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This past weekend I coached my first ever 3 day Juniors Tournament in Las Vegas. I’ve spent many days recruiting this tournament, but have never stayed long enough to see the finals. This year, my club team played well enough to be in the final of the 18 Open Division.
I’m currently working on a new team building presentation for our Volleyball Coaching Foundations Clinic. While doing some research online, I found some very interesting information on positive coaching. After collecting some information from a swimming website, and adding some thoughts of my own, I’ve come up with a Top 10 list of things not to do when coaching club or high school volleyball. The intent is not to sound negative. I think these are all very common mistakes, and if they are brought to our attention in an organized way perhaps it helps us? So, here we go….
My first overseas volleyball experience was bitter-sweet. The sweet parts for me were the opportunities to get to know a new culture, the chance to learn a new language, and the chance to get to make some amazing friends. Even better was getting paid to improve at the sport that I loved. In contrast to these sweet memories, it is hard to forget the bitter aspects that pervaded my time there. My team didn’t respect the coach and the club was poorly managed. As a result, that season my team was an incredible waste of talent. We had the talent to win the league. Unfortunately, these bitter aspects ultimately led my teammates to disengage from the team and none of us performed anywhere near our potential.
In Chico CA, NFL football has been particularly exciting to watch over the last couple of years. Aaron Rodgers is a hometown hero and it’s been thrilling to watch his success. This year, in particular, all of the long-time 49′er fans had something to be excited about. While I’ve become more of a baseball fan over the last several years, I ended up watching a few more football games this year. Of course, I’m a bit of a fair-weathered fan. I couldn’t watch the Niners until this season. I wasn’t a Packer’s fan until Aaron was drafted, but I’ve always been a fan of the Patriots (and Red Sox!) as I lived in Connecticut until I was 8 yrs old.
During my tenure as an Assistant Coach with the USA Men’s Team, I often had the opportunity to talk to Hugh McCutcheon about what were the most important skills for our players in our quest to win a Gold Medal in Beijing. Unequivocally, Hugh always said, “The premiere skill is the ability to see and read the game.” Research in this area further substantiates this opinion. “Expert batsmen, like experts from other striking sports, provide the impression of having ‘all the time in the world’ despite performing their skill under several challenging constraints” (Abernethy, 1981).
This post comes to us from Dr. Steve Bain, who not only knows a lot about neuro-science, but is becoming quite a good volleyball coach as well. Last year at the UW Coaching Clinic he shared some thoughts on improvement as it relates to chemical signals in the brain. This is his brief summary of those thoughts:
Carol Dweck, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford, has written a well know book called “Mindset”. In the book, she identifies two different mindsets that exist within all of us to varying degrees; the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. The reason this is important is because regardless of your beliefs on talent, we can prove all skill and ability exists within the neural pathways of our brain. So, if we develop “fixed mindset” behaviors we are in essence stunting the development of any deeper neural connections, thereby road blocking our improvement and allowing any self-fulfilling prophesies we might have about IQ or talent being inherited to come to fruition.
The 2011 PAC 12 Season is looking like it will be the last where a true double round-robin is used to determine the conference championship. As such, our staff is working hard to ask a lot of important questions about the nature of our conference, the key skills that need to be developed in order to better compete in the conference and a myriad of other questions that I hope will lead to further blog posts.
Congratulations to Chris McGown and the BYU Men’s Volleyball Team on another successful weekend.
