Author: Volleyball Coaching Wizards

The importance of consistency

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Stelio DeRocco talks in this excerpt from his Volleyball Coaching Wizards project about how important it is for the coach as leader to be consistent in their demeanor, attitude, effort, and character.

Stelio was the Australian National Team coach during the 2000 Olympic cycle. He later lead the Canadian National team to a NORCECA championship and coached in a World Cup. As a professional coach, he won 2 Euro Cups with Montichiari (Italy) and 2 leagues and 3 cups with Constanta (Romania).

Note: This discussion of consistency is something John & Mark expand on in Episode 4 of the Podcast. It is also a feature topic in the Wizard Wisdom book.

Managing cultural diversity in a team

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In this excerpt from his Volleyball Coaching WIzards interview, Vital Heynen talks about how a coach can go about managing a team where the players are of different nationalities and/or are of a different nationality than themselves. His discussion of language use may be of particular interest.

Vital led the German National Team to a bronze medal at the 2014 World Championships, then Poland to gold in 2018. He won numerous league and cup titles coaching in his native Belgium, and has also coached professionally in Germany, Poland and Turkey.

Volleyball coaching philosophy change

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This is an excerpt from Mark’s interview in which he talks about how his coaching philosophy has changed over the years. He discusses how he went from requiring his players to operate in a certain way rather than allowing them the freedom to find solutions for themselves.

Wizards at Work: MasterCoaches

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Because Wizards Mick Haley and Ruth Nelson have nothing better to do with their time (haha!), they’ve joined up with fellow coaching legends Bob Bertucci and Brian Gimmillaro to create MasterCoaches. It’s a project where they travel the country providing coaching clinics.

Here’s how they describe the project.

Our philosophy at MasterCoaches is to instruct coaches in the technical aspects of the game, develop the best methodology of instruction for individual skills, how to correct and implement these skills in practice and in competition.

These are 1-day clinics for coaches. A sample schedule is available here. It definitely looks like a fast-moving, jam-packed day!

Review: A huge win

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Here’s a review of Volleyball Coaching Wizards – Wizard Wisdom shared on Amazon by a German reader. First the original German, then the translation.

Wer eine Übungssammlung erwartet, wird enttäuscht. Für alle Anderen ist das zweite Buch der Volleyball Coaching Wizards ein riesiger Gewinn. Endlich mal wieder ein Buch, dass sich mit der mentalen Seite des Spiels befasst und Technik/Taktik zum Glück außen vor lässt. Aus meiner Sicht gehört dieses Buch als Pflichtlektüre in jeden Trainerlehrgang – egal auf welcher Ausbildungsstufe. Statt wie im ersten Buch reine Interviews abzudrucken, haben John und Mark einzelne Aspekte aus zahlreichen Interviews heraus genommen und diskutieren diese entweder selbst oder stellen andere Interviewausschnitte dagegen. Hier bieten sich Lernchancen für jeden Trainer. Absolute Leseempfehlung.

Anyone who expects a collection of exercises will be disappointed. For everyone else, the second book of Volleyball Coaching Wizards is a huge win. Finally a book that deals with the mental side of the game and leaves technique/tactics out fortunately. From my point of view, this book is a compulsory reading in every coaching course — no matter what level of training. Instead of printing pure interviews like in the first book, John and Mark have taken individual aspects out of numerous interviews and either discuss them themselves or put other interview excerpts against them. This is where learning opportunities are offered for every trainer. Absolute reading recommendation.

Review: Recommended for any volleyball coach

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Here’s a review a reader of the first Volleyball Coaching Wizards book posted on Amazon.

As a volleyball coach I was pleased to find a book dedicated to my sport. While I’ve read some great coaching books, such as the ones by Phil Jackson and Bill Walsh, they are both American and about basketball and football respectively. So I very much appreciated not just the technical volleyball aspect, but the fact that the coaches interviewed were from not just the USA, but also Europe and Australia. In particular the interview with Giovanni Guidetti is worth the price of the book alone. His views on coaching and learning are inspirational and thought provoking. The book covers a wide range of volleyball coaching, so not everything will be relevant to each reader (e.g. beach volleyball and college volleyball were less applicable to me), but each coach interviewed had higher level themes relating to coach player interactions that sat above the technical application. Recommended for any volleyball coach.

Volleyball Coaching Wizards at the 2019 AVCA Convention

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Volleyball Coaching Wizards made it’s first public appearance at the 2016 American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) Convention – in a manner of speaking. We’re back again for 2019!

For those of you who will be attending this year’s convention, John is presenting a session titled Wisdom from Some of the World’s Best Coaches. It’s scheduled for Friday the 20th at 11:45 in DLCC 303–305.

John’s presentation will be based on material from our second book, Volleyball Coaching Wizards – Wizard Wisdom. That’s the one where we share the views of the Wizards on a variety of coaching topics.

Special Convention Time Offer

While John’s at the convention (December 17th to 21st) you can get the print version of Volleyball Coaching Wizards – Wizard Wisdom for just $9.99 on Amazon (or the equivalent in your local Amazon store). This is only good during the convention, though!

If you see John at the convention, definitely feel free to say hello. Connecting with new people – and old friends, of course – is a big part of what theses events are all about.

If you can’t be at the convention, make sure to follow John’s updates about the event on his blog.

Wizards on the Web: Jim Stone

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Wizard Jim Stone has a website you’ll want to check out – https://jimstoneconsulting.com/. Definitely worth giving a read. He earlier had a different site, though, which featured an article titled The Man (Coach) in the Arena. It doesn’t look like it’s available anywhere any longer. It was based on a quote from Theodore Roosevelt on the subject of critics, however, which comes up in a video from Brené Brown.

If you’ve read Craig Marshall’s interview in our first book, you’ll know he talks about Brown’s discussion of vulnerability with respect to coaching skills. We used those comments from Craig in our second book as well.

Here’s the TED Talk referred to by Craig.

There’s also a longer presentation on Netflix titled Brené Brown – the Call to Courage. It runs 1 hour 16 minutes, and is a good watch.

From a coaching perspective, there’s an interesting podcast episode worth listening too in conjunction with the stuff above. The podcast is called EconTalk, but don’t be put off by the name. This particular episode specifically links to what Brown talks about with a really interesting twist. It’s one that we need to think about as coaches.

Here’s the link: https://www.econtalk.org/david-deppner-on-leadership-confidence-and-humility/

Milestone: 1000 books sold on Amazon

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According to the reporting from Amazon, at some point in October 2019 we surpassed 1000 total books sold on their global platform.

This includes all three of the books we currently have available. It doesn’t include sales from other platforms, though, so in reality we actually reached 1000 books sold a bit earlier.

Still, a pretty cool achievement.

Not surprisingly, the first book leads the way. It’s been out quite a bit longer than the others, after all. The second book – Wizard Wisdom – has been steadily gaining ground, though. There’s a good chance it will eventually take over the lead.

Of course we wouldn’t have reached the 1000 unit mark yet without the Spanish translation of the 2nd book – Magos del Entrenamiento de Voleibol – Sabidurías de los Magos. It’s done very well in Spain. Curiously, though, we haven’t yet sold any through Amazon’s Brazil or Mexico sites. In fact, we need to find a way to get the book in front of Latin American coaches generally. That’s an on-going challenge, and suggestions are most welcome.

Look forward to updates on new books in development soon. We have some ideas in the works. More information on that as things firm up.

Meanwhile, if you’ve read both Wizards books so far and are looking for more good stuff to read, check out our Recommended Reading List. It’s titles the Wizards suggested.

Check your coaching ego at the door

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A couple of things motivated this post.

The first is a quote from the 2nd Wizards book sent to John by Jan Maier. At the time, Jan was the head coach for the Hamburg team in the German women’s 2nd division (2.Bundesliga Nord). Jan texted the following.

“They (coaches) should be judged on their impact and influence.” love that! More people should read at least that introduction.

This is part of the philosophy we express in the book with respect to coaching excellence.

The other motivator is a post by Jim Dietz, a junior college and juniors coach. Jim also has experience in the USA Volleyball High Performance program (now National Team Development Program). His post includes commentary on what he sees as the arrogance of that program’s staff coaches with respect to coaching level. Here’s what he had to say (bold is Jim’s).

I got tired of hearing coaches talk about how they were unjustly assigned to a young age group or a lower skilled group–that the kids they were assigned were beneath them as a D-1 or elite club coach.  Speaking up to argue that assertion once, I was told my club isn’t known and I’m a juco coach, so my opinion counts for zero.  Yikes.  But it gets worse. Worse is the attitude towards coaching colleagues who cannot further that coach’s march up the illusory career ladder.  Yeah, I coach at a juco…I suck.  Yeah, she’s a high school coach/teacher…if she knew anything, she’d be a 17-elite club coach, she sucks, too,…blah, blah, blah.

Jim is not the only one to express this sort of view. John has definitely heard about this kind of arrogance from others with experience in the HP program, and it’s something that turns off would-be participants. You’ll notice Jim’s use of the past tense to start the quote above, speaking exactly to that issue (If you read the post you’ll find that Jim speaks to the same type of “coaching niche” concept as that mentioned by Wizard Mike Lingenfelter in his interview).

And you know which coaches have those egos and attitudes? It’s the ones with the least justification for doing so. We’re talking about coaches with limited experience and little in the way of perspective – probably mostly younger males, to be honest. They think the level of play of their teams has anything to do with their coaching quality.

Guess what? It’s probably completely unrelated.

Returning to the quote from Jan above, how much impact and influence have these coaches had? Not very much is the answer.

Note that this isn’t just a problem with USAV High Performance, though. Anywhere you have the perception of something as a higher or more “elite” level of coaching you run the risk of this sort of mentality expressing itself. And to be fair, sometimes the perceptions of those not included add fuel to this fire. You can hear experienced, successful high school coaches acting overly deferential to college coaches just because they are college coaches. It’s foolish, but it happens.

One of the features of the great coaches we’ve interviewed is respect and humbleness. Naturally, disagreements about the finer points of coaching happen. A common theme of the Wizards interviews, though, is the sense that there is still a lot to learn, and that learning can come from all different sources. A Wizard respects other coaches, regardless of competitive level or experience. Even more, they are eager to hear what those with more or different experience from themselves have to say. Neither ego nor arrogance is a factor.