Giving Hitters Additional Tools for Terminating the Ball

By: Chris Larson

It’s tough to find that player who has mastered the lost art of “tooling” or “shot-making.” We see the big bombers at every tournament and in every warm-up, but when it comes to game time, these players are often the easiest Continue Reading

By: Paul Arrington, M.D.

So why, if positive reinforcement is so great, does punishment seem to be more effective? To answer this we need to understand the statistical phenomenon called, “Regression to the Mean.” In any sequence of events in which there is some degree of randomness, any extraordinary event (good or bad) is most likely to be followed by a rather more ordinary event. This is seen graphically below:

Random number sequence demonstrating regression to the mean

Since there’s almost nothing in life that isn’t at least partly a matter of chance,
regression shows up in a wide variety of unlikely places. As applied to sport, despite the fact that coaches want to see continual improvement, when there is any behavior well above or well below the average behaviors, the next attempt will be back closer to the average. During practice, the only time coaches praise is when the attempt is much better than average. The subsequent attempt will be worse (back toward average). However, when coaches chastise or otherwise punish, it is because the attempt was well below average. After the punishment, the next attempt will be better (back closer to the average). Regression to the Mean!! The feedback was inconsequential. However, most coaches assume the improved attempt resulted from the punishment, hence, the misconception that punishment is more effective than positive reinforcement.

The continuation of poor coaching behaviors can be understood by the “Regression to the Mean” scenario discussed above. Let’s assume that the goal is to have continual improvement in performance. In this scenario, when the coach praises an attempt he is rewarded with a performance than is poorer than the one he just praised. His good coaching behavior results in not only the apparent consequences of extinction (he is not getting what he wants, i.e. continuous improvement of performance), but also in punishment (he is getting what he doesn’t want, i.e. worsening performance). However, when he criticizes the athlete’s poor performance he is rewarded with improved performance (positive immediate certain reinforcement). Is it any wonder we are inclined to yell and be critical of our athletes?

Because of this tendency for our good behaviors to receive the consequences of punishment and extinction, and our bad behaviors to receive positive immediate certain reinforcement, we must be continually vigilant to avoid this trap. We must be content with future uncertain consequences and not give in to the extinctive consequences and punishments. This is no easy task, however, if we have our own process goals with time lines for each, it is easier to avoid the trap.

The results of failing to recognize regression to the mean is amply demonstrated in the following newspaper report during the 2007-2008 college basketball season:

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — Pat Knight ratcheted up practice his own way after Texas Tech lost by 44 points earlier this week.

It seemed to make a difference in his players’ efforts as the Red Raiders beat No. 5 Texas 83-80 on Saturday.

Bob Knight, said his son, did “regular old drills” that in some way involved basketball. On Thursday, the younger Knight left the court behind and made his players run sprints while carrying weights. Then they shot lots of free throws. After that Pat Knight made them carry tractor tires and then flip them over — in relay races.

“I honestly believe they might have wished my dad didn’t retire after Thursday,” Pat Knight said. “I wanted to take it up a notch. I wanted to leave my stamp on it, so I think everything was pretty original that we did.”

One can only wonder about Pat Knight’s thoughts after Texas Tech’s record setting loss of 52 points in their very next game after the big win over Texas. It is obvious that he fails to understand the real reason for their perceived improvement after punishment.

I’m headed up to Richmond, VA for the weekend for the Monument City Classic Volleyball Tournament.  The first tournament of the Carolina Juniors 16s Team.  The girls are prepared (let’s hope the coach is too).  It should be fun!

IN HER OWN WORDS

By: Kathleen J. DeBoer

“You must drive men, but you can lead women.” This statement by Anson Dorrance, coach of the national champion North Carolina women’s soccer team, became an example of male thinking at a seminar for women’s volleyball coaches in Richmond VA.

Led by MaryJo Peppler and me, the seminar on improving the competitiveness of female teams drew more than 300 volleyball coaches from across the U.S. It was sponsored by the American Volleyball Coaches Association and held before the NCAA national championships. Peppler directs coaching development at the Coast Volleyball Club in San Diego. We are both former collegiate head volleyball coaches.

I opened the seminar by discussing gender differences in competition, spurred by a question from a male coaching friend asked while we were both languishing in the bleachers on a summer recruiting trip. “Why aren’t women competitive like men?” he asked me. I bristled defensively and asserted that women were just as competitive as men and he was crazy.

He spoke of using the same words to motivate his star female player that he had seen motivate a star male player. While the male player rose to the coach’s challenge to “Be da Man,” the female player folded up emotionally.

I knew intuitively he’d made a big mistake in trying to motivate his female star with this approach, yet that day I couldn’t explain why he was wrong in both his approach and conclusion that women were less competitive.

Gender Differences Effect Athletes

Our disagreement led me to search for everything I could find on the topic of gender differences from Tannen, Gilligan, Fischer, Belenky, Heim and others. I became convinced that male and female athletes enter the gym with very different worldviews that influence their behaviors, responses and attitudes.

Most coaches, including my male colleague and me, are completely oblivious to these gender-related differences. Male coaches assume others share their own worldview and are frustrated when female athletes do not respond as they themselves would. Though they know better, female coaches often assume the female worldview disappears when athletes enter the gym. They, too, become frustrated when athletes act out “female” responses.

Female vs. Male “Worldview”

I identified the female worldview as defined by a web, connection and relationship-orientation. In contrast, the male worldview is defined by hierarchy, separation and a results-orientation. The coach had spoken to the male athlete in his language. It put him “alone at the top” and he responded. The same words were alienating and threatening to the female athlete, who wanted to be “at the center of connections,” so she retreated.

Sports talk is peppered with what I call “challenges to manliness” words that encourage an athlete to separate themselves, to one-up others, to have enough pride to fight. Women athletes respond much better to “good old fashioned guilt” words that challenge them to carry their part of the load, that question their commitment to the team, that obligate them to shared sacrifice.

This is just one of many implications of worldview differences for female athletes in team sport settings. Things as fundamental as the importance of winning also are affected by gender-related attitudes. I told of coaching a female athlete who refused to compete with a close friend.

Failure also affects athletes differently: Females tend to internalize it, males tend to externalize it. We define fairness differently: For females it is competing by the rules, while for males it is competing within the rules. Our reactions to criticism are gender-related: Women tend to personalize, males tend to globalize. In the area of play, females bond through interaction, males bond through action.

What does it mean to compete?

Peppler followed with an exploration of the nature of competitiveness what it is and what it is not asking the coaches to provide the specifics. She used their input to discuss feedback loops in coach/player and coach/team relationships. “Most coaches,” Peppler said, “get stuck in one area of the feedback loop in their practices, and then get mad or frustrated when another area produces undesirable results in a match.”

She had the coaches list the specific times where their teams struggle with competitiveness at game point, when facing a dominant opponent, when they are comfortably ahead, etc. Then she asked them to identify the defeating behaviors their teams exhibited in these situations missed serves, careless hitting errors, lack of effort on defense. Peppler identified the left-brain/right-brain components of training versus competing. Practice is mostly a left-brain activity with the focus on certain postures, base positions, precise routes and taught verbal responses.
Competition, however, is a right-brain activity. At peak performance there is no time, space or judgment. The test of coaching is to prepare a team in a left-brain environment to perform in a right-brain activity.

A small group exercise allowed participants to examine the personal characteristics that shape their coaching behavior and impact their relationships with their female athletes. Coaches discussed their strengths, weaknesses, pet peeves and common reactions to stressful situations.

Left Brain vs. Right Brain Activities

Next, I led a discussion on the impacts of gender programming in practice planning and team building. Female teams are more comfortable with connecting activities and less comfortable with competitive activities; the opposite is true for male teams. Consequently, across sports and age groups, female teams spend more of their practice time in single-contact, repetitive drills (left-brain) while male teams engage early and often in competitive game-like sequences (right-brain.)

One result is that female athletes often have better technique but less “killer instinct” than males with the same training and experience. The stress of competition is familiar territory for male athletes but less so for female athletes. The challenge for coaches is to find the balance in training between activities that are comfortable for their teams but only reinforce existing predilections, and those that make their teams edgy but improve their weaknesses in competition.

Next, Peppler demonstrated coaching feedback directed at improving and evaluating the competitive performance of a player as well as the team around her. Peppler’s feedback was emotionless and specific.
She pointed out that anger and frustration signal that a coach is helpless to solve the problem facing a team, and challenged the coaches to evaluate when they revert to these emotions in both matches and practices. These emotions, she asserted, are the result of a lack of clarity; she showed the coaches how to script the competitive response they want from their team and how to include that training in their practices.

The Blanchard Model of Leadership Styles

On the final morning, the focus turned to issues of leadership, management style and relationship development. Peppler identified the Blanchard model for characterizing leadership styles directive versus supportive and gave examples of the styles in coaching behavior. She showed the coaches how to evaluate their styles and gave examples of when each style is most effective.

Next participants did an individual exercise to assess their leadership skills. The purpose was to provide them with a written inventory of their attention to vision, planning, organization, communication, personal improvement, succession preparation and a long-term exit strategy.

I concluded the seminar with a discussion of leadership in a gender context, identifying general differences in the reactions of females and males to authority. Females, more comfortable with flatter and more egalitarian systems, often struggle with capricious uses of power, while males deal better with hierarchical structures and “Do-this-because-I-said-so” directives.

I also identified the subconscious reactions of women athletes to female coaches: Women don’t let other women act like men. Each gender has rigid, though largely tacit, rules for behavior. Both females and males punish their own gender much more viciously for behavior outside the lines.

For this reason, I believe female coaches cannot succeed simply by mimicking male coaching behavior. Their female athletes will rebel. Instead, female athletes need successful female coaching models to learn the gender-related behavioral standards required for leading teams.

A better mantra for coaches of females is:  “You can lead men, but you must convince women.”

At the AVCA Convention in Tampa, the WNVA was announced.  A professional volleyball league in the United States based around a  reality show.  Ron Deshay, Executive Producer of American Idol is passionate about volleyball and about this opportunity.  His passion gives this league a legitimate shot at working out!

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 15 /PRNewswire/ — A revolution is on the horizon in the world of team sports as the Women’s National Volleyball Association (WNVA) fills the vast void between the exceptional popularity of volleyball nationally and internationally and the absence of the indoor game as a professional sport in the United States. Continue Reading

I was looking through some of my old files from some of my old club teams and came across this piece on Blocking.  Ironically, the premise of the piece was written by Bond Shymansky, who at the time was Head Coach at Georgia Tech (he’s now Head Coach at Marquette).  The current Winthrop Head Coach, Sally Polhamus, was an Assistant under Bond at that time.  Sally is now the Head Coach that I work under.  The volleyball world is a small world.

Keys to Blocking Effectively
By Head Coach Bond Shymansky and coaching staff, Georgia Tech
November 16, 2005

•  Blocking is 95% work, 5% natural ability
•  Blocking can control and win matches through these methods
•  Raise intimidation
•  Stuff for points
•  Take away favorite shots
•  Force unforced errors
•  Take opponent out of their game plan
•  Remember the last shot your opponent hit
•  Block the low hard hit balls. Dig the balls over and around the block
•  When alone, block cross court
•  Most hitters hit where they face
•  Time your jump to your opponent, not the ball
•  Seal and penetrate — control the net
•  Block from a stationary position
•  Block aggressively, not randomly
•  Blocks often come in bunches — be patient
•  Get touches, touches, touches — control and stuff
•  Never give up a straight down hit

A girl on the Low Country Club Team that I coached asked for my advice, “What tip do you find most helpful?”

Here is my answer:

To me they are all helpful tips, but it is almost impossible to think through all these tips in the middle of a set when you are about to block.  That is why repetition in practice is key.  Repetition builds each one of these steps into a habit so you don’t have to think about these tips.  They will come automatically.  Blocking is 95% work and 5% natural ability.  It is about timing and attitude.  If you WANT to block (and dig for that matter) you will be more successful because of this innate WANT.

But if I have to pick one tip, my favorite is “Remember the last shot your opponent hit”.  After you become physically and fundamentally sound in volleyball, strategy and the mental part of the game becomes a greater factor.  If an opponent hits an angle shot successfully straight down, that opponent will likely try to hit that same shot again because it was successful.  Your opponent is building confidence in themselves…and their entire team builds confidence.  On the flip-side, if the opponent tries to hit angle and we stuff them.  They will likely change their hit for the next swing and their confidence is deflated and so is the teams.

If an opponent has a successful hit, our goal is to take that shot away from them on the next hit.  So if they hit angle, let’s block a bigger or more angle.  Now if we successfully block a swing, our opponent will likely change to another shot.  They might try to swing line or tip the ball.  If we block them angle, let’s switch to line on the next swing.  If we can block an opponent twice in a row, on two different shots, the entire team’s confidence is really deflated and we can win that match!

As a hitter, what can we learn from this?  Find your favorite swing (line or angle) and don’t give up on it if you are blocked once.  Unfortunately, we all get blocked (many times a hitter gets blocked not because of poor execution, but a tight or ‘trap’ set), don’t give up on your favorite swing.  It’s worked for you in the past, and it will work for you again.  It’s not the hardest hitters that win games, its the SMARTEST hitters.