Volleyball Fan Life-Getting Ready for The Paris Olympics
Eagerly awaiting the Pairs Olympics and watching the USA Women's NT compete, while reflecting on what I see others do.
As we are in the short runup to the 2024 Olympics in Paris, USA volleyball fans are excited about what lies ahead of the USA Volleyball National Teams following the very successful 2021 Olympics in Tokyo. A lively volleyball culture had grown from the successes of all the Olympic and Paralympic volleyball teams in the last quad. The attention is especially focused on the Women’s Indoor team because of the team earning the first gold medal ever in the program’s history in 2020/2021. The popularity and successes of the women’s collegiate game in the US and the appearance of three professional women’s leagues has fueled the interests of both the volleydorks and casual fans.
As we watch the Volleyball Nation’s League coverage this month, we have been taken for a long and emotional roller coaster ride as all dedicated fans often are wont to do during the preparations for the Paris Olympics. The angst and exhilaration from watching the stellar VNL match play coupled with the pressure cooker atmosphere of an Olympic year has dominated our consciousness and have made us beyond anxious and beyond excited.
The ebb and flow of emotions illustrates typical fandom behavior. All USA wins are celebrated with great fanfare and confident predictions of medals in Paris while all losses are despaired over with the distraught declarations bemoaning and predicting disaster for the fate of the team in Paris., predictions of not even making it to bracket play run rampant. The release of the official women’s indoor squad roster for the Olympics during the four weeks of VNL tournament further fueled the fan’s reaction, the usual tizzy over who was on and who was left off the active roster have been endlessly debated. All of this is of course expected and is the norm for a passionate fandom. It is a great demonstration of just how much women’s volleyball has grown and taken hold.
As a longtime USA women’s indoor national team fan, it gives me great joy to see so many who are not only aware of this team but are also obsessing over the fate of this squad in Paris as I am. We have come a long way from when I started following the team. I am feeling very old right now.
My history of following this team over the years came out in a continuous flow of relief, incredulity, and unmitigated joyfulness when the team garnered the first gold medal in 2020/2021 at the Tokyo Olympics. I even documented it in my blog because I dearly wanted to save my reactions for posterity after following the team for many years. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/08/an-appreciation-of-karch-kiraly.html
I started following the team in 1980, and just my luck, it was the boycott year. I was in gradual school in Atlanta in 1984, I cheered mightily for the men’s team’s gold medal and was proud about the silver that the women’s team earned, even though the expectation was for getting the gold, but given the past history of the USA volleyball team in the Olympics (check the record at the bottom of this essay), I was very satisfied with silver.
Looking at the years prior to 1984, the USA had not even qualified for the Olympics in two quads: 1972 in Munich and 1976 in Montreal, our record in the 1984 Olympics was a salient event to celebrate. In the intervening years between 1984 and the present resulted in three silvers and a bronze before the 2020 Gold. Intersperse between the glittering medals are quads that underlines the difficulty with maintaining the top level of competitiveness that characterizes the Olympic volleyball.
I was reflecting on all the of the thoughts above as well realizing how much the game that I love has changed over the years as I thought about the very immediate and very transient reactions of my fellow volleyball fans to the slings and arrows of our previous two months and the prospects for the next two months.
Some thoughts about that:
It is hard as hell to qualify for the Olympics let alone to win a medal. The fact that some feel so privileged as to take earning medals in the Olympics for granted is insane. Many nations would very gladly be in our place. The Olympic ideal is to participate and to compete.
The volleyball world has always evolved, grown, and stretched over the years, as with all human endeavors. The game has gotten more athletic, more physical, and much faster with each quad. Indeed, many neophytes to the game of modern volleyball have expressed shock at the pace of the modern game and they have had a difficult time keeping up with the game as they fell in love with that insane pace. The point is, the ground beneath the game is inexorably changing in real time, the quality of athletes who play the game have also changed inexorably, as with the strategy and tactics of the game.
This inevitable evolution of the game also makes having dominant teams only a temporary situation. Those sides who dominate the game usually do so for short terms, they don’t usually stay dominant for many quads. Of course, good volleyball national programs will always remain competitive, but their chances of achieving the elusive medals undulate because of the dynamics of international volleyball competition. The fortunes of the powerhouses of international volleyball in general have enjoyed their zeniths and have also suffered their nadirs. It is the natural cycle of sports. This is true for collegiate programs as well, except the turnover is much quicker in the international game.
The dynamics of player development over each quadrennial makes maintaining the razor’s edge of competitiveness uncertain for the national teams. Every player has a nonlinear upward trajectory in their volleyball IQ learning curve and an equally nonlinear downward trajectory in their physical capability curve as they age, the shape of those curves is unknown and unpredictable, which makes the decision making geometrically more uncertain. Ideally, the coaching staff needs to extrapolate and predict when the two curves intersect for each player. This needs to be done for every potential candidate there are uncountably many factors that affect each player’s curves, which is unknown a priori. Every player’s performance in the future is an open loop solution: susceptible to unpredictable shocks and fraught with randomness.
Further complications enter into the evaluation when the intangibles of human behavior, maturity, and mindset are accounted for in the evaluation process.
The unpredictability that is a part of each player’s development is also multiplied by the number of players who are expected to play as a cohesive unit, because the team is greater than just the sum of the parts is to be believed.
Finally, being rewarded by nonlinearities and uncertainties inherent in the process of training, selecting, and integrating a program is not guaranteed. Everyone believes that nonlinearities and uncertainties inherent in any process is an opportunity that will reward the hard work, but no one ever expects to be punished by the same nonlinearities and uncertainties. If we were perspicacious, we should know intuitively that the rewards and punishments from any uncertainty rich process can result in more punishment than rewards.
Again it is bloody hard to do this and there is never any direct path. As with all sporting endeavors, the preparation of any team is an open loop process, there are no deterministic paths towards success, or defeat. If there were then why even bother playing the matches, just line the teams up by their “rankings” and hand out the medals already. This is the main point. This is why we follow the team; this is why we ride the emotional roller coaster as we follow the teams through the trials of tribulations of the selection process in the quad, the four weeks of the VNL, and the scant two weeks of the Olympic competition itself. This is why we allow our passions for the team and sport to take us on a wild ride.
Even as I will be glued to the coverage during the two weeks of Paris, wishing I was there personally, I am also circumspect about how I will treat the outcome. I will be passionate about what happens to all the USA teams, because I have many personal costs sunken into the USA volleyball teams. As for the women’s indoor team, the albatross is finally off our necks because of the gold medal in 2020/2021, at least it is off of mine. While it would be nice to start a streak of dominance, I am perfectly happy to just watch them play, to cheer them on, and to indulge in my coaching instincts while Dorking out on the matches. As much as I would love to see it happen, I am not expecting a dynasty for all the reasons I listed above. Again, getting an Olympic gold is hard as hell, it took 56 years for the USA to get there, let us at least enjoy that accomplishment for now, let us not let unreasonable expectations ruin the experience of following this team. It is the unreasonable expectations that riles the fan base to the boiling point.
Nitpicking the coaching decisions will never change any results no matter how hard we want the impossible to happen, so why do it? Playing the what-if games will only accelerate any impending heart attack.
Applying the Stoic idea of premedio maloram (What is the worst that can happen?) and apatheia (equanimity) while watching are the sanest philosophy for the next two months. Simply put, we need to adapt Marty Feldman’s character Igor’s philosophy in Young Frankenstein: It could be worse, it could be raining. (
)
So just enjoy.
USA Women’s National Team Historical Record
2020 Tokyo: Gold
2016 Rio de Janeiro: 3rd
2012 London: Silver
2008 Beijing: Silver
2004 Athens: 5th
2000 Sydney: 4th
1996: Atlanta: 7th
1992 Barcelona: Bronze
1988 Seoul: 7th
1984 Los Angeles: Silver
1980 Moscow: Boycott
1976 Did not qualify
1972 Did not qualify
1968 Mexico City: 8th
1964 Tokyo: 5th