How’s your team? Are they happy? Do they feel fresh, mentally and physically, or are they run down?

This spring, we’ve added to our our women’s volleyball program at LMU the grueling task of sand volleyball. We’ve set our portable offices by the waters of Marina Del Rey. We’ve toiled amidst the horrific backdrop of sun sand and waves, yet we’ve carry on…

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.

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).

Tags: Guided Discovery,Reading the Game,Serve Receive,Visual Keys,Visual-motor

Game-like

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.

One thing we have learned over the years is that volleyball coaches love new drills. After all, if we provide our athletes with new and exciting drills every day, it will motivate them to really get after it. Right? I recently received the following question from a coach…

Tags: Drills,Feedback

Once the initial movement patterns have been taught to our hitters, what they need to look at in order to make the best swing possible becomes a critical part of their training. Here are 3 keys you might want to spend some time with in order to help develop your hitters’ vision and decision-making ability as attackers.