HOW VOLLEYBALL PLAYERS ACTUALLY IMPROVE: A COACH'S GUIDE TO DEVELOPMENT, FEEDBACK, AND CHANGE
Four concepts from the science of coaching on how athletes develop, why the brain is wired for improvement, how to create an environment where change happens, and what actually drives it in practice.
Most coaches have experienced both sides of this. The athlete who looks like your best prospect at tryouts but plateaus within a year. The athlete who seems to be struggling with everything in October and becomes your most complete player by the following spring. The practice environment that feels productive but produces no real change. The one moment when everything clicks for an athlete and you watch something shift in them permanently.
What separates these outcomes isn't talent or luck. It's a set of principles about how athletes actually develop and how coaches can structure their environment to make improvement more likely, more consistent, and more durable.
What follows combines four of our most important coaching concepts into one cohesive guide. Each one stands alone. Together, they give you a framework for thinking about development, practice, and change that applies at every level of the game.
CONCEPT 1 INITIAL ABILITY AND FINAL ABILITY ARE NOT HIGHLY CORRELATED
At our GMS coaching clinics, we often say that initial ability and final ability are not highly correlated. We think this is one of the most important concepts a coach can internalize and one we don't spend enough time on.
The research is consistent on this point. Being a prodigy, or looking like one at tryouts, is an unreliable indicator of long-term success. As K. Anders Ericsson has written: "First and foremost, it is very difficult to predict which individuals will attain expert levels of achievement." Benjamin Bloom's research adds weight to this: less than 10% of successful elite adults were thought, at age 11 or 12, to be performing at a level that indicated they would reach what they eventually did.
This is not an abstraction. It plays out visibly across sports at every level. The player nobody recruited who becomes the best on the team. The athlete who starts slowly and accumulates thousands of hours until the skill is genuinely world-class. The high school starter who never develops past their initial ceiling.
Where Tomorrow's Champions Come From
If initial ability and final ability are not highly correlated, then tomorrow's champions are not born they are made. The question is how.
They are made with hours: a lot of them, and the right quality of them. Research consistently points to deliberate practice effortful, focused, and specifically designed to improve performance as the mechanism that produces expertise. The widely cited estimate of 10,000 hours to reach world-class performance reflects this. What matters is not just the volume but the quality: practice that includes specific feedback, opportunities to respond, and conditions that push athletes just beyond their current capability.
They are also made from a large pool of developing athletes. Because we cannot accurately predict who will develop, programs that give more athletes access to more quality coaching for more years will consistently produce better outcomes than programs that concentrate resources only on those who look promising early.
The player in front of you today is not the player they will be in five years. This is not just theory. It's one of the most reliably observed patterns in athlete development. Don't cut your development short by deciding too early who has potential and who doesn't.
What This Means for Your Program
There is no such thing as general athletic ability that transfers automatically across tasks. Skills are specific. A player who looks coordinated in one context may not transfer that quality to volleyball without deliberate, sport-specific practice. This means the quality of the environment you create matters more than the raw material you're working with and it means investing broadly, not just in the athletes who look ready right now.
CONCEPT 2 IMPROVEMENT IS ADDICTIVE
The following comes from Dr. Steve Bain, who shared these ideas at the University of Washington Coaching Clinic.
If you hang around the University of Washington volleyball program long enough, you will either read it on a white board or hear Coach Jim McLaughlin tell his players: "Improvement is addictive." As Coach McLaughlin knows, this phrase is more than a motivational mantra.
The acquisition and refinement of skilled movements are prerequisites for survival even the most basic goal-directed movements, like seeking food or water, are learned. Given the life-and-death significance of skilled movement, it is not surprising that our brains are wired to ensure we repeat life-sustaining activities by associating them with pleasure and reward. Whenever a reward circuit is activated, the brain notes that something important is happening that needs to be remembered, triggering the release of dopamine telling the brain to "do it again."
In skill learning, our motivations are driven by the desire to return to rewards we have experienced before, and to the conditions that produced them. Each time an athlete executes a successful movement, the neuronal connections associated with that movement are active. If a movement is followed by a positive reward, the entire motor map associated with that movement is bathed in dopamine. Over time and with repetition, this produces a permanent increment in connection strength among the neurons associated with that movement. What fires, gets wired.
What This Means for How You Structure Practice
The implications for coaching are direct:
1. Training environments structured to produce successful skill execution are paramount. The skills athletes train will be tightly coupled to the brain's reward stimulus. This is scientific support for the motor learning principle of training specificity and for whole, game-like practice over fragmented, drill-only practice.
2. Players who can attend to the task at hand improve faster. The cognitive effort required to maintain full focus during practice is high. When athletes are in what Dr. Bain calls iMode improvement mode learning accelerates. When they descend into survival mode, learning stops.
3. Instruct players to focus on the result of the movement, not the mechanics. Research consistently shows that an external focus of attention enhances motor learning in both new and experienced learners. Dopamine's role in brain reward circuits may be part of the reason why.
Create practice environments where athletes experience genuine improvement. The brain's reward system will do the rest. Once an athlete has felt what real progress feels like, they will want to feel it again.
CONCEPT 3 GETTING YOUR ATHLETES TO CHANGE
The following is from Mike Wall, GMS.
When you tell your athletes the same thing over and over, year in and year out, it begins to feel like insanity. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
My favorite athletes to coach aren't necessarily the most talented. They are the ones who have the ability to make changes. And some athletes need to be taught how to do it. For some it's a natural skill. For others it's acquired. For a small group, it may not come at all. Understanding which athletes are in which category, and acting accordingly, is one of the most important things a coach can do.
Teaching your athletes to embrace change is a conversation you should have early in the season. They need to know how important change is to you, your staff, and to their development.
Why We Use Keys
One of the reasons we rely on keys when teaching skills is that they simplify the learning process. We know that athletes have a limited ability to process information. Simplifying feedback is a high priority. When a teacher gives 45 minutes of feedback after a session, the athlete is in "la la land" after the first five minutes. No processing is happening. One focused, specific point something they can really concentrate on in their next practice is more effective than a comprehensive review of everything they did wrong.
I've caught myself in practice giving feedback all over the map. It is more productive to focus on one thing at a time. During this drill, we are working on eye-work and nothing else. If the athlete has a technical issue in another area, that can be addressed tomorrow. Assigning specific coaching responsibilities by drill so each coach knows exactly what they're watching and responding to can have a significant impact on both coaching quality and athletes' ability to absorb and apply feedback.
Creating an Environment Where Change Happens
Here is a practical framework for building that environment:
1. Be a sales agent for change. Sell your players on its importance. It needs to matter to them, and they need to know how much it matters to you. Start this conversation at the beginning of your season and return to it throughout.
2. Structure practice and feedback to maximize the ability to change. Keep feedback specific. Give athletes activities that are strictly cognitive focused on the process, not the outcome.
3. Revisit the conversation about change as the season progresses. Don't assume one early conversation is enough.
4. When you encounter athletes who won't change, address it directly and early. Some athletes need to be taught how to be cognitive when playing volleyball. Don't let the insanity set in by continuing to give feedback that isn't landing.
5. Teach athletes that it is OK to make errors while making changes. The important thing is that they are cognitively trying. Begin with the end in mind: by making changes today, they will be better tomorrow.
6. Celebrate change visibly. When an athlete makes a change, acknowledge it specifically and make sure the rest of the team hears it. Find opportunities to be a sales agent in the moment, not just at the start of the season.
7. Use video. Film can be a powerful tool for athletes who struggle to feel what they are doing differently. Seeing the change is often what makes it real.
8. If an athlete consistently refuses to change despite every available tool meetings, encouragement, film, patience you will eventually need to make a decision that is in the best interest of your program.
CONCEPT 4 DRILLS DON'T FIX PLAYERS. FEEDBACK DOES.
Volleyball coaches love new drills. After all, if you provide your athletes with new and exciting activities every day, it will motivate them to really get after it. Right?
Consider the question a coach once sent us: "My outside hitter makes errors at critical times during the match. Do you have any drills that can help?"
It's a fair question. We do have drills that emphasize certain skills or situations. But drills alone cannot fix technical or mental issues.
Many of our advisory staff members have only 10–15 drills that they really like and return to consistently. As UNC Women's Soccer Coach Anson Dorrance has put it: "After a while, your coaching development ceases to be about finding newer ways to organize practice. In other words, you soon stop collecting drills. Your development as a coach shifts to observing how great coaches teach, motivate, lead, and drive players to performances at higher and higher levels."
The Actual Driver of Change
Drills are not designed to fix technical issues. Feedback is. You will have drills that place an emphasis on certain skills, but at the end of the day feedback and mindful repetitions are what drive change.
If this is true and we believe it is then couldn't you give effective feedback in virtually any drill you run? Yes. Which means the drill itself matters far less than what you and your athletes are doing inside of it.
Some coaches worry that running the same drills every day will bore their athletes. To a point, that's true. But repetition within a good drill isn't the enemy of engagement it's often the foundation of it. Consider: the best practices you've ever been a part of were probably built around a small set of activities. What made them exceptional wasn't the novelty of the drill. It was the quality of the coaching, the demands on athletes to change, and the level of competition within it.
Once you have a list of 10–15 drills that you and your athletes genuinely like, you can stop searching for more. Hundreds of variations can be made from a solid foundation. The question to focus on is not "what new drill can I find?" but "how can I use this drill to deliver better feedback today?"
Drills do not change your athletes. Feedback and mindful repetitions do. Drills are the vehicles that create energy, game-like reps, and opportunities to give great feedback. Choose them with that role in mind.
Putting the Four Concepts Together
These four ideas build on each other in a specific direction.
You can't predict who will develop so invest broadly and build programs that give many athletes access to quality coaching over many years. The brain is wired to reward improvement so structure practice to produce successful skill execution, and the motivation to improve will take care of itself. Change doesn't happen automatically so build an environment where it is expected, taught, and celebrated. And when you need change to happen, focus your energy on feedback and mindful repetitions, not on finding a new drill.
The coaches who internalize these principles don't just create better practices. They create programs where improvement compounds where athletes develop past what anyone expected of them, because the environment they practiced in demanded it.
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