When you tell somebody “you’re a natural receiver” what you’re really telling them is “you got lucky to be so good.” That phrase “you’re a natural” degrades any work a person has done to achieve their level of skill and makes it seam like they simply won a genetic lottery.

I don’t think coaches should be sending this message. Even if somebody really did win the genetic lottery. If an athlete really is a natural at some skill I still think it’s better for them to be told “wow, your reception is great, you must have worked impressively hard to learn that.” This phrase will, hopefully, show them that hard work is praiseworthy and if they work hard that is something to be proud of. Even if they didn’t work hard to begin with and they really are a natural, maybe now they’ll start working harder.

If an athlete starts to believe that they’re naturally talented at something they might believe that they are naturally untalented at other things. The naturally talented receiver might come to believe that since they currently aren’t a very skilled spiker that they must not be a natural at that and have no chance to improve. They will subsequently not put their best effort at trying to improve their spiking. Furthermore, the natural receiver is only as good as their nature. So if a better receiver turns up they might as well fold up shop and not work hard to improve their game. What’s the point if somebody is just naturally better?

The phrase “you’re a natural” is a bit of a trigger for me. I get praise often for being pretty smart. I have heard many times “you’re naturally intelligent.” This insults me and I feel it devalues how hard I have worked at becoming a good learner. What people who tell me this don’t know is that when I was in elementary school I was in “special” education classes and was thought to have a learning disability. I don’t think anybody was praising my natural intelligence at this point in my life.

But now, I’m naturally intelligent. Telling me that isn’t a compliment. It devalues the hard work I did to become smarter. As we now know that the brain can change over time (neuroplasticity). So we can become more intelligent than we currently are. We can become better learners. Not only this, but the more we practice learning the more easily we are able to learn future skills. This tells me that should praise people for being learners and working hard.

So stop telling athletes that they’re a natural at [skill].

1. If they aren’t a natural (most likely) you’re insulting them and devaluing work they had to do to learn the skill in question.
2. If they are a natural, you should still promote the value of work ethic and becoming a learning. Because they won’t be a natural at everything. They shouldn’t stop working hard in case an even more skilled natural turns up.

End of rant.

Even the most data driven coaches will likely have a hard time measuring improvement over time in volleyball. This is due to the cyclical nature of volleyball and the interplay of different skills over the course of every rally.

A player could receive serve at 55% perfect & good in a week of practice in September and she receives 65% in a week of practice in January. Some would say that 10% is a lot better… But can you say that that player is actually better?

What about if you have a player receiving 55% in September and she receives 55% in January? As a coach, you failed to make that athlete improve her reception in the past four months?

In both cases I don’t think the answer is very obvious.

In the second example, the receiver might be a lot better but your servers in practice are a lot better too. So, statistically, not only is your receiver the same, but so are your servers. But! Both are actually better. The servers are creating more difficult serves and the receiver is better able to handle those serves. So it seems like neither are better.

In the first example, it seems more obvious, that yes, your receiver is much improved because if the servers are the same she has a 10% improvement and if the servers are better than she has a better than 10% improvement rate. But if the servers are, in September, forcing bad receptions 45% of the time then, in January, they are only forcing bad receptions 35% of the time it seems like the servers are worse!

Maybe that receiver was just having a good week in January and she’s going to return to the mean the next week. Maybe she has got better but she’s just got better at receiving her teammates serves in practice and hasn’t got better at receiving the opponent you’ll be playing on the weekend!

Because of this interplay of skills in volleyball it is extremely difficult to judge improvement at the higher LTAD stages. The quality of serve is judged by the ability to disrupt the reception and the quality of the reception is based on the ability to manage the serve.

At the lower stages of LTAD it might be a lot easier to measure because we might have a model of what good technique looks like and we are measuring how close we are to attaining that model. If we know there is a certain way we want to put our wrists and hands together on serve receive we can measure how often our athlete is putting his wrists & hands together and see if it happens more and more frequently.

In that sense we are measuring improvement and keeping the athlete focused on the process rather than the outcome. This is not possible at the higher stages of LTAD where an athlete might have already developed their technique and individual style and we are largely outcome driven.

So measuring improvement at the T2C and T2W stages might be more subjective than we care to admit. I would argue that when you’re measuring improvement you might just be measuring what the athlete did that day (or week) and it might not be possible to use that to predict actual improvement. I guess that this is why we need to test statistical and practical significance when testing a hypothesis (for instance, hypothesizing that athlete X has improved from time point A to time point B). This might be what needs to happen in high performance gyms to really measuring the improvement of our athletes more scientifically.

No two rallies in volleyball are alike. What happened once will never happen again exactly as it did before. This means that for those of us who want to be data driven and scientific we might have to be honest with ourselves and admit that we’re going to have to rely on subjectivity when making decisions.

I have been a coach in some capacity for the following teams: 

Highschool: 

• Mount Sentinel
• Sentinel
• Southridge

Club:

• Thunder
• FVVC
• Focus
• Jr. Heat
• Kootenay

High Performance: 

• UBC WVB
• TWU WVB & MVB
• Capilano MVB
• UBCO WVB & MVB
• Team Canada WVB
• Team BC MVB

This made me think about the importance of a badge and if the team you play for matters. I haven’t been coaching all that long but I have a long list of teams of which I’ve been a part. So if being a good teammate/coach is devotion to the specific team then I’m doing a pretty awful job. I think coaches typically talk a lot about how it means something to wear the jersey. I have been questioning that lately. 

I care a lot about the 13 girls I’m coaching right now for Jr. Heat (18U club). Early on, I even talked about how playing for the Heat means something. However, I since corrected myself. Because that was a lie. I would still care a lot about these 13 girls if we were Sky or KVC (other local clubs). 

So I landed on this: a team is who you are. Not the badge you wear. 

We recently had a recruit come to practice with our Heat Varsity MVB team. He mentioned how close his soccer team was, how they always really cared for each other, and wanted to be the best at being a team. Their cheer was “1, 2, together!” 

I stole the “together” cheer because I think it means more than “Heat” or “Spartans” or “Blues.”

Jordan Peterson, in 12 Rules for Life, explains: “It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.” I think this is a team; everyone wants to see everyone else’s life improve. Which makes their life improve by extension.

A team is a group of people who come together and care about each other. They do more for each other than they do for themselves. A team is “together.” They aren’t just the badge they wear. 

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”