Last week we posted about looking to expand our base of interviewers to help us move this Wizards project forward. We’re still looking to hear from people who are interested in taking that on. In the meanwhile, though, we’ve had a noteworthy hand raised in response. Wizard Mick Haley has expressed interest and we’ve talked about what that could look like. It’s starting to take shape.

Pioneer Wizards

An idea dating back to the early days of the Wizards concept was to help share with people some of the sport’s history. It’s something we’ve certainly accomplished to a degree with the interviews we’ve done so far. We can take it much further, though.

The Pioneer Wizards concept is about focusing on coaches who are largely out of coaching now after lengthy careers. They might not be in position to talk much from a current coaching perspective. What they certainly can do, though, is tell us the tale of how we got to where we are today. And they can share with us their own career and personal development paths.

In other words, they can be for volleyball what the likes of John Wooden and Phil Jackson are for Basketball, or Bill Walsh and Vince Lombardi are for football. That is sources of long-lasting wisdom and insight.

We look forward to this branch of Wizards interviews developing in parallel with the Wizard Women ones already underway. Now is definitely a great time to join us on Patreon. There will be a lot of great content coming your way!

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.

Become a Patron!

In the last update we talked about our new approach to making Wizards interviews available to coaches around the world. In this update the focus is on how we actually produce new interviews.

Expanding our interviewers

A major limitation to the project up to this point is John’s and Mark’s availability to conduct interviews. Scheduling, recording, and producing them are quite time intensive efforts. I can be 6-8 hours of work for each of them when you put it all together. With the increased demands on our time seen in recent years, it’s hard to be able to get them done, especially when factoring other things like developing the Wizards books.

There are so many coaches out there worth having their stories and insights shared. And more will continue to bubble up over time. We want to be able to interview as many of them as we can, and contribute their knowledge and experience to the collective coaching consciousness. In order to do so, though, we’re going to need help.

That being the case, we’re putting out an open call for additional interviewers. These could be people who happen to know a certain Wizard caliber coach, and would thus do a single interview for us. Or they could be folks interested in doing a series of interviews. Both types are equally useful to the project.

Could this be you?

Think you could be one of those people?

If you’re familiar with the project you know we have a fairly standard set of working questions we include in the interviews. They form the basic outline of the discussion. Knowledge of and/or research about the Wizard then provides additional direction.

In other words, you’d need to be able to follow a plan, but also do the work needed to customize that plan to a given interview. No two interviews ever go the same way. That’s kind of the point. If every coach was the same, we would need a project like this one.

Think you could do that? If so, contact us. Let us know what you would bring to the project.

Our third of these three updates, also relates to this additional interviewers idea.

There are some developments we need to share with you with regards to the Volleyball Coaching Wizards project. Enough that we need to use a couple of posts to do so. In this first one we’ll focus on the first part of the new approach we’re taking to things.

Using Patreon

We decided to shift our model for distributing Wizards interviews to one mainly focused on Patreon. If you’re not familiar with it, Patreon is a platform which allows people (patrons) to support content developers through small pledges.

The platform features a donation-per-creation structure which fits very well with our project and also takes a considerable administrative load off our shoulders. In other words, it will let us focus on producing content, which is the whole point of this venture.

We’re starting off with two general tiers – $2/interview and $5/interview. Both come with bonuses, which we’ll look to expand upon as me move forward. Our plan is to post 2 interviews per month on Patreon. That way the monthly cost for everyone stays low. We can talk down the road about adjusting that monthly number based on patron feedback.

The first objective

A big motivation for us to go with this dontation-per-creation mode is being able to convert the interview audio for expanded distribution. The most obvious is generating transcriptions. They aren’t massively expensive to create these days, but do take some editing after the fact. Our initial goal is to reach $150/interview in donations to pay for that. Patrons will, of course, get those transcripts as an added benefit.

The next level is translation. It would be awesome to be able to transcribe the interviews into a variety of languages. That’s even more expense, though, so first things first.

Become a patron today and help us toward those objectives.

Become a Patron!

And if you get others to become patrons as well we’ll reach our initial transcription target even faster!

Here’s our second big update, which relates to interviewers.