So, I’ve been coaching my club team for about two and a half months now. We just had a tournament this past Saturday and I’ve been doing some reflecting on some things my players are going through. They all seem to be focused on the outcome, not on the process.
During my high school season, I had a team that was extremely talented and usually played at a higher level than our competition. It was hard as a coach to keep my players motivated. At one point in the season we had won 30 matches in a row. It would be easy to fall into the “We’re beating everyone, we must be playing really well.” The trick for me was to find a way to make my girls believe that just because we beat a team 25-15, we may not have played to our potential. We began to set goals with stats to ‘grade’ our matches. For example, one of our goals was to have a 2.50 passing percentage. We had a variety of goals like this that would take tangible data of our performance and not just look at the final score to decide if we played well. There were a few 25-15 wins this year we were pretty ‘disappointed’ about.
Well…. I have quite the opposite problem with my current club team. We are having a hard time competing and are getting down from losing. I am coaching a group of 11 and 12 year old girls that have never played volleyball before, ever. I guess that’s not 100% true. Most played on a 4th/5th grade intramural team that served underhand and encouraged the girls to pass the ball over the net at any cost, didn’t play positions and would not allow the girls to swing overhand because “they weren’t ready.” I cringe thinking about it…
The struggle now has become not just with bad habits and technique, but from a team, once again, not focusing on the process but on the result. We are usually playing teams that have been playing for at least a year and have girls that are bigger and more athletic. It is very hard for these girls to accept losing almost every match because they see a pretty lopsided score most matches. But this past Saturday… I challenged them. I told them to stop basing their success on the outcomes of the matches, but rather on our team’s performance. Are we doing the little things we have been learning in practice? I told them, I’m done looking at the score… when I don’t have to remind each player to shuffle their feet to pass on the left, being in proper defensive positions, doing an approach each time we attack, and know where to be in serve/receive, then I’ll start worrying about the score. Until we can do all of these basic fundamental things, we can’t worry about the outcome.
We’ll see how it pans out. The team has come really far, I’m proud of them and am excited to see how far they can go this season.
Do you have any similar experiences like this? Do you have any words of wisdom for me we continue on this club season?
