For the past few days I was fortunate to travel to Tampa, FL for the American Volleyball Coaches Association Annual Convention.  In addition, I watched the NCAA Final Four Championships and one of the best volleyball matches ever played between # 1 Penn State and #2 Texas.  I hope you also had the opportunity to watch this amazing match and could imagine yourself on the court.

During the AVCA Convention, I attended educational seminars presented by some of the world’s elite volleyball coaches including Olympic Coaches.  It was an incredible opportunity to exchange great ideas and bring back pieces of wisdom for the team.  One of these educational sessions was presented by Karch Kiraly (the greatest volleyball player in the world) and Mike Rangel (owner of PlyoCity and Karch’s trainer) about Karch’s off-court training regimen.  To be great, there are no days-off for Karch or everyday is a day-off for Karch, depending on how you look at it.  Karch has a love for the game and for competition.  He considers his off-court training days as “days-off”.  These “days-off” he takes joy in, he has pride, as he knows these are the fun days.  He recognizes that in these training days is when he beats his opponent.  He thrives on that idea.

Mike Rangel told us a story about the day after Karch won the Manhattan Beach Open.  Mike received a phone call from Karch asking why Mike was not at the gym at 7:00 AM that next morning.  Mike replied, “Karch, you just won the Manhattan Beach Open, you have three Olympic Gold Medals, you have three NCAA Championships, why are YOU at the gym this morning?” Karch said, “I’m here to workout.  I’m here to get better.  This is who I am.”  Mike soon learned that Karch works-out on his birthday, Christmas, New Year’s, holidays, etc.  Working-out and nutrition is part of his everyday routine.  It is what allowed Karch to be the greatest volleyball player ever and retire from playing professionally at 48 years old!

Karch got better in practice with the guidance of coaches.  Karch became the best through this ultimate off court training discipline which became his everyday routine.

Thus far, I am impressed by each player’s off-court training discipline.  I have heard how each player is changing their routine for the team.  I hope this is a life transformation for each of you.

BUT…there is another lesson in this Team Discipline to be learned and that is balance.  The yin and the yang.  Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.  Karch’s balance is his family.  Your balance is your family.  Take advantage of being with your family over the holiday, but take time to be alone.  Take advantage of your time off, but keep the team in the back of your mind.  Take advantage of your youth, but don’t take advantage of your health.  Make smart choices and smart decisions.

I already have great affection for this team.

Happy Holidays!

This is it…the Most Wonderful Time of the Volleyball Year. The NCAA VolleyMadness is in full swing, the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight are this weekend. Certain matches of the Sweet Sixteen will be viewable online and the Elite Eight matches will be shown on ESPNU (NCAA Volleyball Championship Schedule).  The following week is when volleyball mayhem Continue Reading

Marv Dunphy wrote a great article in the January 2009 Coaching Volleyball Magazine on how the U.S. Men’s Olympic Team won the Gold Medal.  Much overall praise goes Head Coach Hugh McCutcheon’s vision and system.

Following are coaching points of interest by Marv Dunphy:

• How a coach says “no” is more significant than how a coach says “yes”.
• All teams strive to be good in all phases of the game, but the great teams usually have one or two things that they are fabulous at doing.
• The U.S. players individually, or by position, seemed to take turns playing well.
• For the U.S. offense, they scouted and studied every server technically – what kind of arm did he have, how much heat did he have, did he have heat with range, where was the primary location of that heat, did he change depths, did he keep the speed up and did he cut it, did we need to save our timeouts for this server (the smart teams did that with Clay Stanley), what did he do when we adjusted our serve receive pattern (show and take), could we take a jump float with our hands or did we need to pass with our arms, what did he do after any kind of delay, who was their first server, did we need to stay out of our rotations one and two against a certain server, did we need to cover the tape, was it a true spin or did it tumble, etc?
• For offensive tactics, the coaches analyzed what every blocker and defender did on a perfect pass, good pass, medium pass and bad pass.  Mostly, they wanted to know what the opponents tended to do on a perfect pass, and we made tactical plans accordingly.
• The U.S. had a great error-to-block ratio – the team committed 56 hitting errors and was blocked 70 times.  You always want the number of blocks to be higher than the number of errors.
• The U.S. had 12% serving errors, which is very good by international standards.  In collegiate athletics, a good number is 10%.

Marv Dunphy is one of the few coaches with the privledge to coach Karch Kiraly and 2008 Olympic MVP Clay Stanley.  Karch brought the whole game to the court, as he passed, where Clay did not.  But I would like to know from Marv’s point of view the similarities and differences between Karch and Clay.  It’s gotta be an interesting perspective.

There is nothing natural about passing a volleyball.  In fact, the sport of volleyball is very ‘un-natural’.  We do not grow up bouncing a ball off our forearms or cocking our wrists in unison to set a ball.  The closest childhood similarity is batting a balloon in the air.  We grow up throwing, kicking, and shooting balls.  Ever watch a group of football players  get on a volleyball court and try to play?  These talented athletes often look quite uncoordinated playing volleyball.  Volleyball is an extremely technical game, it is the mastery of these un-natural technical movements that makes our sport so unique, so great.

Learning to pass a volleyball takes time.  Through experience we learn the flight, the trajectory of a volleyball.  Serve receive in particular is an art.  It takes thousands upon thousands of repetitions to understand and recognize the movement of a jump serve or float serve.  Great pitchers in baseball, like Phil and Joe Neikro and Tim Wakefield, have Hall of Fame Careers baffling batters with their knuckleball pitch (the movement is similar to a float serve).  Opposing batters hit .250 against these great pitchers (that’s 2.5 successful at-bats for every 10 attempts), yet we in volleyball demand excellence of our serve receive passers (.700 or 7 out of 10 perfect passes) against wicked float (knuckleball-like movement) serves.

It is my opinion that the great players of our game, especially those with great ball control, are the ones that grow-up around the game.  Karch Kiraly and  Misty May watched their parents play on the beach before they were big enough to play with them.  When they were finally big enough, they primarily passed and played defense because they still weren’t big enough to hit the ball over the net.  This experience that makes their movements an effortless, thoughtless habit.

So what can you do to become a great passer if you weren’t lucky enough to have parents that used your crib railing as a net?  First is to know, understand, and successfully apply on a consistent basis the motor movements of passing.  Books have been written discussing these movements, but here are some generalities:

• Smooth, balanced footwork to the point where you will intercept the flight of the volleyball.
• Recognizing when to center the ball on your body versus reaching out to pass a ball off your side.
• Understanding the platform angles around the volleyball court.  For instance, the closer you are to the net, the more parallel your arms are to the floor.  The closer your platform is to the sidelines, the greater the angle to the setting target.
• Learning the “touch and feel” of the platform push and body weight transfer.

Reading the flight of the volleyball, proper movement to the ball, and the touch and feel are essential to the art of passing.  Repetition, repetition, repetition is the best teacher of these elements as a whole.  But once it is mastered, it is beautiful to watch a great libero dance around the court to consistently get themself in position to pass.   Without great passing, a team cannot be great.

How sweet is this?

Karch Kiraly Named USA Volleyball Women’s Assistant Coach

So I offered a little insight into what Mike Hebert is like in an earlier post, so why not continue on with Karch Kiraly? “Working” at the U of MN offered incredible accessibility to the greats of the game. Karch picked up his new hobby of commentating college volleyball for ESPN. Fortunately for me, the U of MN scheduled a match versus Michigan State that was televised by ESPN. So a couple weeks before the match, Karch was doing his homework and contacted Mike for some insight on the teams. Mike put Karch on speaker-phone where the discussion migrated to goofy-footed approaches (and how to correct that approach). To our surprise, we learned that in the last 3 years of Karch’s beach career, he CHANGED his approach when swinging on the left side to goofy-footed. He felt that his feet contacted the ground more simultaneously and quicker, which increased his vertical jump. I just find it amazing that a legend like Karch, in the last years of his career, is willing to change something he’s done for years to find his competitive advantage. Awesome.

So besides commentating, Karch’s other hobby is collecting and archiving historical and vintage volleyball footage. He feels an obligation to preserve the history of the game.

Karch arrived at the gym about 2:30 to meet with the team. He is so gracious. Answering all the questions I’m sure he’s answered thousands of times already. Following the team meet and greet, he sequestered himself to the coach’s room. He spent time preparing for the match, then broke out, on his thumbdrive, a 1960s (I guess) video of an exhibition match of the US Men’s Team versus the Russian Men’s Team and the US Women’s Tean versus the Russian Women’s Team held in an indoor ice hockey arena in Canada (obviously the ice was covered with a 1960s version of sport court). Mike recognized a few of the players which helped Karch’s archive. The video was very good quality, the players serve received five across with the setter coming from the end line, and the blockers could not penetrate the net. It was not only great to see the video, but a surreal time to watch a video with Mike Hebert and Karch Kiraly. Awesome.

Another moment I will forever cherish at the U of MN.