Mumbai Indians rip off Heathfield’s playing strip

Well i thought there was a passing resemblance anyway. AVL up at Mt Lofty this weekend. Don’t know what the times are. Don’t care. Watch it all and make a day of it. Be there!

Private School Poaching and Meaningful Work

From Robbo

Sorry for slightly digging up the passed here Huy, but i just read this post on Haileybury. As an ex-Carey student (another competitor in the APS system with Haileybury), i can say that the Volleyball competition in the private school system is significantly lower compared to that of the public schools like Eltham, Billanook, Yarra etc. Although i was playing against Nick Goldsborough-Reardon, Steve Wallace and Tom Bawden (other than that i think there might have been a max of 3 players who went on to play state league). Private schools tend to concentrate on different sports like football, cricket, and rowing. Scholarships have always been a touchy issue when it comes to sport…

Back in my day (what am i saying? I’m only 25 ), we had a couple of boys brought in to the school on general excellence or music scholarships to play footy when everyone knew they were definitely not the bright students that they were made out to be, and i don’t think they had ever picked up a musical instrument…. This was when you technically weren’t allowed to give someone a sporting scholarship, but i think a lot has changed these days. Haileybury have obviously decided that they want Volleyball to be their sport that they excel in, as each school has their 1 or 2 sports they seem to get consistent results in.

I am not sure what the level of competition is like these days but hopefully this will force other schools to work on their programs and generally raise the level of Volleyball overall in the private school system.

* * *

Aaaah yes. The “Academic Scholarship” for gifted athletes. We had it too at my private school. A lot of the professional athletes my school marketed as alumni were actually given scholarships around yr 10 or 11 – convenienetly when their sporting ability manifested.

Speaking to more people about Haileybury, I have to agree with Robbo that it could make the standard better. They have the cash to pay good coaches. Eg Luke Campbell taking Haileybury’s open team last year. Getting more of these guys to participate by paying them well will make volleyball better overall.

But money is only one part of the equation. Robbo’s observation that private school volleyball could be of a lower standard is generous. It can be F!@#ing awful. For a coach, it’s good money. It must be. I’ve coached at four private schools and respectively paid at $15, $20, $25 and $40 an hour. At Adelaide High they paid for my trip/accomodation to Melbourne and for some of my trainings, at Brighton they paid for my trip/accomodation but not the trainings, and at WHS I am an exception to the rule where coaches  have to pay their way over (A couple of times i have “sponsored” teams and coaches to go).

The private girls schools comp in SA used to have the highest standard coaches around – current and ex national team players and coaches. I remember seeing ex senior national womens team coaches Harley Simpson and Johann Olesk coaching 6-a-side yr9 division D2 girls on a drooping outdoor court where the grass had grown over the marked boundaries.  It was surreal and F!@#ing funny. Since I already have a job, it’s not about the money but rather if I find the work “meaningful”.

In his book, “Outliers”, pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell identified three things that made any sort of work “meaningful”:

1. Autonomy
2. Complexity
3. Relationship between Effort and Reward

Coaching any team gives you plenty of (1) and (2). Effort/Reward is the tricky one. Most of the private schools i coached didn’t play state or national school’s cup. They might have played in competitions against other schools but there usually wasn’t finals. The kids mainly played because sport was compulsory and it was more of a bludge than other sports (unless they had me on a day i felt like doing honest work). Forfeits were common where the other team didn’t even turn up without explanation. From a coaching perspective it made absolutely no difference whether i coached well or not. I just found it really unenjoyable so i stopped and took the vow of poverty to coach only club teams and AVSC schools.

The School’s cup is about as “meaningful” as it can get. It’s got complexity, autonomy, and no matter how big or small you are, if you put the work in you can still be rewarded. It’s a bit like Formula 1. There are a couple of behemoths you have no chance of beating for the overall cup, but as a privateer you can still win an event here or there. Just look at Tin Can Bay!

Coaching a private school that goes to the cup – like Haileybury or Rostrevor College is the best of both worlds; Getting paid to do what you love and having a shot at seeing your efforts rewarded with a national title of some kind. Haileybury’s Open girls team ended up taking the bronze medal in honours beating Heathfield. For he tragics, we got to see the men’s national team captain take on the winningest coach in AVSC history for a medal. it makes for exciting volleyball at the end of the week!

Waiting for the revolution

State League on Saturdays. State School’s Cup in the middle of Footy/Netball Season. Is taking on the cultural hegemony of Australia’s winter pastimes a bold manouvre or an ill-fated revolution?

A friend of mine coaches a colts team for the Brighton Bombers Football Club. He and I will be on different ends of the same dilemna when State School’s Cup comes round on 7-9 August this year. He reckons he’ll be missing about 10 players from his side who will be playing volleyball. I reckon I’ll be missing most of the players in my Willunga High volleyball teams as they go on to play for their netball and footy teams in the Great Southern League.

Having to choose between sports can be hard for a kid. Being in a specialist sports programme at school makes that choice a little easier. But for those of us coaching in schools that don’t have that luxury, the timing of State School’s Cup can make all the difference. I’ve had years where it’s been in late September, so I have to wait on hearing if a couple of my players will be selected in a grand final team while the rest are able to play with their teams out of contention. Last year’s October date was just about perfect. Only problem being that it was too close to the national event making it hard to nominate teams and save up the $$$. I was surprised that with such complexity to the problem, the decision to hold it earlier was met with apparent unanimity between the schools.

State League on Saturdays (at least in SA and Victoria) is also an interesting case in point. It wasn’t always on Saturdays. It used to be during the week but changed round the time that volleyball was moved to the velodrome (yes, a bizarre chapter in SA volleyball history that I’m sure the people who remember are in the minority). Having it on Saturdays is a ballsy move. As an old coach of mine said to me recently “Saturday is the day people choose to go to the footy or netball, to clean the house, go shopping or spend time with the family”. It’s a big ask on a day that already has a lot of demands on it.

Which brings me to the existentialist question. What role does volleyball have in Australia? Do we see it as a sport that has a “complementary” existence to our dominant sports (the football/rugby codes and netball), or do we really want to tackle these other sports head on. It sounds stupid, but I’m sure some bureaucrat is thinking about this in Canberra while VTAM tries to get its funding extended.

I’m sure there are some of us out there who feel that our sport should be number 1 and if it isn’t we should be trying to fight for it to be. It could be expressed in the moral indignation of seeing articles like Devo did about “volleyball being a waste of time” *. On the other end, there are some of us who think to try to compete would be suicide and that at best we should try to coexist and remain dominated.

Communist Thinker Antonio Gramsci pondered why it was that by the 20th century the proletariat revolution in most industrialized countries hadn’t occurred yet. His theories suggested that a “cultural hegemony” existed whereby the “proletarians” had been convinced by their oppressors that their interests were best served under capitalism. In other words there were those in the “movement” who had no real interest to start a revolution. He also pointed out that for a revolution to occur, they would have to win people’s minds first.

We’re in the same kind of problem now. There are pockets out there who have won over the minds of their athletes by creating their own hegemonies. But for the rest of us, we’re working in a very different world.

Over the years I’ve changed from one extreme to the next. From a zealot I’m now a pragmatist. Following the kids I coach at Willunga play football and netball in their local leagues and I can see that other sports have a lot more to offer past the school years. I’m finding that I no longer court skilled school players to play club volleyball unless they’re compulsive addicts. I love the sport, but I can’t build a case for it anymore. The value proposition just isn’t there compared to other things they could be doing.

If anything, clubs should be finding ways to affiliate with associations in other sports and interests. The benefits can be enormous. Football was invented for people to do something when the cricket wasn’t on and the two sports continue to benefit from staying that way. It’s only at the very elite level that people have to choose between the two. Yes, people can play beach volleyball in the summer and indoor in the winter, and while that arrangement helps us keep our existing players, it doesn’t help us draw from a bigger pool.

A lot of successful sporting associations do this. The Myponga-Sellicks football club where a lot of my school volleyballers play has strong links with other associations in their isolated community – namely the netball club, cricket club and local school. They serve dinners at the club every Thursday night and at each home game which the four associations take turns in running and receiving the proceeds. I know some volleyball clubs have these sorts of relationships with other associations, but a lot of them don’t. Creating these relationships begins with finding ways to coexist. Competing for the same days doesn’t help.

To take sports like football and netball head-on is like suicide. We might win a few but the collateral damage could be huge. Co-existence might seem like copping out. It’s not an option that appeals to those that want to see a revolution. Gramsci and his mates never got to their proletarian society (thank god), but some of their better ideas managed to find their way into the hegemony through the people that found a way through coexistence. After all, even though a lot of players I coached don’t play volleyball anymore, I’m sure they’re all better individuals because they did.

A lot of the people who can, and do champion our sport are those who love being involved with other sports (it’s true for major sports too). Let’s try to not piss them off.

* For footballers, Volleyball will always be a waste of time so long as it’s on at the same time as footy. When it it’s on a different time, you start hearing things like “it’s great for my jump and coordiantion!”