Some athletes I work with are very difficult to reach. They will do their workouts and have no problem working hard on the court or in the gym. I might ask them to do something, that I think is very easy, like donating a few dollars to an athlete in a third world country to help with their travel costs or reading a book on mindset or resiliency that I think will help them be a better person…

Most of these athletes will follow my instructions begrudgingly because I’ll be mad if they don’t. I have several mentors in sports. When they ask me to do something I don’t do it because they want me to do it or they’re making me. I do it because I want to be better. If I can be better everything will be better.

This reminds me of the USA women’s volleyball program. On their whiteboard in the gym it says “Job one: Growth Mindset.” Coach Karch Kiraly would explain this as the realization that nobody on the team is good enough yet. The players are not good enough. The coaching staff is not good enough. Everyone needs to be better. Constantly. We can always improve. We can always improve as athletes or coaches and as people. 

This is highlighted by the latin phrase Ancora Imparo. This was said by Michelangelo at the age of 87. It means “Still I learn.” If at 87 somebody like Michelangelo still has the attitude that he needs to change and grow then perhaps that’s an indication that we all need to improve ourselves. 

Being a good person is important. I try to work with all my athletes on this constantly. Some of them have yet to understand. The New Zealand All Blacks are the most successful sports team in history. When you walk into their team room you will read on the wall “no dickheads.” Why does it say this? Because the All Blacks also have a saying “Better people make better All Blacks.” If it’s good enough for the best sports team in the world it’s good enough for my programs…

What does it mean to be a good person? To me it means that you should do more for others than you do for yourself. It’s not hard. It could be showing genuine appreciation or gratitude. It could be going out of your way to help someone without wanting a return on your investment. I had the great pleasure of working with a former professional volleyball player from Romania a few summers ago. He and I were coaching a summer volleyball camp together. When I was giving a presentation on goal setting he asked to interrupt me. He then told the kids that one very important part of reaching your goals is understanding that to get a cookie you need to give a cookie. If you go out of your way to help others people will help you. He said this is what he loved about Canada because everyone helps each other.

A really good example of this is Mark Bell. Mark is a powerlifter. He’s squatted over 1000 pounds in competition. After his powerlifting career he opened Super Training Gym. He allows lifters to train there and learn from him at no cost. When asked why he does this for free I believe he said “because I wanna be rich.”

Many of my athletes understand this to a certain extent. So they’ll do it. Maybe they just do it because I require it. Maybe they really just want to be better athletes. It doesn’t work that way unfortunately. You need to want to be a better person because you desire to be a good person. Not just so you can be a good athlete and win. There are a lot of commercials that say “sports skills are life skills.” Friendship, kindness, and service are sports skills which translate into life skills. One of my athletes said that you are an athlete for a finite amount of time but what you learn lasts forever. Also very true. 

Don’t be a better person to get something. Be a better person because you can be a good person. Marcus Aurelius said “Stand Straight. Not Straightened.” What does this mean? It means that be a good person because you are a good person. Not because you have to be. Be the person you can be because you will make the world a better place. Not because you are looking for an outcome for yourself.

Coach Joe Erhmann, the author of InsideOut Coaching and a former NFL Football player, explains in his book on transformational leadership the expectations of one of his coaches. One of his former coaches used to say “DIG.” That was his coach’s cue phrase. What does it mean? It means Dignity, Integrity, Grace. This is how athletes should act at all times. Especially when under pressure.

I don’t often use that phrase but I appreciate it greatly. However, at the beginning of every season I write one word on the whiteboard. Assertiveness. I tell my athletes that we are going to be assertive this season and forever. Then I explain what it means. I believe it means this: Assertiveness is the behaviour of emphasizing self confidence & persistent determination to express oneself in a positive way. 

When you teach something to somebody you are not only teaching them. You are teaching everybody that they will come into contact with. Your character is your brand. You should always promote your character to the best of your ability. You will get something out of it but this shouldn’t be your motivation. Great men and women make everybody and everything around them better simply by being who they are.

You are capable of more; be the person you know you can be. To everyone. Be good to people who can do nothing for you because how you treat anybody is how you treat everybody. Be a good person even when nobody is watching. 

Another important lesson near the end of the MHPC&TL is to use scientific evidence to inform coaching knowledge. In Kin 572 we were introduced to the methods of knowledge:

• Intuition
• Authority
• Rationalism
• Empiricism
• Scientific

Many coaches coach the way they were coached. Which is the method of authority rather than using the scientific method. Which is easier. It’s easy to say “we do things this way because Glenn Hoag or Carl McGown say so” because then it removes the responsibility from the coach and places it on the authority figure. This is the same as “this is what my coach did.”

I was lucky enough to have some pretty awful coaches that made me not want to coach like them. Fortunately I also have some pretty great coaching role models to fall back on as well.

As a coaching community we need to move away from intuition, rationalism, authority, empiricism and towards the scientific method. If we model this then eventually we can have new coaches who coach the way they were coached. Based on science. This is especially true in an academic setting where we are coaching student-athletes. This is a cultural shift in volleyball where the method of authority is omnipresent. Nonetheless, we should model the scientific method in our coaching practice so our athletes have faith in our methods. Not just faith in us as coaches.

As I am finishing up the last part of the MHPC&TL I’m reflecting on the evolution of my coaching practice over the past three years since I began this journey. In many ways I feel that I know less now than I did in April of 2016 when I got accepted into the program. Which makes me think about this satirical graph pertaining the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

This graph, obviously, wasn’t in the study by Kruger & Dunning (1999). However, it seems to be a semi-accurate representation of my development as a coach. The only differences is that after the valley of despair the upward slope towards being more confident is slower. The more I feel that I know, the more I feel like there is so much to learn.

Kin 572 was a great example of this. I started this class right after I finished a summer at the statistician with the national team and I felt pretty good about my knowledge of statistics. Finishing that class I thought “I need to take that class again.” There is so much to learn in that topic area. I definitely need to take more stats classes and keep expanding on my knowledge of research methods.

I believe I’m a better and more competent coach than I was three years ago and I’ve had so many opportunities to develop. However, I am most certainly less confident that I’m using the right methods or teaching the right systems. That said, I’m more confident in my ability to learn and adapt.

I think the most important lesson of the UBC Masters of HPC&TL is that I am just starting on the journey and that I need to continue to search for opportunities to learn and develop as a coach.

So the problem of now being in the valley of despair is solved by looking for more opportunities to develop and being a life long learner.

Reference of original study:

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121

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”

This semester has been one experience after another for my coaching journey. I took on the head coaching role at a high school, I am taking on more responsibility as an assistant coach at TWU with the women’s team, and school is more difficult.

I decided early in the season to take an extra class: Kin 567 Human Motor Performance. I wasn’t sure that this would be a good idea with my schedule. However, I have learned a ton from our prof, Nikki. This course has definitely enhanced my coaching effectiveness and practice design strategies. To that end, I decided to put off starting my research project until I get a little further into Research Methods with Carolyn and finish Nikki’s course.

I have asked Nikki if she would like to be involved with my research project in some way. She agreed that we could work together on it. However, she warned me that she hasn’t really done much field work.

So where I’m at right now is wanting to do something to do with international volleyball tactics and bring in something with perception-cogitative skills that Nikki could consult with.

Research methods has been a bit of a grind so I am considering taking it as an in person course at UBC in the second semester as it works with my schedule. I am also Seminar in Body, Exercise, and Society next semester. There is also a Seminar in Sensorimotor Control. These classes all work with my schedule because they happen in the mornings. So I am just trying to figure out if the time investment is worth it.

I have really enjoyed taking an in person class and I think I would like to take at least one next semester. I don’t know if Research Methods actually makes me a better coach. However, I don’t want struggling with those topics to hold me back in my academic pursuits so it might be worth taking twice or auditing it the second time.

Please let me know your thoughts.