Sitting Volleyball And Skill Transfer

John Kessel's blog post from September 22, 2014, Top Ten Reasons for a Club to do Sitting Volleybal Training,  showed up in my social media feed today. If you're unfamiliar, sitting volleyball is a variation of volleyball for players with physical impairments. Unlike other sports variants, sitting volleyball is not played from a wheel chair. There are videos of it on YouTube worth watching.

In the blog post, Kessel gives these reasons to break out sitting volleyball for your team:

1. Fun

2. A break from jumping

3. Empathy/awareness for them for disabled/Paralympic sport

4. Get them to be talent scouts for any possible future Paralympians

5. Gets you to use your overhead skills well

6. A way to keep lower limb injury teammates bonded/playing with the team at times

7. Practice arm movement for blocking but no need for a "box"

8. Speed up reading of opponent's upper body - net at 1.15m and court half the length of regular makes for FAST ball net crossing/arrival

9. A great leveler for tall to short - and parents can play too

10. Fun

I can't speak to 1 and 10, but I can't find fault with it. I imagine it would be a lot of fun. 3 is valuable for us as human beings. 4 just seems unlikely to be a reality. I think these are reasons to play sitting volleyball that are outside of immediate concerns and goals of the players and coaches.

2 and 6 are interesting. Overuse injuries are a real concern for coaches and players. Too much jumping can lead to patellar tendonitis and every time you land is another chance for a rolled ankle or worse. This isn't unique to volleyball, but leg and shoulder overuse injuries are a significant concern for front row players. These are closer to immediate concerns and goals of players and coaches. Similar to 2 and 6, using it as a leveler for short, tall, and even parents (number 9 on the list) would be a fun way to include everyone in the sport.

That leaves 5, 7, and 8 as reasons to play sitting volleyball in our practices that more closely approach addressing concerns and goals of players and coaches. It would get you to rely on overhead skills more, arm work would be much more important at the net in blocking (and hitting), and you would need to be faster reading your opponent's upper body. These are all worthwhile and desirable outcomes. The problem is do they transfer?

Skill transfer is greatest when the practice is specific to performance in competition. Basketball players commonly can shoot 10 free throws in a row, but hitting that one or two in a close game situation are elusive. How many times does a basketball player need to hit 10 free throws in a row? How many times in a game is that player going to shoot free throws in such a favorable environment (thinking mainly about the pressure of the situation here and not crowd noise or other external factors)? Our athletes need to develop the basic mechanics of the skill (lots of reps) and also they need to develop the ability to execute that skill in competition. Overhead skills are going to be developed, but the demands of sitting volleyball will best train those abilities in ways that will make little impact on the traditional game. A typical overhead pass in sitting volleyball will probably not get the ball high enough to let a standing teammate then use an overhead pass or hit a down ball. Any improvement in arm movement in blocking will still not address any footwork or eyework at the net. The visual cues the player reads in sitting volleyball will be only a small portion of the overall skill to read hitters in traditional volleyball, if they are the same at all. In some players at least, I'm sure the visual cues a hitter displays in sitting volleyball will be different. Sitting volleyball is going to be fun, it is going to be inclusive, and it will be a nice break from standard training, but I think it is a disservice to think of it as an effective training method.

Should you use sitting volleyball with your team? That is entirely up to you. It probably will be fun and appropriately represent the 7 of 10 reasons in the list that are independent of skill development. If you are doing it for those 3 reasons related to skills, you are probably better served doing something else much more specific to the game you will be playing in competitions. Those three reasons are really what bothers me about suggestions like this, especially when it comes from a respected coach and teacher. This kind of approach is why a lot of ineffective training methods persist. It's why a lot of teams do a lot of silly drills and then under-perform in competitions. It is hard to elevate the game when these ideas stick around. Play sitting volleyball to have fun. Just don't expect your team to get better because of it.

Does A Coach Have To Be A Great Player

There is a common belief that a great player will make a great coach, but is it true? I have long thought that it is not true. Going back to statistics and learning about probabiliy distribution, each skill or trait should have a distribution where the elite skill is only present in a small percentage of the population. A specific combination of skills and traits will therefore be even less likely. Simplified, if elite passing is present in 2% of the population, elite passing and elite hitting will be present in 2% of 2% (or 0.04%) of the population. The greater number of skills, the less likely that combination is present in the population.

Then comes coaching. I think it is common for people to think that playing ability equates to coaching ability. Coaching is a completely different animal. Some players are good at a skill, but they might not know how to describe what they do, or how they do it. They might not be able to teach how to do it. What they do might be instinctive. I remember hearing a sound clip of Brett Favre thanking Ty Detmer in an interview or press conference for teaching him what the Cover 2 defense was. Favre was a future Hall of Fame quarterback, and Ty Detmer was his backup who only played in 7 games during their time as teammates.

Coaching is a complex stew of skills. Knowing the fundamental skills of your sport is important, but being an elite player and having the skills to be an elite coach is going to be ridiculously unlikely. While not approached from this theoretical base, this article about Barry Bonds on fivethirtyeight.com demonstrates this idea with numbers. It's a nice treatment on the subject using baseball's massive collection of stats. It takes advanced playing stats of Baseball hitting coaches who played major league baseball and an advanced stats measure of team hitting stats versus their expected stats.

As theory predicts, there is no correlation between playing ability and coaching ability. In fact the plot looks like just another way to visualize the probability distribution. There are a lot of hitting coaches who were poor players relative to the rest of the population evaluated. There are fewer hitting coaches who were great players. Average improvement over expectations for team performance is pretty close to zero. The line on the graph indicating that average actually drops slightly below zero improvement as the coach's playing ability increases. This suggests that hiring a stud hitter as a hitting coach will most likely result in no improvement over the previous hitting coach. It almost suggests that hiring the stud hitter will actually result in a decline. The best hitting coach was a pretty poor hitter compared to the rest of the sample.

The take home message is that coaches shouldn't worry about how good of a player he or she was. It is more important to learn and improve in those skills specific to teaching the game, and improving your knowledge base.

Micah Christenson's CEV Top Play

Top Play: Micah Christenson
By the beard of Zeus, what was that!? LUBE Volley's Micah Christenson delivers a top play, that you have never seen before! Watch today's #CEVChampionsLeagueM matches LIVE on LAOLA1.tv -> bit.ly/CEV_LiveCEV - Confédération Européenne de Volleyball #Volleyball
Posted by LAOLA1.tv on Thursday, December 3, 2015

I just saw this video clip floating around today on social media. Micah Christenson makes a great play for his Italian team. The pass on serve receive was bad, and he had no chance to set. What I really like about what he does is that as soon as the ball goes over the net, he identifies the hitter and is watching the hitter (Ball-Setter-Ball-Hitter). The end result is a seriously broken play is converted to a point.

Sending the Right Messages

This morning I saw there was a new post on my favorite volleyball blog asking, "What is your message?" I have not seen the video in question, but it is an interesting observation. I think it is especially timely now as the girls' high school volleyball season is winding down and the club season is starting up.

Everything we can do as a coach will send some sort of message. If we aren't conscious of it, that message might not be the one we want it to be. Approach coaching in practices and matches deliberately. Take a step back and examine what message you are sending whether consciously or unconsciously. If necessary have another coach or some other observer provide input and insight. I think in many ways this might be more important than anything else we might do with skill development, practice planning and implementation, or match strategy and tactics.

Volleyball Basics - Offensive Tempo

Offense in volleyball can be said to be "in system" or "out of system". In the most fundamental terms, in system offense is when there is a perfect serve receive pass, and the setter can set any available hitter he or she wants. The basic volleyball offense will have the middle hitting in zone 3, the outside hitter in zone 4, and the opposite hitting in zone 2. The back row outside hitter will also be available to hit in zone 6. When in system the setter can set at a variety of tempos. This dictates the speed at which hitters make approaches and when they can hit. The objective of setting at different tempos is to force opposing blockers to make quick decisions about who to block and where. The desired outcome is that hitters will have at most one blocker to contend with when attempting to hit.

First Tempo

A first tempo set, also called a quick, is the first set that could be hit starting from the time of the set. This is an in system set requiring a good, usually perfect pass. Middles hit first tempo sets in zone 3 although some teams stretch the area of possible first tempo sets into zones 4 and 2. A first tempo set is sometimes described as a set where the hitter has to be in the air or jumping at the time of the set.

Second Tempo

A second tempo set is a set that is also in system. Second tempo sets are faster sets to zones 2 and 4, but sometimes a second tempo set could go to a hitter moving into zone 3 or the back row hitter in zone 1 or 6. A second tempo set is a set that is set at a fast enough pace that a blocker jumping on a first tempo attacker cannot also jump on the subsequent second tempo set. This is the key to second tempo sets. Even if the second tempo set is going to zone 3 or 6, a blocker jumping on the first tempo attacker cannot also attempt to block the second tempo attacker, even if the blocker doesn't need to move laterally along the net to be in the right position.

Third Tempo/Out of System

Third tempo sets are times when the setter is out of position or has a bad pass and the blockers will have an easy time determining who is going to be set. At the same time a set to zone 2 or 4 that is high enough will allow the opposing middle to jump with a first tempo attacker and still make it outside to assist with a double (or triple) block. This is a third tempo set even though the pass was good and there was a quick attempt. Third tempo sets with a good pass are not desirable when running a fast tempo offense.

The key (beyond the perfect pass to start things all) to running a fast offense is to keep the first and second tempo sets close enough together in pace that blockers cannot attempt to block both the first tempo attacker and the second tempo attacker. This by extension dictates that you limit the amount of third tempo sets.

There is a video on YouTube (loud music warning) of several in system sets that shows just how potent this can be. There are times where all three second tempo attackers are starting their approaches at almost the same time in their respective zones (front row outside in 4, back row outside in 6, and opposite in 1 or 2). There are some good examples of the first tempo attacker pushed out into zone 4 where blockers cannot block both. There are also some good examples of a first tempo attacker and second tempo attacker in 6 with virtually the same result even though the blocker would really only have to jump again immediately. In some of these the blocker is still able to attempt a block mostly by virtue of being tall enough to block without jumping.

Run as fast an offense as you can. The way it can limit and hinder opposing defenses can be significant. It can result in higher hitting efficiencies and more free balls when there are digs because defenders are more likely to be caught out of position.

See also:

Zones of the Court

Volleyball Basics are intended to present some of the fundamental volleyball knowledge that everyone serious about the sport should know.

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.

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.