Friday, October 23, 2015

Book Review - The Talent Code

I've been thinking about this one for a few weeks. I finished it a little while ago, and didn't know whether to do this all in one shot, or do a multi-part review. In that time I gave it another read. It's not that long, and it is worth it. I will probably give it a third read before too long. Ultimately I've decided to go a little light on what I could cover here. I might revisit it at a future date, or I might just suggest reading it yourself. Definitely read it yourself.

The Talent Code is a nice addition to any coaching library. There is a lot of great stuff here. The recurring theme of the book is that myelin is central to skill development, and that neurons are myelinated by repeated attempts at a skill. The proverbial 10,000 hours of deliberate practice required to become an expert at something is all about myelination. Even without all the talk of myelination, it is a very insightful and valuable book.

There are three parts of skill acquisition as described in this book. They are deep practice, ignition, and master coaching. Reworded they are the individual's work and effort to develop skill, the motivation to put in and maintain that work, and the coach or teacher who guides that work and effort. I could probably write a lengthy post about each of these three topics.

Deep practice is where all of the myelination happens. There are a lot of thoughts I had while reading this part about applying this to volleyball practice. One of the key points of this part is that simply rehashing a skill you have already mastered over and over is not going to help you improve. Deep practice is about pushing limits and trying to do things that are hard. A simple analogy can be found in weight lifting. If an individual can lift 100 pounds 10 times regularly, the individual is not going to increase in strength by continuing to lift 100 pounds 10 times at every training session. For a volleyball example, a player might first not be able to properly execute a jump serve. The player attempts to jump serve properly and makes adjustments until able to execute the skill. Then the player tries to successfully jump serve to a particular gap in the serve receive formation, or increase the speed or topspin of the jump serve. Deep practice is about fine tuning that control and ability.

Another aspect of deep practice that I thought about is the use of video in teaching. Video is often employed to show the player the performance of the skill and gives the coach the opportunity to show and correct technical errors. There was mention of a young tennis player in the book who performed a skill (I think it was a one handed backhand) in an unusual manner. The player, parents and coach didn't have any idea where that peculiarity came from. It turned out that the player watched a lot of a particular professional player's matches and was unconsciously imitating that player's technique. There was mention of how much more information can be communicated subconsciously visually. I don't remember the numbers but it was several orders of magnitude higher than verbal communication. A good collection of technically sound skill performance could be a valuable training aid. Modelling proper technique is a strongly established teaching method in motor learning. Providing a good video of a professional player performing the skill that the player can watch over and over at will could be a much more effective training aid than one of the coaches doing the same in the gym.

The book suggests deep practice can be accelerated. There is mention of putting in mental effort into thinking about what you just did, why the result is what it was rather than the desired result, and what needs to be done to get the result you want. It is an intensive effort. I long ago heard the suggestion to ask "how did that feel?" after a perfect execution of a skill. It's a way to help ingrain the right way to perform a skill in the athlete's mind. The book seems to support this concept. A possible volleyball application of this idea paired with the visual learning concept is to have players watch their opponents during warm up hitting lines. The goal would be to have the players guess which way the setter is going to set and make their first move to play the appropriate defensive play. Blockers would try to anticipate the set and make the first step to the right for a set to 4, or a step to the left for a set to 2. Just watching hitting lines when the other team is warming up for a match will give your team a lot of reps with immediate feedback on their results at close to game speed.

A very interesting example of deep practice was the discussion of Brazillian soccer. The book credits Brazil's love of futsal for Brazil's world standing in soccer. Futsal is a smaller scale version of soccer with fewer players and less space. Players have to deal with defenders more often and in closer quarters. They have to be able to make good passes. But the real reason it is helpful is that players have more opportunities to attempt the skill. They get more reps. They get more touches. This can be accomplished in volleyball in a variety of ways. You can play doubles and triples matches. You can play on half courts. You can extend rallies by introducing extra balls from the side (the serve is a time consuming skill that really shouldn't be sped up). It's all going to get you more skill attempts which results in more myelin and moves you closer to that 10,000 hours.

Ignition is something that serves as the athlete's motivation to continue practicing. Deep practice is more synonymous with work than play. That is a key reason some athletes do better and improve more than others. The ones that improve because they work harder at it are more likely to have experienced ignition. They are more likely to be motivated. An example in the book is a set of students who read an article about a mathematician that was edited to the mathematician shares their birthday choosing to do a harder test than students who read the same unedited article. There was some subconscious ignition or motivation. They associated with the mathematician because of that shared birthday. Something I thought about immediately after reading that part was to make use of shared birthdays with famous volleyball players, or to point out prominent volleyball players who started playing at their age. I recently heard that Matt Anderson started playing volleyball at age 14. Most high school freshman could form that kind of association and this could serve as a source of ignition. The same could be done for a number of characteristics. It might be a good practice to compile a list of prominent volleyball players that are from a certain state, the same height, the same religion, the same ethnic group, or any number of things that you could mention to players on your teams. It could ignite your player's inner drive to work hard and develop skills at a faster pace.

A couple of pieces of research that was mentioned in the book was examining players' views on the activity and another on the way they talk about practice. In the research on how the activity was viewed, when the participant viewed the activity as something they would do for the rest of their lives, they put in more work and improved more. This is something that can be encouraged by the coach. In the other, researchers found that 10% of skill can be predicted by how the participants talk about practice. This is also something that the coach can have some influence on.

Master coaching is more about teaching than a lot of people tend to think. The book mentions a couple UCLA professors who wanted to study teaching and asked to observe John Wooden. What they saw was instructive. There were many demonstrations of teaching within practice. They recorded that 75% of them were pure information. Compliments and statements of displeasure only amounted to about 7% each. The book also mentions master coaches have a matrix of information or domain knowledge. This is something we need to develop as coaches. The first two sections were to me more about methods to develop our athletes. This section was more about ideas for professional development. I thought more about where I measure up and where I lack than particular ideas for helping my athletes. I have less to offer here than with the other sections. Mostly I will just say that specific, targeted instruction, drills, and practice design are going to help our athletes the most. Other than that, encourage effort more than results.

A quote mentioned in the book by Irish writer and playwright Samuel Beckett sums up a lot of the great ideas in here:
“Try again. Fail again Fail better.”
 The Talent Code is a good read. I think this book belongs on every coach's bookshelf, regardless of sport. I highly recommend it, and I will be rereading it in the future.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

Volleyball Goals

I just watched this video about 9 goals for the FIVB. These are some pretty ambitious goals, and I think it is pretty gutsy to put these out there for everyone to see. There is some amount of accountability to doing this. It's also a nice bit of organizational transparency that is admirable. The goals are largely outcomes outside of FIVB's control, but I'm sure they will inform FIVB policies and strategies for the next few years.

The video made me think about some of my own goals for volleyball, and Open Source Volleyball in particular. I don't have 9, but there are a few goals I would like to see accomplished over the next few years. Just like the FIVB goals, I have very little direct influence on the outcomes. I can't just flip a switch of desire, hard work, and effort to accomplish any of these. I will work on bringing these to fruition.

1. Improve the volleyball literacy of high school coaches.

In my experience coaching at the high school level, there are a lot of coaches that don't know volleyball. My team competed against teams using systems that I faced as a high school player over 20 years ago. The men's US Olympic team of that era was playing a very different game. They were playing a system that is fairly familiar to this era's international teams. I can't blame my high school coaches for playing an older system. They just didn't have easy access even to videos of Olympic matches.

Today there isn't really any excuse. After just a few seconds of searching on YouTube, I can watch complete matches from past Olympics. I can see current international competitions. I can see college matches streaming live even if I live far away from either team's campus. There is a lot more good information out there.

That is a big reason for why I am doing this site. There is a lot of good information out there that can be valuable to inexperienced coaches, and I would like to provide a home for great information and tools. Some of that I will need to generate, and quantify with data. I like to geek out that way, so it will be something I will enjoy. I did this sort of thing before I wrote any of it up. I do it now while I am not part of a coaching staff. I will do it even if I never step into a gym again to teach my favorite sport.

To a lesser degree I would also like to see some college programs adopt a more modern approach to the game. I see women's volleyball in America as a chaotic mix of old and modern. There are some programs rigidly holding onto an older way of playing. There are some that are adopting more modern systems. The National Team has been playing a much more modern game at least since Hugh McCutcheon led the team. Karch Kiraly has since taken over and continued that evolution. College coaches holding to older systems are doing their players a disservice when it comes time for their players to try out for a spot on the national team. High schools are likewise doing their players a disservice if they are sending their best players up to a college team and they have to learn a new style of play.

2. Bring NCAA Division I men's volleyball to my state.

I love the men's college game. I went to a school that had a men's team, and it was amazing to be a fan at matches every spring. I really enjoyed my time as a volunteer with those teams and the things I learned in practices every day. Now I live in a state with three NCAA Division I schools, and none of them have a men's team. There is a Division II school with a men's team transitioning to Division I, but I have a hard time counting that in this tally. When people think of Arizona college athletics, there are basically three schools people think of. Some will only think of Arizona and Arizona State.

As part of goal 1, I want to get the competitive level of boy's high school volleyball in the state to advance to a point where the three schools will have a discussion about adding the sport. I want to see at least one of the three expanding their programs to include men's volleyball. I want to see enough Arizona athletes going to those schools with men's teams that the local schools will want to try to lure them to stay in state.

3. Encourage the NCAA to raise the number of scholarships from 4.5 to 12 for men's volleyball.

I understand and support the rationale behind Title IX and what it has done for women's college sports. I don't understand or support the blatant reverse discrimination institutionally imposed by Title IX with regards to men's volleyball. I see the 4.5 men's scholarships for a men's volleyball team as a big reason for the presence of men's volleyball in the national psyche. I still come across people who think of volleyball as a "girl's sport". Chances are they went to a college that had a women's team but no men's team.

It is hard to entice athletes to choose to play college volleyball for a fraction of a scholarship when focusing on another sport will not only bring a greater likelihood of a full scholarship, but there will be more schools with teams that can offer scholarship. When I was coaching boy's volleyball and had a player who was a legitimate prospect for a college player, I would have suggested pursuing basketball instead. He would be more likely to get offered a scholarship at a minimum, and it would be much more likely to be a full scholarship. Men's basketball can offer 13 for a team. There are also more NCAA Division I basketball teams (with 13 scholarships each) than there are total NCAA Division I-III men's volleyball team (with a maximum of 4.5 scholarships each. Division III teams don't offer athletic scholarships). By comparison there are around ten times as many NCAA Division I women's volleyball teams (with 12 scholarships each) as there are NCAA Division I men's teams. about three times as many as there are total NCAA Division I-III men's teams.

The current scholarship limits are a real obstacle to the growth of the sport in America. It is an unfortunate example of the law of unintended consequences. It is blatant sex discrimination wrapped in a veil of fighting sex discrimination. I can't change this NCAA policy, but I would like to see this changed. I'm not going to bring this up often. I might not mention it any more after this post. It is something that I think is wrong with the sport, and I would like the NCAA to get out of the way of the growth of the sport.

I know these are entirely out of my control, but I intend to make my part of the volleyball world better. If I can influence new coaches through my efforts here to play a more modern, effective system, then I have done my small part. I hope the game grows and the average product on the court is better at every level. Volleyball is a beautiful sport.