The power of teammates.

We played in Saskatoon versus U of S this past weekend. It is our longest bus trip of the year. It is a 6.5 hr trip one direction. I don't look forward to this trip as we leave Saturday after the men's match and return to Brandon. Usually arriving around 4:30-5am.

Combine this with the grind of January and trying to make playoffs. This tends to create to a lot of grumpy coaches and athletes. This time the trip coincided with mid term exams. There was lots of pressure from all directions. It is so easy to get lost in the day to day grind that we forget what is going on. I personally was jolted out of my mood when an old teammate from hockey brought his son and daughter to our practice.

Kevin Shoults and I have played hockey together or against each other since we were 8 or 9 years old. When ever we run into each it is great to see him. We have a lot of past and share a lot of fun times. His daughter who is 13 is really hooked on volleyball. She spent the Friday practice shagging and watching the girls go through the paces. I invited them to come to our pre game meal. It was neat to see how she looked at the team. You could tell she wanted to be where they are one day.

We also ran into one of our alumni Erin Henning was in Saskatoon on a buyers trip for her work. Thanks to Facebook we noticed that she was there. When she cam to the hotel and Erin Visch-Krahn saw her it was amassing. They played together for 3 years the connection they have will always be there. The two of them spent the next two hours catching up on life and reminiscing about fun thing that happened at University. Very few of the stories were about volleyball.

During our pre game meeting we talked about enjoying this time. They are playing volleyball in the best league in Canada, with some great people. At that moment e wry thing seemed so tense but 5 years from now in hindsight it was such a great time. We always talk about good things that happen in our matches, but their are so much more positive things are teammates do for us. A couple of the firs ran out of gas on a trip they called Meaghan she drove out with a can of gas and everything was fixed. Meaghan never thought twice that is just what teammates do. A few years back one of the athlete had strep throat go bionic and ended up in the hospital for two weeks. The team created a list and everyone signed up so she was never alone. We need to take time and appreciate our teammates and have fun playing together. Teammates can really help control the mood on the team. We refer to this as our team self talk. What we say as a team to each other becomes our reality. Sometimes during the grind we forget about how cool this is.

We won both games in Sask. That was our first road sweep in 2 years. We had a lot of fun doing it together.

The second part of that story is we arrived back at 5 am. At 8:30 am we had U-14 try outs, the 6 athletes slept 2.5 hr then came to run the try outs. They were impressive still full of energy and wiser great role models for these athletes. I took them out for lunch to thank them for their commitment and had a blast. I started sharing stories of tHings teammates did to each other. Funny things that happened with them.

I want to say thanks to all my past teammates. You really help define who I am. Yes even you Dan Stankey.

Creativity of Coaching

One of the hardest part of coaching is dealing with an injury amongst the team. When it happens as a coach you need to make sure they are safe and then taken care of right away. Then you need get back to the practice or the match. I feel very callous as the attention goes back to the business at hand. As a coach we need to model what we need the players to do. If an injury happens in a match then we ask the trainer to take the athlete to the team room. We explain to the players at the start of the season that this will happen. We have found that when the players stays on the bench that everyone feels bad for her. As she hops from bench to bench as we switch sides it is a reminder of her injury and elevates the fears it could be contagious.

When I played hockey and a player was injured we used to hang the players sweater on the back of a bench as a symbol that he was there with us.

On the coaching side when an injury occurs it is a challenge. The question is now How can we get the best combination of athletes on the floor? Of course we have players that have trained in that position, but we also look at other options. If a different combination will help keep the same levels we might have to ask a player change positions. Some times the team may be deeper in a position making it easier to move them.

One year at Grande Prairie College we had a tough season losing players to injury and sickness. We went to Grant Macewan (top team in league) we had to move our libero to left side, our right sIde and our healthy left side to become middles. The next best player and athlete was our second setter, so we chose to run a 4-2. That is a system that most of the u-13 teams use. We had to convince our team that this would be successful for us. We knew both setters could play defence and with 2 libero on the floor we thought we would have great ball control. We should be able to force middle and play in some really extended rallies.

We battled but in the end we lost in 5. Even though we lost it was a huge step in our development and help set the tone for our ACAC title.

We lost Chloe earlier this week to a foot injury. Chloe went up to block and came down on the toes of the attacker. Instantly she had pain. Off to the hospital for X-rays. We then started to look at our options. We played. U of Alberta this weekend the nationally third ranked team. They have 3 national team players and a left side who is in running for rookie of the year. We knew we needed to have a decent block over there. We have four legit middles, the discussion eventually came around to moving Tori from right side to left side and trying the mids at right side. After we worked the mids through attacking drills from the outside we decided Meaghan looked the most comfortable over there. We always wanted to get her more swings and this could be away to do it.

We asked Meagh to run a more inside out approach. More of a slide right side than a straight up right side ball. We also knew we would need some back row help. She is a decent defender but our other left sides defend better. The second adjustment was to move our libs to the mid back. We felt this would help Meaghan on free balls. Kendra could take more space. We only use the six sub rule in theCIS so it limits our moves defensively. We also decided to try some subs. The second time Meagh would come around to serve we would use a defensive sub for her. The third time she came back to serve we would use a defensive sub for the middle and lib out Meagh after her serve. This would limit the information overload and let her concentrate on the front row changes.

The danger in this is the confusion in serve reception. During the match we actually had 7players on the floor for serve reception. When we returned serve and switched to our home position Kendra quickly recognized the situation and during the coverage quickly slid to the bench. Mo one seemed to notice. UA won the point anyway.

We knew before hand that there would be something crazy ahead of time. I. Our preface we talked about dealing with it. Here is the discussion.

Adversity happens in all parts of life . How you deal with adversity determines how successful you will be.

We know today that some weird things are going to happen. We know that Alberta is going to score and there is a good chance we will think it is directly our personal fault.

There is a great difference between failing to achieve a result and then drawing a conclusion from that. Those who stay down make a judgment that they have failed, not just their attempt. Moreover, they often generalize from their “failures” to illogical conclusions such as, “I am a loser,” and “I will probably always fail. My life will always suck!”

Therefore, they assume, there is no point in getting up. So they quit taking risks and quasi give up, they seek a comfortable niche.

But then there is the other person.
Everyone talks about 10000 hours to become an expert. It is expected that people who become experts in there craft will put in over 10000 hours thinking and playing their sport before the reach expert level.

But there is also Old wisdom says that the sooner we make our first 5000 mistakes, the sooner we will learn to do anything well.

They realize the biggest danger is our internal chatter. This is the part that builds us up or drags us down. We have to be aware of the chatter.
So catch negative chatter and change it. After an error Say something like," Okay, that didn’t go the way I wanted. Next time, I will do it different. Besides, it’s just one call. On to the next one.” I still have 4000 tries left.

Lets take risk today and celebrate those risks. An error then is just one of our learning mistakes. Lets have fun learning together. Lets overcome this Adversity together.

We win 31-29 in the fourth to win in 4.

A Good Book or More

.

The Christmas break was a good one for myself as I had a chance to go back to Edmonton and see family.  It is always good to reconnect with them.  I also had a chance to read a lot.  One of the main things that my family taught me was the enjoyment in a good book.  I really enjoy reading coaching books or books that I can apply to the team. 

My Ipad is full of this type of books.   I really enjoyed “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle.  This book talks about how there is no such thing as talent.  That is it environmental and that it takes a group to help encourage people to strive towards something.  He talks about why there are pockets of places that develop athletes that dominate sports.  He believes that young kids get inspiration from somewhere and then work towards that icon and try to become that level.  This is why I believe that our university athletes have to give back to the young kids in the community.

A book that really influenced my coaching is “Leading with the Heart” by Mike Krzyzewski.  In this book he talks about how he developed his standards in coaching. In this book Coach K discusses about how he handles his players and deals with administration. This is a must read for all new coaches.

Before the break Tom Skinner gave me the book.”Be Quick, Don’t Hurry” by Andrew Hill and John Wooden.  Andrew wasn’t a star player on Coach Wooden’s team when he played, he actually clashed a lot with Coach.  It wasn’t until later when he was involved in his own career that he realized the messages and lessons that Coach Wooden taught him.  One of the lessons that really stuck with me was fair doesn’t mean equal.  Andrew talked about how he learned if he was going to be late for a meal or a meeting to make sure he was late with Bill Walton.  Bill would get benched but only for a quarter.  Coach explained that if he benched them longer it would affect the whole team in a negative way.  A Quarter was enough for the message to be sent.

Another book that has me really thinking is the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gwande. This book discusses how the evolution of the pre flight checklist for pilots came into existence and how other main industries such as medicine has developed checklists as well. This book helped lead  me to develop checklists that we use as a team for pre-game, checklist of discussion points for first meeting with potential recruits and parents.  As a coach we develop year plans which are essentially an in-depth checklist to help us determine where, when and how much we will train the athletes and prepare them to play their best. In discussing the potential of checklists in coaching with other CIS coaches it has me thinking about how this helps leave no stone unturned