Coaching

Being proficient in serving and passing is essential to point-scoring opportunities, either directly or indirectly. With an effective serve, I can earn points directly via serve aces or force the opponent out-of-system and into an easily defended attack. At every level, there is a direct correlation between the quality of the pass and the ability…

Jim Collins, the author of the best-selling business book “Good to Great,” was giving a speech on leadership. He offered the following scenario. “I would like you to picture Abraham Lincoln, sitting there at 1:30 in the morning in October 1862, getting the battle reports from Antietam. Seven thousand Americans, North and South, dying in…

All coaches want positive vibes to permeate the team environment. Rarely do these vibes occur by accident. Unfortunately, society sends a strong message that it’s all about the individual, not the team. So, it’s swimming upstream for some players to be supportive and engaged when the spotlight is not on them. A wise coach budgets…

An often asked question is how to create a great team culture. Building culture is one aspect of a program that you need to start with a finish in mind. What values do you want your team to reflect, and how might a coach instill those values? Perhaps the jumping-off point is this video that…

Volleyball is a game of movement. Players move in order to move again. We aren’t playing darts or chess; we play a sport where six players need to effectively cover 840 square feet and keep the ball from hitting the floor on their half of the net. At times, especially in serve-receive, three players are…

Last week 50-year-old Phil Michelson won the PGA Championship, one of golf’s four major tournaments. In the process, he became the oldest golfer in history to win a major. Putting the age aside, Michelson is one of the all-time great golfers. He has won forty-five tournaments in total, including winning six major championships. Going into…

In sport, failure comes with the territory. I’ve always have believed that I learned more from failure than from success. In my first USA U-18 competition at the FIVB World Championships, we finished a less than glorious 14th out of 16 teams. Yikes, a massive fail! To be kind, this was a learning experience! The…

Very few would debate the importance of repetition in the process of learning a skill. However, repetition in and by itself is not the key. The nature of the repetition is relevant to the learning process. Mindless repetition does not foster improvement. Repetition without thought merely confuses activity with getting something accomplished. The video below…

Supposedly the youth of the country have shrinking attention spans. At least, that is what we are led to believe. The Associated Press came out with a statistic stating that the average attention span in 1998 was twelve minutes. Unfortunately, that figure shrunk to five minutes in 2008. How they arrived at this figure is…

In recent years the term “Growth Mindset” was the new doctrine you couldn’t escape. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. A growth mindset is a very positive attribute worthy of pursuit. However, there is a difference between being able to define a growth mindset and putting this positive mindset into action. I only…

Options When Evaluating Serve Receive

Model Your Coaching After Abe Lincoln!

Keeping the Non-Starters Engaged

Team Culture, Water Buffaloes, and High Fives

Player Movement and Essential Motor Skills

What Volleyball Coaches Might Learn from Golfer Phil Michelson

Failure Has Value….Sometimes

What’s Really Matters the Most in Skill Development?

Add “Juice” to Team Meetings

Putting Deliberate Practice into Action