Learn the Game By Playing the Game

This question and answer with Golden State Warriors assistant coach Alvin Gentry was just published on ESPN.com. While it is largely about Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors current NBA season and accomplishments, there are a couple gems in there for coaches (and players).

When I was a little shortie, seventh grade, when you were one of my coaches at the Denver Nuggets Summer Basketball Camp, you and Larry Brown taught me something about basketball that I still carry with me to this day. You all had the philosophy that you really only get better at basketball by actually playing basketball. You and Coach Brown were like, 'Just keep playing. Run up and down the court, scrimmage, have some fun, just play. You will learn.'

This comment by the interviewer to the coach leads off the article. There is a tendency in coaches to practice the fundamental skills in isolated blocks. Passing without serves or sets. Hitting without passes. Digging without playing out the rest of the rally. There is some value in this, but there is more value putting those fundamentals in the context of the game. The game is random. It isn't a sanitized stripped down event where everything works perfectly. Even when first learning the skills, put them through the skills in the ugly mess of random that is the game. We can guide that random through engineering the specifics of the game and giving targeted feedback on the skills we are teaching at the time.

I think the way you get better at basketball is by playing 5-on-5. Obviously, the work on fundamentals is important, to work on your skills, but to become a great basketball player, all of the great basketball players that I know, they love playing and they play a lot and they play 5-on-5 basketball. You can drill and you can get better with your fundamentals, but if you are going to become a really good basketball player, you are going to have to love the game and just play.

 This should be obvious. For our players to become great they need to love to play. They need to play 6 on 6. They need to play 6 on 6 a lot. A challenge for volleyball coaches and players is access to court time. Many of the facilities we use for practice and competition are not full time volleyball facilities. A basketball player will be a lot more likely to have access to a ball and hoop. This puts a lot of responsibility on the volleyball coach to give our players the most opportunities to play the game.

That's what I tell all of the young players I coach: For every hour you spend working on your game, spend three hours playing the game. That's how you figure out angles, you figure out cuts, that's the way to figure all of those things out because that's the way the game is played. And that's the only way you get better, I think.

 This is an interesting guideline. Of the teams I have been associated with, the better teams spent less time on the skills in isolation and more on 6 on 6 games. The other teams seemed to spend more time on the skills in isolation and less on 6 on 6 games. The better ones were close to that 3:1 game:skills ratio. The others were closer to the flip side of that, 1:3 games:skills. The best team I've been associated with that spent most of that time in 6 on 6 games also spent more time during those 6 on 6 games doing things to reduce the inevitable downtime that comes with an actual "by the book" organized game.

Holy Cows of Volleyball - Ball Control

When I really started to learn volleyball from college coaches, some with international experience, I soon realized that much of what I was taught on my high school team was outdated and often counterproductive. The new concepts were based on principles of motor learning and focused on improving more in the skills that matter most. It's a very scientific and empirical approach to the game and coaching. What I learned in high school was probably what the coach learned as a high school player. I like to describe it as a holy cow. The high school coach learned it from her coach, who probably learned it from her coach. It wasn't a study of the game that resulted in the drills and philosophies. It was tradition. It was a holy cow. And no one wants to kill the holy cow.

After learning from and associating with exceptional coaches, I became part of another program that was superficially similar. It had a lot of the trappings of the way I learned the game, but it did a lot of things that were not empirically derived. One of the concepts that puzzled me was the concept of ball control. There was a significant amount of practice time invested in these Fake Fundamental(s). I think that's why this recent blog post by John Kessel really resonated with me. It was more of what I learned, and laid out some of why ball control made me scratch my head. It was validation.

Ball control involves a lot of pairs of players facing each other and passing or setting the ball back and forth. It is using a skill of the game, but it is not being used in a game like situation. There are almost no situations in competition where a ball will travel straight to a passer who then passes it straight back along that path. It might happen when a server behind zone 1, or between 1 and 6 serves to a passer in zone 1 and the setter's base setting position is along that service flight path. It rarely happens. Much more often the passer will have to pass the ball at an angle to the setter. All of that time spent on ball control will only have a little transfer to competition in probably less than 5% of serves.

Marv Dunphy said, "the best passing drills are pass, set, hit." For one, ball control drills don't include the setting or the hitting (or the passing and the hitting if they are setting back and forth). Another thing is that ball control drills introduce the ball to the drill in that less than 5% situation. Serving at passers who have to pass to a setting target is going to be much more useful to passers.

I'm sure proponents of ball control drills will talk about how it gives new players a high volume of touches. It gives them a lot of opportunities to practice the skill and learn it. A pair of players performing 100 passes will get 50 touches each. Of course the problem is the skill won't transfer well to competition. If the high volume of touches are important, the players will be better served working in groups of three and passing to the player to the right. That will better replicate what is going to happen in competition than pairs passing straight in front with no angle. Three passers passing to the right will be closer to what happens around half the time in competition. With the way newer players will likely shift from their starting position, this is going to give the passer a random, variable passing angle. The hypothetical 100 passes will still give each passer about 33 touches. It isn't as many touches as with pairs, but the value to the player will be greater.

It's time to put ball control down. Let's kill the holy cow and start practicing more effectively. Teach passing within the context of the game and replicating game like situations, and let's get away from the sanitized, nearly useless passing back and forth between a partner you are facing.

Game Theory and Volleyball

I just saw this write up about John Nash at Five Thirty Eight, and I'm still trying to formulate my thoughts on game theory as it applies to volleyball. I saw A Beautiful Mind, but I never really took that much time looking into game theory. In some small way, it is part of my thought process as I think about offensive and defensive strategies. I have looked a little at set distribution in the past here and here. I like my setters to spread the hitting opportunities around. I especially like this when it is clear that one particular player is going to get most of the points on offense.

In the Five Thirty Eight article there is the specific mention of pass/run decisions in football, and penalty kick direction in the other football. For volleyball there are a few decisions that can be made on offense, and there are two different overarching conditions that govern what decisions can be made. There is the condition of a perfect pass where all offensive options are possible, and the condition where the team is out of system. Even with those two conditions it isn't a simple binary one or the other. There is a continuum of perfect pass with all available hitters an option to a bad pass where there might only be one possible hitting option available.

In the perfect pass, in system situation, there can be 4 hitting options (more if there isn't a libero on our side of the net, or if the setter is on the front row). A first tempo hitting option to the middle should force the opposing middle to make a decision to block the middle, or to block one of the other three available hitters, but it should be impossible to attempt to block both the middle and another hitter. This is an ideal situation where the middle blocker must decide between 4 hitting options. With a front row setter and an opposite hitting from the back row, a wing blocker faces a similar decision whether to attempt to block the setter, or attempting to block the opposite. Here good setting distribution (if I'm getting this right, this is Nash Equilibrium) gives the offense a huge advantage.

Taking it down to the most simple out of system situation where the middle is not a hitting option, there are still three hitting options. The best situation for the offense is three hitters. With Nash Equilibrium neither team has an inherent advantage. There are three hitters and three blockers and the middle doesn't have the same decision of blocking the first tempo or the second tempo. The middle might even be able to see where the set is going and not have to make any decision at all. In this situation it is only a matter of which side executes the skills of the game better, the hitter or the blocker. In many of these situations there is often an obvious setting decision that will be made because of where the setter must be to set and the direction the setter is moving. At this point I don't think there is any possibility for equilibrium.  There are no decisions.

The take home message from this is to train our teams to a) extend the area of the court that the setter can set a first tempo set, and b) give the setters opportunities to set away from the obvious out of system hitters. Extending the area for first tempo hits keeps the defense in a position where the middle has to make a decision, and our team still has the four hitting options. Setting to the non obvious hitters keeps the game in a place where the defense still must make decisions. The offense is always going to be making the first decision. Extending first tempo offense and forcing the defense to make decisions when they aren't expecting to will keep the game in a place where there can be an equilibrium strategy, and keep the probability of success in our favor. Beyond that I have to spend more time looking into game theory as it applies to volleyball.