Inspire

Since the beginning of our existence 8 seasons ago our Vball team has worked under the direction of two words. Loyalty and honour. These words were important to me personally because it was how I was brought up through hockey. If you were loyal to your teammates and coaches and carried yourself in a way that was honourable you would be respected and considered a success.

During my trip to NZ and Tonga I had a lot of time to think about our team and success and failures we have had. I feel we need to move forward and create a buzz about our program. We need to modernize our thoughts. I find the athletes of today our very socially conscious. They care about a wide variety of things. a few years ago our team was heavily involved in raising money for building a fresh water well in Africa. It was an idea one of the players brought to the team. I decided what can we do to modernize our main goal? First we have to define who we are. When thinking about our program and reading through our press clippings I found we pride ourselves on being built through Brandon and Manitoba athletes first. We know we have to add out of province athletes to help keep us Nationally competitive. But when looking for out of province athletes we look for certain things. They must demonstrate our core values. Be very coachable, hardworking and well skilled. They must be community centered. Often out of province athletes become captains and part of our leadership teams.  We want the right out of province athlete who can help inspire our young females.

 I was reading the Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. In the book he talks about the need for an ignition to the start of a person desire to be successful. The person hears about about or meets someone that stirs in them to think "well if she can do it why cant I". I think of the possibilities of our players who are being that ignition right now. If you think of our team and the local girls whether they know it or not they are inspiring young females. Kellie Baker was our team MVP this year and Meaghan Robertson was our Female Athlete of the Year, both are heavily involved in coaching club volleyball. Kellie at the U-16 and Meagh at U-14. every practice they are telling athletes I was right where you are w hen I was your age. Now Gillian Leech, Mary Thomson and Jodie Baker are also staring to coach they too are starting to inspire young females. All of them are saying If you buy into this sport or what ever you want to do you can find success, but it isn't easy.

We have signed a letter of intent with Savannah Guttman from Dauphin, she will be our first ever player from that area to play in BU volleyball. Hopefully she can be the ignition for more players from up there to choose to excell and want to be part of BU Vball.

I think back to my early coaching days with the Killam Spartans. Nikki Kelndorfer and Christie Towers made ACAC teams from that club. Within a couple of years that small town club was producing college level athlete left and right. One year in Grande Prairie we had 4 athletes from the club on our team. Nikki and Christie were that ignition.

I really believe our mission for BU volleyball should be to inspire, to be the ignition for young athletes.

Inspire to me means many things, it is our team goal to inspire young females to pursue excellence in their field. To demonstrate the commitment it takes to be successful, whether it is in volleyball or different life skills. I believe if we look at each day as a team with the goal to inspire each other to new levels of success it will help us achieve all our goals. If we look at each day as an opportunity to inspire a young athlete who looks up to our team then that will hold us accountable to the community as well. If we think I have to work hard physically this summer and need to talk to my teammates so we inspire each other to be the best. It gives us a sense of purpose

Mighty Peace

Mighty Peace.

Tomorrow is an exciting day for me. I have been asked to come back to Grande Prairie to present at the Might Peace Teachers Conference. When I taught here in Grande Prairie I attended these conferences. I am actually pretty nervous to be back presenting in front of friends and colleagues.

When I was invited they asked me to do an all day session.  I want you to know I can talk about volleyball all the time. The organizers asked me to do sessions that would appeal to all groups. They said explain what you think coaches need to hear.  This was a big challenge. How can we make this useful for everyone? 

I know from my experience at the convention I loved when I could walk away from a session with one or two new things to try. With that in mind I have uploaded all the drills here https://www.dropbox.com/s/6qydtk5a7pll72n/MPTC%20presentation.xlsx?m

At least this will be a beginning point.

I feel the session will be generated by how the group asks questions.  I have a basic plan in place and can work through it, but really hope the coaches will ask questions.  I am going to use twitter as an avenue to ask questions also for the shy teacher or inexperienced coach.

When I was beginning to plan for this I thought what makes a successful program.  I contacted a variety of coaches and we came to conclusion it was planning.  The more a person is planned the better off they will be.

Coaches who turn a program around usually do it through structure. Planning for high school team and club team will be different for each setting.  A team needs to take into account of where they need to be successful.  Do they need to win the league to make provincial? Is there a Zone Tournament that decides? These will affect their planning.

When I was teaching and coaching in high school we had a zone tournament that the team needed to win in order to get to Provincials. We really only needed to win that one tournament to get to the provincial championship.  Of course we tried to win each one but we ear marked each tournament for different things.

 

At the beginning of the season we would plan for the entire year. The first tournament we usually focussed on our serve reception patterns and defensive relationships.  The second tournament was mostly block defense relationships.  The third tournament would be about offense.  We would schedule a tournament where the younger kids would play more than the veterans.  This allowed the vets to support and help the younger kids, plus it also allowed for comfort and confidence in the young athletes in case of injuries.

We want to think of things in terms of planning chunks.  We can review things we have covered but our main focus in the tournament was a very specific thing.  We would focus most of our time outs on that topic.  Discuss it in our post game meetings. When I was a young coach I wanted to fix everything right now, but we found that the athletes were getting overloaded with information.  One topic at a time usually worked the best for learning.

This structure helped guide the process.  Plan for success.

After season

I have never been good at making the post game speech. I am even worse at the post season speech. To deal with the post game we have chosen to find a routine that works for us.

The team gives specific examples of positive actions that occur in the match. Even in a tough loss something positive occurred. We then quickly talk about what we saw as a coaching group. Then move on. I have found that addressing it the next day when emotion is removed is way better. That way as coaches we don't say things we will regret later.

But when the season ends I feel I need to address the team a bit longer and often way more emotionally. This year our season ended after a five set loss to the 4th place UBCO Heat. In that match we set a new team blocking record with 27 stuff blocks. We also pushed the Heat with both of our starting left sides injured. It was a who.e team effort but still came up short.

In the team room after it was a very dejected group. We sat around for awhile waiting for the trainer to finish help grab ice and wrap the different players then we began our normal routine of talking about the positives in the match. Brooke Hucaluk and Brianna Walsh had their first starts and battled hard. Meaghan and Lexi were a force at the net. We served incredibly tough allowing our block defence game to step to the forefront.

Then we went around the room asking different people for events this year that stood out for Training in Carberry,and the bus trip to Thunderbay. The team had different examples of funny things that happened outside of the gym. They were very conscious of my presence or I am sure they would have had a few more zingers.

Then came my turn. I began with
Being a CIS athlete is tough we put ourself out there every weekend for people to watch and judge. Because of the hours of training and the wts we do we sometimes make it look easy. So this opens us up to criticism and rewards. But society tends to want to find fault in what we do. When we return to Brandon we will be subject to questioning about our season. Yes not making the playoffs is disappointing but I wouldn't classify the season as disappointing. It is easy to sit in the crowd or on twitter and criticize and these athletes pour their heart and soul into training. We have definitely improved our fitness and that takes real commitment. There are days that everyone would consider skipping workouts but our culture is one that it doesn't happen. The commitment to learning game plan and the adjustments also showed are we set that blocking record in our last match with 3 players on the floor who weren't there at the start.

I have learned there is a bond in teammates that goes deep with those whom we choose to let in to share our life. A university team is a different culture. First years and fourth years together. One is thinking about career and future. The other is still trying to figure out how to find resources in the library. Yet because they play on the same team, work hard through some tough time they become friends. Even though they might not hangout a lot during the school year they are connected.

To me that is the success of sports. Some of my closest and trusted friends were teammates of mine or we coached teams together. Working at getting better together.

But for us coaches the growth we see in our team is the most important.

The culture we are trying to create daily is so important. The caring for each other and the new friends we make. When we see teammates recognize important moments and find away to support is incredible. When the van load of them showed up to watch Meaghan Dance and realized the importance in that it almost made me cry. Then when Bri put the outfit on to join her I have been accused of shedding a quick tear.


I look at Tori, she literally didn't say a word until Christmas her first year. Now she is an important voice in the room. Her confidence has grown so far I can tease her about different things. I would never have done that her for two years.

When I look out at our team I see success everywhere. Brooke and her feet, the commitment it took to make that change is impressive. Mary and her hands same thing. The understanding of the game Kenny has now. The speed and power of Lexi. We could go through each individual to see success.

We won't know how successful this team really was for 10 years when we come back and see what we have learned and discuss the fun we had together. Wins and losses are important but the character is more important,

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

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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

Mid season

We have just officially finished our first semester.  The athletes had their last classes on Monday and now face exams. This is the toughest time to be a student athlete and is a real unique situation for Canadian Athletes.

The athletes are expected to maintain a practice , physical training schedule and study for exams. We have found that this is a time to work on competing.  We organize different types of tournaments in our practice time.  We have played half court 2 v2 and 3 v 3. This allows our athletes to compete and get contacts.  It also allows them to continue to work on block defence relationship.  It is a perfect opportunity for the athletes to continue to improve without the stress of learning an oppositions tendencies.

We also use this time for mid season meetings. A chance to touch base with the athletes and to discuss the semester and guide them towards goals for the second semester.  We have a general itinerary that we work through. 1. School, this is our priority and we want to make sure they are on track.  During the year we meet with all the first year players ever Tuesday. They have to show their plans and routines for the coming week. Also a chance to remind them of different assignments. Kellie Baker our Captain has a gift with organization and teaching these skills that she has taken over the role as peer tutor.  2. Team, we ask the athletes if they can see any potential red flags.  Is there anyone left out or not fitting in?  3. Specific volleyball skills, this is things related directly to the athlete.  What do they see as their strengths and weaknesses. Then we compare them to what we saw as a coaching staff. 4. General volleyball, we  discuss are team in general terms, what did they see the  first semester.  The athletes view will vary depending on whether they are starting or coming in on a role situation. This unique view can often help us move forward, and ultimately it will become their team.

I myself am very disappointed with our 5 and 7 record.  But I am not disappointed with the team.  We have learned to train and practice like a Top CIS program.  We have bought into our team values and are working towards our goals.  We need to learn how to win now.  We showed flashes of brilliance and have shown we can compete with the best.  But now we need to learn to not accept competing as our goal and to start demand winning.  I am quite proud of our team and how far they come. I wish we had more wins to show for this.

In a lot of meetings we found that we have a decent I between rally routine when we make an error.  We struggle to get over errors when another person makes mulitple errors.  We then spend our rally trying to figure out how to help them out. Instead of focussed on what it takes to score on this rally.  The other error is we spend to much time evaluating our game instead of playing. Sometimes a 1 scoring pass is a great pass.  Then we need to find out how to win off that pass. Instead we let a poor scoring pass bring us down. Ron Thomson from Grande Prairie College had a different view on why this occurs.  He thought maybe this occurs because of the way we design our drills.  I think back to our practices and often we will do drills that are scored with a 2 or 3 pass earning a point, a 0 or 1 pass takes away a point.  Another drill I use often is a serve and replace drill. If you pass a 2 you stay to pass again with no penalty.  A 3 pass scoters you a point. A 4 pass or perfect pass will score you 2 points.  But a 1 or a zero removes you from the drill. Instead maybe we should reward a team that can win with a bad pass.  Make it worth more points.   I onced coached a men's team, on this team we had a left side that would make poor pass on purpose so he would get set. When the game was on the line you knew he would hang the ball up just outside attack line.  Not  a great idea, but it sure taught our team we could win off bad pass.

Here is the highlight video we made for our team.  We hope it will motivate them over the break.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ebmzrpp5rozafzl/first%20semster2012.mp4