Confidence is a funny thing. Confidence comes from having success. It comes from a person’s social environment and what they experience. It is a hard thing to gain easy and to lose. As coaches we often spend a lot of time dwelling on the mistakes that a person makes. Often it is pointing out the same errors over and over. Tony DiCicco in his book “Catch them Being Good”, suggests we do the opposite, we look for when they do the action or tactic we expect and then show them this on video. If you cannot show them accomplishing it, then show them someone else who does it correctly. In practice he believes we should never refer to the error, but only the action we need. The idea of a blooper film to show the mistakes really reinforces the errors.
This past weekend we had two big matches to play. Our team is on a 4 match league win streak . UBCO is only 2-8. Even though their record wasn’t great they are a strong team and had a real tough first semester. With such a tough schedule it was incredible for UBCO to come out of the first semester with 2 wins, keeping them in the hunt for a playoff spot.
Unfortunately for them their setter was injured and had to come to Brandon with their back up setter only. Watching on Friday, people could see that the UBCO Heat wasn’t as confident in their team concept. WE didn’t find out until the hitting warm-up that they were going with a different setter. The new setter set a high ball and it allowed their attackers to change a bunch of their hitting angles. More time to see things, plus our block timing would be different.
Steve Manuel, UBCO Coach, is famous for having teams that compete hard and have strong ball control. So we knew this was not going to be 2 easy matches. The first day you could feel the difference in confidence levels in the two teams. WE had our libero, Lindsay McLaughlin diagnosed with a small fracture in her wrist so she is out for awhile. WE decided to put a first year leftside Shanlee Mclennan in that position. Shanlee had basically never played this position, but she has the right disposition for making a difficult change.
The libero position is one of the more mentally challenging positions in sport. It is very hard for them to directly lead to points. They can make a great pass and the other team could still end up with a point. They shank a ball and everyone knows where the point is scored. To play this position and be good at it the athlete needs to have high self-esteem. We discussed with our team to really keep it positive. Social influence within the team will help with Shanlee’s confidence.
Friday we won three straight and played fairly well. Jaryn Ruether, our fifth year player, is in nursing and she came straight to warm-up from her clinical practicum. She looked fatigued before the match started, but played her usual steady self
The best part about our schedule is we play the same team on consecutive nights. The coaching in Canada West is very strong and Saturday’s matches are always close. Steve looked at his situation and needed to make a change. He needed to play to his teams strengths. UBCO came out with their setter playing out of the middle. She is a good athlete and this really enhanced her strengths. Plus it was the first time we had ever looked at this. In this type of set up the setter needs to dump some so the opposition middle blocker has to be aware of her. We asked our middle to wait and chase the set. Have high hands and try to deflect the ball up on the dump. Plus we moved position 1 into the pot more. We won the first set easy 25-18, but you could see UBCO figuring out this line-up. Second set we won 25-23. Our confidence was starting to shake. Jaryn Ruether was a steady force for us out there. She was finding different ways to score, she ended up with 20 kills and 17 digs through the match.
UBCO wins sets 3 and 4. So now we have to head to the fifth set. In between we talked about who we are as a team, and tried to bring focus backed to worked for us up to that point. WE jumped out to a 7-1 lead. Then 8-2 at the change of sides. 12-7 I took our first timeout with the hope of maintaining our aggressive nature. They were climbing back you could see confidence building in them. 12-10 I took our final time out. WE couldn’t get out of this rotation. They were serving us tough and we were relying on our outside attacker to score in tough situations. WE ended up down 14-12 before we finally sided out. This is when I saw something in our team that hadn’t been there before. Up to this point all match the team was trying hard to stay positive, help each other out of the rut. Again confidence is something that is gained from a group of people or previous experience. A big dig transition and block score. Then a hitting error on their part ties the game.
We have comeback from down before and you could feel our confidence grow when we tied it up. UBCO hasn’t had the success we had the first semester, I could sense a panic on their part. We ended up winning 17-15 and kept our playoff hopes alive. I wonder if they would have had a reverse schedule would they have been more confident in these situations.
So success adds more to our team self-concept and hopefully it can carry us through this next weekend. We are at 8, magic number is 9. Let’s get it done fast.
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