Some good insight from former Australian Men’s coach Mark Lebedew. I had the pleasure of listening to Mark speak about training and cue recognition when he was in Adelaide last year. It has certainly improved my trainings since. He also has a great deadpan sense of humour. I do recommend watching the technical videos on the fivb site of the 2007 men’s world cup. Will be even better when they start posting more stuff on it.
You’re right about the weird relationships between volleyball and ’skill models’, but I happen to think this is a particularly Australian idea. The idea of the ’skill model’ is that there is one right way of doing something. This is, of course, completely wrong. And the biggest mistake that people make is confusing technique (which is a functional method of performing a task) and aesthetics (how it looks). Volleyball is not an aesthetic sport.
To the specific examples, none of these things are new. I know I’ve been talking about using the arms in passing for 15 years and Velasco for longer than that. But in Australia people spend too much time thinking about legs and arms and not nearly enough time about the platform. Italian junior coaches spend hours teaching the platform. Watching 100’s of kids at Junior Nationals trying to pass without a platform is much worse to me than fingernails on 100 blackboards and not because it is not aesthetically pleasing but because it is functionally not effective.
I could talk about coach education for hours, but the coach has a responsibility to his/her players to a) study the game, b) look beyond aesthetics and c) not allow that near enough is good enough.
As for videos on the internet, there are plenty of links to volleyball videos on Devo, but specific technical videos are on www.fivb.org
