Pandora’s Box

So within a few hours of posting up my observations on what happened when SA went from 6 state teams to 12, a whole bunch of people read it and commented. I’m surprised anybody reads this (I can deduce I have two subscribers so a big thankyou to both of you out there), so I was really surprised when I got this…

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Christian Stapff 

Huy,

As the new face with Volleyball Australia—in my capacity as Sport Development Manager—your article raises some important questions for our sport.

Before I do, your readers may want to know: What gives me the authority to comment?

I have played for the WA Institute of Sport Volleyball team from its inception in 1986 until 1995. Over this period, I had the opportunity to represent Australia. During this time our WAIS team placed every year or played in a medal playoff.

As a coach I had the privilege to coach players such as Julien Prosser, Dan Howard, George Petrou, Wade Willcocks, and many (who, I hope, will forgive me for not mentioning their name—the list is long) who represented WA, the Junior National Team and at the National Team level This period also coincided with a golden period for our junior programs in Western Australia—Men and Women. The credit goes to coaches

My hope this debate (dialogue would be preferable) continue as I am not sure we have arrived at a model meeting all our kids needs.

I will comment on a couple of issues–some raised by your article, others raised tangentially from what you stated.

There are a number of issues at play when we decide to have second and third teams for each age group.

• Will the second/third team be competitive?
• Does the team get good coaching? Are we playing at home?
• What actually is the purpose of a second/third team?
• And, is our sport structure actually allowing a team to fulfill such purpose?
What has occurred to me is we should maybe consider if it is not better to match second/third team against other second/third teams—a level playing field, assuming each state selects the teams on merit.
The athlete is more likely to strive to getting better faster—the incentive to strive for the 1st team or second team, and so on…. In addition, since second and third teams (or even lower teams) have less experienced coaches as well as less playing and athletic skill( a generalization) the playing field is somewhat leveled.
What if one state has more teams than grades i.e. 5 teams but there only three levels. Easy, the lowest performing teams play in the third level competition.

The issue, I believe, revolves around access for athletes to competition they and their parents pay for. In the past it was the state-v-state concept, but this I believe had hurt volleyball development in Australia because the numbers (twelve per team) were so limited. I believe that multiple teams per age group is a worthy concept, if we level the playing field so highly skilled teams do not meet low skilled teams i.e. a ‘first’ team plays against a ‘second’ team. We should not that even among ‘first teams there is a significant gap between Winner and last place.

The concept of ‘multiple teams per age group’ raises the question can we develop and provide incentive for a regionalized concept: i.e. representative teams from regions not just states. To an extent schools cup approaches this concept, but schools cup does not provide opportunities for athletes whose school does not go to Schools Cup.

There are pockets of volleyball excellence in regional areas, and right now they center on schools, or where a good coach is developing players.

If we are concerned solely about medal counts we also may lose the thing I like most about volleyball it is an intensely physical and technically demanding game , but also a social event.

As Sport Development Manger with AVF I want to raise one more issue:
• Participation at Schools Cup

How can we improve participation and skill levels further?
Should we include a height related division in each age group?
This was trialed by FIVB, and surprise, surprise, a country which is not known as a dominant volleyball nation won the tournament (I like the idea because I fit that criterion. The criteria: Men=1.85cm, Women=1.75cm). Which country? Indonesia and they beat Russia in five sets. Was skill the decisive factor?

What impact would a player height limitation have on kids?
• Kids grow at varying stages—and some will not reach physical, mental and emotional parity for awhile.
• Their athletic development can vary by up to four year when we compare early developers and late developers
• Short kids can compete—they are always in the game since they don’t face big blockers/ big hitters; skill level now is important!
• Tall players play against tall players—less chance to get arrogant, complacent and develop bad technical habits
• You, as a short player can play up but now you know what you are up against! This is good for those average height, but are big jumpers, outstanding athletes or wannabe liberos

My point is: kids want to play, kids want to improve, and if they have a chance to win—it is a trifecta.
Keep in mind the following:

1. Kids care less about winning than having the opportunity to play (Research says: 80 % of kids would rather play on a losing team than sit on the bench of the winning team!!!) and,
2. they play best when the chance for success or failure is 50%; this applies to any team by the way. Ever coached a team either winning too easily or losing badly?

We should ask ourselves: what is the purpose of this competition? Does it represent opportunity for coaches and referees as well?

Let’s begin with the end in mind!

Sincerely,

Christian Stapff

Team SA Part 2: Failed States – the decline of SA’s competitiveness

Few would argue that SA did badly at last year’s AJVC. It got many people talking about where we went wrong. Was it an isolated year of badness? Or was it a decline? People started talking about the “good ol’ days”. There’s this fantastic blog with all the stats and info on AJVC over the years. Here are some interesting stats I pulled.

1995-2002

	Gold	Silver	Bronze	TOTAL
1995 MEL	2 (U19W, U17W)	0	0	2
1996 MEL	2 (U17W, U17M)	1 (U19W)	0	3
1997 BRI		1 (U17M)	4 (U21W, U21M, U19W, U17W)	5
1998 PER	2 (U19W, U17M)	3 (U17W, U18W, U19M	0	5
1999 ACT	3 (U19W, U17W, U17M)	1 (U21W)	0	4
2000 ADE	4 (U19W, U19M, U17W, U17M)	1 (U21W)	1 (U17M2)	6
2001 MEL	1 (U17M)	3 (U21M, U19W, U19M)	1 (U19M)	5
TOTAL	14	10	6	30

[President's Cups: 1998, 1999, 2000]

2002-2007

	Gold	Silver	Bronze	TOTAL
2002 SYD	3 (U21M, U19W, U19M)	1 (U17M)	1 (U21W)	5
2003 BRI	0	1 (U17M)	4 (U21W, U21M, U19W, U17W)	5
2004 PER	1 (U21M)	2 (U19W, U19M)	1 (U17W)	4
2005 ADE	3 (U19W, U19M, U17W)	1 (U21W)	1 (U21M)	5
2006 ACT	0	2 (U19W, U17M)	1 (U19M)	3
2007 SYD	1 (U19W)	1 (U21M)		2
TOTAL	8	8	8	24

[President's Cups: 2005]

I’ve defined these two eras as such:

• 1995-2001. 7 years before SA expanded its programme. Junior Development Manager, Trish Virag oversaw the programme before being promoted to managing VSA’s business interests. Second teams were rare and only fielded if exceptional, such as the Travis Moran led SA Blue team in 2000, which won Bronze and earned Travis all-star selection. [NB Tony Scott's comment on this post has indicated that the 2000 U17 Boys Blue team was actually the U16 School Boy's team getting some extra practice]

• 2002-2007. 6 years in which SA expanded its state programme from 6 teams to 12. State programme overseen by Richard “Sooty” Casutt, then Mick Nelson, then Simon Phillips. In this time VSA rapidly grew and had a high turnover rate.

On cursory inspection, not much difference. We had some good years and some bad. We averaged 4 medals per year in both periods. We won nearly twice as many golds in the first period, and made the gold medal game 24 times compared to 16 in the second period. We had a distinct advantage when the tournament was held in Adelaide, winning the President’s Cup both times. Not unusual since it was easier to get our best teams and coaches involved. A good indicator is when we do well interstate, which more evidence points to the first era.

So ignoring when we hosted in 2005, the data shows a clear decline in the last 5 years. There’s no single reason for this, but as someone with an interest in economics, I’m going to look at the number of teams we fielded, and the resources we had to support them.

Participation v Success. Quantity v Quality. Again

The expansion of the state programme represented a profound shift in philosophy and became a polarising issue. So why did they do it?

The basic problem was participation levels at the elite levels was just not high enough. 2001 saw state league reduced from 8 clubs to 6, with the two Northern clubs, Giants and Tea Tree Gully Trojans both folding. State league didn’t seem to be getting younger and there weren’t enough young players coming through. The U21 state teams struggled to get enough players and often had players who had been dropped from younger teams. Viability seemed to be a big problem.

To solve all this Richard “Sooty” Casutt, who had taken over from Trish, championed the expansion of the state programme to increase the stock of players. By then, many states already had multiple teams at the U19 and U17 age groups, so we were the next to follow. In 2002, we fielded second U17 girls and U17 boys teams. By 2004, we had 6 x U17 teams, 4 x U19 teams and 2 x U21 teams (only 1 would compete since there weren’t enough teams for an U21 women’s competition).

Expanding the programme did make a difference. State league participation increased, with a lot of clubs fielding 2 reserve teams. A lot of these teams were development teams with younger players. Other things changed round this time too that boosted participation. Age level divisions in junior league were scrapped in favour of more flexible ability-assessed divisions. Non-club teams could compete in junior league seeing more school-based teams participating.

Everyone is special (which means nobody is)

The above is a quote from my favourite animated movie, The Incredibles, which unusually for a family film made a sinister commentary on the effects of political correctness and equal opportunity. The main problem some people had with expanding the state program is that it would debase the value of being selected. If everyone is special, then nobody really is. Another argument was that with such a dramatic increase in numbers, the quality would coach. You could call a lot of these people traditionalists or purists. They were part of a time when volleyball was a boutique sport, that although small, was incredibly rich in quality. They would not want to see it watered down to lowest denominator garbage.

On the other extreme, there were people who were progressive and wished to see the sport grow beyond its traditional limits. It was the age-old debate of quantity vs. quality. There was nothing dubious about either motivation. Based on the influence of the people who taught me, I would fall more into the “quality” camp, although I have also been involved in taking part of programmes that are more participation based.

Did it work?

Well, in a sense both sides were right. In the years that the new policy was introduced, participation at state league increased and our U21 teams were a lot stronger and had better results. But the standard did drop at the younger levels, with SA’s dominance in the U17 age groups significantly diminishing. Some would say that our resources were just spread too thin to accommodate 6 young inexperienced teams every year. Overall we won half as many titles as we did before and 20% less medals.

“Progress” had its costs there was a real “changing of the guard”, as many experienced coaches stopped being involved with the programme. Bold ideas will inevitably alienate people while attracting new ones. With less experienced coaches around and more athletes than we had had before, the standard definitely dropped.

“Development”

As a screen producer by trade, 90% of my time is spent in developing projects that may not see the light of day. It’s a tricky and speculative business, and developing volleyball players and teams is no different.

One year I was the assistant coach of the U17 men’s “yellow” (third) team, and it was hard. We ended up picking 10 kids (with 3 teams of 9 or 10 I don’t think anyone who turned up got cut) who were 14 or 15. Although they managed to win two games against a second ACT team and a second WA team, they really weren’t strong enough to compete against a lot of teams and got hammered. There’s a great basic rule I got from Eldo when I did his Level 1 coaching course: a drill or exercise has to have a success rate of 40-70% to be effective. When my team was getting pummelled I really questioned whether they were learning much at all.

Development teams need to rotate their players to give them equal game time. But does this work? Whether you rotate the players during the sets, between the sets or from game to game, there are problems. Conventional wisdom says repetition improves players. So rotating between sets or games means an inexperienced team has to find its feet again and re-invent the wheel. You could just give the equal court-time within each set by giving them set roles and subbing then on and off in frontcourt or backcourt. This certainly lets them build familiarity, but also doesn’t expand their skill-set, another no-no of development.

Generally, all of this works counter-intuitively to one of the most effective learning tools of representative sport – meritocracy. Staying on if you play well, and getting dragged if you don’t. The study of economics has long taught us that people’s behaviour changes when the incentives do. Perhaps the problem is there were too many players which meant giving equal court-time would create instability, so reducing the team to say 8 players would give them more repetition. Having coached two bottom aged development teams at national tournaments I can say that they’re physically at a disadvantage and their performance starts going downhill after the third day. So in this case less isn’t necessarily more.

I think another part of the question is the quality of the coaching. Are they learning from an excellent experienced coach, or an inexperienced developing coach? It could be the blind leading the blind. Coaches with the gravitas to get the best out of a representative team don’t grow on trees, but good-willed people who want to help seems to. One practice for the developing U17 teams was to designate a Head Coach who would oversee all three teams and coaches. Usually this person was one of the coaches who under previous circumstances was good enough to get a state team a medal. However, this responsibility had a catch 22. Either this person could spend a lot of time with the top team to ensure a medal at the expense of the rest of the programme, or spend equal time across the three teams at the expense of medal chances.

So it became increasingly hard to give an answer to parents who asked if it was worth their child playing in a development team. It’s expensive, so do they really learn that much from being annihilated on court in most games? Are merit based and equallist ideals confusing in a state programme? Elite sports leagues like our football codes and governments ask that question everyday. What does it mean to a player to wear those proud colours but get pumped every game because they’re just not up to the challenge yet?

In its defence…

Some great players did come out of these development teams. Travis Moran played in a second U17 team in 2000 that won Bronze and earned him all-star selection. He represented Australia at the Athens Olympics. Greg Sukochev played in the same team 2 years later in 2002, and went on to win an AIS scholarship. And Chris McHugh, who i coached as a podgy 11-year-old went unnoticed for years until he turned heads playing in same team in 2005, going on to be part of national beach programme.

The core of the SA U17 girls third team in 2005 became the core of Eldo’s Bronze medal winning SA U16 team the year after, so the development teams weren’t without their successes, although many would have to agree that having 12 teams was a little too much.

2008

SA’s result in 2007 got a lot of people talking and reviewing these policies. I’ve heard that they might go back to 8 teams, with second teams at the U17 level. It seems like a good balance. I might even be attempted to get involved again. I hope a lot of our best coaches are thinking that too. As someone lucky enough to have been a part of winning teams for SA, I hope SA glory doesn’t remain a thing of the past for too much longer.

Trials start tomorrow.