Why the sudden focus on philosophy? I found myself in a situation where my coaching felt as if it was very quickly approaching a metaphorical zero.
It seemed like any "serious" (or even not so serious) coach I met was doing more, improving faster, and winning with more regularity. Those are, of course, subjective feelings, but they were grounded in some aspects of reality. I wanted to compete, but that meant either making commitments I couldn't keep or doing things that didn't align with my own thinking and my values. Staring at the end of my rope got me looking a little deeper into understanding the challenges I am facing.
As it has gained traction and grown in mainstream popularity, volleyball has joined the ranks of other popular high school sports where it is difficult for a homegrown high school program to keep up or get ahead. The proliferation of club sports has amplified the gap between players with money and access. CIF efforts to stop recruitment are laughable, especially when factoring in money and private schools. Restrictions on off-season practice have eased so much that we are now just left with a two-week summer dead period to make sure that athletes are not literally playing for 12 months a year (and we know there are no ways to get around that). I'm sure opinions abound about whether these are positive changes, but I think it's safe to say that youth sports have evolved into something different from what they started out as.
Why does this matter to you? I don't know that it does, but I'll tell you why it matters to me:
I think high school sports are important because of the opportunities they offer to young people. They learn about the world through the activities they participate in and there is a lot to learn from athletics. They learn about a lot more than just volleyball when they join the team. I don't just mean that I try to teach life lessons in volleyball. I mean that everything we do shapes our beliefs about how life works. We are always learning and forming opinions out of our experiences. This leads me to…
The probability of winning is now distributed according to a set of variables that is different from what the purpose of youth sports might imply. The race is not mainly to the swift, the resourceful, and the hard working. Club teams often matter more than school teams. Money and access are increasingly the gatekeepers for access to quality coaching. Time and resources matter as much as, if not more than, methodology. The implications are debatable but important.
Combining the above two points leads me to this somewhat selfish point that is of most importance to me. The current environment is unfavorable to people like me: Parenting age coaches who want to coach, balance their lives, and still do a disproportionate amount of winning.
There are a lot of reasons I think that #3 is really an important thing, but I will get into that some other time. For now, I want to emphasize this: There is a very real gap between what youth sports are in reality and what we like to pretend they are about. That’s not to say that it’s all bad. I am just learning that I want to be more detailed, honest, and true to my beliefs about coaching and sports. The question is whether or not doing so will help or hurt my effort to build better teams and create more value for players, parents, and coaches I work with.
This context is the cultivating environment for my thought process. "Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work--going from 1 to n." I believe that most coaches adapt to their environments in this "1 to n" manner. Put in more time, have (or recruit) better athletes, and get more kids into the best clubs. These are all variations of the same game plan. This list isn't exhaustive, but those are the most common and effective ways for teams to get ahead.
Am I just here to complain about the fact that other teams are doing those things? Of course not. Investing more time and energy is commendable. Having better athletes is usually more a product of location and demographics. Clubs raise the level of play in their spheres of influence, and in the big picture, that's good for the game.
So what's the problem? We are what we are, and the athletes we have are the ones we get to work with. It's not my place to pressure kids or their parents into coughing up money and signing up for a club, even if I am happy to recommend it. Even time and hard work, considered to be the great equalizers, feel more and more out of reach. We have more coaches than before, but we are inexperienced and limited in our time and flexibility.
This might not feel like a big issue for a volunteer coach or someone stepping in to help fill a role temporarily, but it poses a significant difficulty for someone like me. I don't have the ability to compete by moving horizontally from 1 to n. In fact, as my practical limitations have increased, my incremental improvement as a coach has not kept up. I'm drifting ever so surely from one to zero, and it feels like I'm bringing all my teams with me. It's a bad feeling, to say the least, but it keeps me from sitting still. I can tell you this: when you think you're headed for zero, you start looking a lot harder for solutions. There has to be a way to do this…right?
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