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:

Coaches, like so many others, are taught that purpose is something to find. So they search for it. They search high and low, outside and within. But they’re looking for the wrong thing. They’re looking for something complete, a fully formed vision of what they are meant to do. Purpose isn’t something that exists somewhere, merely hidden from your view until you search intently enough to discover it.

Purpose is a thing you make. Purpose is a thing you build. Purpose is a thing you learn. You assemble your purpose, brick by brick. You discover what your purpose is as you build it. That means you make mistakes as you build it. That means you try out ideas that work in the short term but then discard them in the long term.

Purpose is not a static thing you can discover and then rely on for the rest of your career. You are continually making it and refining it as you find yourself in new situations and surrounded by new people. Your life changes. Your purpose should be able to change as well. You can have different purposes in different areas of your life and at different times in your life. That means you’re not supposed to figure it all out at once, nor are you supposed to figure it out for all time.

But why do coaches expect to find a purpose rather than build one? Because humans are social. Humans live lives of social comparison, relying on cues from others to interpret their own lives. The philosopher René Girard wrote about mimetic desire, or the wanting of things in order to mimic the wants of others. He wrote, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”1 To Girard’s way of thinking, people do not typically want something because it is inherently desirable. They want it because they see others wanting it.

Mimetic desire, which is a kind of social learning, can be useful, particularly for children and adolescents. They learn what is acceptable to like and to want as they learn to navigate the world around them. It can be said that novice coaches are like adolescents, entering an unfamiliar world and searching for cues from others about how to conduct themselves and in which directions they should point themselves. But I believe that searching for cues in others takes coaches too far. Doing so ignores that coaches aren’t children with no life experience. They have life experiences, just in other parts of life. When it comes to building your coaching purpose, your other life experiences count for something.

Novice coaches may not have relevant experience in practice planning or in drill selection but they have relevant beliefs about teaching, learning, and competing. If you leverage them, those beliefs can help you build your coaching purpose. Your beliefs are how you choose to be the noun, coach. Your purpose is how you choose to do the verb, to coach. They are connected.

Mark Manson talks about experimenting to build your purpose. He says, “Beliefs are theories, actions are experiments, emotions are feedback.” Your beliefs and your values are not your purpose, but they do help you construct your purpose. You can hold values and beliefs while you’re just sitting on the couch. But your purpose gets you off the couch because purpose is what gives your values direction. Your actions are shaped by your purpose. Reflecting on how your actions made you feel is feedback that suggests if you need to make changes in your values, your purpose, or your actions.

The example above uses my personal beliefs as a starting point to illustrate Manson’s outline. Regardless of what I do for a living, I hold some beliefs about how to treat teenagers. But I can have different beliefs about how I should treat them when working at a grocery store compared to how I should treat them when coaching. Because this Substack is called Inspiring Coaches, I’ll focus on the latter setting.

In practice, a purpose I abide by is freeing athletes to compete and perform at their best. My purpose helps me select the actions I use during practice. If I believe athletes should feel free to explore and compete, then directing their actions doesn’t fit my purpose. But supporting athletes in making decisions does fit my purpose. My purpose also helps me select activities that work in concert with how I want to coach within those activities. After practice, I reflect on how well I embodied my purpose and on how I felt as I coached. Those emotions are feedback about how well my actions represent my beliefs. Am I content with how I acted during practice? When I feel content, did I act in accordance with my espoused purpose? How I answer those questions helps me understand if my purpose and my actions are well-aligned with my beliefs as well as with each other.

So how do you build purpose? Mark Manson also poses some questions around building purpose. He asks, “What do you spend your time on that feels meaningful? How can you do more of it?” There’s a difference between what feels comfortable or easy or well-understood and what feels meaningful. I think that’s where many coaches get tricked by mimetic desire. They think meaning will emerge when they just do the thing but meaning comes from how you choose to do the thing.

Less-experienced coaches do what they see others do but they don’t discover the hidden purpose that other coaches seem to have when doing the same thing. They are discovering what Frankl said about meaning differing from person to person. But when they don’t feel the same purpose, they question themselves rather than questioning the purpose itself. If you do what others do and you don’t feel the same, the problem isn’t necessarily with you, it’s possible their actions just don’t align with your purpose. You don’t have to change your purpose to mimic theirs. That misalignment is feedback and you can construct both methods and a purpose that suit you better.

So get back to the question of meaning instead of the question of fitting in. You’ll find that having meaning, having purpose, will give you the feeling you were looking for when you did what others were doing. To quote Manson again, “When people ask, ‘What is my life purpose?’ What they’re actually asking without realizing it is: ‘How can I use my time in a way that feels meaningful?’”

Purpose should not only give your values direction, but it should require action. As Manson and his cohost Drew Birnie discuss in their Solved podcast, “Finding Your Purpose” (link below), “Not only do you live out your purpose through action, obviously, but you also figure it out through action as well.” Your actions should bring you feelings of meaning, of personal significance, of authenticity. Those feelings (and the lack of those feelings) help you continually construct your beliefs and your purpose.

As I’ve written repeatedly (like here, here, and here), I believe I do my best coaching when I am most authentically me. There are many ways to find build your purpose. It requires work but it’s work you can and should do while growing your technical coaching skills. Ask yourself not just what you should do, but also ask yourself what you want to feel when you’re done.

Mark Manson’s Solved podcast, “Finding Your Purpose”:

Welcome to the club!
Which club?
The one you already belong to.
How did I get in this club?
The same way all the rest of us did.
How did all of you get in the club?
The same way you did.

Annoyed yet? Don’t worry, I’m not going to explain it. That’s not how social learning works.

When you think of learning, you’re likely to think of school. But the model of learning a subject, like math, isn’t representative of learning a craft, like coaching. And study after study about coach development shows that coaches learn much more by informal means than by formal ones. And yet, your history of formal education - all those years in class - influences how you think you should learn anything, including a craft. You were implicitly taught that being told about coaching is how coach learning should happen. But, as I’ve said before…

But it’s time for a slightly different revelation. I’ve used the movie clip below from “A Few Good Men” before, but in a different context. But this scene also highlights something important and overlooked about learning.

The manuals the lawyers use are examples of formal learning but Lieutenant Kaffee shines a light on what I’m most interested in. The kind of learning the movie clip highlights is social learning. At its roots, social learning theory holds that many behaviors are learned by observing and interacting with other people.

It’s possible to learn some things about coaching by sitting in clinics, reading books and watching videos. But, as I mentioned earlier, research in coach development shows that these kinds of formal learning are not the primary ways coaches learn. Learning socially is a big part of how coaches figure out how to coach. That’s because…

Much of what coaches learn socially isn’t directly about coaching but it impacts what coaches learn about coaching and it impacts how they coach. In addition to the techniques and drills coaches are intentionally learning, they are also learning how to behave, what to look and sound like, and many other things that aren’t explicitly taught but are part of learning to be a coach. Social learning is happening all the time and the learning started before you were even coaching. You learn that way. Players learn that way…from you.

“…coaching [is] ideologically laden, where athletes were not merely learning technical and tactical lessons but developing attitudes, values and beliefs.”1

The quotation above can only be true because coaches have ideologies that are expressed via their coaching. Your ideology is one of the most important things you have learned and continue to learn via social learning.

I’ve written about the expectation of teaching “fundamentals” above all else. Where did that idea come from? Other coaches. It’s how you saw it done, so it’s what you assumed you were supposed to do. And there’s another thing you learned at the same time: that you are supposed to learn the same way as the athletes you coach. You learned from other coaches that your “fundamentals” are techniques and drills so you should learn those above all else.

Because of that lesson, coaches find themselves focusing so much on learning technique and drills that other areas of coaching aren’t noticed or aren’t considered to be relevant. You learn that techniques and drills are important so you pursue them for years. And then you don’t even notice that when experienced coaches talk about what makes them good at their craft, they never talk about their knowledge of technique and drills. You don’t notice because you’re too busy paying attention to the stuff you’ve already been told is the important stuff. That’s because there’s an even-more important lesson you learn that precedes the lesson about technique and drills. It’s the lesson that makes you think technique and drills are so important.

In an article about teacher development I’ve referenced elsewhere, researcher Deborah Britzman wrote2 that less-experienced teachers believe they “must master the art of premonition and instantaneous response - both of which depend on the teacher’s ability to anticipate and contain the unexpected - to insure control as a prerequisite for student learning” (p. 449). Further, she says “…any condition of uncertainty is viewed as a threat to becoming an expert” (p. 451). This is an expression of the value placed on control in classroom teaching and that value has also extended to coaching.

Control expresses itself in two main ways in coaching, organization and knowledge. Coaches seek to control the environment and, to some extent, players through organization. A coach will be perceived as competent if their practice sessions are seen as being well-planned and well-executed. Having drills for the right occasions aids in the perception of competence. Coaches seek to control situations and, to some extent, players through their knowledge. As Britzman pointed out in her quote above, coaches attempt to use knowledge to counteract uncertainty. Having answers to player questions and explanations for game situations aids in the perception of competence. Because coaches learn that control and competence is important, they pursue things that enhance their ability to project a sense of control, both to themselves and others.

If you learn (socially) that control is important, then you will seek to learn (formally and informally) things that you believe will help you be in control. This illustrates my point about social learning impacting what you learn and what you do as a coach. No coaches I’ve encountered have explicitly said that control is important. And yet, the majority of them learn and coach in ways that reaffirm that exact belief. Coaches learn (socially) ideas about what it means to be a “good” coach, so they seek learning opportunities (formal and informal) that help them pursue being “good”.

I have a problem with this.

I don’t have a problem with coaches wanting to be good at their craft. I have a problem with the unexamined premise of what “good” is. In many cases, what is “good” is what’s been done before. It’s not good, it’s understandable. You can explain what you’re doing to others. In many cases, what is “good” is what coaches you admire did. It’s not good, it’s a model to follow, in the absence of building your own model.

To get philosophical for a moment, I have a problem with this because it is an example of the is-ought problem, also known as the naturalistic fallacy.

Coaches assume that what is done is what ought to be done to become a “good” coach. The truth is that, using current methods, becoming a “good” coach happens much more by coincidence than by will. Why should you do things the way you saw them done? Because that’s what you learned from the society you’re in, not because it’s a proven method for coaching excellence. That, for better or worse, is how social learning can affect your learning and coaching.

Doing things the way they’ve always been done is a terrible reason to do anything. And yet, that’s the basis for much of what you learn socially. Social learning is how many norms are passed on and that process has been very helpful in many situations throughout history. But I think many coaching norms passed on through social learning don’t have good reasons for being passed on. The examples I gave above of learning drills and techniques are only two. I can explain how these norms came to be passed on but I can’t explain why.

I can, however, offer suggestions on how to make social learning work for you. It’s not about reflexively rejecting previously unquestioned norms. It’s about productively questioning those norms. One important question to ask is what following those norms allows you to be (and prevents you from being) as a coach. Another important question to ask is what following those norms allows you to do (or prevents you from doing) as a coach. As I mentioned above, the answer to the latter question is often that it allows you to fit in. I’m not sure that’s a great reason to coach a certain way.

If you don’t think that’s an adequate reason to coach in a certain way either, then it’s time to ask a different set of questions. Who do you want to be as a coach? What do you want to do as a coach? How do you want players to experience you as a coach? These questions are about your values, which can be thought of as your personal norms. Your values are still things you learned socially but also developed for yourself. They are also things you teach socially. They comprise the ideology, the “attitudes, values, and beliefs” I quoted above, that athletes are learning from you.

So social learning is clearly not the problem with coach learning. The problem is any kind of learning done without thought. The problem is assuming that how things are is how things ought to be. That leads to doing work in the name of conformity. I think that’s what Confucius was warning against because that work doesn’t bring you closer to anything of meaning, it’s mistaking change for progress. You learn (with thought) so you can do better work with more meaning.

All of that sounds nice, but there’s substantial pressure for coaches to fit in. There’s a need to do what others have done and are doing. The necessity you feel is a product of not wanting to explain why you’re doing it differently. The necessity you feel is an expression of how much society values and prioritizes social understanding and acceptance.

That desire to feel understood and accepted is real. I’m not saying it shouldn’t exist. I’m saying you can be understood and accepted while being different. If you look, there are coaches all around you that do things differently. What are they teaching you? What are they trying to do? Who are they trying to be? What do you have in common with them? How do you want to be different from them? This is how you think your way through social learning.

Social learning happens everywhere in coaching, so it’s important for you to understand social learning because of how it impacts your learning as well as your coaching. To take control of that impact, you should thoughtfully approach your learning. Thoughtfully learning means asking questions that help you define the norms and values affecting you. Thoughtfully learning means choosing norms and values that reflect who you want to be as a coach and what you want to do while coaching. There’s no doubt this takes work and attention but your efforts will result in better, more meaningful coaching than if you had spent the same energy pursuing techniques and drills in an unexamined way.

Please reach out with questions, thoughts, opinions, etcetera. I’m always open to hearing from you.

Link to the slides

I talk about fans coming to volleyball through connections rather than from channel surfing. I think the television networks have data that supports a healthy amount of casual viewers but I do believe we’re missing what volleyball fans care about as well as how the game actually works.

I want to reiterate that this presentation isn’t intended to call out broadcasters. It’s a call for change in the systems that support those broadcasters. It’s a call to action for fans to deepen their connection to the game.

For the most part, the stats I discuss could be calculated and displayed using data that is already being collected by college SIDs using NCAA Live Stats. Getting them would require some changes to their software as well as changes to the packaging of that data by Stat Broadcast and others.

Two of the most common positive activities that people engage in at this time of year are reflecting on the year that was and making promises to themselves about the year ahead. Something I find so interesting about people is how they’ll wait for a particular moment of the year to practice one or both of these activities. But, recognizing that’s just how people are, I’d like to engage in a little bit of both of them and invite you to do the same.

First, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that you’ve been following along for another year. I’m proud to say I’ve shown up every week for two years now. I want you to know how much I appreciate when you tell me that you save my emails when they arrive so you can read them when you have time. In a world that excels at packaging quickly and easily digestible content, it means a lot to me that you would put my writing aside so that you can give it more time. Like many other metrics I’ve discussed, open rates are just proxies for things that I’d rather know but can’t measure. While it’s nice to see that you open my emails, what I truly wish for you to open is your minds. That’s the kind of engagement I care about. So thank you for not just subscribing but for taking a journey with me.

Second, I’m finding my footing after changing jobs this summer. I have to admit that writing enough to get something out every week has been more challenging than I had expected. But I’m optimistic that I’ll continue to find inspiration and collaborators in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Speaking of inspiration, my biggest resolution for the coming year isn’t a thing I hope to achieve but a thing I hope to embody. I think often about the interaction between doing and being and I think my resolution for 2026 is much heavier on the “being”. There’s someone I want to be in the coming year. In that sense, I think my resolution is about my resolution.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from the 2025 AVCA convention was a sense of determination. When my main job was working with a single team, resolution was sort of taken for granted. I was always doing my best to help the team be their best. Now, my sense of purpose is more self-determined and much broader in scope. At the convention, I had the opportunity to present some big ideas about the future of storytelling in volleyball broadcasts (links to come). While preparing for the presentation with my coworkers, I made a joke about one of them being Flavor Flav while I got to be Chuck D. (If you don’t know who they are, please educate yourself.) But, since then, I’ve come to embrace that comment as more than a joke.

Chuck D said a few things in Public Enemy’s 2012 song, RLTK that really resonate with me these days. (It just so happens I am currently 52, as he almost was when he spit this rhyme.)

5-1 not 5-0, Im’ma be 52
Bomb drop non-stop spitting on you…
I walk real talk across these beats
At the age I am now If I can’t teach
I shouldn’t even open my mouth to speak

The more I think about Chuck D’s legacy in music and activism, the more it inspires me to move boldly forward. There is a role I can play in volleyball that requires speaking eloquently and confidently about subjects we care deeply about. I need to be deliberate in my speech and convicted in my work.

In my work with VolleyStation, I have a chance to advocate for change in the future of volleyball in the US. I believe in our vision for continuing growth and engagement in our sport. In my writing here, I have a chance to advocate for change in how coaches learn and develop. I believe that, together with you, we can make a difference. Neither of these opportunities are for the passive. It’s going to take a lot of energy, but that’s something I can bring.

Shifting from my reflection and resolution to yours, I invite you to expand your reflective work in the coming year. As I discussed in one of my presentations at this year’s AVCA convention, So You Want to Control the Controllables..., as well as in my series on building a coaching philosophy, there are many ways of reflecting on your work. Many of you reflect on your choices and actions already. You ask yourself if the drills and games you use worked. You ask yourself if today’s practice plan worked. As Donald Schön wrote in The Reflective Practitioner, “We are…at once the subjects and the objects of action. We are in the problematic situation that we seek to describe and change, and when we act on it, we act on ourselves” (1984, p. 347). I invite you to remember that, not only are you part of the situation you are reflecting on, you are a changeable part of that situation. While you may default to changing other parts of the situation, look for moments when changing yourself may be more productive than other kinds of change available to you.

Lastly, I want to encourage you spend time in reflection throughout the year and not just at the beginning or end of years and seasons. It is possible to spend time reflecting on your choices as well as on your values regularly without being overwhelmed and without feeling like you are aimlessly adrift. A phrase I like to remember in my coaching is, “it’s never too late to make it better.” You don’t need to wait until a season is over to make changes or to try new things. You can make small tweaks or even large shifts while things are in motion.

Try it. Not all change is progress but there is no progress without change. I’m looking forward to a passionate, purposeful year. I hope you are too.

Please reach out with questions, thoughts, opinions, etcetera. I’m always open to hearing from you.

Link to the slides

Here’s a link to Deborah Britzman’s paper. I found it insightful, containing many great observations about why teachers (and coaches) learn the way they do.

Here’s a link to the excellence, actually podcast I quoted from. I highly recommend this for more great observations about our urges to control.

If you want more about the complexity of performance in sport, read this.

At least one attendee caught a math fact I had hoped people would overlook. I set up a math equation, Anxiety = Uncertainty x Inability to cope with uncertainty. I said coaches try to reduce uncertainty to zero, which would result in anxiety going to zero. I later said coaches should increase their ability to cope with uncertainty because it set up my point better. But, to be mathematically accurate, I should have said that coaches should decrease their inability to cope with uncertainty, which would lead to a decrease in anxiety. I didn’t like the double negative so I opted for bad math instead.

Here’s a link to the Walton and Yeager paper. This is one of several papers they have written about “wise interventions”, a concept from education that I think has great parallels to coaching.

Read more about flow here. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s work, especially his work on flow, has been very influential for me in areas beyond just coaching.

I’m a fan of the challenge point framework. There is a lot to it but the result is much more connected and engaging coaching.

I showed a longer clip from Instinct at the end of the presentation. It’s something I think of often when I consider what I think I can control in my life. Here’s that clip. (Trigger warning: it contains some physical violence.)

First, congratulations to both teams on their seasons and especially to Texas A&M, who bring the number of programs who have won an NCAA title to a lucky 13. I think they are deserving champions and went through the tournament in entertaining fashion.

With that said, I don’t think the final match is one that will prove particularly memorable for anyone other than Aggie fans. While the defense and hitter coverage were amazing and inspiring to see, contrary to cliché, neither win championships. If you’d like evidence, look no further than Kentucky’s dig total. They dug more balls than A&M did while facing fewer attacks and yet they did not win.

What does win championships? Points. In particular, kills win championships. But, in this year’s championship, Kentucky won that battle too, 40-39, and yet they did not win. Neither team scored enough kills to put themselves in the upper echelon of NCAA finalists. A&M was 39% kill and Kentucky was 35% kill. Average NCAA semifinalists and finalists score 41-42% kill when they win so neither team quite hit that threshold. (A&M fell about 2 kills short, while Kentucky was around 5 kills short.) As a result of not scoring enough, both teams allowed errors to decide the outcome. Unfortunately for the Wildcats, they lost the attack error battle, 20%-13%. In general, matches aren’t super engaging when errors determine the winner and I don’t think tonight was any different.

Ifenna Kos-Okpalla, Lizzie Carr, and Asia Thigpen each had kill percentages that put them in the upper third of attackers in their positions but each contributed very little to the overall scoring. Kos-Okpalla was the biggest contributor of the three, accounting for about 1/5 of her team’s kills. But it’s hard to appreciate good attacking when it’s such a small part of the team’s success. These contributions shouldn’t be overlooked, but they will be overshadowed. And they will be overshadowed by lackluster performances by most of the pin attackers.

I had been looking forward to watching two first-team AVCA All American outside hitters from Kentucky go against two second-team AVCA All American pins from A&M. Of the four, I think only Kyndal Stowers played like an elite finalist. The other three were, well, average (at least when you’re only considering performances in the semifinals and finals). In terms of kill percentage, only Stowers achieved a kill rate (43%) that compares to the top third of semifinalist and finalist pin attackers.

Looking at team scoring, A&M definitely performed like a championship team, siding out at 72%. Their point scoring was sufficient, 44%, but it felt like more than enough because of the huge side out advantage they held over Kentucky. The Wildcats actually sided out at a decent rate, 55%, but teams in the semifinals and finals probably need to be at 60% to have a good chance of winning. So, by holding their opponents to a more pedestrian side out percentage, the Aggies were able to open up big gaps because they sided out so much better.

In closing, I’ll reiterate that I think Texas A&M is fully deserving of the trophy and I also think Kentucky deserved to be in the final alongside them. I believe they were the two best teams in the postseason. I’m sure both teams wish they could have performed better but, ultimately, you only need to be better than the team across the net from you and the Aggies were certainly the better team tonight.

You may notice the stats I chose to describe tonight’s performances (K%, E%, SO%, and PS%) are not ones you hear if you watch a lot of volleyball on television. But we’re trying to change that. Here’s a link to a written version of The Romo Effect, in which I discuss why these stats are more useful for communicating about volleyball matches. Here’s a link to the video and the slides of my 2025 AVCA presentation of the same name.

If you’re attending, please say hello! Building community starts with little conversations at events like this.

My Presentations

My first session, The Romo Effect and the Coming Evolution of Volleyball Storytelling (Thursday, 12/18, 8:45am), is a VolleyStation project that’s taking a big swing at how we can keep growing and deepening fan engagement with volleyball in the near future. We’re going to talk about better building blocks that give both broadcasters and fans a more accurate and robust way of viewing the game. Using stats from 10 years of NCAA semifinals and finals, we’ll explore the foundations of a new way of understanding and talking about volleyball.

My second session, Good Talk About Good Coaching (Thursday, 12/18, 1:45pm) is called a roundtable discussion but it’s actually a guided small group discussion. In theory, you had to sign up for it ahead of time and space is limited but I say show up anyhow and we’ll make space for you.

We’ll be exploring how coaches’ personal coaching frameworks impact the ways they manage some common coaching situations.

My third session, Measuring What Matters (Thursday, 12/18, 3:45pm) is also a small group discussion that required sign up ahead of time because space is limited. I’m okay with more people showing up but I don’t know how the AVCA feels about it. I make no guarantees.

I’ll be helping coaches and analysts think through the process of creating their own metrics to help them measure things that are important in their programs.

My fourth session, So You Want to Control the Controllables… (Saturday, 12/20, 2:15pm) is a typical meeting room session with space for all. No need to sign up or talk your way past the bouncer.

The session will be an adaptation of a series I posted on Substack earlier this year. But I won’t be just reading what I wrote. As I have done in past presentations, I’ll only spend about half the time talking. The other half will be paired or small group discussions around prompts from the content. Here’s the description I wrote for the convention agenda:

“Coaches are very fond of controlling things. Top coaches are regularly lauded for their obsession with and attention to detail. This presentation suggests the idea that control might not be what it’s made out to be.

During this session, participants will discuss what’s worth controlling, how to intervene effectively in practices and competition, and how to plant seeds of change in their teams.”

My Agenda

In case you’re coming to Kansas City and looking for ideas to fill your schedule, here’s some of the presentations I’m planning on attending.

Wednesday, 12/17

5pm - AVCA Convention 101: What Every First-Time Attendee Needs to Know
It’s not my first convention, but I like to check in to hear what others are recommending and what they’re trying to get out of the convention.

6pm - Pre-Convention Seminar Part 3: Attack and Block - Tactical Tools for Winning the Net
(This session requires purchase of the pre-convention seminar package.) Lauren Bertolacci is someone whose coaching philosophy I really respect and admire. I want to see her session not because I want to learn the tactical tools she’ll talk about but because she’ll talk about her values too.

Thursday, 12/18

11:45am - “Coaching Us” From Reactive to Ready: Preparing Your Club for the Conflicts You Know Are Coming
Dr. Jen Fry’s presentations always crush and always give me something to think about. She recently published a book about managing conflict and this will certainly be a great distillation of what’s in her book.

Friday, 12/19

9am - Super Session
I’m really interested in the last four of the six mini-sessions. Yes, my boss at VolleyStation is part of one of them. But I’m also fascinated to hear from the ESPN and BTN people about how they see the future of volleyball broadcasts. The last two mini-sessions are about rules and coaches growing and changing, which I’ll always be interested in.

10:40am - Indoor Club Management Track - Investing in Coaches for Long-Term Club Success through the Onboarding, Development and Retention Process
I care a lot about coach development. I have a lot of opinions about how it can be done. I think clubs are great places to help coaches develop so I want to hear what these directors are doing and why.

1:15pm - Building the Toolbox: Training Creativity and Range
This might be similar to Bertolacci’s pre-convention seminar session. I’ll go to this one if I can’t attend her Wednesday session.

1:15pm - Semi-Final Match Analysis with Nate Ngo and Virginia Pham
Nate and Virginia are amazing at their jobs. I’ve been talking with them a little about possible ideas and content for this session. I want to hear their perspectives on Thursday’s national semifinals.

3:45pm - Engaging Ways to Enhance Volleyball IQ and Decision Making
I’m always interested in decision making from a psychological perspective. I’m interested in this presentation to see what Poole has to say about coaching player decision making.

3:45pm - Statistical Benchmarks: Key Metrics from Top Programs and How to Evaluate Your Team
I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on benchmarks and standards. I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on evaluating team performance. I’m curious to see what I can learn from the thoughts and opinions of others on these topics.

Saturday, 12/20

9am - The Pressure Playbook: Coaching Perfectionistic Athletes Without Breaking Them
Perfectionism is a complex subject and I think coaches, including me, can learn a lot about how perfectionism expresses itself and how we can coach perfection-minded players.

11:30am - Seeing the Game: The Visuomotor Foundations of Reading, Decision-Making, and Movement
Similar to my interest in Poole’s presentation about decision making, I’d like to see how others are helping athletes become better at making decisions.

Sunday, 12/21

10am - Better Starts With You: Coaching the Person Behind the Player
I always want to coach people before I coach skills so I’m interested to see how Kindig talks to coaches about supporting the human growth of players.

11:15am - Closing Session – Sunday Stories: Insights from Top Coaches and Leaders
This session is always an entertaining potpourri of topics. It’ll be the last thing I do at convention before heading home.