…at least for a while

For those of you who read my rants, I won’t have to go into why I’ve decided to stop coaching League/Reserves on Saturday and Junior League on Fridays. I love coaching and working with players, and being both a student and teacher of the game, but turning up to matches has just become unenjoyable for me.

I coached my last Junior League game on friday night, and my last League Women’s and Reserve Women’s games last Saturday. The Saturday games were nice for the reason that most of the girls I got to coach were kids I’ve known since they started volleyball at the club many years ago. Trainings as one big group were definitely a highlight in a disappointing season for me. The last games were uneventful, save for us winning a set in League, and me getting a yellow card in the reserves match for taking too long to call a substitution. I don’t doubt the call was correct but it reinforced that I could find better ways to spend a Saturday. Is it really “time wasting” when your team is getting served off the court and you lose in less than an hour and the duty team just sits on the empty court waiting for their game to start?

I have no idea what I’ll do next year. I’ll still coach AVSC because it’s a lot of fun. I still love learning about the game so I might spend a year just following other coaches around and learn their philosophies and techniques. Or I might give a hand to some of the coaches who have generously taught me how to be a better coach.

The point of all this, is now that i’m doing a lot less in volleyball, the narrative component of this blog effectively ends. There’s not much else left to write about besides the odd tournament i go to. Allan Desalvo has kindly allowed me to muckrake on his blog where i can post my occasional thoughts on the sport i dearly love. I’ll see you all there.

Thanks for reading.

Volleyball’s really ramped up in the last couple of weeks so I haven’t posted until today. One of the things that have added to my load is coaching our League Women’s team. Our League coach quit just before the first game. The best we could do was her assistant who had booked a holiday during the last 3 games of the season. We’ve run out of coaches so I’ve got the gig (Over the 6 years I’ve coached our reserve women’s teams, our league team has had 4 different coaches). With only a few weeks to go before i quit club coaching it’s good to see what it’s like.

Our League team lost a bunch of players last year and they’re still young. They haven’t won a game this season but have played well on some occasions. We worked hard on Tuesday night and I had really no idea what to expect on Saturday. I had been asked to take the team for trainings but we were looking for someone else to coach them in games. Failing that I found out about 12hrs before the game that I would be taking them. At training our focus was on first ball reception (getting reacquainted with the floor) and serving with pressure. It’s quite enjoyable coaching both the league and reserves team: you get a good number to work with; you’re not siloed off from what the other team is doing.

We ended up playing Mt Lofty. I didn’t find out till after the game they were top of the ladder (outside of tournaments i’m oblivious to ladders and tables). We played pretty well. We lead most of the first set and got a set point first, but ultimately lost. We were leading 18-12 in the second set before losing that too, and in the third we came back from a 6 point deficit to respectably finish in the 20s. More than anything, the mood was quite positive. they had a lot of fun playing some great volleyball. the girls played for each other, stayed competitive and did some really good things on court. Meanwhile, my reserve women’s team won their second game for the season. From 2 sets down, they won the next 2 to take it to 5, and after being 8-4 down at the change of ends, took the lead and won the game.It was good because some of these girls hadn’t won a game in 5, much less one from 2 sets down. It’s something i’ve always felt was a necessary experience in volleyball (as well as losing in 5 sets from 2 sets up).

It was one of the better days I’ve had coaching at state league this year. Sadly, days like this are fewer than they should be. Wonder how many people will come out to training tonight.

Ever played chicken? two people drive cars at each other till someone turns. I haven’t because i’m a wimp. But I end up playing chicken each time we have a junior league game against another “city” team up at Mt Lofty

This week, my div 1 boys team is playing up at Mt Lofty. We have the late game at 8:40pm. Let’s be clear on a few things:

• Mt Lofty is the best volleyball venue we have in SA
• It’s about 15 minutes from the CBD. Which means it takes about as long to get there from the CBD as it does to get to Marion. I live 5 minutes from the freeway so it takes me less time to get to Mt Lofty than any other venue.
• Hills dwellers have been making the trip to our metropolitan venues for YEARS.
• Contrary to the claims of some people, it DOES NOT take longer to drive from Marion to Mt Lofty than it does to go from Mt Lofty to Marion.

Regardless, playing up at Mt Lofty has not caught on. Last week we had an 8:40pm game at Mt Lofty too. Our opponents AHS forfeited at about 4pm. I was going to go into the game scraping together barely 6 players and no setter. The game would have been wildly spontaneous and unpredicatble. Probably not in a good way. I didn’t expect to win. Yet all we had to do to win was hold out long enough until 4 1/2 hrs before the game for the other team to forfeit. I’ve coached AHS, and they can be, um, unreliable, so the chicken strategy isn’t exactly baseless.

I used to to say “fortune favours those who turns up”… but in this case “fortune favours those who intend to turn up”.

This week our opponent is Mt Lofty. I’m highly doubtful the same tactic will work. We’ll do our best to give them a good game.

p.s. for those of you who aren’t from SA, for an idea of the mob-like-outrage reactions you see from people when they learn they have to play at Mt Lofty, just watch the video below:

Over a week late, but here’s my wrap of my state schools cup coaching Willunga. Why am I so obsessed with School volleyball? well, let’s admit it, what people do in schools IS the grass roots development of volleyball in Australia, and that matters. and right now, in SA we have two schools that have a majority influence in this area. so THAT matters.

Good

• Willunga U15 girls won 2 sets. In different games, but still…
• Willunga U16 girls beat Heathfield by 3 points on countback, and took a set of Brighton
• Loxton Qualified for honours, playing off for the gold medal
• Heathfield Open Honours Girls upset Brighton to win gold medal
• Heathfield Open Honours Boys took Brighton to 5 sets
• Heathfield won State Cup by 2 points.

Bad

• only 30/80 teams at State Cup NOT from Brighton or Heathfield (Brighton alone brought 30 teams)
• Too many honours games not reaching 4th set and being decided by countback
• ONE time out per set
• U15 Willunga Girls having to playoff for an honours spot with a duty team that was unsupervised – because their supervisor was also coaching the team playing against us.
• U16 Willunga Girls having to forfeit a winnable match against Brighton 2 because of netball.

Now we have to see if we can get wild card entries into honours events at AVSC.

Bottom line, if this scheduling keeps up, we may as well call it the “Brighton-Heathfield Derby Cup”. If you want to grow the sport at the grass roots level, put the event on in september when less kids play other sports. From a coaching point of view, it also stinks, as chances of coaching teams into honours are limited outside the SIV system.

Or maybe what we want implicitly is for two hegemons to determine the destiny of our sport in SA. If that’s the case, let’s at least admit it.

Brighton and Heathfield don’t always take the top two spots; Loxton proved that. I’d like to see it possible for teams to keep having a crack.

Why don’t we look at country towns more to grow our sport? Before the Mebourne Tigers decided to join the rebooted NBL this year, the sports media criticised that the new NBL “doesn’t have the involvement of the 3 largest Australian cities and it’s really just a rural league with no credibility blah blah blah” but I don’t really see how that is necessarily a bad thing. If these teams have strong and sustainable local support then who cares where they are from!

Take a look at our volleyballers playing professionally overseas and a lot of them aren’t playing for clubs based in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, and New York. They’re playing for teams in places no one’s ever heard of like Sète, Münster, Jastrzębie-Zdrój and Twin Falls! Country towns can really get behind a team, even if it’s just semi-pro. Their commitment to sport and community is fanatical. Could there be enough of them out there to have a strong national league? Apparently there is for basketball.

Recently, one of my old coaches was telling me about his days playing for Whyalla Spikes in the 80s. Back in those days, they were the only team in state league competition that had sponsors that paid for all their fees and travel. A club like Spikes could draw from a lot of the other local associations for support too. When my Dad lived in France, one of the stronger volleyball clubs with a lot of local support was AS Cannes.

Could we find some country towns out there that would be good candidates for some sort of club-based competition? What if like the NBL we had an AVL that had a strong country flavour? Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but I definitely think we’re not exploiting what the country has to offer and fighting a difficult battle in saturated metropolitan sports markets.

Admittedly, I am pretty biased. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed this year is watching the Willunga High School volleyball players and coaches play football and netball in their country association. Sport is honestly a lot more enjoyable in the country than it is in the city. It’s not just about winning and constantly improving yourself. There is something they love about the shared experience of competing with and against each other. And sport is sacred – it’s the social focal point and something that the community gets behind.

The most important thing is to get a game on. You don’t see forfeits out there or excessive disputes about the rules. They just see it in their best interests of everyone to just play. MOST of the things that shit me about club-based volleyball wouldn’t happen in the country.

On most weekends now I try to sneak in watching my adopted team, the Myponga-Sellicks Mudlarks around my coaching commitments. It’s usually a lot more fun than volleyball. I’ve been invited to get involved next year in some official capacity.

I know next to nothing about football. They like to drink a lot and I’m a teetotaler. They’re a dairy community and I’m lactose intolerant (to be fair though, a couple of the leading dairy identities there produce milk that’s extremely good and suitable for lactose intolerants). But they’re great people, and whatever shit-kicker job they give me has got to be better than the crap that goes on at state league.

Comments on Devo’s blog appeared earlier this year suggesting we should split up the age group events at National Juniors and send them out to Country towns.

I wholeheartedly agree and it’s a brilliant idea. For starters, we’re not getting economies of scale anyway (it would appear that a bigger volleyball event doesn’t attract better sponsorship). Secondly, country tournaments are great. Great venues, more sponsors, more local support. Even in terms of developing the sport, country towns are an untapped resource.

I’ve enjoyed all the country tournaments I’ve been involved in as a player and coach. The Riverland Open was awesome back in the days that Janice Scott organized it. They’d put on a dinner and “show” one night and it was pretty friendly. The Mt Lofty tournaments have some of this flavour now that the Scotts have moved over. Theyw had Uni games in Geelong and Newcastle when I played which was great, Warrnambool’s always a highlight and Albury-Wodonga is always fun.

National Juniors has become so big that there aren’t a whole lot of options where we can host it. At least not as many options as if it was smaller. U15s has a lot of teams, but it can be hosted in Albury-Wodonga. A lot of towns could host U16s too. And when there’s choice, there’s the chance to get a better deal.

Anthropologically, smaller is a better number. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that the human brain only has the cognitive ability to manage about 150 social relationships. Communities and organizations of people work better on 150 or less. At that number order and civility can be maintained with personal relationships rather than formal rules and procedures.

If you look at an U16s tournament, there are 6 boys teams and 6 girls teams with about 10 players each. That’s 120 kids. About 24 coaches and their assistants, and some officials. That number looks pretty close to 150 and it’s by all accounts a consistently enjoyable experience.

Contrast that to National Juniors this year. Just read  Devo’s post “AVJC – last look” on the tournament – ironically titled since there’s anything but a sense of finality in the discussion! We had a Victorian team turn up to a dead rubber 2.5hrs late. They said they were stuck in Brissy traffic. Some sources say they left their accommodation after the game started. The QLD team they were playing refused to play them. It was late and they had a gold medal game the next day. It went to the rule book (because when law and order can’t be maintained through personal relationships, that’s what people do), and the Vics were supposed to be booted out of the tournament, but they weren’t, and luckily we had the two best performing teams play against each other. There are other things people are debating about too. Coaches not turning up to all-star-7 committee meetings. Twice apparently. A team losing a set because the duty team scoring wrote the rotation of the wrong team down. All sorts of other stuff.

I’m not going to bother trying to work out who got it wrong. But I reckon that most of this stuff can be resolved easier, or avoided entirely when there are less people involved. Communication is a lot better to begin with. And when less people go, it can be more selective, which means taking less players that get into trouble, less coaches that get into trouble and less officials that get into trouble.

I like hearing nostalgic stories of what volleyball was like when it was smaller. AVSC used to be so small and niche that it was really only for the “junkies” – people who are even more addicted to the game than the “tragics”. It was held at the AIS in Canberra, where there are less courts but they’re better. Games would go on late into the arly hours of the morning and no-one complained. They don’t when it’s small, and the relationship between everyone is better.

What kind of pleasantries happen at smaller tournaments? At the Riverland Open, the Riverland Association put on a dinner and dance “show”. At Albury Wodonga, they put on a BBQ before the tech meeting. At the U16s last year, the hospitality students at Heathfield put on a meal at their new cafeteria facility. At SA Open this year, Mt Lofty took the Heidelberg guys out to dinner at a Pizza place owned by Heathfield’s deputy headmaster. And when people get together and do this kind of things, they end up being more pleasant to one another, and it’s only possible and practical to do when numbers are small. These pleasantries have a distinctly parochial feel about them, and that’s why they work.

You can do all this stuff out in the country. Serve dinner on some nights at the local football club, where everyone from all the teams can eat together (On other nights do the separate team thing). For the club it could be good fundraising and it’s usually better value than the stuff you get from the accommodation or takeaway joints. In the winter there are probably vacancies in some of these places and accommodation could be affordable. You don’t have to negotiate with city traffic to get somewhere on time. Some of these towns are a good compromise to travel too. Albury-Wodonga is kind of convenient for NSW, VIC, ACT and SA teams. Bit of a bugger for QLD and WA unfortunately.

There’s a chance to grow the sport too. Coaches and players (there are always AIS players and coaches who have to go to these tournaments) can come over early and run clinics.

And people are just nicer out in the country. It’s called country hospitality for a reason! Why not split these tournaments into smaller divisions and get bids from a lot of places to host them, and see what deals get put on the table. The different individuals, businesses and associations in a country town can mobilize pretty quickly and efficiently to put something on, and they often do a bang-up job of it.

Apparently they put the bid out for AVSC last year but it’s so big that it’s really hard to see any other city being able to compete with Melbourne. But if it was smaller, we would have been able open it up more and have more bargaining power. But that won’t happen. It’s the participation driven showpiece event. But the AJVC competitions could definitely be made smaller, better and more affordable. And to not look at country towns as options is underestimating what many of them have to offer.

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.

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”

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.

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”.