FeedForward

With every training session, you as the coach get a certain amount of opportunities for feedback. Sometimes, if your athletes or students are playing, you want to curb what you have to say. And when we are teaching them skills or ideas, we want to give them the cues and information they need.

A few ideas have come up recently about feedback that are important to share. They are not ground breaking but at a recent clinic in which the coaches were also in learning modes, feedback became an issue.

First, as the saying goes, if you try to catch five rabbits you won't catch any. This couldn't be more true. Often we give too much feedback on different things. For middle blockers in our sport, they are inundated with 20 things to think about every play: block, don't block, get out of the setters way, read that hitter, push your hands over the net, faster feet, cover your hitter, make yourself available, etc.... It's a wonder more middles don't need therapy sessions when they retire. 

Keep your feedback  to ONE thing. Of course there are 20 different things that you, as the coach, see the players are doing wrong, but just focus on that ONE thing for the time of the game or drill. You have time to go to the other 19 at other games and drills.

Another thought was from the book "The Coaches Guide to Teaching" by the brilliant Doug Lemov. It's a wonderful book with so much great information, but one thing that might catch your attention is Doug's question about how important your athletes will feel your feedback is.

His point is if you are hammering home a cue or a point over and over again, the players can feel from you how important that is. However, as soon as play begins, the coach begins talking about 20 other things and soon the athlete realizes that the cue or point they were hammering home before isn't as important as they thought because the coach is talking about all these other things.

That is our mistake as coaches. If we want that specific point or cue to hit home, we have to treat it like it is of major importance and not interfere with the message by talking about other things. Keep your point relevant and important to your athletes.

The last point to make is how much feedback. Twenty five or 30 years ago, it was thought that every rep needed some coaching feedback. But science has shown us that the brain is easily overloaded and too much feedback is actually detrimental to the learning process.

Pick your spots. Watching an athlete take one rep and giving feedback isn't a very representative sampling. Give the athlete several reps, see if an overlying problem exists that you can give feedback on...ONE problem at a time.

Too much feedback is worse than none at all. Remember your student athletes have a very low threshold for attention: don't waste it. Find that piece of information that the player can use directly to make them better. There is no reason to talk about other things.

For the sake of practicing what we preach, we'll end on these cues about feedback to your athletes.

Specific, succinct, selective.

WARmups

Recently, the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA), one of the preeminent volleyball coaching education resources in the country, sent out a link to members to download 20 practice plans for the upcoming season. The practice plans were free for an e mail (of course) and a PDF link was sent.

This was the first 45 minutes of the first two hour practice:

The first 45 minutes of a two hour practice were dedicated to NOT having a ball cross the net. In fact, half of that 45 minutes was spent with NO ball at all. By the end of the first two hour practice, the athletes had not played one minute.

As you forage to the next practice and the next, you notice the same: Practice #2 with 20 minutes of non ball warm ups and 15 minutes more of the ball not crossing the net. Although there was 30 minutes of play out of the two hours in #2, the subsequent practices showed more of the same: stodgy, non challenging drills preceded by footwork patterns that put on display the idea of action with NO perception, and small nuggets of play imbedded within the banal.

Butterfly drills, shuttle drills, zone serving with no reception, blocking footwork and shuffle drills for 15 minutes.

If you want to get kids to quit the sport, these are the 20 practices to do it!

Shame on the AVCA. Perhaps they received these plans from a coach and without editing just posted them. This coach, with respect, may not be up to date on the science of the sport that has been available for the last 25 years. No matter, the AVCA is one of the few educational resources for volleyball coaches in our country and with these free practice plans, new coaches will drag their athletes into a boring and monotonous set of practices that will see them exit the sport soon after. They thought volleyball was supposed to be fun!

Warmups are the biggest pushback when talking to coaches about how to make their practices more athlete centered. The tradition of run and stretch and footwork patterns and shuffles is dull and lifeless, it sucks the life out of a practice session and takes young athletes who crave the speed and excitement of the game and reduce it to pre programmed movements and actions. 

The war on warmups has three fronts to the battle. First is the science.

There are over 330 studies at the Center for Disease Control that state that static stretching before a workout is without value and can, in some cases, be harmful. A recent New York Times article on fitness myths listed this as #1! (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/well/move/fitness-myths.html)

It's also ridiculous to think that every athlete needs to stretch the same muscles. Setters, liberos and outside hitters use different muscles during practice but the idea of everyone doing the same stretches is as outdated as thinking everyone is comfortable in the same shoes.

Yes, a dynamic warmup is more effective than static stretching but if the same warmup is done at every practice the same way, human nature will take over and it will become rote and ineffective as athletes will just go through the motions to get to what they want to do....PLAY!

This leads to the second front of the war, engagement.

Go to a concert of a band you are a huge fan of. Chances are you will know the first song, probably the second and maybe even the third song. Why do music acts start concerts with songs that their fans know? To get them excited, jumping and dancing, singing along...engaging their audience.

Why can't this be the case at a volleyball practice? Why can't we engage athletes while they are warming up? Why can't we play short court monarch of the court with no jumping and passing only: competitive, fun, play! Why can't we rotate teams and then add setting to the game? Then add jumping or attacking and go full court? 

The same 10-15 minutes of running in circles, doing ineffective stretches and footwork patterns without any perception of the game just became 10-15 minutes of engaged athletes getting contacts, opportunities to read the ball, read players and the game, and oh yeah...have fun!

This is a simple fix for Coaches. It will take imagination and forcing yourself off your path of dependency, (coaching how you were coached), but the results from your athletes will prove to you quickly how much more effective this warm up is.

The third front in the war on warmups is financial.

The cost of gyms has, and continues, to skyrocket. Let's just take a small gym at a local middle school that charges $75 per hour. The cost of practice is $150 per team. If you take the first 15 minutes of practice running, stretching and avoiding a volleyball, you have charged your athletes $18.75 of practice time that was useless. That's $150 a month and over a 7 month season, comes to $1050. 

That's for just one team. Multiply that by how many teams are in your club and you can see the amount of money being flushed at the expense of outdated traditions.

One other thought. If you ARE the team getting 15 minutes more touches and opportunities to read every practice over a team that is running and stretching and boring their athletes every practice, who is going to show more improvement? As USAV Grassroots Guru John Kessel says often, "this is a learning competition." How better for our athletes to learn than to play?

If you have players that need to stretch because it is their mental or pre practice routine or they are coming back from injury, they have before practice starts to do what they need to. But once the whistle blows to start practice, put a ball into the warmup. Your athletes will respond!

As for the AVCA, there needs to be a reevaluation of what is being offered. If they want to become another of a long list of volleyball "content providers" with no responsibility for what they put out, then they should reevaluate what is being shared. If you are going to ignore science and engagement, what are you actually doing for your coaches? 

Make your warmups athlete centered, use your imagination to get them fun and engaging and give your team a leg up on the competition by giving them an extra 2 hours a month of play instead of running and stretching. 

They deserve it!