proverbial ledges, counseled them about their goals in volleyball and in life, listened when they needed an ear to listen, wiped away tears and snot as they sobbed, helped them deal with absentee parents, helped them deal with overbearing parents, and any myriad of things that seem inconsequential in the greater scheme of things but very consequential at that place and moment. There is joy and angst associated with doing all those things, they are by no means a major part of the all-encompassing duties of a father, but is enough for me to feel that I am useful and being able to fulfill a need for these players that I have watched grow from unsure and faltering to being confident and sure footed.

Coaches are often asked: Why Do You Coach? Especially someone like me, who on the surface, does not have skin in the game, i.e. no children of my own to coach. There are lots of reasons for doing what I did and do. It is all of what I had just described, one of the rewards is that I am in contact with many of my former players, on social media or otherwise; I enjoy receiving missives from them to keep me up on their busy lives; I enjoy being invited to their special events: graduations, engagements, marriages, and birth announcements. What makes those gestures special is that the gestures are their choices and not due to any obligations to me.

At the end of each of the seasons, I tell all my teams that it is up to them to reach out to me rather than having me reach out to them; the choice is theirs. I also tell them that they will always have me in their lives as long as they want me there, I never want to force my way into their lives because that puts the emphasis on what I want for me, rather than what they want for themselves. They must want me there.

But the most special happenstance that has developed is that those players from the early teams now have children of their own and their children are now playing volleyball. It is one of the greatest honors and has turned into a point of pride for me: to be asked to give advice about how to navigate the new club volleyball environment and what to do which is best for their children. The realization that they still trust me enough to ask for my opinions about what is best for their progeny made me grateful and once again, made me go back to try to recall what I did, right and wrong, to earn this responsibility. It is a little bit of paternal responsibility that I do not take lightly. It is reassurance that I did not screw up too badly.

There have also been instances of former players who have jumped into coaching roles with both feet. I look upon this with great pride: I did not sour them on the coaches and coaching to dissuade them from entering the role. The fact that some of them had reached out to tap into me as a resource was staggering and very satisfying.

Although there are also some bad along with the good. Those players that I felt like I have failed are never far from my mind. As with everyone with the imposter syndrome, I acutely remember those players that did not click with me or have chosen not to stay in contact with me. The sense of failure gnaws at me, and I replay those interactions to discover what went wrong and what I could have done to change the narrative and to repair the damage. This exercise is frustrating because I know that time cannot reverse itself, I cannot make the story turn out better. The only recourse is for me to rethink, learn, and hope to do better the next time it happens. The urge to reach out to them is counterbalanced by the fear of having the offer of reconciliation rejected because the damage and hurt is too great.

When I became an engineering professor, having come full circle from my gradual student days, I entered the role fully knowing that I plan to bring my coaching experience to the role. I was convinced that the lessons that I had learned from the fast paced and unstructured environment of the gym and interactions with hormone filled teenagers can be applied to the formal and structured environment of the classroom and interactions with career-oriented undergrads. There are times when I wonder which of the two groups demanded more patience and forgiveness: the teenage players or the twenty-something undergrads.

The attitude and skills that I had honed and developed with the teenage volleyball players became the attitude and skills that I apply to the undergrads. My role became more than just a disseminator of information and knowledge, my role became that of a confidant, a motivator, an advocate, a protector, and someone who shows them all the wisdom that lies behind the curtains and beyond. Just as I delight in the successes of my players after they are finished being on my team, I delight now in the successes of my students in the work environment and in pursuing other degrees, forever ready to share my experience with them as they request it. I make the same offer to my students at the end of the class: reach out and contact me, you are stuck with me in your lives, but only if you want me to be in your lives. It is your choice.

I had heard an adage when I started coaching: the only two groups of people who will never be jealous of your accomplishments are, in order, your parents and your teachers. I suppose that is the link between my paternal pride for my students and players’ accomplishments and my superficial claim to the role of a father. Which is more than enough for me.

Happy Father’s Day 2025.

Previous Father’s Day essays.

On the 23^rd anniversary of my father’s passing.

On the 20^th anniversary of my father’s passing in 2021.

https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/02/remembering-my-father-on-20th.html

Written in 2019 and reposted in 2024.

2014

https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2014/06/fathers-day-2014.html

36 years on, my memories are still vivid, my emotions are still raw, and my faith in my fellow humans are still diminished as a reflection of what people are capable of doing to other people; indeed my faith has been steadily diminished over the intervening 36 years, but it started on June 4.

I was in graduate school in Atlanta and I was following the coverage of the protests in Tiananmen Square closely, even though I grew up in Taiwan, my loyalties had always been with anyone who claims to be Chinese, whether they are from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, or anywhere the Chinese diaspora had managed to spread.

The Tiananmen protests started serendipitously on April 15 as the Chinese students, people my age, met in Tiananmen Square to eulogize the passing of Hu Yaobang, a pro-reform general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As with most spontaneous eruptions of idealism, the protests were disorganized and seemingly directionless. The Central government’s response was equally disorganized and directionless.

My attention was glued to CNN as the protests grew and gained momentum. For a month and a half, we alternated between fear of what we knew the CCP was capable of unleashing and joy as we optimistically thought that this portended to be flowering of the western style democracy in China. Even though I was many degrees of separation from those students, a certain loyalty pervaded in my consciousness. As my father had always reminded me, we are all off springs of the Yellow Emperor, so we are all one family, I felt a kinship with those protesting. As the crowds in Tiananmen swelled, my emotions and my pride swelled. It felt like a drama unfurling in front of us through the lenses of the television cameras, the more the protests were sustained the more our emotions rose to a crescendo. Nothing seemed impossible, even democracy in China, amongst a people that had been forever subservient to whomever was in power at the moment for thousands of years. My spirits soared as the authorities dawdled and as the number of protesters grew at Tiananmen.

Until the morning of June 4.

I remember that a group of Chinese graduate students were going to dim sum at Hong Kong Harbor, a Chinese student mainstay on Cheshire Bridge Road in Buckhead. As we were feeding our hunger for the tastes of home, someone came in to say that the CCP had stopped dawdling and had decisively made their move. All of a sudden we weren’t all that hungry anymore. I vaguely remember going to Emory University with many other Chinese students from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Someone had somehow gotten permission to meet in one of the theaters at Emory. We didn’t know what to do, we didn’t know what we could or should have done, all we knew was that there was this unbearable flood of emotions surfacing. We sobbed uncontrollably and we gave speeches, nonsensical and emotion laden speeches. No one was making any sense, we just knew that we had to get our frustrations, anger, and sorrow out of our minds and bodies lest those frustrations, anger, and sorrow get turned internally and killed us all from the inside out.

The frustrations, anger, and sorrow grew in those days following June 4, as the sights and sounds, at least those that were allowed to be broadcasted, came out of the hermetically sealed airwaves of China. There were unsubstantiated rumors of the total number of people killed and imprisoned by the CCP.

As with all things, the urgency and immediacy of the moment subsided as the news cycle moved on and the CCP succeeded in locking up all the news coming out about Tiananmen.

Now here we are, 36 years later. Many things have changed over nearly four decades. Even though I assiduously observe the day as a personal day of remembrance: of my personal memories and of those souls that were lost during that period immediately after the massacre. It is also a personal remembrance of the day that my innocence died. My innocent belief that there is a limit to the kind of cruelty that humans can unleash on other humans died that day. My innocent belief in my father’s admonition that because we are all off springs of the Yellow Emperor we should all be one family died that day. I wouldn’t say that my general cynicism was born that day, but it grew considerably from that day forward.

In the intervening years, I have met many Chinese students who had come to the US as scholars, but we never talked about where they were on June 4, I left well enough alone, but there had always been an unasked question about that day.

There have been interminable diagnosis and analysis of what had happened, debates had erupted amongst us about whether the CCP did the right thing in putting down the “rebellion” in the face of uncertainty, with the potential risk of undoing the central government control that had survived centuries of upheavals. It is an unending debate.

36 years later. Those student leaders who had managed to disappear from China and from the world are nearing the age of retirement or have already retired. What were once heads of jet-black hair are now full of grey. Memories are fraying at the edges. I have images in my mind’s eye of the youthful student leaders: defiant, hopeful, and completely ignorant that their fate had been tragically foretold by thousands of years of precedence, a fate characterized by unimaginable cruelty and betrayal.

I wonder what they are thinking, whether if they felt it was worth the sacrifices that they have made.

I wonder if they had ever heard of Benjamin Franklin’s quote: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." I wonder if they had seriously contemplated the meaning of that quote, I wonder if they have any regrets.

What of those nameless and faceless apparatchiks? They have also seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. Those who ordered the crackdowns. Those who ordered the others to fire. Those who pulled the trigger. Those who ran over the prone bodies of the helpless fellow off springs of the Yellow Emperor in Tiananmen. What are they feeling 36 years hence? How do they feel after having played a critical role in the continuation of the inexorable flow of Chinese history? I wonder if they actually think about it. I wonder if they have any regrets.

My own memories are fading as well, the pictures in my head from watching the news coverage 36 years ago are sepia toned, the edges are frayed by time. I know that my emotions and feeling are still the same: disappointment, nausea, betrayal, and ultimately resignation because I am Chinese, I know what to expect from the Mandarins in the Chinese culture when dealing with the rest of us peasants.

I will however, fight the good fight against the flow of time eroding my memories and my emotions. I will continue the day of remembrance on June 4 every year.

To be clear, I embrace NCAA volleyball teams recruiting and thriving off the success of foreign athletes. I think it enhances the experience for all concerned. This is neither a statement nor a recommendation, but after the recent NCAA Beach and NCAA Men’s championships, there's reason to pause and consider that they were completely dominated by foreign players in what we call our Olympic sports.

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I'm not sure a solution is warranted or even what it would or could be. But I know this: In a country in which we put so much emphasis every four years on winning medals at the Olympics, if the finals of those two sports in America are indicators, we are falling behind.

Foreign players playing on collegiate teams is nothing new, there have been foreign players playing at the collegiate level for many years and they have attained various levels of success. What stands out now is the number of players that are having very high levels of success, as Lee has pointed out.

I wholeheartedly agree with Lee, the more diversified and the broader our talent pool under the college sports umbrella, the better for our collegiate and international game; cross pollination is more than beneficial, it is critical for growth.

Since most of us have more than a rooting interest in the USA NT, having the foreign players compete in the American collegiate arena affords us a chance to watch those players who are at the last identification and development stage for their own countries as they hope to enter the senior level of competition, it gives us a chance to see the potential future Olympic competitors for their national teams.

There are many questions that come to mind when considering the topic of foreign players competing in the collegiate game, the questions revolve around two closely intertwined subjects, the direct evaluation of status of the players and the indirect judgements of the identification and development system of the countries.

Some sample questions regarding the players:

· The foreign athletes who play and compete at the highest level in the collegiate ranks had chosen to come to the USA at this point in their development phase, which speaks volumes about how the USA collegiate level of competition is viewed. The question is whether these athletes are representative of the cream of the crop for those nations? Or are there better players than these who had chosen to come to the USA? If there are better players who have not come, how much better are they in comparison? How would those players fare in the American collegiate level?

· I am speaking of the junior level athletes, there are senior level athletes playing in the professional leagues who could perhaps still play in the USA colleges but chose not to come. The question then is: how do you compare them with those who did choose to come play.

· What of the American players that are competing against these foreign players? How do they compare with those foreign players, both those that came to compete and those who stayed home to compete domestically?

· Flipping the perspective around: how would the American college players fare in the same competitive environment that those foreign players had trained in?

Which brings us to the second and parallel topic: the identification and development systems. As most people know, the USA’s college-based talent identification and development framework for players who fill the pipeline for international competition — which ultimately culminates in Olympic competition — is unique because no one else does athletic development in the Olympic sports in this way, even though there are as many development philosophies as there are nations. Mark Lebedew had written a blog describing the European way. (https://marklebedew.com/2024/09/08/north-americans-guide-to-european-sport/)

The USA’s results on the Olympic stage in recent years speaks to the efficacy of the American collegiate feeder system: or does it? While taking the results from the Olympic and VNL performance as a metric is a natural human inclination, doing so also ignores many other factors, the size of the population that each nation must draw on, the distribution of athletes that are Olympic caliber that are within that population, the national team staff training emphasis and philosophy, amongst many others .

It is common belief that a nation with a larger population has an advantage in identifying players because the larger sample space gives them a better probability at identifying more of the better athletes. While the list of countries that have been highly successful at Olympic volleyball competition shows that the large population theory may have some legitimacy, there are enough counterexamples of nations that have been successful in the Olympic competition that do not possess the population advantage.

The USA national teams have always been able to be competitive as the broad identification and development pipeline has been able to fill the Olympic training teams with stellar performers from the collegiate level. Many of in the volleyball fandom have postulated that our long-term identification and development programs are less than perfect, so much so that they have imposed the narrative that the USA national teams are just benefitting from the large population theory; based on that belief, some volleyball cognoscenti worry that someday, the advantage from the sheer number of available Olympic level talents will erode as other nation’s identification and development programs become better able to produce better players from a smaller and less talented pool of athletes: better trained, more physical, more experienced, smarter, etc. Another hypothesis is that the USA’s population of potential Olympic ready players from the collegiate ranks will inevitably saturate if we continue to just depend on the existing identification and development system as it is; fortunately, the USAV has not just sat on their hands, they have revamped and renewed the system many times; but people will always play the what-if game. In addition, the recent creation of the three domestic professional leagues has disrupted the traditional identification and development paradigm, mostly for the better, although the jury is still out on how much better. In addition, what of the impact of the as yet to be decided House settlement on the identification and development program. Since the USA’s model depends on the viability of collegiate volleyball to produce players to feed into the pipeline, the potential advantages and disadvantages of the settlement on the USA’s pipeline won’t be known for a long time, even as we await the terms of the final settlement. (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/volleyball-fan-life-house-settlement)

Yet another moving part is the boom in club volleyball, a critical part of the identification and development process, which ostensibly will feed more and better athletes to enter the collegiate pipeline.

This is how the success of the foreign players playing in the USA’s collegiate system invite theoretical comparisons, it places players who have had success in their own country’s identification and development programs in the middle of our own identification and development programs right before the selection to the senior level competition phase for the Olympics. It is an interesting exercise, even as the comparisons can seem to be somewhat apples to oranges, it is inevitable for many to be drawing conclusions with imperfect reasoning.

Some open-ended and impossible-to-answer questions that are entertained are:

· In the long term, it is obvious that many of the foreign players bring different perspectives about competition, what it means to be competitive, they will perhaps have different perspectives on strategy and tactics, playing philosophies, and have different problem-solving skills because of how they are trained. Are these differences in perspective so disparate from the American perspective as to create gaps between the players? Or are the differences unique to each player?

· If there are tangible and differences between them, what are they and should there be systematic changes in our identification and development programs to close the gap? The question is: when comparing apples and oranges in terms of long-term development, what are we missing? Or if we are missing anything?

· Those questions are not completely open ended and lacking in information as the National Governing Body for volleyball, the USAV, have always played international competition for those in the pipeline for the national team, but seeing and knowing any differences is not developing and creating changes to ameliorate. Is it due to early developmental training? Is it having different competitive experiences? Does it have anything to do with developing the intangibles: maturity, selflessness, team culture, etc.?

· How does our unique development model for developing future Olympic athletes stack up against the numerous development models around the world?

· Are there any systematic shortfalls in how we teach and develop? Are they real?

· The other end of the question is: by anticipating and addressing any perceived shortfalls, are we doing more harm than good for athletes in our long-term development pipeline?

For those of us sitting on the sidelines, it is a natural debate to fill up the discussion threads on social media. It is an unending discussion since none of us are in any position to absolutely know, or to convince anyone one else of our opinions because the topic has so much inter-relationship with so many other factors, we have so little empirical evidence, and we have no way of becoming the tzar of the USA NT development program. Those jobs are taken and are in capable hands, but that has not, nor will it stop our pondering hypotheticals, propose solutions that will never be tested, and make decisions that no one will execute; after all, that is our passion, or we would not be digging into the granularities of the impact of foreign players on the USA national team.

But we speculate because it is fun to do so, and second guess those who are being paid to do the job.

There were many things that intimidated me when I began coaching, things that I did not know: tangible things and intangible things. One thing that I had not been overly worried about and had paid scant attention to is game coaching, or game management as my friend Alexis calls it, not because I didn’t value game coaching but because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I thought I could just apply my extensive experiences playing B level the rec leagues and that would be that. I discovered soon enough that I had a deep and large hole in my game coaching experience, one that is difficult to fill as I was clueless as to what I needed to do. My rec league playing experience was good enough to fool the players at the beginner levels, but I quickly behaved as an impostor: insecure, indecisive, fearful of being exposed as a phony, and sensitive to criticism from fourteen-year-olds.

Simply put, game coaching is what a coach does during a match. Most people think it is just exhorting the team to victory, throwing in occasional pats on the back for a job well done, and lots of polite golf clapping and cheerleading, but it soon became obvious to me that it is so much more than that. A big part of the problem is that game coaching is not something that could be learned from reading books, my primary source of education; or from attending every single coaching seminar that I can afford, my secondary source of education. To draw an analogy, Alan Watts once described the practice of Zen as: “Zen is an experience that is non-verbal in character, and inaccessible to the literary and scholarly approach.” I have come to appreciate and appropriate this sentence in the context of coaching in general, but game coaching in particular.

As I gained experience coaching, I started to pay attention to unexpected situations that confronted my team and learned the hard way about game coaching as I progressed through the ages, seeing teams that can execute better and figuring out matchups and strategies to counter them on the fly, learning how and when to adjust my lineup and my team’s positioning while they are on the court. I learned from watching other coaches and then tried to apply what I learned from them to my own team; my models were mostly club and high school coaches, but I also learned from college and professional coaches.

One vital truth that was made abundantly clear was that it is impossible to account for all the elements that affects a competition, the ebb and flow of the game is dictated by the nonlinear interactions, reactions, decision making ability, and emotional impulses of all the players, coaches on both sides of the net, and finally, the massive amounts of uncertainties that are inherent with athletic competition. It became obvious to me that to expect game coaching decisions can be deterministically predicted a priori is a foolhardy exercise, there are too many complex interactions for anything deterministic to happen. Although if the opponents are known entities and have been well scouted, a pre-determined game plan is definitely desirable. It is better to have a plan based on how the match is expected to play out than without a plan; having knowledge of the opponent’s tendencies under specific conditions helps the players to anticipate the action before it happens and allows them to prepare for the opponent’s action and reaction. The problem is that not everything is predictable, no matter how much data is collected from previous matches nor how cleverly the statistics are interpreted.

The predictability of the opponents and the viability of a game plan are affected by the Expert Reversal Effect: experts are more capable, are more skilled, and are better at resolving problems than novices; as such, the predictability for high- and low-level play are different, which affects the viability of any game plan. Novice players will, inevitably, have a hard time executing while playing, which means that the speed and tactics of novices are more predictable, but the relative low level of skill and ability to execute are going to make their game play less predictable because they are not playing at the rhythm that are expected at a higher level nor can they make the plays that they intended to make. Indeed, the novice players are hard pressed to predict with any accuracy whether they will execute what they had planned.

Expert players know more, are more practiced, more skilled, stronger, faster, and have more knowledge and experience, which makes the rhythm and the game flow faster and more consistent. This is in many ways more predictable since there is a minimal amount of unintended that occurs with novices, errors which introduces breaks in the game rhythm and flow; on the other hand, the speed and tactics of experts are less predictable because they can execute at a much higher level, and the ball flight is faster and less predictable.

To make matters even more challenging, game coaching decisions are made instantaneously, all under stressful conditions, with incomplete information since the feedback from the decisions is sometimes not immediate and takes time to develop and evolve. Another challenge is that the coach is just making decisions, they are not executing the decisions, which is up to the players, which creates an imposing gap between thought and action. The question then arises: was the coach prescient enough to have trained the players to respond to their decisions, or whether the coach had prepared the players to be able to respond serendipitously and autonomously? Finally, there is the question of when should the coach assert themselves into the game flow and when should the coach trust the players to make the correct decisions and execute?

This is the challenge and reality of competition.

After some brief conversations with some very experienced professional coaches, I wondered about which of the elements: existing background knowledge, experience, decision making ability, creativity, cognitive clarity, or any other intangible factors most contribute to making a coach better prepared for becoming a game coach? That thought is what triggered this article.

But first, a caveat. This is my attempt at a thought experiment exploring the game coaching idea, the background for my exploration is my coaching experience, almost all of it on the club level, my work experience in engineering and academia, and my autodidactic education in learning and cognitive processes. Those are the guardrails under which I undertake this experiment, I understand this is rather scant, especially in the high-level coaching context, but it is what it is. You have been forewarned.

What kind of skills does a coach need to be prepared for making good game coaching decisions? A vast majority of the tools involve having considerable experiences that are stored in the coach’s long-term memory, some tools are tangible, some tools are intangible:

· Tangibles: Situational strategy and tactics for their team and for the opponent, team and opponent tendencies under those situations, and common situational solutions to common problems.

· Intangibles: Psychological makeup of the teams. How each player reacts under different circumstances, both individually and together. The coach’s cognitive makeup contributes to their making effective decisions à la minute.

Unfortunately, we don’t really know what is needed until we are in the game and the situation presents itself. When it does, the situation falls into one of four quadrants of the Eisenhower matrix of awareness and knowledge. (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/connections-antifragile-and-using)

If the situation falls into the first quadrant: I am aware of what I know, the solution is known and the coach is aware, so that the coach can impart that knowledge. If the situation falls into the second quadrant: I am not aware of what I know, then it is a tossup, it could be a gift lying in wait and surprising the coach when he/she retrieves the possible solution from their long term memory which they were not aware that they knew; but, if the memory is so buried in their memory that they are not able to retrieve what they were not aware that they know, then that memory serves no purpose at that point in time. Quadrants three and four are those experiences that I was and was not aware that I did not know, which is seemingly a lost cause. The common denominator for quadrants three and four is that the coach does not have the direct knowledge to retrieve so that their having to face the situation is the moment of truth and it should spur the coach to somehow gain that experience, but it does nothing to help the coach at that moment; it can also a moment of opportunity for the coach to connect the situation with the knowledge that they know they have and improvise a solution based on what they do know and the context of the situation. This is in some ways an exercise in far transfer while they are pressed temporally and under conditions of incomplete information. (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/volleyball-coaching-life-what-does). To improvise a new solution, the coach’s mind needs to analogize and connect different situations to create a new solution for the situation, but it is a new solution just for that coach. This challenges the coach’s willingness to experiment and take risks. On the one hand, since the coach cannot retrieve a direct solution from their memory, they have nothing to lose, so they can take a chance to make stuff up as the situation demands. ­On the other hand, if the coach is risk averse, the Einstellung effect — a mechanized state of mind for problem solving — will result. Einstellung is also defined as having a predisposition to solve problems in specific and predetermined manners even though there are better methods of solving the problem that can be improvised.

But what will it take for the coach to experiment and to improvise? It depends on the amount and the type of experiences with similar situations that reside in the long-term memory and the tangible results from their improvisation. The probability is that the coach will improvise when their previous improvisation proved to be fruitful but will not improvise when their previous improvisation was unsuccessful. This kind of conditional decision making on whether to be risk averse or not can be loosely categorized as resulting, where the results of their previous forays determine the decision maker’s mind whether they made the correct decision or not. In reality, there are times when the decision does not work out in one’s favor even when it is the right decision; and there are times when the decision works out in one’s favor even when it is the wrong decision. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2018/12/volleyball-coaching-life-resulting.html)

It is obvious that the expertise reversal effect is once again in play. This is true of coaches as it is true of players. The novice will not have the rich and full set of experiential memories in their long-term memory to retrieve to help them make decisions. They have no knowledge resources to retrieve and use as basis for exercising their imagination by using the far transfer cognitive skill and improvise. The expert coaches can and will retrieve a larger set of experiences, both consciously and subconsciously, which makes their improvised decision better.

Is it just garnering more experiences? To have coached more matches and having had the privilege of adding to their experiences by sheer numbers of matches coached?

Coaching in many more competitions will definitely fill the long-term memory with experiences and knowledge, just a repping a skill many times helps improve a player, but there are many nuances that can be obscured by a focus on the sheer numbers.

First and foremost, the best experience for game coaching must be at or above the level of the competition at which the coach is coaching at: iron sharpens iron. When I was starting in my engineering career, we spoke about the importance of experiences. A wise colleague asked whether having X number of years of experience merely means having just one year of experience X number of times, or X years of experience, there is a large difference.

To avoid the fate of having just one year of experience X number of times, the coaches must constantly challenge themselves by gaining game coaching experience with successively higher levels of competition, just as players need to struggle against better competition and better athletes, the coaches must also sharpen their game coaching skills by coaching against better coaches and against teams that play at and above their team’s level. The improvement in game coaching comes from the struggle to overcome the successively higher levels of competition.

Another element to consider is formal knowledge, in the game and in the craft of coaching. A coach can observe and absorb all the game action that unfolds in front of them, but unless they are aware of and understand what they are seeing they will not be able to learn from what they are seeing. Unless the coach understands the principles of the two-person serve-receive, they won’t understand how to attack or implement it. Unless the coach understands the purpose and intent behind combination sets, they won’t be able to teach their team how to defeat it or to execute it themselves. Unless the coach understands the weaknesses exposed in their defense by the back row attack, they won’t be able to understand how to fix the weaknesses or use it to attack an opponent. Returning to the Zen analogy, formal literary and scholarly approach does play a role in becoming a better game coach.

A more nuanced factor also plays a role, but this factor is anything but obvious: the factor is understanding causal relationships within the game since each act in sport is conditional on the previous act, this is why the statistical modelling for sports is based on Markov Chains. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/03/stats-for-spikes-markov-chains.html)

Coaches need to be able to discern the underlying logic in the game action and not be fooled by the surface results and be misled by the termination statistics. The Survivorship bias is so named because it is a data selection bias that focuses on the survivors in evaluating an event or outcome, this phenomenon is referenced in the link below. https://worldwarwings.com/the-statistics-that-kept-countless-allied-fighter-planes-in-the-sky/.

· When fighter planes return from combat, they were evaluated based on the location of bullet holes they received.

· The initial impulse was to reinforce the damaged areas with more armor.

· Additional armor meant heavier planes that are less maneuverable and less fuel-efficient.

· But the reason against additional armor on those parts where there are the most holes is that the holes precisely showed the strongest parts of the plane since the plane survived despite the damage it suffered: the holes revealed the parts that needed the least additional protection.

· The evidence of which parts need to be protected is on the missing planes, the ones that did not return. The additional armor needs to be placed on the parts of the plane that have the least amount of holes.

Game coaching is an exercise and proving ground for our cognitive system by forcing us to make decisions that are necessarily immediate and — within the realm of the competition — need to be accurate. The decisions are usually best made without using a rules-based approach — if-then decision making. It is also impossible to have experienced all the contingencies and have them in our long-term memory, so a scorched earth strategy is also incomplete.

Many have likened game coaching to making decisions in board games like chess, checkers, and Go, where one mastermind is moving pieces in reaction to the opponent; and those board games can be activities which could serve to stimulate the mind to make better decisions. This simile does not really apply because sports involve individual pieces with minds of their own and move independently even if they are well trained and disciplined.

Some had asserted that poker is a much better game with which to stimulate human decision making and simulate the conditions of complex decision making, therefore a better form of preparation to make instantaneous decisions like the situations presented in complex situations like game coaching. Thinking in Bets (Duke, 2018) and The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (Konnikova, 2020). The random drawing of cards in poker introduces uncertainties, and there is more than a single opponent involved, so it prepares the mind to respond to multiple sources of challenges. It is indeed much closer to the kind of decision making involved in game coaching: infinitesimal time to react, multiple options, multiple challenges, but even with the randomness inherently associated with poker, it does not directly simulate the kind of decision making required in game coaching.

At this juncture of this thought experiment, it is apparent that becoming prepared for game coaching is an open loop process, where there are no metrics that deterministically give the coaches an indication of whether they are prepared for all the challenges of game coaching. Indeed, this is the nature of decision making, it is difficult to quantify whether someone is prepared to game coach and at which level. One metric that many use is through counting wins and losses, but that is, once again, a form of resulting. Wins and losses, depending on the teams, are usually better indicators of the strengths and weaknesses of the players as compared to the opponent, the amount and quality of game preparation that the coach had planned, and a dose of luck. This does not mean that the coach’s game coaching prowess does not affect the number of wins and losses, it is a factor that buried indirectly, the effect of game coaching cannot be directly assessed through the wins and losses.

How does a coach assess their game coaching abilities? How do they assess what they are lacking in the game coaching department since there is no direct means of pinpointing what they are lacking and what areas they need to put forth an effort into improving? This is where most great coaches agonize over videos, statistics, and try to replay their very transient memories of each moment of each match to trouble shoot their game coaching. While videos, statistics, and memories are helpful, they are sometimes not granular enough or accurate enough to adequately assess the overall game coaching performance. Indeed, if the review was performed from the subjective perspective of the coach being assessed, there is a strong possibility that details will be neglected or explained away.

In the article link below, I made the reference to the buddy system, which I found in Annie Duke’s book, Thinking in Bets. https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/volleyball-coaching-life-assessing

Here is my interpretation of Annie Duke’s Buddy System in an outline format, the responsibility for any inaccuracy is mine only.

· Create a group.

· Each member is accountable to each other.

· Need to be accurate above all else. Accuracy over confirmation.

· Always encouraging.

· There needs to be a diversity of perspectives.

· Diversity in opinions reduces uncertainty.

· Each member must be open to the diversity of ideas.

· Each member must be courageous enough to challenge biased thinking.

· There must be a de-bias function within the group: a dissent channel and Red Teams specifically to de-bias.

· No bad luck stories are allowed.

· Being a Stoic: Member must not care about things that they have no control over.

Identifying confirmatory thought is hard, the person whose decisions are being reviewed must behave as below:

· Be the first to give profuse credits.

· Be the first to admit mistakes.

· Be the best at finding mistakes in good outcomes.

Having a buddy system seems like a good feedback path to assess game coaching decisions, much more honest and useful than just by going with wins and losses, the system will also focus on resulting and einstellung when the person being assessed fall into those traps. It is extremely difficult to assemble such a system because of egos and trust; the overabundance of ego of the person being assessed and the lack of trust the person being assessed has for the “buddies” taking part in the review.

I am confident that most coaches will go through this practice with their own staff, that this practice is not an original one. The question is whether their process is as formalized as what Annie Duke proposes for her decision making in poker, or is it more or less stringent than what she proposes?

As I review the thought experiment, I realize that even though nothing substantial has been presented, I am glad I went though this thought experiment, as spurred by the messenger conversations I had with my friends. I am much more certain of what I think about the subject of game coaching, what it entails, the elements a coach needs to accumulate in their long-term memory, the factors that need to be considered to make best decisions under trying circumstances, and the discipline and curiosity they need to exercise as they coach in games. If nothing else, it has made me more cognizant of my own thought processes while coaching during games. Self-awareness is always a good attribute.

References

Duke, A. (2018). Thinking in Bets. New York: Penguin.

Konnikova, M. (2020). The Biggest Bluff: How I learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. London: 4th Estate.