This is the third of the three big updates we have on the Volleyball Coaching Wizards project. The first was about our new approach to making the interviews available. The second shared our plans to expand the interviewer pool. In this one we’ve got news about a new sub-project that’s currently underway.
Of women, by women, for women
For a while now we’ve wanted to create a new series of Wizards interviews focused on women. They would be interviews of women coaches (not to be confused with coaches of women) conducted by a fellow female coach, being sure to address elements of the profession especially relevant to women in coaching.
To put it quite bluntly, John & Mark as male coaches haven’t had the same experience female coaches have had in their careers. As such, they aren’t best suited to have in-depth conversations on things from that perspective. Thus the desire to have a female interviewer.
The focus
The focus of the Women Wizards series is on role model type coaches. These are women who are still actively coaching, or perhaps only just recently retired. In other words, experienced and successful coaches that are or could be visible in action to the current generation of early-career women coaches. We want these interviews to be motivational and inspirational for them, as well as informative. Current active coaches are a bit more relatable in that regard.
This is definitely not to say retired women and/or those who have moved into more administrative roles aren’t interview candidates. We just may categorize them in a different fashion than the active ones.
Of course, as always with the project, we want broad representation. That means women from around the world and all different levels of play.
Got any recommendations? Let us know.
Our interviewer
We originally had a pair of women lined up to do the interviews, but availability became a problem. So we’ve gone in a different direction. Lauren Bertolacci has agreed to take on the project. She’s super excited for this Wizard Women series, and has already done her first interview!
Lauren is an Australian who currently coaches in Switzerland for NUC Volleyball. She played both professionally in Europe and for the Aussie national team before moving into coaching. In fact, she got her start coaching the men’s team at Volley Luzern.
Those of you who have followed John’s Coaching Conversation series may have seen Lauren in a couple of the episodes. She was on the sessions about coaching across genders and culture development.
Special Patron Tier
As reported on Update #1 of this sequence, we’ve moved to using the Patreon platform to make the interviews available. Patrons on the primary tiers will get access to every interview posted (initially at a rate of two interviews per month), including the Wizard Women ones.
We’ve decided to create separate Patreon tiers just for the Wizard Women interviews, though. Patrons in these tiers won’t have access to the other interviews, but they will have the advantage of getting the Wizard Women interviews more quickly. Their release won’t be slowed down by being mixed in with the rest of the ones in the general list.