Tag: coaching philosophy

Being authentic as coaches

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In this excerpt from his Volleyball Coaching Wizards interview, Giovanni Guidetti looks at how different nations have their own approaches to training, each resulting in considerable success on the international stage. He concludes by suggesting that at the end of the day each coach must be authentic in how they decide to coach their teams and players.

Giovanni is currently the Turkish women’s national team coach. He previously coached the Dutch national team to 4th in the 2016 Olympics. He previously also coached the German and Bulgarian national squads. He coaches professionally in Turkey and has won multiple CEV Champions League titles and FIVB World Club Championships.

Additional thoughts from Giovanni’s interview can be found in Episode 8 of the Podcast, as well as in the Wizard Wisdom book.

Respect and playing weaker teams

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In this excerpt from his Volleyball Coaching Wizards interview, Simon Loftus talks about the value of respecting the opposition and having objectives for matches against weaker opposition other than simply winning.

Simon became the first coach of a Scottish national volleyball team to win a championship when he led the Scotland men to the 2012 Novatel Cup title. As coach of the men’s and women’s program at Leeds Met University in England, his teams won 6 U.K. university (BUCS) championships and 5 Volleyball England Student Cups. He has also coached professionally in Sweden and has NCAA coaching experience.

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.

Podcast Episode 32: Killing the Player Inside

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In our interview with Glenn Hoag, he shared a comment from legendary coach Julio Velasco. It was that in order to truly be successful a coach must kill the player inside of him. This episode of the podcast explores that comment and its implications for your mentality as a coach. During the discussion we mention the conversation from the Peggy Martin podcast. That’s the one talking about coaching players as they are.

Feedback, questions, comments, etc. are always welcome!

Podcast Episode 30: The roles of a coach with Jan De Brandt

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In his interview, Jan De Brandt shared what he thought of as the three roles of a coach. They are the dictator, the creator, and the observer. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about those different roles and how we take each of them on at different times while working with our teams.

During this show we also mention the podcast we did on Craig Marshall’s view of the most important skills of a coach. The topic of post-match team talks came up as well.

Jan De Brandt has coached professionally in Italy, Turkey, Spain, Azerbaijan, and Germany, as well has his native Belgium. He is currently the Women’s National Team Coach for Hungary, having also coached Belgium. Among his coaching accomplishments are winning the European Volleyball League, silver medal in the CEV Champions League, bronze in the CEV Cup, plus league and cup titles in Turkey. Jan started his career coaching men, but switched to women after a few year

Feedback, questions, comments, etc. are always welcome!

Podcast Episode 28: Starting a new season with your team

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What do you do at the start of a new season? Sometimes you have a lot of returning players and only a few new ones. In other cases you have a lot of turnover, if not a completely new squad. In this episode of the podcast we talk about the things that are important to do at the outset, particularly in the area of leadership. That’s in terms of both it’s identification and recognition.

In this episode we reference the interview with Tom Turco, that features in the Volleyball Coaching Wizards book. Friend of the show, Ruben Wolochin is mentioned. He was with us for both Episode 5 and Episode 6 of the podcast. While Sue Gozansky does not get a specific mention, we do talk about some of what we talked about in Episode 1 of the podcast.

We also talk about this interview excerpt from John Dunning with respect to team culture.

We also mention Kathy DeBoer’s book Gender and Competition. The movie Necessary Roughness is in the discussion as well.

Feedback, questions, comments, etc. are always welcome!

Podcast Episode 26: Player-Coach relationships, with Athanasios Papageorgiou

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The relationship between player and coach could be the most important aspect of being a successful coach. In this episode of the podcast we explore that idea. It starts off with two excerpts from highly respected German coach and coach educator Athanasios Papageorgiou. They bring up the idea of looking at coaching beyond what you do in practice and how you manage match situations.

Athanasios Papageorgiou is probably best known in his native Germany as a coaching educator as he was Head of Coach Education for the German Volleyball Federation from 1986 to 2014. He remains and FIVB Coach Instructor, which he’s been since 1993. Papa, as he’s known, coached professionally from 1986 to 1992, winning a German championship and a German Cup during that time. Since 1983 he has been head coach for the German National Disabled Volleyball Team (standing), and has also coached the beach version since 2006. He taught volleyball at the German Coaches Academy for many years and has authored five books.

Feedback, questions, comments, etc. are always welcome!

John Dunning on defining team culture

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At the Art of Coaching Volleyball clinic in Fort Worth, TX (held at TCU), John got a chance to sit down with John Dunning, Terry Liskevych, and Russ Rose for a set of interviews. They were not full Wizards style interviews – which generally go 1:30-2:00 hours in length – but they addressed some similar themes. We’ll be releasing clips from those interviews on our YouTube channel over time – five of them this week.

Here’s the first, featuring John Dunning talking about developing and enforcing team culture.

Podcast Episode 20: Training A side vs B side with Arnie Ball

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Playing 6 v 6 games in practice is something we all do. It’s a fundamental part of preparing our teams to play in competitive matches. The question is how best to make those games as productive as possible, especially when it comes to how we split out the players. In this episode of the podcast we have a discussion about that, starting with comments from Arnie Ball about having A-team vs. B-team scrimmages.

Arnie Ball spent more than 30 years coaching the men’s team at IPFW where he won over 500 matches, reached the NCAA Final 4 six times, and was a national runner-up. He also won over 200 matches as the IPFW women’s team coach in the first few years of his tenure there. Arnie was named conference Coach of the Year three times and the 2007 AVCA National Coach of the Year. He has worked in the USA national program in a number of different coach roles and is a member of the AVCA Hall of Fame.

Feedback, questions, comments, etc. are always welcome!

Podcast Episode 17: Better results from random training with Tom Tait

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The benefits to be had from incorporating more random or distributed (game-like) training in your practices as opposed to the old-school block style of training (basic repetitive skill execution) are often discussed in coaching circles these days. In this episode of the podcast Tom Tait, who knows a thing or two about skill acquisition, talks about how you can still do skill coaching in a game-like environment and how we need to allow our players to develop their athleticism in that way.

Tom Tait is basically the father of Penn State Volleyball. He was the first coach for both the men’s and women’s teams, having handed the latter off to Russ Rose. He developed the men’s program into a consistent NCAA championship contender before eventually also handing that off. Since then he’s been focused on coaching education, working with the US national team program, and continuing his work as a professor at Penn State.

In the discussion a graph is mentioned which shows why random training is superior to the block alternative, based on scientific research. Here it is:

This was presented at the USA Volleyball High Performance Coaches Clinic in 2015. John was there and shared what was discussed in Going beyond maximizing reps.

We also referenced the desirability of being as efficient as possible in our practice planning and implementation. That was talked about in the Jan De Brandt episode.

Feedback, questions, comments, etc. are always welcome!