I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eight, “Etienne Wenger: Coaching and communities of practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

I ended part 1 saying if you want to get better at coaching, go coach with someone who can help you produce meaning in your coaching. Now I’ll dig into why I think that’s so important.

While you can learn by having co-participants with little knowledge, that makes you like the two blind men in the painting above. You are each trying to make sense of a situation while lacking some vital understanding of that situation. It’s incredibly valuable to have a mentor that can offer their understanding of not only the situation but also some understanding of your perspective. A mentor is at their most useful when they see what the learner sees and can verbalize how they understand what the learner is trying to understand.

Co-participants influence the meanings each person takes away from each situation they experience together. (So the mentor also potentially learns too!) This is not a passive process, even if it isn’t entirely conscious. In the academic literature, the process is considered to be negotiated. That means you shouldn’t just ask a mentor what to do and then go do it without consideration. There should be a back and forth between you. There should be an opportunity for who you want to be to emerge instead of having your coaching style dictated to you by another person.

The process of negotiation makes meaning. It also makes you. This is a big reason why co-participation is so important in learning. Without it, you don’t form your own identity. Your identity is not just who you are in isolation, your identity is who you are in relation to others. You figure out who you are by seeing how you want to fit in and how you want to stand out. You figure out who you want to be by seeing how others respond to who you currently are.

There’s an interplay involved in learning and becoming a coach. There’s being a coach, and there’s coaching. They are interconnected, both of them are necessary. You have to do the verb and you have to be the noun. Your learning and your becoming are both part of doing the verb and being the noun. In fact, the relationship between doing the verb and being the noun is also negotiated.

For many novice coaches, their journey begins with being the noun. They are hired to coach because of their playing experience. Even though they have experienced what is often called the “apprenticeship of observation”, they have yet to do the verb, to actually coach. Doing the verb is vital to the development of a coach’s identity. It is by actually doing coaching things that one builds the concept of the coach they want to be. Even if you’ve read about or watched a video of something you’d like to do, it isn’t until you start doing it yourself that you feel what it’s like for that new thing to be part of what you do (and who you are).

Just reading about coaching or watching videos about coaching aren’t learning because neither brings meaning to being a coach or coaching. It’s not until you change your behavior that learning has taken place. If you read something (like a Substack post about meaning) and you go coach exactly as you had before you read it, then you haven’t learned anything. If, on the other hand, you read something and it helps you see yourself differently in coaching spaces, then you may change a decision or two while you are coaching. That’s learning. And it also demonstrates the connection between being and doing.

If you decide that you want to be someone a little different than you were when you coach, you’re changing the noun first. Maybe you tell yourself you’d like to be the kind of coach who wears golf shirts and buttons the top button. So you just start doing that when you coach. Maybe you tell yourself you’d like to be the kind of coach who doesn’t talk much to the team right after competition, instead saving your comments for a later time. So you just start doing that. The specific reasons for the changes aren’t the most important thing, what’s most important is that your reasons hold sufficient weight that they lead you to change your behavior. That’s making meaning.

But you can also change your behavior first and that leads you to change how you see yourself. That’s changing the verb first. Perhaps you notice you are using a drill or game much less than you used to. Perhaps you find yourself speaking differently to athletes than you used to. Upon reflection, you see that those drills, games, or words no longer reflect the person you actually are when you coach. While your behavior has changed, it isn’t until you reflect and create meaning for the behavior changes that learning has taken place. You create meaning by doing the verb. The meaning you create is what allows you to be the noun.

Learning is this interplay between doing and being. Who you are and who you want to be influence what you choose to do in your coaching and how you choose to do those things, and vice versa. All coaches, regardless of their experience, are always changing in some ways because they are always shifting what they do and who they are. Learning to coach, then, is a continuous process.

Meaning creates the filters through which you process “new” coaching ideas. Who you currently are and what you currently do will shape your responses to new ideas you are exposed to. Those ideas are always all around you. They’re in the way you see others coach. They’re in how you feel as you’re coaching and how others feel as they are coached by you. They’re in your changing perspectives as you age and gain experience.

It would seem that you don’t need a mentor as you age, gain experience, and become better at understanding yourself but I argue that you do. A mentor reflects who you are back to you and presents you with ways to understand how you do the verb and how you are the noun. A mentor shows you things that are in your blind spots. They don’t tell you what to do with what they see, they create space for you to see it for yourself and create meaning for yourself. They teach you about yourself, rather than instruct you about who you should be or what you should do.

To sum all of this up, learning means changing what you do and who you are when you coach. Those changes arise because of the meaning you make. If you really want to keep learning and keep improving at your craft, you have to keep learning which means continually creating meaning for what you do and how you do it. Reflection and mentorship are two vital ways to do that.

I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eight, “Etienne Wenger: Coaching and communities of practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

There was one short phrase in this chapter that really started me thinking. It’s not the main point of the chapter but, to me, it’s the most important takeaway.

This simple statement belies a massive idea about coaching. Most coaches assume the ultimate product of learning is knowledge but I don’t think that fully explains what learning is or the role learning plays for coaches and players alike.

Allow me some latitude to set up my exploration of meaning. I want to start with art. I’ll use an example of a public art installation to help explain meaning.

The sculpture above resides in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City2. Like many works of art, there is a small sign nearby to tell you about it.

This little sign can be thought of as providing information about the sculpture and, after reading the sign, you could say you have some knowledge about the sculpture. But what have you learned about it? What do you really know about the sculpture at this point? While you know more than you did before you read the sign, I’d argue you have learned very little. But what more is there to know? Much more than just what appears on a little sign.

So what is there to learn? Meaning. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, so allow me to explain how it’s being used.

You can think of reading the little sign as “what is meant by a concept” but I’m most interested in “implied or explicit significance”. By this definition, you can think of meaning as a bridge between knowledge and understanding. While the little sign next to the sculpture gives you a little knowledge, it doesn’t give you understanding. It’s like knowing which words in this sentence are nouns. Knowing that gives you some information about the sentence but it doesn’t help you understand what the sentence is saying. If you want to understand the piece of art, you need things like this article about it to learn what the artist is trying to say through the piece. This is one way “meaning” can be used, to help you distinguish between knowledge and understanding. The sculpture becomes more than just a four meter tall piece of bronze from 1990, it becomes a symbol or a statement.

The separation between knowledge and understanding is everywhere in coaching. Coaches commonly mistake knowledge for understanding when they believe they only need to learn drills and tactics to be functional. They seek to understand sport and athletes mechanistically. They think they only need to be able to describe what athletes are doing in their game to say they are coaching. That’s like saying identifying parts of speech is the same as reading comprehension. That’s like saying the physical and historical characteristics are the most important things to know about of a work of art.

Assuming that acquiring knowledge is the same as learning is like assuming that piling bricks together is the same as building a house. For the bricks to become a structure, there must be a framework the bricks fit into. The larger framework gives the bricks their significance. So it is with knowledge. The coaching things you know require significance; they need understanding.

If, as Cushion states, meaning is the ultimate product of learning, then something won’t be understood until its meaning is established. Learning, then, is a process of discovering the many meanings of what you do. It’s the process of gaining understanding. This, as Cushion might say, is meaning-making. It’s the process of recognizing which bricks make sense in the building you are constructing. It’s the process of not only finding bricks that work but also of making your own bricks and of understanding how to fit all your bricks together.

If you read the article about the sculpture, you are presented with the perspective of the article’s author as well as the perspective of the sculptor. Through his quotations, you can learn about the sculptor’s meaning for his work. But there’s a key difference between learning about Pomodoro’s meaning and generating your own. Not to get too meta, but knowledge of his meaning isn’t, in itself, meaning; to you it’s just knowledge. While you might better understand what he made, that knowledge is not very helpful to you if you are creating your own art. And that’s what gives meaning its…umm…meaning.

To create meaning, you have to wrestle with ideas yourself, not just read about the meanings of others. Learning means changing your perspective; it means changing your relationship to what you observe and do. Learning means looking at something again and seeing it with different eyes, ones that have been influenced by the understanding of others. But you need the meaning of others to understand your own meaning.

Meaning-making, and therefore learning, can’t be done alone. According to Cushion, you need “differing perspectives”. Learning means comparing your observations, thoughts, and interpretations with co-participants. The act of comparing can take many different forms and most coaches opt for comparing by talking about situations rather than experiencing those situations together with the people they’re comparing notes with. But that’s more like reading Pomodoro’s quotations about his work than standing in the courtyard taking in the work with someone else.

How do you find out Sfera con Sfera moves? You could watch the video above. But how do you find out what it feels like to stand in front of a 4-meter tall, intricately designed, spinning, brass orb? What’s it like to catch the glint of the sun off of it? To truly participate, you need to be in its presence. You need to have a direct relationship with it, not hear about someone else’s experience.

But the direct relationship has to be between you, the situation, and co-participants. To build your own meaning, you need others standing there with you so one of you can say to the other, “did you see that?” or, “look over there”, or, most importantly, “what do you think of that?” That’s what it means to co-participate. That’s how you establish meaning. You do it by comparing your thoughts to the thoughts of others interacting with the same situation as you. It’s the same for coaching.

Cushion points out that coaches need co-participants when they coach. That may seem obvious; a coach without athletes and a practice or competition setting isn’t really coaching. But that also means coaches need co-participants to learn as well. Reading a book or watching a video about coaching isn’t learning because it isn’t social. There’s no opportunity to create meaning, that won’t happen until you’re actually working with athletes. You can compare notes with other coaches after the fact all you want, but that’s not learning the way standing next to each other in the middle of practice or competition is. If you want to get better at coaching, go coach with someone who can help you produce meaning in your coaching. This is why I think mentorship and apprenticeship are so valuable in coaching.

That’s where I’ll pick up in part 2.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

In part 3, I gave some detail about the symbiotic nature of field, habitus, and capital. The relationships between people are fraught with the consequences of our politics. While it can be difficult to see the causes and consequences at first, it’s an important step because it sets up the last step: making changes.

Ask yourself why coaches can fall back on compliance. Ask yourself what a player’s “yes” is worth if they can’t say “no”. Do you believe a coach’s work should be more on players than with players? Do you believe the coach-player relationship should be determined by force of will? Is demanding that players do what you tell them going to make you feel like you’re doing your best coaching? These are all things that the field allows and, therefore, perpetuates. Because the field perpetuates them, coaches will perceive that what the field allows is what the field requires to be successful.

This is where the subjects of habitus and field become even more sensitive. Because the field allows (or even encourages) you to coach for compliance, then being a “successful” coach means having compliant players. The field encourages coaches to do things for “the player’s own good”, but doesn’t encourage them to question how they know what that good is. If you’re rewarded for coaching that way, why would you coach any other way? After all, you’re competing for social goods when you coach and the field determines which social goods are at stake. If that’s what the field wants, that’s what the field will get because there are no incentives to go against the field. Or are there?

Remember that fields are products of the habitus of their members; it’s a two-way street. You can shape the field, even as it shapes you. In some ways, it’s as simple as saying you don’t want to abide by what the field values. That departure can be small, it doesn’t have to be wholesale rejection of the status quo. The only prerequisite is recognizing that the field isn’t currently supporting the habitus you want.

Think back to that player that wanted to be coached hard. I described them as seeing something missing from the field. There’s no rule saying that people have to do all the adjusting; the field changes too. Maintaining your habitus, despite the mismatch with the field, creates the conditions for change in both you and the field. That may seem daunting, like you’re taking on an entire institution. But, to the extent that’s true, you at least don’t have to confront the whole institution head on. It’s possible to begin in a corner of it and work your way out.

Remember that fields are interconnected and nested. You can create your own, smaller field within the one you aren’t fitting into quite like you want. The smaller field can be nearly identical to the larger field that subsumes it. But, within the smaller field, you (and others you include) can choose what your field will support and what it won’t. Coaches and teams already do this all the time, every time they say things like, “in here, this is how we define success.” Statements like those are how you change the world, or at least the little corner of the world you coach in. But you can’t just say that and then take someone else’s definition of success.

I had a professor in grad school who, when teaching how to create data visualizations, exhorted the class to never accept the default settings2 that applications choose for those visualizations. Bourdieu helps you realize field and habitus are constantly choosing defaults for us. He also helps you realize field and habitus are malleable. They can’t really be built from scratch, but they can be influenced and changed.

Rather than just accepting the default settings of “how it’s always been done” or the default settings of “how you were coached” or even the settings of what’s popular or common, you can actually choose deliberately. It’s okay to accept a lot of the conventional wisdom. It’s okay to be influenced by the field, but there’s much to be gained from questioning what that influence is and how deeply it shapes your coaching and your relationships.

One aspect of the larger coaching field I choose to change in my smaller field is what coaches talk to players about. I want players to have the opportunity to wrestle with ideas too. Instead of recommending that players conform or comply with my coaching because “that’s just how it is”, I would rather help them see the consequences of actions in terms of the field. I want to help them see the world through their own eyes and not just through mine. I want their “yes” to mean something so that means I need to create space for and then foster their understanding. I choose to accept that players have their own habitus that I need to understand rather than overcome. If you want to do that, you can’t just talk about sports. You have to start talking about something that actually means something.

That player who wants to be coached hard? Instead of you forcing them to change or them forcing you to change, what if you helped them see ways they could gain capital in your shared field? Remember that sports are just their (and your) way of trying to secure social goods. They’re looking for ways to belong and that doesn’t have to mean the same thing as conforming. What if belonging was a product of sharing their ideas about why they want to be coached hard? What if coaching was a product of sharing your ideas about what it means to coach and be coached?

You can be part of creating a field in which that kind of coaching is “how it’s done”. When people speak of “normalizing” some behavior, this is what they mean. It requires willfully changing how and why things are done (field), who you are when you’re coaching (habitus), and what you value and expect while coaching (capital).

Exploring Bourdieu’s work can feel a little bit like seeing through The Matrix for the first time. It can be very challenging but very freeing. It can been challenging because his work can leave you feeling unmoored from past certainty about what to do and who to be3. It can been freeing because it helps you realize that so many limits in coaching are only limits when you agree they are limiting.

You don’t have to accept the default settings. But, once you move past them, it’s nothing but work. Glorious, daunting, never-ending, rewarding, life-changing work.

P.S.: Here’s a quotation from one of my favorite cartoonists, illustrated by another one of my favorite cartoonists. The quotation drives home the idea that you don’t have to accept the field’s defaults if you decide they don’t work for you.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

In part 2, I described Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field and began illustrating how habitus, capital, and field are interconnected. I alluded to the fact that the interplay between them is, well, complicated. In the language of social science, it is contested. That doesn’t mean sociologists argue about if the interplay exists, it means people interacting with each other bring different habitus and, therefore, different understanding and expectations. Those differences bring about challenges, conflict, and, hopefully, resolution and change.

Power difference and reproduction: the coaching process

An important factor the trap of “they don’t care how much you know” highlights is how much coaches follow what they see others do or what they believe other coaches value. This, in Bourdieu’s terms, is part social practice and part habitus.

Cushion is explaining that social practice produces habitus and habitus produces social practice. The first is learning, the second is reproduction. Reproduction is an incredibly important and incredibly under-appreciated part of social learning. Social practices change as individuals’ habitus interact in slightly different ways over time. But social practice is based in something, in some kind of history. It was there before you and it gave you some understanding of what you could do. Think of social practice as a hiking trail through a literal and figurative field.

Sometimes, like in the picture on the left, it’s clear where you’re supposed to go. Social practice has made the “correct way” obvious. Sometimes, like in the picture on the right, it is less obvious. There may not be a “correct way”. But that’s where habitus comes in. Are you a fan of stairs? You’ll probably go left. Do you have really great shoes you want to test out? Maybe you’ll go right instead. It depends on who you are and how you interpret the trail ahead of you. But the interplay between who you are, how you interpret things, and the “correct ways” of social practice deserves your attention.

The trail example makes the interplay of habitus and social practice seem like a neutral thing. But remember I told you all coaching is political because social goods are at stake. Social practices can, and often do, stealthily limit your coaching in troubling ways. The most basic example of social practices limiting your habitus is the practice of coaching how you were coached. While the coaches you were exposed to may have been excellent, that doesn’t mean their ways of coaching are appropriate for you. Their ways of coaching are expressions of their habitus and are tuned to help them acquire capital they value most.

What ends up happening to novice coaches is they don’t discover and deliberately nurture their own habitus until they’ve already unknowingly built it around someone else’s practices. Again, this seems like a neutral thing, especially if you liked the coaches who coached you. But…

This is why I think Bourdieu’s work is so important in coaching. Coaches often overlook that coaching is not just the technical and tactical; it’s not even just the psychological. Coaching is an expression of habitus. It is a reflection of the field. Both habitus and field encompass far more than the drills you choose or the strategies you use. For example, the typically active and talkative coach who becomes passive and quiet when their team is playing poorly is not using some coaching move they learned, they’re expressing their habitus. The coach who has a drill they only use for punishment is similarly expressing their habitus much more than they are demonstrating their coaching prowess.

Those are two examples of what coaches do that reproduces social practices that are coaching-adjacent but don’t seem to be straight-up “coaching”. Coaches may not have learned those exact behaviors from coaches they were exposed to, but they did learn that “coaching” can include these expressions of influence and control. Coaches use these behaviors to communicate messages to the players in their care, usually messages of displeasure and dissatisfaction. Coaches and players have learned that coaches can act on those emotions but players cannot. That’s the danger of unexamined reproduction of social practices.

I’m not trying to make some version of the “players have all the control now” argument or the “kids today” argument. This isn’t about picking a side in those arguments. It’s about interrogating why those narratives exist and how they affect coaching and playing sports.

It’s unlikely you’ll see habitus and capital anywhere on the agenda at the next coaching seminar you attend. But habitus and capital are part of the fabric of coaching, so why aren’t those topics being discussed? I think the biggest reason for not talking about these topics is coaches’ lack of vocabulary around such topics. Bourdieu supplies a framework to have bigger and more important discussions. Cushion supplies some questions using Bourdieu’s language:

So let’s explore these bigger and more important discussions. Let’s question the status and necessity of capital within coaching contexts.

Consider the player who says “coach me hard”. A player like that brings a previously-formed habitus with them into a new field with a different hierarchy and different social practices. The coach sees a habitus that needs adapting while the player sees something missing from the field. What’s going to change? The distribution of capital (and power) in the hierarchy establishes that the player’s habitus will change rather than the coach’s style. The player doesn’t need to agree with the coach that their behavior needs to change, they only need to comply. This is an example of symbolic violence.

It’s symbolic violence because the coach doesn’t have to overtly force the player to comply. Players know if they don’t comply they will be labeled as “not coachable”, “not caring”, or “not competitive”. Getting stuck with those labels could cost non-compliant players capital, which would manifest as being benched, being isolated, or not receiving the same coaching as compliant players. Those outcomes are combinations of coaches’ habitus and “coaching”. I put coaching in quotation marks because the coaches’ actions aren’t clearly coaching behaviors, they’re just human behaviors carried out by coaches.

It’s symbolic violence because of the arbitrary nature of coaches’ responses to the player’s behavior. The field allows coaches to respond as they choose while simultaneously not allowing players to respond as they choose. There’s no clear connection between coaches’ behaviors and their values as coaches. These behaviors aren’t clearly used to help the player become “better”, they’re used to make the player comply.

Consider another example with similar implications, “buy in” from players. On the surface, it seems that coaches are trying to have players agree with an agenda the coaches provide. But again, even though coaches seek buy in from players, they don’t actually need it. Coaches can demand compliance from the player and non-compliance will have the same repercussions mentioned above.

In part 4, I’ll finish on a more hopeful note about how neither you nor coaching are as bad as it might appear, mostly because both you and coaching are capable of changing each other.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

In part 1, I described Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital but I left out his third major concept, field. While habitus and capital are fairly easily understood in terms of an individual and in terms of one-on-one or small group (e.g.: team) interactions, the concept of field helps coaches understand the larger context within which coaching happens.

Field

At first blush, the concept of field in coaching seems straightforward enough. It’s the where, when, and who of coaching. But it’s not that simple. Field is also the why and how of coaching.

As I’ve written several times previously, the coaching you do comes from somewhere. Habitus explains some of where your coaching comes from. Bourdieu gives a framework that explains the origins of some aspects of your coaching you may not have considered previously. Field sets people’s expectations of what coaching and being coached should look like. Field determines what kinds of capital are important and what kinds aren’t. Field is how everyone knows who the leaders and followers are. Understanding the field you’re in allows you to know which coaching moves can work and which ones can’t. But the positions everyone holds and which moves work keep changing because people keep changing.

That’s kind of the goal of coaching, isn’t it? Coaches are trying to help players grow and change. You’re always helping them stretch and reach to move closer to their potential. You are always changing too. You’re gaining experience and trying new ideas. All that is gradually incorporated into who you are and the coaching you do. Bourdieu is reminding you that, as you and the athletes in your care change, the field you’re all in both enables and limits the changes that happen.

Fields and capital in coaching

Coaches and players are striving to change themselves but their reasons for doing so are rarely interrogated. It’s assumed that they’re trying to achieve things like earning scholarships and you’re trying to achieve things like winning championships. Bourdieu reminds you the things you’re each pursuing are kinds of capital. As each of you gain and lose different kinds of capital, standing in your field can fluctuate. Think of how perceptions of players change when they move into or out of the starting lineup. Think of how perceptions of coaches that have “lost the locker room” or won a conference tournament change.

Bourdieu invites you to see those changes in standing through the lens of field and capital. Coaches and players are striving for social goods. There are many ways to pursue those goods, many reasons to pursue them, and many things to do when those goods are attained or lost. There are many directions to go from here but I want to focus on how novice coaches move through their field. Cushion writes about the kinds of capital novice coaches typically seek.

A reminder from part 1 of Bourdieu’s types of capital:

• Economic (that which can be immediately and directly converted to money)

• Social (such as social position and connections)

• Cultural (such as specialized knowledge)

• Symbolic (from honor and prestige)

Cushion says that novices have “limited social gravitas”. While I agree with his assertion, I think it’s also a narrow view of social capital. Cushion seems to be saying that new coaches don’t have social capital because they don’t have many established relationships in their field. No one will take them seriously because no one knows them. It would appear the solution is to get people to take you seriously so they want to get to know you. That’s using cultural capital to earn social capital.

But, to me, that view is narrow because it assumes social status is all there is to social capital. I don’t think it is. There’s trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. Can trust be earned by knowing stuff? Yes, but it can also be earned by taking care of others. It can be earned with consistency of behavior. To me, this is the root of the cliché, “they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. The cliché tells you to pursue social capital directly, even as a novice coach, instead of pursuing cultural capital first. It’s a cliché because expert coaches tell novice coaches this constantly. Why doesn’t anyone seem to learn the lesson?

Because they think they learned it. They take time outside of practice to build relationships, asking players about their lives outside of sport. For many coaches, that effort seems to suffice for showing how much they care. To me, it demonstrates, that capital is only useful as part of field. While I agree that coaches really are showing care and gaining social capital, they’re still missing a vital perspective about field.

The statement above gets to the heart of the difference. The issue, in Bourdieu’s terms, is that the capital the coaches are earning can’t be easily used in the field they want. While there is some consistency in habitus and social rules between the “outside sport” field and the “inside sport” field, that doesn’t mean capital earned in one field is easily transferred to the other. Coaches have power inside sport that they don’t have outside sport. They have much more control over the hierarchies inside the teams they’re part of. They can show care for a player outside of sport but then disregard them inside their sport because the player’s “inside sport” cultural capital is very different than their “outside sport” social capital.

Just like coaches, players are pursuing both cultural capital and social capital both outside sport and inside sport. When coaches don’t fully honor players’ pursuit inside sport, they fail to learn the lesson of showing how much they care inside sport. Experienced coaches work at connecting with players’ pursuit of capital inside sport and finding ways to support each player’s individual pursuit. I don’t think that kind of work is inaccessible to novice coaches. I think it’s just something that falls into a blindspot because they’re so fixated on showing how much they know.

That brings us to the last section, where we try to understand how coaches are influenced by fields and habitus. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably already guessed this will not be wrapped up neatly. That’s where we’ll start in part 3.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

The quotation below sets the stage for this discussion.

Cushion is saying that coaching is often treated as a collection of skills, drills, and competitions. According to this view, coaches can take individual drills, games, and ways of performing skills, mix and match them, and call it coaching. The problem with this, Cushion points out, is that coaching loses its connection to the people that are being coached and to the people doing the coaching. It becomes a thing coaches do to people instead of a thing they do with people. The social aspect of coaching is crucial because coaches and players aren’t things, they are people and people inevitably relate to one another in different ways as they do things together. People have things they value and those values impact how they do what they do together.

I’m going to cheat and include a quotation from a different book, but I think it provides a crucial perspective. I read this quotation from linguist James Paul Gee several years ago and it has stuck with me ever since.

Although Gee is referring specifically to language, the quotation makes the larger point that all our social activities are “political” because social goods are involved. Gee refers to “money, status, power, and acceptance” as social goods and that connection is perhaps the most important lesson in the chapter I’m discussing here. As Cushion states at the end of his chapter,

So how can people make sense of the politics of coaching? As the title of the chapter indicates, Pierre Bourdieu created frameworks to help explain. The sociologist had three areas of focus that, together, shed light on how social goods are distributed and contested in coaching. Those three areas are habitus, capital, and field.

Habitus

The word habitus closely resembles habit, and with good reason. It describes actions people take that are expressions of who they are, what they believe, what the their history has disposed them towards, and what they see in the situation they’re in. You can see that habitus may be part habit, but it is also much more than that. As Cushion writes,

There’s a circular nature to what habitus is and how it is expressed. It reminds me of the M. C. Escher piece, Drawing Hands. Habitus is both a creator of structure as well as a structure itself that is created. Habitus is part of a feedback loop in which it is simultaneously both cause and effect. One hand draws the other into existence.

But those descriptions might not have given you a clear idea of how habitus actually shows up in you and in your coaching. I don’t know if it’s possible to easily sum up habitus, but I’d start with two words: structured improvisation. Every practice, every competition is at least a little bit planned and at least a little bit made up. That’s not exactly what habitus is, but it gives you a great way to relate.

What makes the structured improvisation of habitus different than that of practice and competition is that the structure of habitus is mostly invisible. It is the “…combination of a social actor’s deeply ingrained identity and his or her less fixed, occupational identity (Meisenhelder, 1997; Everett, 2002)” (p. 44). The improvisation flows out from these identities. It is improvisation because the combination of identities and moments is ever-changing. Improvising based on that structure creates new understanding and new possibilities for action that become part of the structure that then gives rise to new improvisation.

Habitus is both how you act and what has shaped your choices and actions. But it is not formed or reproduced in a vacuum. Habitus is a product of and a producer of social practices and structures. And Bourdieu saw additional factors that also influence and impact social practices.

Capital

Like the habitus/habit similarity, the second piece of Bourdieu’s frameworks uses a word that calls to mind other meanings. You may be familiar with capital as it relates to economics, where it refers to the means to acquire goods and services. When Bourdieu talks about capital, he’s talking about the means to acquire social goods.

Gee referred to money, status, power, and acceptance as social goods that are always at stake in social interactions. Bourdieu refers to several forms of capital:

• Economic (that which can be immediately and directly converted to money)

  • A pro contract is a form of economic capital

• Cultural (such as educational credentials)

  • Knowing specialized language about your sport is a form of cultural capital

  • Habitus is closely related to cultural capital

• Social (such as social position and connections)

  • Wearing popular clothes and shoes is a form of social capital

• Symbolic (from honor and prestige)

  • MVP and All-American awards are forms of symbolic capital

  • Being seen as “coachable” or credible are also forms of symbolic capital

Having capital gets you power so many social interactions are driven by the desire to either demonstrate the capital you possess or gain capital. Different people may pursue different forms of capital in the same situation. The same person may pursue different forms of capital in different situations. It’s all very context-dependent, with people ranking the importance of different forms of capital in various ways. People leverage one form of capital to gain more of another.

A coach can portray themselves as knowing a great deal about coaching a particular skill when talking to players (cultural capital) but then choose to portray themselves an knowing less when talking to another coach (symbolic capital). A coach can leverage a conference coach of the year award (symbolic capital) into a better contract at another school (economic capital). A player may emphasize how much their team likes them (social capital) to convince their coach to select them as team captain (symbolic capital).

Coaches, players, and other stakeholders are constantly cooperating and competing for social goods. You can be positive, you can be negative, you can (very rarely) be neutral. What you can’t be is outside of it all:

Who you are and what you value is constantly being shaped by the coaching you do as well as where, when, and who you are coaching. Capital is just a way of framing some of the factors that shape your coaching world.

Bourdieu has one more concept that affects coaches. While habitus and capital are fairly easily understood in terms of an individual and in terms of one-on-one or small group (e.g.: team) interactions, the concept of field helps coaches understand the larger context within which coaching happens. That’s where I’ll start part 2.

I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter three, “Michel Foucault: Power and discourse, The ‘loaded’ language of coaching”, written by Jim Denison.

I ended part 1 saying it’s virtually impossible for me to coach purely subject matter when I see power everywhere. I can’t watch others coach and only see how they coach skills while ignoring how they use power. You are never teaching just subject matter. You are always exercising control and, therefore, teaching others how to respond to that control.

Many coaches are aware of how they use power only in explicit situations. They know they’re demonstrating power when they impose punishments. They know they’re demonstrating power when they make decisions that could be either given to players or made with player input. They are far less aware of how they use power at other times. Remember power influences what others can think, do, and be in spaces they share with you. Who gets to make decisions, both during and outside of practice and play? Are all players wearing the same outfits at practice? While the players may get to choose what they actually wear, whose choice was it to match in the first place? Why is matching important? Who does most of the talking in huddles? What’s the ratio of questions to statements or to requirements? These are all expressions of power because they are all rules, whether explicit or implicit. They all speak to what you will support players thinking, doing, and being.

Discourses and power are intricate and many-layered. It’s possible to give with one hand while taking away with the other; to appear to acknowledge the power of others while also dismissing that power. I knew a coach with an “open door” policy and they regularly met with players who had ideas and concerns. Allowing such meetings is a one way of sharing power. That same coach would often use those meetings to listen to those ideas and concerns and then explain to players why their ideas were inadequate or why their concerns were invalid. The coach could still say they listened to the players, but they also influenced the players to think, do, and be exactly what they wanted the players to be. The coach made space for players to express themselves while simultaneously negating any sense of empowerment they may have hoped for as a result of their expression. The coach was able to do this because a larger discourse supports such behavior.

In part 1, I mentioned that coaching is its own endeavor but it is simultaneously located within a larger discourse. The specific coaching you do is nested within the discourse of sport coaching in general. It is nested within the discourse of the community where you coach, like the city you’re in and/or the league you coach in. Those discourses set expectations for what kinds of coaching and playing behaviors are valued. Others, often people not even present when you coach, are influencing what you (and players) can think, do, and be. Those larger discourses can facilitate certain behaviors while inhibiting others.

Coaches are, more often than not, liberated by larger discourses that affect coaching. Players are, more often than not, limited by larger discourses that affect coaching. For instance, in my “open door” example above, notice who has the power around having meetings. The coach is free to determine the “appropriate” forms of communication. The player is limited to the forms the coach chooses. But how was that balance determined? We are simultaneously subject to the discourses we are part of while also shaping those discourses as well.

We shape discourses by how we set rules for others and for ourselves. We shape discourses by when and how we follow, bend, and break the rules others have set for us. Teaching can be setting rules. Teaching can also be an exploration of the space created by rules. Denison works to show coaches your coaching can be better when you pay attention to how discourses impact you. He works to show coaches how your coaching can improve when you actively engage with your situation rather than passively accepting it. What does that active engagement look like?

I am always asking myself what I am teaching to others. I am teaching them how to play a sport and how to comply with my control over them. Players trade their autonomy for a chance to learn how to play a sport from someone they perceive as an expert. Today’s society tells us that the “truth” is specialized coaching is necessary to learn sports so players appear to have no choice but to subject themselves to the control of a coach if they want to participate in sports. While there are varying degrees of control exerted by coaches over players in such a discourse, the control nevertheless exists. Even a “player’s coach”? Yes. A player’s coach is a coach that chooses to express their power, just in less-controlling ways.

But player’s coaches may or may not make the nature of the discourse plain. Players may only see they have more autonomy playing “for” such a coach. But they are still subject to the “truth” that dictates a coach is necessary. There is still an unstated assumption that a coach must be part of the experience. I’m not saying that all players should rebel and there should be no more coaches. I am saying that the nature of the coach-player discourse may need the coach to make the first move in changing that nature.

Remember that people are never powerless to change discourses. Foucault believed individuals “…had the opportunity to negotiate and to work within power relations in productive and positive ways” (p. 34). Once you create an awareness of how you function in a particular discourse, you create the means for changing that discourse. This is what it means to coach in an engaged way. In my opinion, part of a coach’s expertise is creating space for changing a discourse. In the words of the author:

The thing I want to point out in this approach is how the author talks about helping the athlete construct a new narrative. A “new narrative” can mean a lot of things, like believing they can play a new position they haven’t played before or that they can get stronger via a new strength program. But it can also mean helping an athlete open themselves to a new way of performing a skill. Rather than just demand that an athlete change their behavior to create change, the coach instead seeks to change the athlete’s relationship to the behavior. That, too, is power because it is influencing what the athlete views as possible and what they are willing to try.

Another example of constructing a new narrative is how a coach interacts with a player that expects the coach to “coach them hard”. There are frequently many aspects of the discourse that influence players to accept, and even encourage, derogatory and controlling behaviors from coaches. An engaged coach can help the player construct a new narrative about what kind of coaching facilitates better performance. But that construction will take much more work than just telling the player they should just start over and believe something else.

I think a coach in this situation can help an athlete create a new narrative by asking two questions. First, the coach can ask them how coaches in their past have treated them. Second, the coach can ask them who they think holds primary responsibility for getting the best out of them. With these questions, the coach is inviting the athlete to reflect on the power relations in their past, compare them to present power relations, and consider possible new relations going forward.

It’s so much easier to think of coaching as just teaching subject matter. Foucault shows you that coaching is not and never can be just about subject matter. You cannot socially engineer your way out of that truth. The influences of power are everywhere. Your coaching can be so much better when you learn about the discourses you are in and choose to engage with them rather than just conforming to them.

I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter three, “Michel Foucault: Power and discourse, The ‘loaded’ language of coaching”, written by Jim Denison.

This book tackles some topics that transcend coaching but have profound impacts on how coaching is done. The chapter on the work of Michel Foucault contains this statement in the introduction:

If I want to understand coaching better, I need to first provide a framework that will help me understand coaching better. The beginning of that framework is the recognition that coaching exists both within a larger context but also as a unique endeavor in itself. To understand this idea, the author uses Foucault’s concept of discourse. You can think of a discourse as a collection of ways of thinking, doing, and being that shape your experiences of the whole world as well as specific parts of the larger world.

When I say coaching exists as a unique discourse, I mean there are ways of thinking, doing, and being that only make sense within the context of coaching sports. For example, in volleyball, the term “set” is used in two different ways. Coaches and players rarely need to stop and explain which one they mean because, to them, the context is usually quite clear. To non-volleyball people, the difference between the terms might not be clear at all.

When I say coaching also exists in a larger context, I mean there are many aspects of coaching that are influenced by broader systems elsewhere in the world. The nature of the relationship between coaches and players resembles much of the structure and expectations of teacher-student relationships. While some words, like “set”, have special meaning, others, like “learn” are used more or less the same way as they are elsewhere in the world.

You can call “seeking to understand coaching” engaging in discourse analysis. The authors frame it like this:

That suggests that discourse analysis is far more than just simply defining words. Discourse analysis is a process of coming to understand who people can be and who they become as a result of being part of a particular discourse. Analyzing what coaching is or how it’s understood can take a lot of forms but the book chapter I’m digging into uses a specific kind of analysis, Foucauldian discourse analysis. That means the author was considering discourse through a very specific lens, that of power. The author quotes Foucault when defining power as “a relationship whereby the actions of some help to guide or direct ‘the possible field of action of others’” (p. 31). For Foucault, power is about relationships and how different people can influence what others think and do.

The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote engage in a specific discourse. They both agree to participate according to certain rules. (Wile E.’s agreement is implicit in his continued pursuit of his adversary. What if he just walked out of the frame instead?) The rules allow them to (briefly) defy the laws of physics. The rules also doom Wile E. Coyote to constant defeat. While both characters have the power to act as they choose, only one of them is allowed to succeed. This, Foucault tells us, is how rules (power) construct “truth”.

I put “truth” in quotation marks because it emphasizes that truth is not nearly as objective as we assume. The key idea is that truth is socially constructed, in the real world as well as in cartoon worlds. But not everything can be contested in the real world. You can’t socially construct your way out of the effects of gravity, for instance, no matter what Wile E. Coyote might want. But you can (and do) socially construct your way into almost everything about coaching.

Denison is saying that what “coaching” is, is agreed upon, usually without much notice, by coaches and athletes. That agreement becomes the “truth”. Coaches demonstrate their agreement with what coaching is by acting in certain ways, like having players warm up before practice or competition. Players demonstrate their agreement with what coaching is by participating in the warm up. This is an example of power being about how one person or group can influence what another person or group thinks and does. The coach does something because they think it’s objectively true and players follow the coach because they believe the coach is always right. But players also follow because coaches don’t like coaching players who don’t agree with them.

While power may be unequally distributed between coaches and players, it is important to note that neither group is powerless. Just like Wile E. Coyote, there is some power present, even if it isn’t exercised in a contrary way. For instance, if a player doesn’t agree with the assertion that warming up is useful, they could arrive late to practice to avoid warming up. And, even though coaches typically hold more power than players, they are simultaneously in relationships in which they hold less power. For instance, coaches are regularly subjected to coaching orthodoxy. If a coach uses an “unconventional” warm up, the coach ends up answering endless questions about their competency and/or being told to change the warm up.

Some might call what coaches and players feel “pressure”. We can talk about pressure being exerted on the coach to change and conform. But, according to Foucault, it would be more accurate to think of influence rather than pressure. For Foucault, pressure suggests outright control of the discourse. But coaches may not see themselves as being pressured and, instead, see themselves as maintaining the status quo and answering to the requirements or the standards of coaching. Coaches want to maintain the status quo because doing so helps them feel competent. That’s the difference between pressure and influence, the person agrees to conform on their own.

I’ve mostly kept the focus on how coaches are subject to power in how they choose how to coach. And, believe me, that can give you enough to chew on about how you choose to coach. But what I think about even more is how coaches’ power is silently shaping how others experience their coaching, sports, learning, competing, and, ultimately, how those others experience themselves. I can’t stop thinking about this quote from the chapter: “Sport in this sense, as practised [sic] by many coaches, can be thought of as a modern discipline that is ‘both an exercise of control and a subject matter’ (Shogan, 1999: 11)” (p. 32).

It’s virtually impossible for me to coach purely subject matter when I see power everywhere. I can’t watch others coach and only see how they coach skills while ignoring how they use power. You are never teaching just subject matter. You are always exercising control and, therefore, teaching others how to respond to that control.

That’s where I’ll pick up in part 2.

What is “One Player at a Time”? - read here

Like many coaches, coaching is the second act of Cindi Miller’s athletic career. But, you could say coaching is also her third or fourth act as well. And she packed even more into each act as well. When Cindi reflects on her playing career, she feels like she went from being very loose and celebratory to overly focused while in high school and then back to loose while in college. While she felt more loose, she also found herself treating playing as a job, telling herself that she was paid to perform. She also took the title of “student-athlete” very seriously. When she wasn’t in the gym, it was all about school. With that level of focus, it’s pretty impressive that she was able to feel loose while she was playing.

But that looseness belied her “have to” mentality around playing. Contrast that with Emma, a player Cindi worked with during her time coaching in college. Cindi describes Emma (not her actual name) as treating volleyball “more as a hobby” and that she approached the game with a “get to” mentality. In a word, Cindi described Emma’s approach as “joy”.

Cindi described Emma as “one of the most joyful people I’ve ever met”. Cindi described her playing self, on the other hand, as driven more by a sense of responsibility than anything else. That contrast is important because Emma’s approach to sports helped Cindi understand a lot about herself, about the coach she was, and about the coach she wanted to be.

Both Cindi and Emma were perfectionists as players but that perfectionism was expressed very differently in each of them. Emma was very much a people pleaser. Since many people-pleasing behaviors can also be called “coachable” behaviors, it’s important to distinguish between the behaviors and the motivations behind them. It’s hard to know if a player’s constant head nodding and attention to your every word is rooted in a desire to maximize their potential or to minimize the disappointment of others. Cindi came to learn that Emma’s coachability was a product of fear.

That fear doesn’t have to be caused by the coaches, it can be something players bring with them. But coaches can certainly bring it out of players, no matter their intentions. That’s something Cindi learned from Emma. Cindi, as a young, inexperienced coach, was often too tangled up in figuring out who she was supposed to be and that kept her from seeing who Emma was. Cindi, being close in age to the players she was coaching, felt the need to create separation between herself and them. Cindi also felt unprepared, saying “athletes came into my office and I felt I wasn’t qualified to help them.”

Cindi was caught in situation created by the way coaches are (or, better, are not) developed. Young, inexperienced coaches are left to their own devices instead of being guided by the coaches they work for and with. As a result, Cindi was powerless to help players like Emma in the ways they needed it most. Since no one helped Cindi figure out how to talk to Emma about anything other than volleyball, Cindi’s coaching was severely limited.

Cindi’s sense of not being prepared led to her to feel like, in her words, “I needed to know all the answers.” Unfortunately, knowing all the answers was restricted to volleyball stuff. She felt she wasn’t allowed to address issues of personhood, empathy, or compassion. That made anything more than the most rudimentary kinds of coaching awkward. As a young, female assistant coach, she was expected to be the “good cop” to the head coach’s “bad cop”. Cindi found herself enforcing rules that she didn’t align with. And, while she could feel that disconnect, she didn’t have any way of managing the situation. She told me she wanted “to be their safe space.” But when you don’t feel equipped or supported to talk about anything more than volleyball, how do you do that?

Cindi described the coaching part of her as being “emotionally disregulated”. She watched as Emma showed the “other end of the spectrum” of her joyful emotions during practice and competition. When Emma wasn’t feeling okay with how she was measuring up to people’s standards, it would hit her hard. Cindi watched Emma “power through” her negative emotions. Cindi talked about learning from Emma in moments like that, but she didn’t talk about being able to help Emma make sense of what she was going through. Cindi told me Emma “couldn’t verbalize where her feelings came from” and I don’t know if Cindi knew at the time where those feelings came from either.

Cindi eventually left college coaching and also stopped coaching club volleyball for several years because the gap between her values and the values of the coaches and club she worked for was too much for her to reconcile. She said she “couldn’t be complicit in causing fear in athletes.” But, lest you believe this story is one of burnout and missed opportunities, Cindi is coaching again. She’s also in regular contact with Emma and other players from those college teams. She kept those experiences with her and learned from them as she studied to become a therapist. She brought her education to bear on her experiences and came to understand her coaching in a different light. She talked with former players and learned with them and from them about what coach-player relationships can be like.

Cindi recalls apologizing to Emma years later for her inauthenticity. She apologized for not allowing Emma and others to have the same experience she had as a college student and athlete. She remembers Emma giggling and saying there was nothing to apologize for (which, Cindi added, is exactly what a people pleaser would say). She recalls Emma calling her “Coach Cindi” and how that made Cindi realize that title was something she no longer wants to identify with. It might be appropriate to describe “Coach Cindi” as putting athletes first and people second. It’s hard to put anything other than sport first when you feel like you don’t have the tools or the support to coach people first.

Now, Cindi says her coaching is firmly rooted in “person first, athlete second”. To her, that means her coaching embraces that neither she nor people in her care should expect themselves to have 100% to give every day. It means not expecting people, including adults, to have perfect emotional regulation. It means not expecting perfect performance. Perhaps, above all, it means listening.

As Cindi returns to coaching, she’s asking herself how she can impact athletes in a different way, one that reflects her belief in “person first, athlete second”. She described the “whirlwind” the players in her care felt as they experienced compassion from a coach, something that “Coach Cindi” may have had but couldn’t express. Cindi seeks to feel emotionally regulated as she coaches, not allowing others to determine her mood the way they could when she was an athlete and, again, as a young coach. She’s “in love with light bulb moments right now”, helping people in her care to make connections, both athletic and emotional. She works to be “calm, cool, and collected”, showing people in her care how much she loves and cares about them.

But, perhaps most important to me, is that Cindi wants to feel joyful in her coaching. She never forgot how palpable Emma’s joy was to her and others around her. It may be the highest tribute a coach can give to a person they coached. Cindi embraced this emotion that she, herself, had such difficulty expressing for so long, and made it a centerpiece of how she and others experience her coaching.

Have questions for Cindi? You can ask me here, you can email her directly, or follow her on Instagram.

When you’re at a national qualifier (or any other club tournament), you may find yourself needing to scout an opponent you have no prior knowledge of. You might only see one match before you play them. What can you do to prepare yourself and your team to play against them? At VolleyStation, we’re surrounded by expert scouts so we asked them what they would do. We organized their ideas into easily actionable steps for you to follow when you’re scouting at your next tournament.

Four Questions to Guide Your Scouting

It’s easy to just watch an opponent play and jot down random notes about what you see but it can be difficult to turn those notes into something coherent. Here are four questions that will help you stay focused on what matters.

1. What can they do?

2. What do they want to do?

3. How can we absorb their pressure?

4. How can we exert pressure on them?

What can they do?

This question seems like an invitation to write down anything and everything the team you’re scouting tries, but it’s actually asking you to discriminate between what they try and what they can actually do. Here are things analysts recommend focusing on.

• What are their common attack patterns? (Some analysts we talked to said they weren’t concerned about specific rotations, but others were. We say try both and see what works best for you.)

• Who are their strongest and weakest passers?

• Do they have particularly powerful servers or servers who often serve short?

What do they want to do?

This question helps you narrow down everything a team might do into the essence of that team. Every team has certain things they want to maximize to give themselves good opportunities to score. Good scouting helps you focus on what your opponent emphasizes.

• Who is their top attacker?

• Who are their secondary attackers?

• Who are the most common attackers in certain situations (like first ball, transition, or rotation 3)?

• Which rotations do you see them start in?

How can you absorb their pressure?

As you’re watching a team’s offense, it’s important to think about how you will defend against them. You don’t have to change your systems dramatically, but you do want to pay attention to how their offense is going to put pressure on your defense.

• What are some general attack directions/tendencies? (Analysts we talked to emphasized keeping this very general, don’t get bogged down in details.)

  • How will your team defend against their most common attacks?

• Do they serve particular passers or particular areas of the court?

  • How will your team handle passing responsibilities against their serving strategies?

How can you exert pressure on them?

By noting some of a team’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies, you can map your own team’s strengths on top of those to make some tactical choices.

• How do they defend against attacks from each zone?

  • Who can you set to exploit their defense?

  • Where can you hit to exploit their defense?

• Which rotation can you start in to maximize the pressure you can apply?

• How can you apply your serving strengths to exploit their passing?

What do you communicate to your team?

If you answer all the questions above, you’ll have far more than you need to compete against the team you scout. Take a few minutes to consider what you should do with the information you’ve gathered.

• What did you see that’s interesting vs. what did you see that makes a difference?

  • Not everything you see will require changes from your team. If what the other team will do doesn’t change what you want to do, there’s no need to bring it up.

• Keep your notes and changes focused on what your team can do.

  • If an opponent does something you’ve never faced before, let them know it’s coming but don’t spend time trying to devise a new plan that your team has never tried. It’s not all about adjusting to the other team. Stick to your strengths, play your game.

More KIT than KISS

College and pro analysts have much more information than they communicate and they recognize they don’t have to Keep It Simple, they need to Keep It Tight. Your players can understand what’s happening and they don’t need it explained to them. You need to decide which factors will score enough points to matter and which factors won’t score enough to be decisive. It’s not about how much information the players can handle, it’s about prioritizing and editing that information down to what will drive winning.

In the end, remember your scouting is a distillation process from many possibilities down to fewer likelihoods but not all the way down to certainties. Don’t hesitate to change your plan if the match isn’t going the way you scouted. Stay curious and nimble during your match.

Thanks to Andrew Clark and Daniel Jones, among others, who contributed their ideas when I reached out.

I thought I’d share it here for those that are thinking about location data. A few notes about the talk…

• The 50/50/50 club in the first plot (slide 4) is an idea that originated with Andrew Clark. The 50s are percentages: kill percentage, good pass percentage, and serving knockout percentage. A player joins the club by having greater than 50% in each of those metrics in a single match. Think of it kind of like a triple-double, but harder to do. Only 8 LOVB players have 50/50/50 matches this season.

• The “Multiplicative Idiocy” drawing (slide 21) is from The Oatmeal. While I think the comic puts it rather harshly, I really like the main point, that combining ideas is multiplicative rather than additive. I see it constantly in brainstorming meetings, people trying to marry ideas together and ending up with a result that is less than the original separate ideas. I think it’s important to consider that not all ideas should end up together. Sometimes, some ideas should lose.

• If you don’t remember it, the weight room controversy (slides 23 & 24) was a very public display of a systemic issue that can affect how support staff can be affected along with teams. Factors outside your control can severely hamper what’s possible.

• As I mentioned, I love Sankey diagrams (slide 27). Visually, they can be amazing. I think there’s so much in sport that works well with flowing visuals.

Here’s a link to the slides: Google Slides link

Here’s the video:

The concept below comes from The Sports Coach as Educator edited by Robyn Jones1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eleven, “The development of expert coaching”, written by Paul Schempp, Bryan McCullick, and Ilse Sannen Mason.

I was inspired by this passage from the chapter:

Borrowing from the work of David Berliner (1994) in educational psychology, the purpose of this chapter is to describe the developmental stages in becoming an expert coach. Specifically, the skills, knowledge, characteristics and perspectives common to coaches as they pass from beginner, to competent, to proficient, to expert coach will be identified (Bell 1997, Berliner 1994). While these stages seem to imply a hierarchy, everyone passes from one to the next on the journey toward improvement. One can, however, choose where one stops in developing expertise. To help meet the new challenges of sport, these stages will be presented so that sport coaches may identify their current stage and recognize the skills, perspectives and knowledge necessary to elevate to the next level and beyond. (p. 145)

In part 1, I gave some initial thoughts, both of the authors and of my own, about the how to define coach development and about the first two stages the authors lay out, beginner and competent. In part 2, I described the authors’ views on stage 3, proficiency, as well as my own thoughts on what it means to be proficient. In this part, I’ll discuss expertise, as well as dig into what I still haven’t figured out about coach development.

The last stage is perhaps the most fraught, possibly because it’s viewed as the ultimate goal of coaches. But, even if it is so highly sought after, that goal can still look very different for different coaches. And that variety maybe can’t be captured within a single framework.

Expert Stage

Experts, as far as the authors are concerned, are simply coaches who consistently get the best performances out of athletes in their care. The athletes “learn more and perform better than athletes of less expert coaches” (p. 155). Much of what the authors go on to describe about expert coaches are just extensions of skills evident in other stages of coaches: extensive knowledge, intuitive decision making, excellent planning, etc.. The key to expertise, it seems, is doing a larger variety of things that lead to positive outcomes more often.

While that seems a bit self-evident, I think it’s worth digging into. The authors are saying three things about experts: they do a wider range of things than proficient coaches, the things they do lead to improved athlete performance, and the things they do lead to improvement more often. To put it another way, expert coaches have more tools and they know better when to use each one to get more of what they’re looking for. But I wonder if there’s some survivorship bias in this description. Did the authors look at coaches they deemed to be experts and conclude that anything they did must be expert behavior? What if the results the authors observed were correlated to expert coaching behaviors but not caused by them? These are difficult questions to study and answer. Even if those questions don’t have easy answers, I think the points the authors make are still worth considering.

Why do expert coaches have more tools that work better? Because they’ve figured out what works for them and what doesn’t. But that’s not a reference to a list of moves they rely on or avoid, it’s a reference to them understanding their personal strengths and weaknesses. They don’t walk into situations, size them up, and pick a tool out of their toolbox. Picking a tool out of a toolbox infers that coaching actions are discrete, external things that coaches can acquire and I don’t think that’s the best way of looking at expert coaching. Instead, I believe they walk into a situation, have a conversation with that situation, and develop a way to add to that conversation that moves the situation forward. This view is taken from Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner, a book the authors are fond of.

I believe expert coaches help a larger percentage of athletes a greater amount because of their understanding of specificity. They understand that individual athletes are just that, individuals. They aren’t identical, and coaches treat them identically at their peril. Helping each player get more out of themselves is a product of expert coaches’ ability to tailor their coaching to who they are coaching and the situation in which the coaching happens. This is another example of the metaphorical conversation the expert has with the situation.

Developing these metaphorical conversation skills actually does take time because each coach needs to build their own viewpoint and voice. I think there are two main reasons why most coaches don’t reach this stage in their coaching. First, many coaches run out of time. As I’ve mentioned earlier, that’s where I think the coaching community should change how it treats beginning coaches. We have the opportunity to engage with them and help them shape how they view coaching. Second, it takes a lot of reflective work on your values and purposes. That work isn’t mandatory to coach, it’s just mandatory to be an expert coach. Many coaches will put their efforts into other areas of coaching. And that brings me to the stuff I can’t reconcile about coach development.

What Else Is There?

I can’t escape this feeling that there’s some kind of track that runs parallel to the stages of coaching expertise presented by the authors. Coaches can (and do) view their game and their place in it through a variety of lens. So expertise can look a lot of different ways and I think that variety of excellence is somehow both explained by and also outside the framework the authors have constructed. Their stages explain a lot about the skills coaches possess but I’m not sure those stages can tell me if a coach is good or successful. That might be because there aren’t single ways of defining either of those terms.

I think this might be due, at least in part, to the lack of coaching goals and values described in the framework. The skill framework laid out can be considered in the absence of coaching goals and values but I think, without goals and values, coaches are left wondering which skills are worth pursuing more intently than others.

As much as it seems to go against what the authors outline, I think it’s possible to be an expert at elements of coaching without aligning with the progression of stages. One coach can become very adept at collecting and applying drills and games in their practices. Another coach can create an amazing toolbox, full of techniques for players to master. Both coaches could be simultaneously considered expert coaches and yet that designation doesn’t capture what you or I might consider most important about coaching. They have found ways of coaching that satisfy them and they are working to maximize their skills within their definitions of coaching.

What might lead to different definitions of coaching and different paths to coaching expertise? The authors suggest one way for a coach to consider themselves successful, by measuring athlete improvement. But that characteristic is far from the only way. That measurement of success relies on a particular coaching value: player improvement. Are there other values a coach can hold that still allow them to become experts?

“Perform better” is a broad concept so it feels like there’s plenty of room for valuing different aspects of performance: physical ability, technical skill, competitiveness, among others. It seems like helping players improve in any of these areas could be an indication of coaching expertise. And there are still plenty of other values and goals coaches can have for their coaching and for the athletes in their care. I’m not sure I can say that players “performing better” is the only way to measure coaching expertise.

Another complex topic in coach development is learning from outside sources. The authors state that proficient and expert coaches learn from a variety of sources: other coaches, conferences, coaching books, non-coaching books, etc.. (I argue this is another thing beginning coaches don’t have to wait to do, but that’s not the point just now.) A coach’s goals and values will direct them to outside sources that hold ideas that are most useful to them. It’s not only important that coaches seek diverse sources of learning, but also that they are aware of what they learn from those sources. Seeking outside sources of learning is an expression of not only a coach’s skill but also an expression of their values. The expertise is not in seeking outside sources, but in knowing what to bring back to your coaching.

Maybe the most challenging thing for me as a coach developer is understanding the relationship between developing coaching skills and developing coaching values. I think both areas are vital for coaches and they are necessarily intertwined. What a coach wants to learn in one area is influenced by what they care about in the other. I think what makes mentoring coaches so challenging is when they are unaware that such a relationship exists. I go back to the Logic of Appropriateness: if a coach wants to know what to do in a given situation, they need to know who they are. As much as I’d love to just tell a coach what to do, my answer is rooted in who I am and I would be doing that coach a disservice by telling them what I would do instead of guiding them to what makes sense for them.

As awkward and dissatisfying as it would be in the moment, I think my job as a coach developer is to bring the coach’s attention to themselves before returning it to the situation. As with so many kinds of learning, it isn’t easy or comfortable and it often doesn’t make sense to the learner at first. But that’s better than imposing my own values on their coaching. But maybe that’s the most important lesson about expertise: it isn’t something that can be earned, given, or found. It doesn’t just happen over time, it has to be built.

The concept below comes from The Sports Coach as Educator edited by Robyn Jones1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eleven, “The development of expert coaching”, written by Paul Schempp, Bryan McCullick, and Ilse Sannen Mason.

I was inspired by this passage from the chapter:

Borrowing from the work of David Berliner (1994) in educational psychology, the purpose of this chapter is to describe the developmental stages in becoming an expert coach. Specifically, the skills, knowledge, characteristics and perspectives common to coaches as they pass from beginner, to competent, to proficient, to expert coach will be identified (Bell 1997, Berliner 1994). While these stages seem to imply a hierarchy, everyone passes from one to the next on the journey toward improvement. One can, however, choose where one stops in developing expertise. To help meet the new challenges of sport, these stages will be presented so that sport coaches may identify their current stage and recognize the skills, perspectives and knowledge necessary to elevate to the next level and beyond. (p. 145)

In part 1, I gave some initial thoughts, both of the authors and of my own, about the how to define coach development and about the first two stages the authors lay out, beginner and competent. In this part, I’ll discuss proficiency.

Beginning coaches, you may remember, tend to rely on algorithms to coach because they view coaching environments as stable and consistent. This reliance narrows their vision to mostly things related to players following coach plans and instructions because everything else can be thought of as constant. Competent coaches recognize the dynamic nature of coaching situations and plan differently to account for that. The main difference between them is how they view coaching situations. I think that shift in view may be more important than the differences between any other stages. But let’s get into the next stage anyways.

Proficient Stage

According to the authors, a big difference between competent coaches and proficient coaches is what they notice. In addition to seeing what their team needs, proficient coaches also see what the individuals on the team need as well. They can keep track of individual players’ performances while managing the demands of practice and competition.

I think the authors assume proficient coaches add this skill on top of the skills of a competent coach but, if I’m honest, I’m not sure a coach has to adopt the view of a competent coach in order to exhibit the skills of proficiency. A coach can notice how both a whole team as well as individuals on the team are or are not following rules. A coach can have intricate plans for both a whole team as well as individuals. So maybe there’s more to proficiency than just seeing both team and individuals.

The authors say proficient coaches notice the things that matter most; they don’t treat everything as being equally important. Another way of describing a proficient coach’s approach is:

While beginning and competent coaches often see the symptom, it is the proficient coach who can see past it and identify the cause. Once the cause has been identified, it is far easier to supply the appropriate cure. While a beginner flounders in futile attempts to cure all the symptoms she or he sees, the proficient coach easily cures the multitude of symptoms by eliminating the cause. (p. 152)

I don’t think a coach can grasp what is most important in a situation without critically evaluating what the situation actually is first. In that sense, I would put this skill after competence. But it also feels like the authors are resorting to flowery language without really specifying how these skills are developed, they only indicate that proficient coaches have developed them.

The authors seem to believe that skills like being able to notice both player and team progress and diagnosing causes are products of time and I’m inclined to agree, but with reservations. I think they’re describing the world as it is: it takes so much time for coaches to expand their vision because they’re allowed to spend their early coaching careers doing things that don’t build coaching expertise. But that doesn’t mean they have to take so much time to develop that wider vision. There’s nothing magic about the passage of time that improves coaches by itself. Coaches develop because they change their behaviors to meet changing situations. There’s nothing requiring coaches to wait to change their behaviors. Coaches could accelerate their development by choosing (or being mentored to choose) to focus on different things.

The authors do make a recommendation about how coaches might do this: “Beginning and competent coaches can speed the development of this process by attempting to identify the environment cues that are most pertinent to a player’s performance and the lesson goals…” (p. 153). I’ll build on their recommendation by quoting from a different book, Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential: “Accelerating learning requires…being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it” (Grant, 2023: 33). There’s a lot of uncertainty for coaches who choose such a path but I think that’s for the better because coaching isn’t about certainty, no matter how much coaches may act as if it were so.

So getting to proficiency can happen slowly, over time, mostly by chance. Or it can be achieved by creating and taking chances. I think a beginning or competent coach would have a difficult time figuring out how to create such chances by themselves but I think they could learn from more knowledgeable others that took an active interest in their development. I think guidance from mentors could help less experienced coaches feel secure in exploring and taking chances instead of seeking security through rules and procedures when they are left to their own devices.

There’s a lovely phrasing of the idea of exploring and taking chances instead of seeking safety that I am borrowing from Martinus Evans, founder of the Slow AF Run Club (I highly recommend checking out his story and his mission). He said he didn’t have to be competent to belong, he said he needed to “be there to become”.

Regardless of how coaches find their security, it seems that feeling secure positions coaches to learn and develop sufficiently to be considered experts. That’s where I’ll pick up in part 3, talking about expertise and what I still can’t account for in coach development.

The concept below comes from The Sports Coach as Educator edited by Robyn Jones1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eleven, “The development of expert coaching”, written by Paul Schempp, Bryan McCullick, and Ilse Sannen Mason.

I was inspired by this passage from the chapter:

Borrowing from the work of David Berliner (1994) in educational psychology, the purpose of this chapter is to describe the developmental stages in becoming an expert coach. Specifically, the skills, knowledge, characteristics and perspectives common to coaches as they pass from beginner, to competent, to proficient, to expert coach will be identified (Bell 1997, Berliner 1994). While these stages seem to imply a hierarchy, everyone passes from one to the next on the journey toward improvement. One can, however, choose where one stops in developing expertise. To help meet the new challenges of sport, these stages will be presented so that sport coaches may identify their current stage and recognize the skills, perspectives and knowledge necessary to elevate to the next level and beyond. (p. 145)

In the time I have studied coach development and reflected on the traits of coaches I encounter, I have had great difficulty achieving any kind of clarity around grouping coaches in a coherent way that describes how and how well they function. Much of my difficulty arises from a central problem: there doesn’t seem to be just one way to group them. I don’t think there’s a single spectrum coaches can be slotted into. I don’t think there are clear groups coaches fall into that describe who they coach, what they coach, how they coach, and what their goals are based on those other factors. I think it is possible to be a good coach doing good work towards good goals and still be seen as less than by other coaches that are doing arguably average work towards different goals. How is a coach developer to make sense of that?

I find the variety of ways the pieces can fit together both intriguing and frustrating. I love that there are so many ways to be a good coach. But how do I support developing coaches that are trying to assemble pieces in different ways than me? Their values and methods may be equally useful but not appropriate for who I am and how I want to coach. It’s one thing to tell another coach, “you’re doing it wrong” and help them find the right way. It’s something completely different to tell that coach, “you’re doing it differently” and give them expert guidance about how to coach their way. How do I communicate to them that they should keep doing what they’re doing, even though that’s not what I would do?

It seems that assessing coach development relies on some sort of absolute structure of coaching prowess and I can’t seem to decide on what that absolute structure is. Maybe there are elements that are universal, like similar behaviors that are applied regardless of differing values or situations. Those seem hard to find too. How specific can one get about what good coaching behaviors look and sound like before unintentionally introducing contexts that don’t apply universally? This is where “The development of expert coaching” comes in. The authors echo my thinking:

Simply knowing the characteristics and qualities of an expert is, however, not enough. Remember, too, that experts are individuals and their thoughts and actions often take on an idiosyncratic, at times eccentric, quality. Therefore, in considering the stages and the characteristics of each, understand that they represent commonalties [sic] among coaches rather than a prescription for being a great coach. (pp. 145-146)

The authors lay out a framework that tackles some of the issues I’ve been wrestling with. While I don’t think they have all the answers (or maybe even all the questions), they gave me a lot to work with and consider. As I said in the introduction, one of my reasons for writing about this book is to share it with others and another reason is to give me space to reason through what I’ve read. So I’m going to talk my way through their framework and hope that at least one of us benefits from doing so.

The first thing to do is lay out the “developmental stages in becoming an expert coach”. The authors use four stages: beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. Laying out these stages necessitates explaining what each one is. I’ll intersperse the authors’ structures with my own thoughts about them. I’ll begin at the beginning…umm…beginner.

Beginner Stage

Their conception of doing the job correctly includes following the organizational rules and procedures, particularly those centered on establishing order and managing the practice environment…This seems natural because through the naive eyes of a beginning coach, it is relatively easy to notice players on-task, listening, following directions and enjoying the experience. It is more difficult to discern athletes who are actually gaining knowledge, developing skills or improving performance. (p. 146)

The authors believe beginners are beholden to rules and procedures. They suggest beginners focus on them a great deal, use them extensively in their practices, and measure success by how well athletes appear to be following the coach’s rules. As a result of this focus, the authors continue, beginners “…seldom feel any personal control over the conditions and events of the practice and, therefore, may lack a sense of responsibility for their own actions” (p. 147).

I think their feelings of lack of control or responsibility are due, at least in part, to beginners’ lack of rules and procedures to control both themselves and the athletes. If they only had the right rules, they tell themselves, their practices would go better. So they go in search of rules to create the structure they think is necessary. I think this is expressed by beginner coaches asking more-experienced peers for drills and techniques. These are clearly procedures that less-experienced coaches can follow, which can give coaches that feeling of control they may be lacking.

What’s interesting to me (and highlighted by the first quote in the next section) is that coaches can be successful and potentially never leave the beginning stage. As a result, it feels strange to me to call this stage “beginner” if a coach in that stage can be well into their career. But what I realize is there are two ways you can view a career unfolding, in terms of time and in terms of development. A coach can work in the profession for years but not develop very much in that time. What is unconsidered, though, is the converse of that statement. Can a coach develop a great deal in a short time? Is a coach that does so considered a prodigy or can such a learning trajectory be more accessible than thought?

The authors describe the coaching world as it is but, at least in this case, they don’t consider if it could be different if coaches learned differently. Many people, including the authors, seem to work from the assumption that becoming a good coach takes time for everyone, everywhere. But what if you take the authors’ main assumption about beginners, that they desire rules and procedures to the exclusion of more helpful coaching tools, and help beginners see that desire as a limitation to their development?

Beginning coaches could be exposed to the traits and habits of competent coaches through deliberate, structured mentorship and teaching. Such facilitation would both accelerate learning and decrease frustration as coaches would spend less time acquiring rules and procedures, then finding those things aren’t helping them coach as they expected, then discarding those rules and procedures.

More on that in a moment. First, consider what beginning coaches need instead of structure. Consider what competent coaches do instead.

Competence Stage

As the authors lay out the second stage of development, they point out that many coaches “Despite having efficient management routines...never aspire to develop instructional prowess or help athletes learn” (p. 149). Coaches can remain in the beginning stage and still be...umm...competent. Such coaches are as successful as they choose to be. But, to move on to actual competence (at least as the authors define it), coaches move on from focusing on rules and procedures towards something else.

As beginning coaches accumulate experience, they begin to look to that experience to determine solutions and make decisions instead of simply following the rules and procedures they searched for previously. The authors refer to this as “strategic knowledge”. Such knowledge helps beginning coaches advance, and another piece of their advancement is a shift from being guided by rules to being guided by purposes. Being guided by rules means coaches expect the process to look the same, to look like what the rules dictate. Being guided by purposes makes the process more dynamic. This shift allows coaches to move from having to stick closely to their plans towards contingency planning which, according to the authors, is “if/then” planning. To them, competent coaches “see similarities across context” and can rely on their experience to choose what to do based on what they see.

The ideas of strategic knowledge and similarities across contexts give insight into the limits beginning coaches are imposing on themselves2. “Rules and procedures” can be thought of as algorithms. Algorithms are enticing to beginning coaches because they remove the need for expertise which, by definition, these coaches don’t yet have. The problem is expertise requires skill, judgement, and discretion. Coaching via algorithm allows coaches to avoid actually developing the expertise they need to become competent.

Another issue with coaching by algorithm is doing so requires stable environments. Following the same procedure in stable environment should get you the same results. But coaching environments are rarely stable, which leads to consistency in procedure but not in results. I think beginning coaches become competent coaches not when they focus on strategic knowledge but when they can reckon with the inherent instability of coaching.

Competent coaches reckon with instability by exchanging algorithms for principles. Contingency planning and other applications of strategic knowledge are examples of principles, which are different kinds of rules. Principles allow discretion and adaptability. Principles don’t have to be followed exactly the same way by everyone, everywhere, at all times. So, to exchange algorithms for principles, coaches have to let go of their expectations of stability and sameness.

That’s where I think there’s space for short-circuiting this inefficient way of developing. It is the duty of more-experienced coaches to disavow beginning coaches of the notion that coaching situations are stable enough to work in the way they imagine. Rather than allow beginners to build upon an imaginarily solid foundation, more experienced coaches can do more good for beginners by pointing out how contexts impact those imagined foundations. While there’s certainly more that experienced coaches could do, it would be enough of a start to do that.

This leaves two more stages and a lot more thoughts still to come. In part 2, I’ll enumerate proficiency and expertise, as well as dig into what I still haven’t figured out about coach development.

The concepts below come from The Sports Coach as Educator edited by Robyn Jones1. Specifically, they come from chapters 9 (“The coach as a reflective practitioner”, written by Wade Gilbert and Pierre Trudel) and 10 (“Mentoring - Harnessing the power of experience”, written by Chris Cushion).

Here’s a passage from chapter nine to set the stage:

What is troublesome with learning to coach through experience is that we do not know what it really means. Is learning through experience as simple as only spending time in the field? For Bell (1997: 35) this ‘is not the case. To become better skilled at one’s professional practice, a novice teacher or coach needs to do more than simply spend time on the job’. (Jones, 2006: pp. 113-114)

There are two elements of this passage that I find noteworthy. First, Gilbert and Trudel are saying that a novice coach, left on their own, will have difficulty understanding what their experiences mean. Second, when they quote Bell, they say that just coaching isn’t enough for novice coaches to adequately learn the craft. They’re alluding to a very important tool in learning to coach: reflection.

I have written elsewhere about the importance of reflection in coaching. (Read more here and here.) Just like Gilbert and Trudel, I rely on the work of Donald Schön to describe how coaches can reflect on their work.

Let’s take the first point Gibert and Trudel raise in the quote above. Coaches in general are left to practice their craft in relative isolation. This can be problematic for less-experienced coaches, even if they have good practice plans or other resources. Being left to one’s own devices does lead to some learning, but that process is wildly inefficient because, as Gilbert and Trudel point out, such coaches have no experience to recognize and interpret the meaning present in the situations they participate in. There’s plenty of feedback present, but no framework to help them interpret that feedback.

The authors write that coaches can get more out of their coaching by reflecting on the coaching they do, but that process is still slow and sometimes painful because there’s still no framework for assessing the coach’s work. I believe it takes coaches so long to achieve mastery because they are forced to learn the most important lessons alone and because the resources made available to them are focused on less-important lessons. This is where mentors can be immensely helpful. But even having a mentor is no guarantee of improving the learning process.

Reflection and mentorship must work together to create better learning, otherwise learning is limited. Gilbert and Trudel describe it like this: “if mentors are not reflective coaches they will only transmit to the apprentice-coach the knowledge-in-practice and their own routine” (p. 125). When a mentor tells an apprentice what they know and what they do, the mentor does nothing to help the apprentice understand what prompted the choices the mentor made. According to Schön, this happens because “In real-word practice, problems do not present themselves to practitioners as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain” (Schön, 1984: 40). The apprentice doesn’t need a solution so much as they need to make sense of the problem.

Mentors, then, should help apprentices recognize the situations they are in. To create opportunities for this kind of mentorship, Gilbert and Trudel suggest having “…mentors attend the coach’s practice instead of the apprentice-coach entering the coach-mentor practice” (p. 125). Generally, apprentices show up to the practices of mentors rather than the reverse. But why not have the mentor see what the apprentice is actually encountering during their practices? The key is still for the mentor to describe their understanding of the situations that arise. This can prompt discussion between mentor and apprentice about the situations. As the apprentice comes to recognize situations, the mentor can begin to ask questions that will help the apprentice organize their thoughts.

But there is also great benefit to an apprentice being part of the mentor’s practices. The benefit doesn’t come from simple supervision, it comes from the mentor intentionally creating situations that give the apprentice access to different parts of coaching instead of overloading them with with everything a coach does all at once. Tod Mattox gave a great example of this when he talked with me about 46 Challenge: clipboarding (see the “who” section in the “depth” half of the post). The idea is to help apprentices limit their focus to specific aspects of coaching in order to help them learn parts of the whole in a manageable way. This is what Lave and Wenger call “Legitimate Peripheral Participation” and it is a central piece of Chris Cushion’s chapter on mentorship.

Coaching is a social and behavioral thing so participation like “clipboarding” involves immersion in not just what the coach is doing but into the entire community in which their coaching happens. Since coaching is a dynamic, contextual thing, the community in which it happens “…is not simply a repository for technical knowledge and skills, so a protégé needs more than just being shown ‘the answer’” (p. 134). A mentor doesn’t put an apprentice into a situation and tell them what to do, they put an apprentice into a situation and help them see what the situation requires of a coach. This gives the mentorship pair a rich set of experiences to reflect on and discuss.

Cushion writes about four different forms of reflection that mentorship pairs can utilize (p. 135). After each, I have added a sample question mentor coaches can ask to prompt discussion.

1. Technical examination of immediate skills and competencies (Which coaching skills did you use in the situation you were in?)

2. Descriptive analysis of performance, skills and competencies (How did you use those skills and how comfortable do you feel using them?)

3. Dialogic exploration of alternative methods to solve problems (Regardless of how successful you thought your behaviors were, let’s discuss a couple options you could have tried instead.)

4. Critical thinking of the effects of a course of action (What might some of the long term effects of your coaching in this situation be?)

Reflection and discussion in this style helps both mentor and apprentice coaches learn how to reflect on their own. But the forms of reflection above are focused on the apprentice’s behaviors. There’s still more important learning the mentorship pair needs to address. As Cushion writes, “The key for successful mentoring it would seem is to assist the protégé to become the focus, and to develop their abilities to analyse and draw meaning from the experiences that matter most” (p. 137). Deciding what a situation means is much more important than deciding what to do in that situation.

Why is meaning more important than doing? Because deciding what a situation means opens the possibility of not acting. Even though every moment may present an opportunity to “coach”, not every moment benefits from action on the part of a coach. (I wrote more about that idea here.) Learning to find the meaning of situations makes for better coaching.

What can mentors do to mediate apprentices’ meaning-making? They can share their own focus and purpose in a shared situation. When a mentor shares their focus, they help the apprentice know where to look and what to listen for, which helps them see what the mentor views as the salient parts of the situation without expecting the apprentice to interpret what they see the same way. When a mentor shares their purpose, it helps an apprentice understand what the mentor finds important to them in the situation without expecting the apprentice to adopt the same values. Mentors can also elicit perspectives from apprentices to help them crystallize their own philosophies.

What does an apprentice do with the meaning they find? They can use that meaning to begin answering the three questions that form the “logic of appropriateness” (March and Heath, 1994). (I wrote more about that process here.) As a reminder, here are those questions:

1. Question of recognition: what kind of situation is this?

2. Question of identity: what kind of person am I?

3. Question of rules: what does a person such as I do in a situation such as this?

The value of mentorship is not in answering questions asked by apprentices but in helping apprentices answer the questions above, posed by their coaching. Mentoring in this way helps coaches, as Cushion puts it by paraphrasing Snow (2001), “…not to ignore or downplay the personal knowledge and experience of the trainee (or perceived lack of it) but to elevate and build upon it” (p. 140). Apprentices may know little about coaching, but they know a lot about themselves and how they best communicate and connect with others. Mentors should highlight the importance of this understanding and find ways to help apprentices use it.

Cushion quotes Bloom to sum this up: “By doing this through a mentoring process, coaches could be given the opportunity to integrate information ‘relevant to crystallizing their own philosophies and unique coaching styles’ (Bloom et al., 1998: 278)” (p. 140). This should be the outcome of reflection and mentorship: an apprentice creating their own values and purposes instead of unknowingly and uncritically adopting the values and purposes of their mentors.

The concept below comes from The Sports Coach as Educator edited by Robyn Jones1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter seven, “Athlete learning in a community of practice: Is there a role for the coach?”, written by James Galipeau and Pierre Trudel.

I was inspired by this passage from the chapter:

One way for coaches to better understand the complexities of athletes’ lives is to adopt a coaching style based on the concept of pedagogy instead of assuming a constrained role of ‘teacher’. Referring to the work of Savater (1997) on the historical use of the word ‘pedagogy’, Jones et al. (2004) explain that the scope of the work of a pedagogue was once much more comprehensive than simply being a teacher: ‘In contrast with the teacher…who was merely responsible for delivering specific instrumental knowledge, the pedagogue had a broad-ranging and holistic role in the moral development of a young person’ (Jones et al. 2004: 96). This description of pedagogy fits our views on the multiple roles that coaches play on a team as opposed to simply being the person who teaches skills and drills. (Jones, 2006: 91-92)

There are many synonyms for “educator” and many of those terms are used interchangeably. In the passage above, Galipeau and Trudel distinguish between two such terms, pedagogue and teacher. While the authors write only a couple paragraphs about the subject, I want to delve into this difference in more detail. But, to do so, I’m going to change the words describing the roles. Although I’m using different names, they correspond to the same roles. Let’s consider what it means to be an “instructor” and what it means to be a “teacher”.

Instructors, in my opinion, instruct. They give instructions to others who carry out those instructions. I’m not saying it’s easy work. Good instructors put a lot of care and attention into crafting their instructions. Those instructions can be intricate, they can be detailed, they can be layered. Instructors need instructions for individual athletes and for teams, they need instructions for the present but they also need ones that set up future instructions. But, in the end, they’re still just instructions.

Instructions are what you get when you’re building IKEA furniture. They work because everyone everywhere gets the same materials and uses the same tools to work towards the same product. It’s all self-contained. Instructors assume their instructions are universal, that they work the same for all recipients at all times. Instructors assume that what to coach and how to coach are the most important topics to address. They also assume that who they coach matters far less, because recipients of coaching only need follow the instructions they are given.

But just using instruction limits learners. The who matters. The who affects learning. Instructions change actions but learning changes behavior. Changing behavior doesn’t just change action, it inevitably changes who you are. Changing behavior changes who learners are because they have to change their relationship with what they’re doing. Think about flow for a minute. Flow can be defined as “the melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is.” Flow requires bringing the self into the actions. Instructions can’t tell people how to bring themselves into what they do. That’s what teaching is for.

Teachers seek to understand who is being coached. Who the learner is and who they’re trying to be shapes their behaviors. Their identity shapes what they see as possible and worth pursuing and how to pursue it. Teachers notice what learners in their care can do, what they can’t do, and what they try to do when faced with new situations. Teachers view teaching as figuring out how learners engage with situations and tailoring their support to match the behaviors they see. They have a bigger, more complete picture in mind than the learner does and they guide the learner towards unexplored territory. As a result, the learner expands their beliefs about what is possible and worth pursuing and how to pursue it. In short, through learning they change who they are.

But there’s more to it than just what happens within the learner. Galipeau and Trudel write that

Understanding who is being coached as well as who is coaching could help lead to better coaching practices, better athlete–coach relationships, increased satisfaction and, ultimately, better athletic performance. (Jones, 2006: 91, emphasis mine)

The who affects not just learning but also teaching. Who you are matters. Teaching requires more than just observing and adapting to a learner. Just like learners, teachers’ behaviors are influenced by their beliefs and values. An educator shifts from instructing to teaching when they embrace and integrate their unique beliefs and values into their practice.

Embracing your beliefs and values starts with understanding what they are. But it can’t stop there. Many coaches compose mission statements or draft coaching philosophies. But, if you’re not careful, those just become instructions on how to coach instead of becoming coaching behaviors. To illustrate, I’ll quote John Lyle from a different text, The Coaching Process2:

There is a temptation to characterize the philosophy as ‘this is what I think coaching should be like’, but this is not appropriate. Such a statement would be a statement of aspiration, and would say nothing about the reality of the coach’s practice. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to think of the philosophy as ‘these principles guide my coaching practice’. (Cross and Lyle, 1999: 30-31)

Lyle is reminding you that it’s not enough to say what coaching “should” be like, you have to show your work. Your behaviors have to connect what you believe with what you actually do. That’s what makes what you do teaching. Teaching can’t be just following someone else’s instructions or someone else’s blueprints. Teachers don’t say, “I’m doing this because a coach I respect does it.” Teaching reflects what the teacher believes is possible for them as a teacher just as much as it reflects what they believe is possible for the learners in their care. Teachers say, “I’m doing this because I believe it helps me be the best coach I can be.”

Notice the beliefs I’m talking about aren’t related to what you teach. That’s rooted in Galipeau and Trudel’s description (the opening quote above) of not simply teaching skills and drills. There aren’t “best” skills and drills but there are behaviors that work the best for you and in your present context. You need to think about how to be the best coach you can be within the context of your current team. Being your best self helps you connect with the people you coach. Teaching and learning are social and behavioral endeavors. Being the best coach you can be is being the best teammate you can be, which helps the team you’re part of be the best it can be.

The difference between an instructor and a teacher is that teachers acknowledge they aren’t working with pieces, but with people. Instructing assumes what matters much more than who. Teaching assumes that who teaches and who learns have profound impacts on what can be taught and how. Either way, you’re educating. Choose what kind of educator you wish to be.

While I learned a lot about what goes into a volleyball broadcast, I also learned that the building blocks I discussed in The Romo Effect can work. It is clearer to me now what it will take to make changes to broadcasts. But that gain in clarity comes with a cost: “clearer” doesn’t mean “easier”. Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been thinking about since then.

• There’s knowing volleyball, there’s knowing broadcasting, and then there’s knowing volleyball broadcasting. What’s interesting to me is how little overlap there is (or needs to be) in order to produce and broadcast a volleyball match. As much as I wish it were different, I’m not upset about that. Because…

• The people working on these matches love producing, directing, and broadcasting sports. If they loved volleyball as much as I do, they’d be sitting where I am instead of where they are. It’s not fair for me to ask them to care about my thing the same way I do. (I wrote about that concept in a coaching context here.) But…

• If they care about doing their jobs well, there are opportunities aplenty to learn more about the sports they cover. The problem is the way volleyball broadcasts are produced makes learning more about the sport really hard. Because…

• Everyone working on these broadcasts is freelancing. They’re busy trying to fill their schedule with jobs so they can make a living. Given the time they have, it’s hard to go deep on anything other than the job itself. If they want to get work, they need to ready for any job, not just the ones in some sport they happen to also be a fan of.

• What would help? There’s at least two options:

  • Keep production crews together for multiple events. That’s what you get in NFL broadcasts (among others). While NFL crews are broadcasting different matchups every week, they at least stay together and that gives them opportunities to figure some things out because they at least know who’s with them and what they’re doing every week.

  • Bring a domain expert into the process. Having someone who understands volleyball and understands at least a little about broadcasting in the meetings (and probably in the control room) could help those less familiar and support those that already know more. While having volleyball experts (like coaches) work as broadcasters can be good, a broadcaster’s job is not to influence the broadcast the way someone can if they’re in the control room instead of the broadcast booth. But…

• To no one’s surprise, these ideas require more money than is currently available. As it is, the broadcasts I watched were run by what might be the minimum number of people possible. I don’t know how likely it is to see more money invested in volleyball broadcasts in the near future, but I’m somewhat optimistic. It remains to be seen how producers and executive producers would spend such extra money, but there’s probably a long list of things they want that are probably more important than my ideas.

How do factors like those listed above impact the implementation of the building blocks I outlined in previous posts?

• Ease of access to stats is still a major issue. Watching pro broadcasts helped me understand that not everyone has access to the same stats. College broadcasts have a more robust infrastructure to rely on, namely the sports information departments at each university. But, even with that infrastructure…

• Data gathering and analysis is largely ad hoc, meaning that it depends on who is working. If the producers and the broadcasters are more interested in analysis, then maybe more analysis happens. But there’s no guarantee that much of the analysis will make it on the air if one of those two groups isn’t as interested or comfortable. Further…

• Incorporating more/different stats into broadcasts requires work from at least 3-4 people: the producer, the graphics person, and the broadcaster(s). Not only do producers and broadcasters have to care about which stats are being incorporated, but having those stats appear on screen would be tremendously helpful. That means the graphics person has to have access to them, the producer has to ask for them, and the broadcasters have to talk about them when they’re displayed. If any one of those three things doesn’t happen, stats are unlikely to survive in the broadcast. What would help stats survive?

• Stats need to be portable. Portability in metrics means a stat is “stable between contexts that everyone from different contexts can understand.” (I took the idea of portability from C. Thi Nguyen.) Kill percentage is more portable than hitting efficiency because you don’t have to worry about what is or is not an attack error. Portability is important because broadcasters don’t have to spend time explaining things that are highly portable. Reception average isn’t very portable, unfortunately, because it requires a great deal of context to understand and implement. Why do stats need to be portable? Because…

All of this discussion is overshadowed in many ways by another factor that came up constantly in my meetings: time. For at least 30 years volleyball, both in the US and across the world, has been making accommodations to make the game more attractive for television. Many of these accommodations have been aimed at making match length more predictable. But television has been changing too. While producers and executives would like to have matches fit into neat time slots, fitting isn’t nearly as important as it used to be. Linear television networks have “spillover channels” that can begin coverage of an event that’s been preempted by another event running too long. Streaming content negates the concern for overlapping programming completely. So time isn’t at the same premium it was even five years ago.

And yet, volleyball, both pro and college, are incorporating a serve clock into matches. I watched the production crew be left behind by a challenge that was resolved before they even received the video feed from the challenge review system. They were desperately trying to show viewers what had happened but the delay in delivery of the video, coupled with the speed of the review and the pressure of the clock, left them no choice but to cut away from the review to go back to live action. I credit the officials for a speedy review, unlike what is often seen in challenges. But the officials have no choice after they complete the review but to move on with the match.

For reasons and situations like those above, the producer we met with isn’t a fan of the serve clock or other moves meant to speed up the game by minimizing time between rallies. I agree with them. It makes it a lot harder to tell any kind of stories in any kind of depth when there’s so little time in between rallies to tell those stories. Could better things be done with the existing time? Sure, but the current format is handicapping broadcasts in that regard. I don’t know how to navigate the tradeoff between how long a match lasts and how much storylines can be developed. I do believe this tension must be addressed.

I am hopeful for a future in which broadcasts are able to tell more stories about how matches are being won and lost and that they include more stats that connect better to how teams won and lost. One reason I am hopeful is a conversation I had with one of the broadcasters about kill percentage and points. They asked great questions about how those stats were better than what they were used to using. And then they listened intently as I showed them an example (set 3 of the 2025 NCAA championship match) of how kill percentage and points could give a clearer explanation of why teams win. They saw the value of those stats in telling the story of a race to 25. It’s moments like that give me hope that we can bring about positive change that will keep volleyball fan engagement growing.

In part 2, I started sharing the building blocks for the evolution of volleyball storytelling. In this part, I’ll finish sharing those building blocks and give a tiny peek at where this evolution could take the game.

The Building Blocks Volleyball Needs

• Kill percentage

• Distribution data

• Reception data

• Points

• Team scoring data

• Set-level data

Points

As mentioned previously, when elite teams play, points are earned much more often than errors are conceded. For this reason, broadcasters and fans should be exposed to earned points (kills, blocks, and aces) much more than they should be exposed to errors. There's so much more to talk about.

The box plots above are separated in two ways. First, they are split into earned points (pair on the left) and unforced errors (pair on the right). Then, they are split into when teams won sets (left side of each pair) and when teams lost sets (right side of each pair). What you see is that, on average, set-winning teams earn about 19 points and commit about 5 unforced errors. On average, set-losing teams earn about 15 points and commit about 5 unforced errors. The difference between winning and losing is more often in the number of points each team earns rather than in the errors they commit.

But to tell stories about points, information about points needs to be made clearly available. While this is the case internationally, it is not the case in the U.S.. NCAA box scores typically do not display points as a single number and, if they do, the way blocks are counted can make the number unreliable. If earned points and unforced errors were displayed consistently and in one place, people could easily relate those numbers to the race to 25 points as they watch a match.

Kills and Errors: an Example

In the 2025 NCAA regional semifinals and finals, Texas first beat Indiana and then lost to Wisconsin. In the graph above, the two leftmost bars show Indiana's kills and attack errors as well as Texas'. The two rightmost bars show the same information for Texas, followed by Wisconsin. In the match against Indiana, Texas made fewer unforced attack errors than Indiana but also earned fewer points than they did. Indiana had more of each, but in equal amounts, so both teams were equal in points won and lost via attacking. This means the match was decided by other factors. In this match, Texas had 12 blocks while Indiana had 3. Two nights later, Texas committed nearly the same number of unforced errors and had slightly more kills against Wisconsin than against Indiana. While Wisconsin committed quite a few unforced attack errors, they more than made up for that by having more kills than Texas by a wide margin. Being able to see how and how much teams are earning points is a powerful part of telling stories about how and why teams win.

Team Scoring: Side Out and Point Scoring

Team scoring data is another building block that helps people understand how the race to 25 progresses. This data has been made more available by NCAA teams in recent years but, because it is still not universal, it is rarely used by fans and broadcasters to explain how matches unfold. But side out percentage and point scoring percentage are simple, powerful pieces of data that can help tell stories about who's winning, who's losing, and why.

In the graphs above, the left pair show side out percentage while the right pair show point score percentage. Within each pair, the bar on the left shows the percentage when teams win sets, while the bar on the right shows the percentage when teams lose sets. The differences are clear. If a team wants to win the race to 25, they need to side out at better than 60% while point scoring at over 40%. To frame it in a slightly different way, If a team can side out at over 60% while holding their opponent to under 55% side out, they will win the race to 25.

As with the previous building blocks, team scoring data is intuitive and powerful. Does a team side out on their first or second try for an entire set? They’re probably winning. If they get stuck in serve receive at some point in a set, do they make up for it at some point with how they are serving? These are stories that become possible to follow when team scoring data is made available.

Set-level Data

The point was made earlier that winning matches in volleyball requires a team to win three races to 25 before their opponent does. Match-level data obscures how each race is progressing and makes it more difficult for people to understand how the score of the current set came to be. Only data separated by set can give that information.

This data is generally available in an NCAA box score, but only for a very limited amount of data. Typically, people can see set-level data for teams but not for individuals. While that makes some set-level storytelling possible, it's difficult to explain how individual players are contributing to their team on a set-by-set basis.

Set-level data is a powerful tool that helps explain how match-level data comes to be. The box plots above represent average players’ performances but each blue dot shows a measure of single-set performance. The sum of the blue dots yields the average, which can look very different than what happens in a single set. Having the comparison between set-level data and match-level data makes it possible to tell much more nuanced stories about performance.

Each of the building blocks listed above becomes more useful when available by set as well as for an entire match. Rather than struggling to figure out for themselves why a player or team is losing a set, despite good match averages, people can refer to how that player or team is doing in the current set and compare that information to how they did in other sets. They will be able to see how strategies such as distribution and serve targeting change on a set-by-set basis.

Looking Ahead

When stats are available that better reflect how volleyball is contested, those stats are much more easily incorporated into commentary, television graphics, and everyday volleyball talk. This helps connect more people to the game because, as Tony Romo illustrates, volleyball people can point others to what’s going to happen and where it’s going to happen. Broadcasters can set up more interesting pre-match discussions about how teams compare and what to expect when they compete.

When volleyball people have access to building blocks that connect better to the game they’re watching and talking about, they are able to make richer comparisons to other sports. A volleyball setter isn’t just like a football quarterback because they both take the ball and give it to other people. A setter is like a quarterback because they make reads of situations and make offensive adjustments to exploit what they see. A setter can “check down” to a different offensive option as their team’s reception forces them to move off the net. When the number of kills two teams earn don’t differentiate them from one another (like Texas against Indiana above), earning points in other areas of the game help explain the score difference. It’s like when football people talk about teams “relying on special teams” to win a game.

If we start using the building blocks described here, we create the foundation for the next evolution. These are relatively small steps, things that can be done without too much change to systems already in place. Think of how much better broadcasts will be when everyone has access to rotation-level data, heat maps, and advanced analytics. But we can’t get to the next evolution without starting this evolution first.

To view the video of the presentation as well as the slides, click this link:

In part 1 of the series, I outlined some of the problems with the tools currently available for storytelling and how volleyball actually works so I can dig into how we can build off of that structure to tell better stories.

In part 2, I’ll outline some of the building blocks that we should be using to better connect how we talk about the game to how the game is actually contested.

The Building Blocks Volleyball Needs

• Kill percentage

• Distribution data

• Reception data

• Points

• Team scoring data

• Set-level data

Kill Percentage

Kill percentage is similar to attack efficiency but it explains more with less. It's better at describing how often a player or team scores when attacking, it's better for predicting outcomes and layering into more advanced stats. How is kill percentage similar to attack efficiency? Kills do most of the work in determining what a team's or player's attack efficiency is.

The data in the plots above show team kill percentage and attack efficiency, with teams clustered into thirds. You can see that the distribution of the teams is roughly the same in both plots. That means changing from attack efficiency to kill percentage doesn’t take any explaining. The benefit is that kill percentage has a much clearer connection to winning points, winning sets, and winning matches. When a team has a higher kill percentage than their opponents, they almost always win. Kill percentage helps fans understand what is likely to happen when a team attacks. Teams that earn kills 50% of the time will score about half the time they attack. It’s much harder to figure out how often a team that hits .250 scores, but it isn’t 25% of the time.

As that example shows, kill percentage is more intuitive than attack efficiency. It’s more intuitive because it doesn’t include errors. Remember that winning the race means getting to 25 the fastest, not the cleanest. Kill percentage helps fans understand who’s winning and why more easily than attack efficiency.

Distribution

Distribution data is much better than assist data because it tells more about setters and offenses, it connects better to attacking and passing metrics, and it creates opportunities to discuss decision making and strategy. The stories that can be told about setters using distribution are stories about how they manage their teams' offenses and distribution gives fans insight into how setters are doing that job.

The data in the two plots above show how NCAA semifinalist and finalist setters distribute the ball to their attackers in two situations, good passes and medium passes when they have three front row attackers. It’s not necessary to understand reception grades or passing averages to understand what these plots are saying though. All a fan needs to understand is that “good” means the setter’s life is easy, they can set comfortably and “medium” means the setter’s job is a little bit tougher, they have to move a decent amount before setting.

In the semifinals and finals, setters distribute the ball fairly evenly between outside hitters (F), middles (C), and opposites (B) when things are easy. When things get a little harder, they set middles a lot less, set outsides a lot more, and set opposites a little more. That makes a lot of intuitive sense as fans watch games. That becomes a baseline and comparisons can be made between that baseline and specific teams.

As an example, here are the same two plots, showing only 2025 NCAA champions Texas A&M’s distribution. They benefitted from having All American Logan Lednicky attacking on the right, so they set her much more than most teams would set their opposites. As a result, they set their outsides much less and their middles an average amount. When things got harder, they didn’t set Lednicky much less. (You may remember how well Maddie Waak, their setter, was able to take some more challenging passes and get them to her top attacker.) Waak set Lednicky much more than most semifinalists and finalists set their opposites on medium passes.

Having this information available for discussion gives broadcasters and fans rich and interesting ways to talk about setters and offenses that current data doesn’t allow. When people want to talk about how a team’s offense runs through a certain player, distribution data is a powerful way to tell that story.

Reception Data

Contrary to expectation, the kind of reception data needed for better storytelling isn’t reception averages, at least not in the near future. Gathering that kind of data would be much more difficult because it would require many more people with specialized knowledge of the game and it would require universally accepted standards for receptions. Both of these things are highly unlikely to happen any time soon, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stories to be told about passing.

Just having information about how often each player passes would be a great start. That information would facilitate stories around serving strategies as well as more nuanced discussions of the “serve-pass battle” that often comes up. Who teams are serving is an important part of that battle, but there’s no data available to support those discussions.

To give an example of how that simple data can be layered onto other data to tell better stories, consider one aspect of how Louisville and Texas A&M served at each other in their regional semifinal.

These two plots show the same data, the only difference is which data point is highlighted. The plots show how well a team attacked in a match when a particular player passed compared to how often that player passed, so each dot is a single player in a single match. The two highlighted players are liberos, Ava Underwood of Texas A&M and Kamden Schrand of Louisville, and the boxes show their performances in their match against each other. Louisville served at Underwood 47 times in the match and Texas A&M earned a first ball kill 38% of the time when she passed. Contrast that with how A&M served at Schrand: she passed only 27 serves, probably because her team earned a first ball kill on 52% of her passes.

There’s a story to be told there about why each team chose their serving targets but that story can only be told if people have access to reception counts. The story gains depth from the addition of kill percentage. Using this data, it becomes possible to not only talk about serving strategies but it also becomes possible to have stories to tell about liberos and other ball control players.

In part 3, I’ll finish digging into the building blocks and close with a look forward at where we could go.

To view the video of the presentation as well as the slides, click this link:

Where Volleyball Fandom Is and What It Needs

There's been a lot of talk lately around the growth of volleyball attendance and viewership. In the last few years, women's indoor college volleyball has done things like this...

And this...

The question becomes...

Actually, the question becomes, "How do we fulfill the potential we’re showing?"

To answer that, it's helpful to consider where all the fans are coming from. While networks talk about "casual viewers", fulfilling volleyball's potential will require more than just casual fans. How do fans go from casual to something more? They connect to the game and people who love it. This doesn't mean having interesting factoids about players. It means feeling something. It means knowing something. Like this guy...

Tony Romo doesn't just know football, he feels football, and he shares both his knowledge and his emotion when he broadcasts. When you watch a football game Romo analyzes, you notice his excitement for what’s happening and you might even notice how he points you towards where it will happen.

What's special about how he does his job?

• He loves not just the game, but the analysis and the insight.

• He demystifies the game by connecting what we see (the context/situation) to what is about to happen.

• He increases engagement by directing fans towards where the important stuff will happen.

• He helps fans understand not just what happened tactically but why it happened.

• He understands not just how the game is played, but how it is contested.

But volleyball doesn't need its own Tony Romo. Volleyball needs to create the framework that supports people like him as they nerd out for fan learning and enjoyment. Volleyball needs a better understanding of how volleyball is contested. Volleyball needs to give people that love and understand the sport better tools to share that love and understanding with a larger audience.

The Tools We Have

To better understand how volleyball is contested, you should first notice which tools are commonly used now to describe the game. The stats listed below are examples of tools that limit the stories that can be told about our sport.

• Attack efficiency/Hit percentage

• Assists

• Errors

• Match-level data

Attack Efficiency/Hit Percentage

How does attack efficiency limit storytelling? The same way batting average limits storytelling in baseball, where attack efficiency came from. In baseball, getting a hit is a step towards scoring a run, which is a step towards winning a game. Batting average tells you something about how good a hitter is, but it doesn't tell you nearly enough. That's why baseball has turned to other stats. Volleyball should do the same. Attack efficiency tells you something about a hitter, but it doesn't make the hitter's contributions to winning points very clear. Unlike batting average, attack efficiency subtracts points for errors, which means fans can't use it to tell how often their favorite players are scoring.

Assists

How do assists limit storytelling? They don't describe what a setter is actually doing to direct their team's offense. They don't describe how well a setter is actually setting, they're just a stat that early statisticians took from basketball because someone setting an outside hitter looked enough like a point guard passing to a forward. But basketball assists tell you something about how special certain players are, whereas volleyball assists do not. When Nikola Jokić, a center, accounts for 1/3 of his team's assists per game, he's a unicorn. If a setter gets less than 1/2 of their team's assists, their team has some serious problems. That means assists don't describe anything useful about a setter's performance.

Errors

How does talking about errors limit storytelling? While errors can sometimes make the difference between winning and losing, they typically aren't what makes the difference, even when the score is close. When you watch the NCAA tournament, teams are earning three times as many points as they are giving to their opponents via unforced errors. Focusing on errors means less time spent on what actually drives winning: earned points. Further, since unforced errors occur so much less often than earned points, they should be discussed relative to earned points, rather than in isolation.

Match-level Data

How does match-level data limit storytelling? In other sports, when teams run back out of the locker room after half time, the score is the same as when they ran into the locker room. That means their efforts from one period of play to the next are cumulative. But the score keeps resetting in volleyball. If a player scores 10 points in the first set and doesn't score another point in the rest of the match, fans are missing some important context about that player's performance that can't be seen if they only know that a player scored 10 points in the match. Only having match-level data makes it hard to tell stories that compare one set to another, which is often key to understanding how and why teams win.

Just Having Stats Is Not Enough

People like Tony Romo use stats to help them explain what they see happening during play. But if the stats don’t connect to what they see, then it isn’t the expert who needs to change, it’s the stats available to them. That’s why volleyball isn’t waiting for its own version of Tony Romo. Volleyball is waiting for stats that allow experts to adequately explain what they’re seeing.

The stats you’re waiting for aren’t even that fancy or advanced. That’s what makes these building blocks so useful in storytelling. They’re simple and intuitive. They can be used alone or layered into other metrics. They’re universal because they help describe the game wherever it’s played, not just by the pros.

How Volleyball Actually Works

Perhaps surprisingly, volleyball works a lot like a hurdles race. Even better, volleyball is like a series of hurdles races. A team has to win three races to 25. In hurdles, the winner doesn't have to run the cleanest, the winner is who runs the fastest. In volleyball, the team that wins is the team that beats the other to 25, regardless of how neatly they get there. Then both teams go back to the starting line and race again and the outcome of the next race can be very different to the last one.

Unlike teams in other sports, volleyball teams can’t patiently wait for the game to be over once they have a sufficient lead. Just like in a race, if a competitor stops racing, they will be caught. Volleyball teams have to keep scoring in order to win the race to 25, just like runners have to keep running to get themselves across the finish line. Hoping your opponent will stop racing and push you across the finish line doesn’t work in hurdles. It almost never works in volleyball either.

If that’s a better way of understanding how volleyball is contested, then what kinds of stats would help experts tell better stories about volleyball matches?

That’s where part 2 of the series will start.

To view video of the presentation as well as the slides, click this link: