Out of Whack

With my usual schedule thrown out of whack due to a unique professional opportunity, I’ve been missing a whole bunch of volleyball commitments. thankfully some reliable ex-players are taking up the slack. Chris McHugh is kindly taking my Reserve Women for two games and in those weeks they lost one game 3-1 with only 5 players after an injury, and 2-3 (17-19) after about 4 match points.

One of the few volleyball luxuries I still have is my availability to coach my younger teams. I managed to help out with my Willunga girls at the finals of yr 10 knockout on friday. They met a formidable Brighton team that had 4 girls on my reserves team + Emma McEwen. Brighton ended up going down to Heathfield in both the boys and girls comps.

I still get to go to Junior league training and games. One f the things i’m astounded by is how malleable players can be in changing their technique when still young. One of the curious things I’ve been trying is a “different” setting technique i picked up from Michael Brookens when he was in adelaide for WAVL. Ive tried it on about 4 players with pretty immediate results (although it’s not working as i’d like it to in game situations). it’s a bit different from the traditional skill model with i still believe only really uses 3 fingertips on each hand. Michael suggested I check out Bond Shymansky’s DVDs. I bought about 6 of them and a couple of them are great (at least one of them is average) and i have been trying out a lot of the stuff in them.

I also like the spiking skill model of taking off perpendicular to the net. Especially for middles who under this approach use a limited arm swing action. taking a look at the FIVB tech videos of womens matches, it seems a lot of teams have middles that approach and swing like this as well as middles who hit like outsides.

Who knows what’s right. No doubt the kids will go back to their school programmes and get told off. So i’ve told them it’s some experimental stuff that isn’t exactly “conventional wisdom”. I think it’s always worth showing players different ways of doing things and explaining the context so they can make up their own minds. If anything, this kind of experimentation is a lot of fun.

Equitable court time, specialisation v development & “creating history”

From Ed Binnie:

Eldo,
for a state league, I’m inclined to agree with you.
But I would like to hear your thoughts on Juniors and school. Too often I see players in U15s etc being used as defensive specialists, or specialist blocking subs, or double sub to ensure constant back row setter.
My thoughts are that this is creating overt specialisation of athletes. I had one player join a uni side who had never dug a ball in his life, because he was a front court only player. Especially at young ages, where heights and athleticism are still developing, surely we’d want our juniors to be exposed to the full game, not just the one thing they can do well. This applies to AJVC, AVSC, and the U16 and U15 tourneys.

* * *

Specialisation of athletes exists whether you sub players on or off or keep them all on the court. I’m inclined to believe that if a coach won’t put a player on for 3 rotations on the FC or BC, they’re hardly going to put that player on for 6 rotations under the 12 sub rule. In a perfect world you would just take 3 players off halfway through each set and leave the subs on, but it doesn’t always work.

I have always coached junior league that way, so technically i could still get all my junior players equal court time under 6 sub rule and develop them equally. One of the (unwritten) rules eldo had when he took me for my level 1s is that every kid should get on at least 60% of the time. If there’s a chance to “create history” (an expression i’ve heard verbatim from a lot of head coaches!), then you do what it takes to win. 12 sub rule subbing will only get you to 50%. I think with junior league teams and AVSC div 1 & 2 teams, the court time should be equal and the players having a chance to develop all round skills.

I think you Ed makes a good point about it changing the game – constant backrow setter, specialist blocking subs etc. It becomes less about the best 6 players with good craft skills taking on their best six on the other side, but that’s not a bad game either. it’s become part of a necessity in tournaments. Expensive travel cost of tournaments => more game time => you have to use your full bench. I don’t think this is too bad at a national junior or avsc honours standard. it’s a different level of play with different expectations than equitable junior league/avsc div 1. And besides, at best of 5 sets, the player that plays 50% of the time subbing only on or off can play nearly as much as the div 1 / junior league player who’s on the whole time (trust me, i’ve done the maths on this one!)

Where U15s falls is the grey area. Vic, ACT and QLD have rep teams so maybe the expectations are like nat juniors. SA hasn’t entered ever as far as i know (although if we did, the group that eldo takes each year would probably make up most of the team anyway, with a couple of brighton kids that go with hawks). So for the SA teams that go, it’s probably more “developmental” than the rep teams that go over. I do find the level of specialisation at U15s disturbing. I coached against teams that employed 5-1 systems with specialist passers, and teams that played with the player in position 2 setting – in essence they could have rotated on at the serve – they were both competitive!

a uni-age player who has played for years but never dug a ball would have been poorly coached whether they played their whole career under 6 sub rule or 12 sub rule. if anything, they would have dropped out (or “weeded” out) under 6 sub rule because they never got on the court. But then again maybe getting people unsuited to quit volleyball for other sports earlier is good development (sounds insensitive, but marketing guru Seth Godin actually wrote a book about knowing when to quit). who knows.

12 sub rule is not a perfect system. and it can be used or abused. as winston churchill said of democracy “it … is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”

Fast Food

The Bergers were faster on Saturday night but Mt Lofty still finished in front.

It was billed as a blockbuster and justly so [You can see some of it now on Devo]. It’s always a great game when teams like the Falcons, Heidelberg, Mt Lofty and USC Lion match up. The Bergers are on top of the table in the Vic Volleyball League. I’m not sure where Mt Lofty are on the ladder but they’re always in the top 3. Two great coaches – Raoul Tuul (Lofty) and Michael Brookens (Bergers). It’s old school Australian Volleyball meets new school Australian Volleyball [though oddly enough the two men probably aren’t that far apart in age].

Lofty ended up winning 3 sets to 1, no doubt helped by ex-Heidelberg and international player Dave Jones suiting up for them. Tony Scott dominated as Libero (and executed a spectacular jumping backset, leaping from behind the attack line) and Marcus Jones was too strong in attack and on the block. There were moments that Heidelberg looked unstoppable, with Cedric Legrand putting on an impressive display and George Santamaria setting brilliantly as always.

Heidelberg plays fast, and later on I spoke to Michael about their game philosophy. The pass comes in fast, preferably not going any higher than the antenna. The ball leaves the setter’s hands at hitting height. The swing hitter passes from around the middle of the court and has to cover a lot of distance to hit the ball (often they hit the ball well before it reaches the stick). It’s dynamic and there’s a lot of movement. It appears confusing and spontaneous, but that’s the general idea – to undermine the read block and get 1-on-1s as much as possible.

There are coaches who do things well, and those who re-invent the recipe. The biggest joy in watching the Olympics is seeing how coaches find that point of difference to get an edge. The Bergers style of game requires a substantial investment to reinvent nearly every aspect of play: the passers need to stab the ball in rather than slow it down; the setters have to have the right technique to be able to play fast passes; the hitters all need to hit more like quick hitters with an open-body approach and more vertical less horizontal jump.

The Bergers are still developing this style of play and it will continue to evolve [you can't get a team to play that much faster overnight]. When it was fast it was effective, but when they had to slow down the ball it was back to an even playing field. No doubt it was this early stage of development and missing a couple of starters that cost them the game. If the Bergers are dominating now in the Vic League, one can only wonder what they will look like in 12 months time. Let’s hope we get to find out at next year’s SA Open.

Tiser today

More on our attempt to stream a volleyball match live over the internet.

Messrs Lowrie and Smith were leaving as I was ariving at Mt Lofty, so the story was probably being written as we were trying to get ustream to work. nice mention of Devo’s “popular blog”.

DECS gently downs ustream

Last night, a bunch of tragics from 3 states attempted an Australian first: To stream a volleyball match live over the internet. Sadly, their noble attempts were foiled by archaic IT principles. This is their story

My experience in volleyball has told me that if you put three tragics in a room they would struggle to even agree on the colour of an orange.

Which meant the idea from Vic volleyballer “Jason” on Devo’s blog to stream Saturday’s Mt. Lofty v Heidelberg blockbuster live on the internet with a free service must have been damn good for it to be met with such unanimity. I got prodded to read the discussion and thought it would be a great idea to be part of the first Australian volleyball match to be streamed live over the internet.

Seeing games in their untimed entirety on any television broadcast system is unlikely. But if we can get this to work on the web, it would be amazing. It could create some real interest in the game and energise the tragics out there to spread the great gospel of our game.

I’d love to see the kids I coach play national juniors in Queensland and U16s in NSW. I’d love to see the players I used to coach play for the Australian junior and youth teams and AVL. I’m sure their parents who foot the bill would like to see these games too. Could we set up a camera in the coach’s lounge pointed at the two showcourts at AVSC with live streams? Screw it. Let’s set up a FEW cameras, invest in a video splitter, find some uni media students that know how to mix and make it a bit better.

The site Jason suggested was “ustream.tv”, which after a quick on my macbook webcam  proved to a pretty neat tool (I’m sure that like YouTube, these ustream guys are hemorrhaging $$$ from the data charges). You can even add text to the live video stream, which would have been handy for keeping scores. You can have it linked in to twitter and facebook and use it to reach your existing networks. Alexis Lebedew and Chau Le were mostly concerned with the upload limits and firewalls at the Mt Lofty venue so Murph and I met with Stuart Scott and Eldo up at Mt Lofty to do another test.

Sadly, we couldn’t get it to work. The Mt Lofty Rec centre shared the adjoining high school’s internet infrastructure and the firewall just wouldn’t let ustream detect the cameras plugged in. Even plugging an Ethernet cable to my laptop and pointing the webcam toward the court wouldn’t have worked. It was a problem that went well above our heads and the authority of the school’s IT guy. It was standard Department of Education and Childrens Services (DECS) IT policy.

A tool like ustream has so many possibilities. It’s got at least a dozen applications for teaching media. How much could you teach kids about media with this and encourage them to engage with the outside world? Yes there are privacy and security issues, but we should really be trying to embrace this technology rather than blanket banning it because it’s too hard to make it safe.

Although we couldn’t get it to work, I’d have to say the passion of, and cooperation between all the people involved who wanted to see this happen was fantastic. It was one of those few indescribably enjoyable experiences that remind you why  you put up with all that other nonsense that comes with being involved with the sport.

Mt Lofty v Heidelberg tomorrow night @ Mt Lofty. Video files of the game will be uploaded to the net straight after the set is finished. Keep your eyes peeled on Devo!

And live streaming will only be a matter of time!