On the night before the game, as the coaches and I left the final all-star team selection meeting the night before, Victoria’s coach, Craig Smith, had the air confidence that his team would not just be going through the final step before picking up their silver medals. He had a plan and they would be contenders. Victoria’s girls team had the benefit of an extra coach, Bill McHoul travelling under his own steam doing performance analysis with video and statistics. They definitely had a plan.

The next day after more than 2 hours and 5 see-sawing sets, Victoria triumphed in a fantastic game. In at least 1 set, Queensland looked clearly stronger; in another Victoria looked stronger.

Victoria won, but they very nearly lost.

* * *

Listening to my management podcasts (The podcast itself was a fantastic discussion on whether you put your extra marginal time and resources into your best, worst or mediocre performer, and worthy of a post for another day), I came across a great quote from Napoleon: “Mass at the point of attack”. Principally, Napoleon won numerous battles by throwing all his forces at what he considered the decisive points of battle. What is significant to note, is that he did this by stealing resources from other parts of the battle, and in doing so came close to losing a lot of the battles he won.

In Superbowl XXV, then NY Giants defensive coordinator Bill Belichick devised a gameplan (that is now on display at the NFL Hall of Fame) to counter the Buffalo Bills formidable “K-Gun Offense” by focusing on their wide receivers. When presenting the plan, Belichick opened by saying they would win the game if they allowed Buffalo Running Back Thurman Thomas rush over 100 yards. The underdog Giants lead early but did nearly lose in the end. The Bills worked out the plan halfway through the match and made more rushing plays. Thomas rushed for 135 yards and scored a touchdown. The game was decided in the closing seconds when Buffalo missed a penalty kick, giving the Giants the game 20-19.

Volleyball matches aren’t so different. Focusing your strength on one or two things can allow your opponent to exploit the areas you’re neglecting and you can get close to losing before winning. On aggregate, teams that win might only score a handful of rallies more than their opponents. They might even win by scoring less rallies.

That’s not to say that a gameplan is worth only a handful of rallies. In Victoria’s case, it may have been the difference between losing in straight sets to winning narrowly in 5 sets. But winning despite nearly losing is not always easily digestible feedback that the plan was effective.

From scouting a team, you might be able to find dozens of weaknesses, but the art of coaching is in choosing one or two (which your team can execute) to direct the “mass at the point of attack”. Even at a high level, players are often not able to remember let alone execute more than 2 tactics. But how do you know if you picked the two correct things to attack when the difference between winning and nearly losing is miniscule? The plan might still have been a good one even if you nearly won but lost. That kind of feedback is even less digestible when you lose.

Maybe it doesn’t always matter. Over lunch, a wise coach who mentored me through coaching a state league women’s team advised me that a “bad plan” was better than no plan; that often he had introduced plans in pre-match meetings that either weren’t well thought of or he knew had no reason to work. But that having a plan gave the team the focus and purpose to perform. Hawthorn Effect in action.

But what’s clear is you do have to give something up in order to execute a game plan well, and have to be prepared for the eventuality that it might get uncomfortable watching your team get beaten in areas you have the means to address. You might even get close to losing or actually lose.

I’m interested since as an avid reader of volleywood, I’ve read persistent claims that players on the team don’t get along with Piccinini (including Aguero). How much of this is true, I do not know.

What I do know is that when two or more people don’t get along it’s a result of behaviour on at least one of the parties. However, in any team or professional environment we have a tendency to tolerate undesirable behaviours from high performers that we wouldn’t tolerate from others in the team.  Hugh McCutcheon has stated that as part of his philosophy, people are different and in his system, are treated differently. As such he admits that behaviours are accepted from some people that wouldn’t be accepted from others.

But at what point is it better to ditch the high performer?

In her book Multipliers, Liz Wiseman writes about how high performers can either have “Multiplier” qualities which make the people around them perform better or “Diminisher” qualities that make the people around them perform worse. We think of bad behaviours as attitudes that are visibly bad, but “Diminisher” behaviours can be more subtle: the player who plays the ball that’s not theirs because they don’t want the weaker player to play it is a Diminisher preventing that weaker player from reaching their potential; The player that lets the weaker player play the ball knowing that the weaker player and team will get stronger is a multiplier.

Diminisher behaviours from a high performer are often overlooked as they are often judged and rewarded on their individual contributions rather than how they affect the contributions of those around them. Even if superiors are aware of the effect they have on colleagues, they will justify that the high performance outweighs the diminished contributions from others. Wiseman argues that having staff operating at less than 100% is a significant cost to the organisation. A Diminisher might score 20 points a game, but getting rid of them might liberate the rest of the team to score more and make less errors and make you better off.  Diminishers have to go.

Sometimes it’s just plain visibly bad attitude and behaviour and it gets tolerated. In one of their Manager Tools podcasts titled how to manage an arrogant producer, management consultants Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne talk about how to deal with a high performer who has behavioural issues. Simply put, they say you give positive feedback on the performance and negative feedback on the behaviours. And if ultimately they don’t change, you have to fire them. Once again, the argument is made that the individual output does not outweigh the output you’re losing from somebody else.

In sport, whether the team wins or loses determines the narrative that either validates or vilifies the decision to keep or ditch the troubled star.

Steven Johnson and Alan Didak both got into trouble with their clubs and the law, but were retained and both helped their clubs win premierships. The history written by the victors would say these were good decisions. I’m sure when Carlton win a premiership, everyone will say what a great idea it was to get rid of Brendan Fevola. Of course all these situations are not the same (other than they’re all players that score a decent volume of goals), and public opinion only complicate things. Some of these players may have personal problems but still get the best out of their teammates. A good decision is one that assesses the impact it on the output of the rest of the team.

Brendan Fevola might have the freakish talent to kick enough goals to win a Coleman medal. But at some point, his behaviour prevents his teammates from performing at an adequate level to score enough points to beat their opponents on a regular basis. To be getting less than 100% from even one member of a team is a cost to any organisation.

“When you want to win a game, you have to teach. When you lose a game, you have to learn.”

“Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you’re in control, they’re in control.”

“Leadership is the ability to get a person to do what he doesn’t want to do in order to achieve what he wants to achieve…it’s getting the best out of people.”

I got sent this video some time ago. When i saw it, it reminded me of the feeling I get when I see 3 undersized junior players with no conditioning trying to receive a whole court in a 5-1 system. 

My boss at my new job paraphrases this Henry Adams quote whenever things don’t go to plan:

“Chaos in the law of nature; Order is the dream of man.”

What dawns on me is that as volleyball coaches, we’re essentially dreamers on any given day – trying to impose a system on randomness and complexity.

Players and teams are never too young to learn a system. To build a system is to build desired behaviours. To build desired behaviours is to build a desired culture. And that’s worth doing at any age or stage of development.

All the teams I have coached that enjoyed success have had good systems. Good in the sense that I stole them from coaches who had proven them to work. A coach’s system is is a form of their creative expression, and trying out different coaches’ systems is one of the most enjoyable things I find in volleyball.

Systems don’t have to be overly-sophisticated. Some of the best ones are really simple. One of my pet peeves is seeing junior coaches apply overly-specialised systems to novice teams. The 5-1 system developed and popularized by the USA teams in the 80s has become some sort of gospel that coaches assume was etched on tablets sent from the heavens and to be applied to EVERYONE. It wasn’t. It was something conceived to work for a bunch of players with particular characteristics. I seem unable to convince many of my colleagues coaching junior teams that their 15-year-old players don’t resemble Karch Kiraly, Steve Timmons, Craig Buck etc etc.

One coach complained to me at a tournament that he thought the SIV schools in SA teach their athletes the wrong system. I asked him what he meant, assuming he was talking about basic skills. His gripe was with the fact they allowed some of their teams to play with the setter following the receiver as opposed to the setter following the middle blocker.

The other thing junior coaches forget, is specialized systems are designed to hide weaknesses and emphasise strengths. Developing players need to be exposed to their weaknesses and need the opportunity to play in a system that allows that.

I’ve been watching a lot of videos on the NFL website recently, since I find watching documentaries and reading books about sport to be far more interesting than actually watching sport. This one video talks about Tom Landry’s complicated offensive system at the Dallas Cowboys in the 60s and 70s. The best quote comes from a former player at 01:33:

“The system was too much for me. And I think I grew to resent him based on some of that. He didn’t know I was a drug addict or alcoholic until, you know, a couple of years later”

Just classic.

I would have to say that over the last 12 months or so, the biggest influence on how I view culture from a coaching and professional perspective comes from this podcast. I’ve written about this before, but the quote above kept me awake on one particular sleepless night as it occurred to me that if we were to express it as a mathematical equation it would look like this:

Culture = ∑ Behaviours

Sounds trivial. But the light bulb moment came when i realised that by looking at it like that, there were things that weren’t in the equation. Things like external events.

There’s always talk about how external events can shape a culture, but another way of looking at it is it’s actually the behaviours in response to those events that determine a culture.

I’m convinced this applies on an individual level too. We don’t have to be a product of our environment. We can be a product of our behaviours. Published science has plenty to say about nature and nurture, but at the end of the day it’s the behaviours we choose that make us who we are. We can’t choose what happens to us. We can only choose our behaviours.

How does this relate to volleyball? I’m always amused when i hear coaches and players talk about a culture, a behaviour or a performance as if it is something beyond their control. “we played badly because ….”, “people don’t turn up to training because…”. At the end of the day, people choose and need to hold themselves to task.

Culture is what you get when you sum-total all the behaviours. And all those behaviours are within our control. and just because nobody sees certain behaviours, doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.

For me, culture and systems of play are equally important and two sides of the same coin. To build a system is to build desired behaviours. To build desired behaviours is to build a desired culture.

I never tell my players what their behaviours should be. Philosophically, I’m too laissez faire to tell anyone how they should behave. But I like to ask them if they think their behaviours matches their desires.

I have always found the notion that as individuals, we are the sum-total of our behaviours, both empowering and frightening. It’s frightening because it would suggest there is no divine force determining who you are and your identity is not absolute in any shape or form; empowering because it’s within your means to create your own reality.

It’s the reality that people choose (or not choose) to create, and how those realities compares to their desires, that makes coaching interesting to me.

One of my mantras used to be “you’re never wrong if you call mine”, but I’d have to say I was wrong. That just encourages the most assertive person to play the ball instead of the person who is supposed to play a ball. Many “systems” have the most vocal person playing the ball, or the most dominant person. These teams might win in the shorm term against the easy teams, but not against an organised team with good players.

With kids it’s an interesting sight. The ball comes in between 2 players:

• The less confident player “defers” or waits for permission from the “star” player to play the ball
• The player with lower social status defers or waits for permission from the more popular player to play the ball
• The quieter player lets the more vocal player call for and play the ball
• The louder player calls the ball even if they’re not even in the postcode as the ball and another player plays the ball anyway
• People start going for the wrong ball. They don’t notice that you don’t make good contact on the ball while moving quickly.
• Anarchy, confusion and errors. Coach calls a time out and says everyone needs to talk more and try harder.

My favourite moment was when I was helping a team and convinced the coach to have them take turns with the setter in position 2. We were quite clear on this instruction.  An underclassman played in 2 while one of the senior “regular setters” played in 3. As the ball came up to the setter’s position, the underclassman looked up at the ball, looked at the regular setter, looked back at the ball, back at the setter before finally setting the ball! We’ll iron that out…

It’s not impossible to teach kids to play with a system. It just means you have to accept that your best player (ie the one that has peaked at 12) who wins most of the points doesn’t always touch the ball. You have to create a team and culture where the right person plays the ball – not the loudest, most popular or most skilled.It’s the difference between having a system and a pending a order.

I spent the last 2 weeks of preparation for the National U16 tournament having my team play 6 on 6. servers v receivers for an hour and freeball v defense for an hour. After each rally i would give feedback on when the right person played the ball and when the wrong person played the ball. It was stressed that our “better” receivers were not to play the ball if it wasn’t theirs – even if they could reach it.

During the tournament, the players worked it out. in between rallies if there was a moment of confusion you could see players gesturing to their chests to indicate they should have played the ball – it was usually the right person. They called out of habit but not to claim the ball – everyone knew before and in between contacts whose ball it was. Our defence worked great.

In the meantime, there were teams that had one star player, some other “good” players and players to make up the numbers. Whenever the ball was in doubt between the “star” and the “fodder” player, the “star” would always take the ball. Even if it was a crappy ball 2 feet above the floor that had to be dug over as a free ball. As it turns out being a star player doesn’t help you give a free ball better than your less-skilled teammates. For those teams, they were able to beat the weaker teams, but against the stronger teams, were just outclassed. Those dominant players were overloaded, over extended and were unable to regularly get in the places they needed to to use their weapons.

My new mantra is a modification of a McGown quote. “The ball doesn’t know egos, only angles.” When it comes between you and another player it doesn’t know who is the better player, who is more experienced, who is more popular or even who called ‘mine’. it only knows who is in the spot to make the better angle.

It’s the difference between having the team with the best player and having the best team.

A number of things in the last few weeks have compelled me to write about referees and officials. You may be surprised to find i have nothing bad to say about them, if anything to the contrary.

I have a deep respect for referees and officials. Well, at least the ones who take their craft as seriously as I do (which fortunately is many). I was very impressed with the standard of refereeing and officiating at this year’s AJVC. In general, the referees were professional, friendly and competent. I certainly enjoyed getting some excellent referees from NZ and the other states. Not all the referees were perfect in their calls, but i can’t say any made more mistakes in a game than any player or coach. The standard must have been pretty good given that at the “lowest” level (u17 women), i thought it was still pretty good.

What I respect about the craft of refereeing when it’s done well, is it’s about shaping a game that in enjoyable for the players and the spectators. As a coach I might work hard to make sure my players are in rotation before every serve and have no issue with a game finishing if the other team gets called out of rotation. A referee thinks differently – it’s not how players and spectators want the game to resolve itself. Like good coaches, good referees have an idea of what volleyball should look like in their heads. As a coach, the game in my head must allow my team to be more efficient and effective in winning rallies than the other team. It’s not necessarily a concern that this efficiency is boring and unenjoyable for the other team to play and for the specatators to watch. A good referee thinks differently. In terms of their idea of what a game of volleyball should look like, a good referee is an arbiter of good taste. (coaches on the other hand may have poor taste, but it can be argued that winning is never unfashionable).

I don’t subscribe to referees and coaches having an adversarial relationships. I think of the relationship between coaches and referees (should be) a bit like that between a Director of a film and the editor. Both are storytellers from different perspectives. The Director’s job is to get the performance out of the actors. The editor’s job is to assemble it together so that it makes sense to the audience. The director is usually not allowed in the editing room. The editor doesn’t come on the set. A difficult scene may have taken 2 weeks to shoot and was physically, mentally and emotionally gruelling – but if it the editor doesn’t think it serves the purpose of telling the story to the audience, they’ll cut it. Directors even express their understanding why scenes get cut in their DVD commentary. Alan Smithee has more problems with the producer than the editor. Directors, coaches, editors and referees should all be invisible. The audience should only see the drama created by the players. and i mean players in both the sporting and shakespearean sense.

Referees also have the only properly functioning commission in the sport. and mentoring. At state league levels, most referees get given feedback by a senior referee on their performance. The feedback is in the interests of the development of the individual referee and nothing else. There’s a coaching commission i’ve subscribed to. I think it covers me for insurance. I get a newsletter each week, but to tell you the truth, it’s annoying i have to download it and open it as a PDF. I don’t have a formal mentoring relationship with any other coaches (but as a coach of a bunch of losing teams, i get plenty of advice from just about everyone). There are coaching mentors, but unlike the referees, the agenda isn’t purely on the development of the coach. Coaching mentors might be in charge of a high performance program and have interests related to their key athletes. They might be the head coach of a state program and need to get results. Furthermore, the fact that coaches have to compete with one another at some point makes it hard. I’m curious to see what would happen if I experimented in having a coaching mentor who didn’t give a shit about anything (players, results etc) other than how coaching performance compares with the objectives of the coach.

Stephen Long, who is in charge of refereeing in SA boasted to me that he could take any State League level player and make them into a good referee in a few weeks. I couldn’t say the same thing about turning any decent athlete into a good player.

My instinct says that referees being more selfish in their own interests doesn’t help the game get better. Zhuangzi, Lao Zi, Capitalism and functioning models of democracy would disagree with me and say everything hums away nicely when that’s exactly what everyone does.

* * *

Coaches are in a position to grow the sport more than officials. A coach always feels that they take on the responsibility of developing the sport more than referees. Does excellent refereeing and officiating make the sport better?

A look at AJVC and everything is spot on to the high and officious standards of our sport. The referees are properly accredited and there’s a “jury” of sorts going from court to court. There’s protocol. I get told off for calling the sub late or the player not holding the paddle high enough. The handles of the odd numbered paddles lean one way and the evens the other. The rules and protocol as enforced by the referees and officials probably translates well to an international level of the sport.

Compare that to the US. At a similar level, competitions are far from being held to the same strict standards. A lot of their referees probably aren’t qualified. In short, the way they do things from a refereeing and officiating perspective probably doesn’t translate well to an international game. But they finished the 2008 Olympics with a Gold and Silver medal in the indoor competition, and 2 golds and 1 silver on the beach.

I don’t think great refereeing helps the sport that much, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. If anything, coaches and players have a lot of catching up to do. If anything has become clear to me in the last couple of years, our “elite competitions” do a great job of providing  our referees and officials with the practice and pathway to get to an international level (weird asian federation politics aside). I couldn’t say the same about coaches and referees.

* * *

After pondering about all these things for two weeks, i was quite affected by a couple of umpire/coach/player incidents that occurred recently in my football club and league. I was sad to hear that there was a bad incident between a coach of my football club and an umpire on the weekend. The team (a young junior team) was getting flogged and it was bad enough that the coach was abusive towards the players. He hurled abuse at the umpire and when told to shut up released an abusive tirade at the umpire. Complaints came from the opposing club’s coach and presidents as well as people at our own club. Being a small country club, the umpire was actually our club’s president, filling in because we regularly can’t get enough umpires. As an A-Grade player the umpire had played under the coach, and their daughters were close friends at school and in their sports. It was undesirable (dare i say unacceptable) behaviour on so many levels.

I can’t say what happened on tuesday night at the committee meeting when this issue may or may not have been brought up, but it was disturbing that on a broad level at our club, the behaviour wasn’t deemed “unanimously unacceptable”. There are still plenty of people who think talking to officials like that is acceptable.

But that wasn’t the worst thing that happened recently. Somewhere else in our league a few weeks back, a senior colts player (u18s) punched an umpire. he made deliberate and physical contact with an umpire. The tribunal suspended him for 10 years (the last 5 years suspended). Commendably, the league took this pretty seriously. However, the SANFL community football league saw things differently and on appeal, the suspension was cut down to 3 years.

The league was irate at the “support” they received from the SANFL

The SANFL emailed a press release, which was rather unsatisfying

In protest, the umpires board are wearing red armbands and have refused to umpire any junior grade games this weekend. They could have refused to umpire any matches in our league and the adjacent league.

It’s a good thing in volleyball that coaches can’t talk to referees during matches.

I don’t argue with referees. At least not during games. For starters there is a low “return on investment”. Secondly, it’s just wrong.

This only hurts sport. Any and every sport. As a “sporting nation”, we have a long way to go in understanding and respecting officiating. After hearing about the 2 incidents in my football league, i felt ashamed that i was someone who liked sport.

The men had a great win against China the other night while the women came back from Vietnam and performed well against the host country. If the men can consistently play well against China, South Korea, Japan and Iran, they might have a chance qualifying for the Olympics which would be great.

Word has it they’re under enormous pressure to perform or else the program will get cut.

I’ll be pretty pissed off if they shut VTAM down. It’s crappy enough that our women’s indoor program is a shell of what it once was.

My father recalls living in France in 1979 when an Australian Men’s Volleyball team came to play some friendlies. According to the daily sports newspaper, L’equipe, they were comparable to a “good French 3rd division side). The only other thing my father recalls is that while the French team warmed up in pairs, the Aussies warmed up with one ball. Given that since then, VTAM has participated in 2 olympics (making it to the quarter finals in 2000), 3 World Championships, 2 World Cups and won an Asian Championship. That’s an incredible amount of progress that has come from the hands of a lot of dedicated people.

Anyway, i thought the videos below might illustrate the progress and achievement VTAM has made over the years. Cheers to Alexis Lebedew and Nathan Roberts for the videos.

Life has been interesting for the last few weeks. The biggest part of this being selling out my company and being jobless for the first time in years. Selling and leaving the business, I’ve effectively ended a 15-year chapter in my life. My State League team isn’t winning either. there are 3 strong teams and 3 not-so-strong team (all of which expect to be able to beat the other 2 quite reasonably). Oddly, none of this seems to bother me all that much. My sister is visiting from London with her 1-year-old son and the novelty of spending time with my red-headed nephew has been distracting.

It’s also the perfect time to do the 2-week FIVB Level 1 Course, which being run at the moment at the AIS. come to think of it, job or not, since the last time this course was run in Australia was in 1988, so it’s always a perfect time to go to this course. The FIVB seem to run these courses in countries that seem to neither speak english nor have stable governments. Good course in Australia with english speaking presenter = must go.

Mark Lebedew is teaching the course so that makes the experience worthwhile in itself. Moreover, the 24 other coaches are great to learn from too. Coaching isn’t unlike art or filmmaking. I’m convinced that like artists, those who coach are compelled by a idealised vision of a reality in their head that is ultimately unattainable. It’s the suffering in always falling just short that actually creates the great art and impetus to continue. I can’t think of anything more enjoyable than hearing other coaches share the game they have in their head. For years i was reluctant to leave Adelaide because of the business and the skepticism i would enjoy coaching volleyball anywhere else. Now that i’m wrong about the second of those assumptions i’m open to living and working somewhere else.

The course also involves a significant practical component. Part of this is presenting and running drills in the gym that all the other coaches have to participate in. It’s the coaching equivalent of masterchef. You cook something based on a theme ingredient and people either like it or hate it. there’s a practical test later too that involve “coach initiated” skills. My inability to throw a ball (something I could never really do) will surely haunt me in this endeavour.

The other interesting part of all this is staying at the AIS in Canberra. It is an impressive monument to sports, but not exactly what I expected. There is very little about being a full-time athlete in a professionally run minority sport that is glamorous. The accommodation is, how shall I say, modest (OK if you are a visitor getting cheap accommodation, but perhaps less so if you have to live here everyday). I can see how it’s not the easiest place to live as a teenager. You would seriously have to love the sport you were playing to live here for extended periods of time. The food is great though.  I’ll be glad to be coming home in a week.

At the same time, the VTAM players are back from overseas training for the international season. The Lonsdale Group report suggesting that VTAM scrap attempting to qualify for 2012 seems a distant footnote, with the AVF appointing a coach and high performance manager and players turing up to practice. Business as usual. I see the players happily eating together in the dining hall and they seem in high spirits. I’m mostly impressed that these guys are prepared to go back to living like they did as 15-year-olds  for the chance to represent their country. That and the fact they greet their old junior and school coaches at the course with a lot of warmth. I honestly hope they qualify for the Olympics this time after a disappointing couple of years.

I can’t say that I have the burning desire to represent my country like most Australians do. But I concede that maybe it’s more fun than it seems to the untrained eye.

1. Last weekend, I watched the Adelaide-based members of VTAW (Volleyball Team Australia Women – the senior women’s indoor national team) training camp, and their coach shared with me some of the things they were working on, including receiving serve with the hands. Makes sense. It seemed to be worth investing in.
2. This week my DVD of Carl McGown’s presentation on forearm passing at the 2010 AVCA conference arrived in the post. Titled Forearm Passing: How the Best Do It, it’s a great presentation that basically sings from the same hymn sheet as Hugh McCutcheon’s presentation at the 2008 Australian Volleyball Symposium, but goes more into the research. Most interestingly, when quizzed on receiving serve with the fingers, McGown makes this curious  claim: In the 2010 men’s World Champs gold medal game, the Brazillians only received 1 out of a total 90 float serves on their fingers, and the Russians received 8 out of  a total 102 float serves on their fingers. McGown reinforced that “the best are receiving float serves on the forearms”.
3. Looking at the Technical Videos from the men’s and women’s world champs last year, 4 of the 6 women’s teams featured have dedicated reels of examples of receiving serve on the fingers. The men’s videos have none.

Is receiving serve on the fingers now more of a trend in women’s volleyball than men’s now? Or maybe none of this proves anything?