Volleyball Coaching Life-Private Lessons

Some thoughts about privte volleyball lessons.

I had made the choice to not take a club team the last few seasons because I had taken on the role of primary care giver for my mother and I needed to stay close to home. I do miss coaching a team, the challenge of organizing and working with a group of athletes and molding them into teams is my kind of challenge, regardless of the talent level of the athletes; it is the intent and passion of the athletes that matter.

I have worked with teams within our club, working on techniques and isolating on skills when the team coaches don’t have time to devote to the individual needs within their practice time, time spent improving their team play. It was especially fun working with the 18’s because I had the opportunity to introduce playsets and combination plays because they had not learned those plays in all their years playing the game. Their enthusiasm revived my love of the game and of coaching. ( https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/02/volleyball-coaching-life-teaching.html)

I was recently asked by a former player to work with one of her athletes, a middle hitter. She aspires to play in college, but she started playing relatively late, so she needed some instructions in the fundamentals. I agreed to help her out in that aspect and to mentor her on being recruited.

When I was knee deep in club coaching, I, in my hubris, thought that all private lessons were a money grab, that the private lessons were superfluous in view of the club volleyball activity. Looking at it from my own limited viewpoint, I strive to give my players a uniform understanding of the fundamentals of all the volleyball skills. I devoted practice time specifically to training the fundamentals, especially in the younger ages but I also devoted time at the beginning of every season, no matter the age,  to reintroduce the skills via basic fundamentals so that the players can refresh and rethink their approach to each skill. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that this fits into learning theory, giving the learners a chance to retrieve and renew their neural pathways and schemas. It just goes to show that sometimes a blind squirrel can still find a nut. The thing is, I thought every coach did this. At least those coaches that I coached with in the early days of my own indoctrination into club coaching. We spent the early practices of the season working on skills and techniques, building the basis sets in their schemas so that they can retrieve the knowledge and use them to create new neuronal sequences as the situation demanded. This was a no brainer.

As our sessions began, I worked with C through the progressions and tried to monitor and learn about her habits, actions, and reactions. We worked through some of her physical kinks and preconceived habits; fortunately, she had very few really bad habits. We worked on her footwork and tried to provide her solutions to her own physiological hurdles so that she could get faster. No middle can ever be too fast in their footwork: on time is too late.

C is a relatively quick learner and a hard worker. She is also incredibly tough on herself mentally, so I spent time in practice trying to make her believe in her abilities and work ethic. This is something that I have noticed I had to do, whether in club practices or in private lessons: if I wanted to get the athlete to get better, I had to convince them not only that they could, but that they are also deserving of the chance to be better. In time, her attacking improved, we added more tools to her toolbox, her blocking got better once she learned to watch the hitter rather than the ball and was able to gain a split second on the hitter by improving her foot speed and how to anticipate. She was gaining confidence, not as much as I would like, her self-talk is less than stellar still, but it is better.

One day C asked me if we could concentrate on working with her passing and serving. We had worked a little bit on those two skills, but once again my assumptions and hubris got the better of me and I worked mostly with her middle hitter skills. She was frustrated that she wasn’t using those skills in club or in high school. She had determined, rightly, that she needed to get better at those skills if she was to be an attractive recruiting candidate at other positions, which would require her to serve and pass, as well as to set and defend. I was kicking myself because I had prided myself in training all of my players to be at least competent in all skills and I had neglected to do so with her because I was in such a hurry to improve her skills for her immediate needs, which is to be a better middle in high school.

We started on her passing skills, and I asked her to tell me what she knew about passing. I was kind of stunned because outside of the obvious, she had no VBIQ whatsoever about passing. The simple progressions and salient physical frameworks of passing were alien to her. She started late in club ball, started when she was 14, she is now 17, so she was a little behind, but it was still stunning. I went over everything on passing as I would with an 11- or 12-year-old and threw everything but the kitchen sink at her. Asking her the “why”, “how”, and “what if” questions and answering those questions when she didn’t know, which was most of the time. She was, much to my delight, a quick study. She still would not be a primary passer for me, at least not yet, but in the period of a few practices she was able to apply those principles that I had shown her and implemented the principles. At least she is faring reasonably well in a practice environment. Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and she has not done that yet.

When we started on her serving, I asked her what her goal was while she was serving, her response was to just get it over the net. At 17. She must have seen the look on my face and started laughing. She said she rarely served and when she did, she was so nervous that all she wanted to do was to serve it over. I questioned her about where to serve, who to serve, and what to serve. No idea. We started from scratch, starting with standing top spin. She quickly progressed to being able to nail the end line consistently. We went over all the cues with passing and reversed it to figure out where she should target as a server, she understood that and was able to serve deep down the line and in between passers. Deep cross court was a challenge. I also had her work on short serve, something she had never done before. Not pretty but she can hit zones 2, 3, and 4 from zone 1 and zones 3 and 4 from zone 5. Hitting meaning on the 3 meter line or a little behind the 3 meter line. She is not able to get her serves any closer to the net. This was after being shown why and how. I would say she is a pretty quick study given the fact she had never been shown “why”, “how”, and “what if” prior to this. She understands when to go deep and when to go short, she understands when to serve hitters and when to serve the setter’s path to the net. She can’t consistently serve short yet, but she gets the idea. Floats are reserved for later.

Why am I bringing this up? To gloat? To brag? Hardly.

Here is a player who started playing at 14, a bit later than usual, having had three years of playing and most importantly, training in a club environment, and she is lacking in five of the seven fundamental skills in volleyball. How did this happen?

She had been tagged as a middle at 14 and her training had been concentrated on the two skills that applies to the middle while all her other five skills had not been developed, if not completely ignored. Why? She is not devoid of athleticism, even though she may not be amongst the top one percent of players her age. In my short time of training her, she progressed significantly in a very short time, so she has the elusive and ill-defined “coachable” personality. She knows she is behind, so she works hard in every session that we have. Having had the opportunity to work with her one on one, I know the reason for her lack of progress is not ability, athleticism, or attitude.

Some conjectures on my part.

·       Her needs were neglected for the sake of her teams. Which is ironic because the initial purpose of creating club volleyball was to improve the players’ skills to prepare them for high school and later, for college. One of the founding sales pitches of the JVA was that the JVA teams are not chasing after the brass ring of qualifying for the GJNC, they are therefore less pressured to prepare for competition and more time is devoted the original intent of club ball, to get the players better. While the clubs who are known for training are still training their players as they know how, the JVA itself has abandoned that idea of training taking precedence over competition as they are putting the carrot of playing in more travel tournaments more often. It is inevitable that the training suffers in deference to preparing for competition.

·       Stemming from that emphasis on competition, coaches began to substitute scrimmages and competition for skill work, out of expediency, out of pressure to prepare the teams to perform, or out of habit. Ignoring the tenets of the Expertise-Reversal Effect. (From Wikipedia).

o   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.

Instructional techniques that assist learners to create long term memory schema are more effective for novices or low-knowledge individuals, who approach a learning situation or task without these knowledge structures to rely on. In contrast, for higher-knowledge learners or experts, i.e. learners with more prior knowledge of the task, the reverse is true, such that reduced guidance often results in better performance than well-guided instruction.

o   In essence, the Expertise Reversal Effect says that in order to build the long-term memory schema referred to previously, the teacher/coach need to create instructional designs/drills or practices that have more opportunities for the novice and less experienced players to retrieve and repeat the fundamental. These drills and practices also require more structure and guidance for the novice and less experienced players. While the more experienced players require opportunities to improvise and create better schema that are more situational and competitive while requiring less structure and instruction.

·       More cynically, each coach, it doesn’t matter whether it is club or high school, have adopted the viewpoint that the players as a means to an end — to win at any level. Players are viewed as a tool for the team’s success, however that is defined.  The relationship between the players and coaches is seen as being purely transactive. But, if it were just transactive, what does the player get out of the relationship? It used to be that primary emphasis was on the players  improving by learning through coaching and teaching. The winning was a close second, but second all the same. In this particular case, C’s part of the transaction was nullified — for three whole seasons.

While I see this transactive attitude as a natural progression of the business aspect of club and high school ball: winning means parents, administrators, and booster are happy which feeds the coffers and sustains the club or program. Does that justify the inequities perpetrated on the players?

Note that I am pointing out exactly one data point out of all the players that have gone through the club system each year. I am not proclaiming causation, but I have seen many other players that have gone through the club scene that have had similar experiences. I conjecture that the vast majority of the players have had to suffer through this inequity, possibly more so now than in previous years mainly because of the explosion in number of clubs and players who are playing in this system. Quality of experience is something that none of the volleyball organizations: USAV, AAU, and JVA has ever guaranteed. They can’t. The variability of coaching experiences, knowledge, and philosophies is too great and the measures of quality experience is too amorphous.  Well-meaning people at various levels or organizations have attempted to standardize coaching education but the desired uniformity and quality are unevenly distributed as coaches, like everyone else, cling to their rugged individualism. Some clubs have the good fortune of aggregating great coaches together or have taken the responsibility to train new coaches, but that does not necessarily mean that each individual coach will do what is right.

Returning to my singular data point. I will continue to work with her as she wants to work with me. I have tried to show her how she can self-observe and self-correct for certain situations; but the Expertise Reversal Effect dictates that she will still need guidance and structure. That is something that I cannot provide in a private lesson environment.