Volleyball Coaching Life-Playing Systems
A bit of riffing about playing systems as I see some coaches struggle with choosing the perfect playing system, whether they are offense, defense or serve receive.
I was mesmerized with the idea of playing systems when I started coaching, being a math and science nerd and having been working with and learning about engineering systems, I leapt on the idea of playing systems as a familiar entrée into the unknown and unfamiliar world of coaching and sports.
When I first started coaching, I only knew what I had been doing as a very poor rec league player. Basic serve-receive was what I had been playing in gradual school, the three and a half receive, a variant of the three across passing. The offense was bare bones: left-front hits third tempo high balls at the far-left antenna, middle hits second tempo balls close to the setter, and right front also hit third tempo high balls except at the far-right antenna, if they get set at all; front row players run to their assigned positions and then wait for the set which are usually too far inside and at unpredictable heights. The defense was strictly perimeter, everyone runs to a line when the set goes high outside, and any ball that goes into the donut hole in the middle of the court becomes an adventure.
As I learned more about volleyball, I dove into researching the three key volleyball playing systems: serve receive, offense, and defense. I learned about Doug Beal’s two man serve receive system, I tried that with 14 and under girls, which was an absolute disaster, many serves fell untouched, and I gained some unwanted gray hairs. I learned about the Japanese quick sets and combination offensive schemes along with the back row attack, the result was a little less disastrous, but I couldn’t get my 14-year-olds to hit quicks or attack from the back row, I was lucky to get a good front row attack. I didn’t even try the tri-middle offense because I could barely get two girls to try to play middle, let alone three. On defense, I tried the rotational system, the rover defense, the middle-middle defenses amongst many other systems, and we had just as many problems covering the 900 square feet with one system as the other, it might have helped if I had taught them how to team block first.
One problem was that I was just treading water since I was ill prepared and ignorant of the nuances of the different systems I was trying to teach. I hadn’t played a sport until I started to hack around with volleyball in college and I had never coached a sports team in my life, and it showed.
Every playing system I learned about both made sense and did not make sense, as they all had their advantages and disadvantages. Each playing system had their vociferous proponents and their equally vociferous detractors who eagerly proselytize about their favorite playing systems. Since I did not have the organically developed game sense from playing, I flip flopped between the systems, trying different systems at the peril of my team and my sanity. I am still tempted to apologize to my first teams for my incompetence.
It wasn’t until much later in my coaching experience that I realized that the advice that I had first been given by experienced coaches was true: playing systems don’t make teams successful, it’s the teams that makes playing systems successful. This is not to imply that any playing system will be the right playing system for any group of players. Selecting playing systems is critical for many reasons but there is no such thing as a universally perfect playing system for every team.
When one the team coaches from the gold medal winning USMNT from 1984 and 1988 was asked about the defensive system that was used, he described the system as: “5 players in their spots and Karch wherever he wants”. It’s not the system, it’s the team stupid.
Systems cannot be nor should be labeled simply as being “good” or “bad”, those are judgement. There are, however, right and wrong systems for the personnel on the team and the context of competition.
· The right system takes advantage of the disparate talent level and skill sets of all the players.
· The right system can be executed by all the different athletes on the team.
· The right system can neutralize the opponent’s best advantages over your team.
· The right system allows your team to best match up with the opponents, physically and philosophically.
· The right serve receive system allows the team to deliver the most settable ball to the setters.
· The right offensive system allows the team to attack more effectively against any opponent’s defense.
· The right defensive system is just the opposite: it allows the team to defend more effectively against any opponent’s offense.
If taught effectively, any team can learn to adapt to any system and if the players are convinced that the chosen system is right for the team. A system is the right system for any team if and only if the system fits the strengths of the personnel on the team, the players believe the system, and the players truly understand the nuances of the system.
The natural next question is: if any system can be the right system why not teach all the different systems of play? I have thought about doing that all the time, but as I accrued more coaching experience, I realized that it is impossible to teach players all the possible systems and expect them to execute and change systems on the fly, asking them to do that would grossly over stress their working memories — recall that each person can only keep 3-4 tasks in their working memory at any time. I have also not had the privilege of working with a level of experienced and volleyball savvy players who operate and compete at such a high level that they already have the necessary long-term memory to call upon and use.
I usually start the season by choosing a base system for serve receive, offense, and defense and then make adjustments as necessary, all the while knowing that when the system I chose proves not to be the right one for the team, I will have no compunctions about blowing it up and introducing another system that should be more right than the previous system, if it comes to that.
Using playing systems does many things for playing a sport, the first thing that it does in the coaching context is that the playing system serves as the learning scaffolding for both players and coaches. Choosing a playing system serves the purpose of developing the players and their playing ability.
In the educational context, scaffolding is emphasized in many educational literatures. Scaffolding is the structured learning activity and students support that teachers implement to facilitate student development. It can be based on dialogues between a learner and a teacher and it also serve as guardrails that are put in place to minimize the learning stress that is placed on the student’s working memory as they are learning yet unknown knowledge while not having any prior knowledge or experience with the topic.
Scaffolding also serves as an apt and accurate metaphor for what happens as the players evolve and develop to become proficient players. Using the construction example, the scaffolding is first constructed to support the building as it is built, scaffolding relieves the stresses placed on the walls as the building rises. When the building reaches the completion stage, much of the scaffolding has been removed because they are no longer needed; indeed, excessive scaffolding left on the building could impede the progress of the construction.
As with erecting a building, scaffolding should be excessively constructed to prevent unexpected problems from happening when introducing the playing system to the novices. As the players become more proficient at executing the playing system and advancing towards higher levels of expertise, the scaffolding should disappear gradually. Ideally, scaffolding should altogether disappear by the time the players approaches a very high level of mastery.
There are many ways that implementing playing systems can be considered as scaffolding for coaching:
· Introducing playing systems eases the novice learners into the sport. Teaching playing systems allow the coaches to ramp up the novice’s learning experience gradually, at a rate that is commensurate with the growth of their long-term memory while also allowing novices to learn without flooding them with too much information and overloading their working memory.
· Using playing systems allows the coaches to help the players to play the sport as intended and limit the unnecessary chaos in the game environment as the players progress through the learning process.
· Playing systems guide the player in responding to the unexpected and unpredictable events that happen continually in sports.
Playing systems are a necessity because implementing playing systems gives players and coaches — whether they are novice or expert — a uniform language to communicate about how game is expected to be played. Playing with a chosen playing system is communication shorthand for players and coaches despite differences in language, culture, and habits. It is a unifying force for the team.
This communications aspect of playing systems can also be looked upon to evolve team play and eventually the sport to levels that are beyond the existing playing systems. The evolutionary capacity of a playing system, i.e. the breadths, depths, and nuances of the playing system, can only be expanded by experimenting while playing with the known playing system. As the players are experimenting, they are also learning from their failures of executing the playing systems while also evolving the playing system beyond the predefined boundaries of the playing system.
How the players learn their playing systems has a symbiotic relationship with how the players play the games. Indeed, the content of what is taught and how that content is taught directly impacts the team’s understanding of the playing systems which then impacts how the playing systems are implemented, which impacts how the team executes the playing system.
In chapter 9 of Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking: Fast and Slow, (Kahneman, 2013), titled: Answering an Easy Question, Kahneman shows that when humans are challenged by the difficulty of answering an intended question, we subconsciously shift the goal post and seek to answer an easier question.
In a quote generally attributed to Mozart: “Music is what happens between the notes.” Similarly, there is also a quote attributed to Miles Davis: “It’s not the notes you play; but the notes you don’t play.”
Drawing an analogy with the two quotes on music with the game of volleyball, we can say: volleyball is played between touches. When people opt to answering the easy questions rather than the hard questions that need to be answered, we answer questions about the times that we are touching the ball and not answering the hard questions about what happens between touches. In the context of teaching playing systems, when we teach playing systems in terms of just the scaffoldings that we had put in place we are missing the most important parts of the playing systems, which is the internal logic and philosophical underpinning of Why: Why do we do what we do with the playing system? Why did we make the choices that we made in selecting a particular playing system? Why are these choices better for our team than the other playing systems? The answers to those questions should always be the foundation of how each team executes and implements their playing systems.
Looking to answer only the easy questions creates bad habits which will inevitably lead to programming the players to play like robots without teaching them the holistic idea behind the playing systems and the interconnections that is the magic of each of the playing systems, creating players who can only react, where what is needed is players who can and do act autonomously.
The first sign that coaches are opting for Answering the Easy Questions option is when they never deviate from teaching procedurally both in practice and in instruction.
Procedural teaching is teaching by discrete instructions, it employs if-then instructions for specific situations, focusing on assigning positions for specific circumstances, and emphasizing reaction rather than action. Note that procedural teaching is a regular part of pedagogy; it is a part of the scaffolding effort. The problem is not with the procedural thinking and teaching, it is that coaches continues to lean on the scaffolding long after the scaffolding has done its job. The scaffolding becomes a crutch for the coaches to depend on and return to when they don’t wish to analyze the context as it applies to the playing systems and try to synthesize plausible solutions while hewing to the principles and internal logic of the playing systems. Scaffoldings are by design deliberately removed when it is no longer needed, a crutch is a scaffolding that has been made permanent in all instances and for all time.
Procedural coaching is when coaches answer the easy questions by telling the players to be thinking the playing systems rather than answering the hard questions by allowing the players space to learn to act without thinking; when the coaches never challenge the orthodoxy of the playing systems rather than asking the hard questions, doing critical thinking, and risk being wrong with the players; and when the coaches give the players rote answers rather than allowing the players to explore the unknown and untested options that may or may not work.
The ultimate in procedural coaching happens when coaches pretend that they are infallible rather than admitting that they don’t know everything and learn with and from the players.
The result of only coaching procedurally is that the players and their volleyball training reflects that procedural coaching. A player who is coached by procedural coaching will instinctively limit the ways they play the game because they had never been taught otherwise, they are used to playing with limited knowledge and are lacking an ability to resolve situations on their own. This intuitive self-limitation not only will eliminate the players ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome challenges, they won’t even be aware that they are limiting themselves or that they are capable of create options. They will execute the playing systems with staccato grindingly mechanical movements rather than flowing with continuously coordinated team movements. They forever will be a split second late in playing the ball because they will always be thinking about what is next, as they have been taught as opposed to instinctively anticipating and forecasting the ball and people’s movements. They will always be waiting passively for the ball to come to them rather than running to the ball aggressively.
To only apply procedural coaching with playing systems is to completely ignore the reason to of playing systems: to develop and advance the sport, to meet the responsibility of fully developing the players as coaches are supposed to do, and to leverage the collective genius of the team to meet the challenges of competition.
This is a case where thinking as a group is always the intended result, but not to the point of exercising groupthink.
In my mind’s eye, I have always imagined an ideal team in an ideal world, with the best of the best athletes in the world who are immaculately prepared and able to perform a volleyball ballet. All six players moving as one, all picking up on all the same cues, collectively responding to the cues from the opposing team, and anticipating the movements of both the opponents and teammates. Intuitively executing the playing systems as they were intended, switching between playing systems fluidly as the situation and context changes instantaneously.
The offensive, defensive, and serve receive systems are all attacking and flowing, always played flexibly with each member of the team adjusting, but also moving as one.
Each one of the five attackers in the offensive system intuitively flowing to attack the gaps in the block and the floor defense as the setter knows exactly where the hitters are, and more importantly and where they are going.
Defensive and serve receive systems must be, by nature, more about anticipating, reacting to, and adjusting to the opposing offense; flowing to the anticipated points of attack, improvising when there is an unexpected change in ball flight to cover the unintended gap left in the defense and serve receive systems, and ultimately to somehow overcome the unanticipated and the unknown.
I am not delusional enough to believe that I will ever witness such a team or be lucky enough coach such a team, I am nowhere near that level of a coach, but a guy can dream about it and most importantly, make that imaginary team a model to aim for as I coach my novices. It does help to dream.
References
Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking Fast and Slow. NYC: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.