Last week I had the privilege to listen to Karch Kiraly speaking about his experience as a coach/player for 2 hours. For those who don't know, Karch is a 3-time Gold Medalist (2 indoor, 1 beach) and is the current head coach for the USA Women's Volleyball team. Some would say he's the Michael Jordan of Volleyball: At the risk of fellow Chicago residents rioting at my house, Michael Jordan was the Karch Kiraly of Basketball. Winning professional tournaments across 4 decades, he is arguably one of the most successful athletes in the history of sports.
He covered topics of all subject matters - from strategy used with the Women's USA team to his experience as a parent watching his son play for his high school. I wasn't able to record the first 15-20 minutes, but from that point on I did my best stenographer imitation and took notes on everything he was saying. Below is a cliff notes' version of the interview that I felt would be beneficial for people involved in juniors volleyball. I have included my own notes in ()'s.
On watching his son play in high school:
The first year was tough for the boys. Most of them had no experience playing, but they worked hard. The parents wanted them to win just one set SO badly, and they came close a few times but were unable to do so. Their record was something like 0-93. After the season, I asked to help.
(Parents: this is arguably the greatest player in the history of the game. Note how he didn't blame people, he didn't criticize the coach - he and the other parents supported the kids, appreciated their work ethic, and at the end of the season ASKED if he could help. I was impressed by this as if there was any parent on the planet that had a right to offer their critique, it's probably the 3-time Gold Medalist!)
On a disappointing finish at the 2014 Grand Prix:
"It was disappointing, but we did get an extra week of training out of it. We went back and worked on some things that needed fixing like footwork for pin hitters and jump float serving.
(I love the fact that even at the world-class level, he's spending time fine-tuning things that I think are overlooked at the juniors level. A pet peeve of mine is hearing coaches say "They should be able to do x". Karch put it simply: "Coaching is teaching". If players aren't doing things correctly, help them fix it!)
What suggestions do you have for coaches and players to be their best in big events for them and overcoming anxiety?
Every time we put the USA uniform on, we treat it like a gold medal match. We play every Friday night to assess where we're at and how training that week translated. By the time we stepped on the court against Japan, that was our 82nd "gold medal match".
You wrote "big events". They're ALL big to us. We don't build any match bigger than others. This helped our whole program acclimate to playing deeper into the tournament against tougher and tougher opponents. Our approach was the same as when we were having these Red-Blue matches.
When they're all big, they're all the same.
On being a "Volleydork":
I am a total Volleydork. I get total goosebumps from things people think are corny. A beautiful forearm pass from a tough float serve when they've been working on it.
Things that people call little, they aren't little to me. They're big when you do them well and they're huge when you don't.
What did you do to get better as a coach when not in the gym?
By being a learner, by not being afraid to ask questions, by not being afraid to make mistakes. Job #1 for our players is to BE A LEARNER. If you're afraid to make mistakes in front of others, it's going to hold you back from taking risks, it holds us back as learners. A good example of this is anybody you know who has picked up a second language - it HAS to be a learner. One of the hallmarks of being a learner is not being afraid to try it.
When I was in Italy playing, I carried a dictionary with me, and I asked my teammates all the time about Italian so I could get a bigger deeper experience. I got a simple book on Italian from a University of Washington bookstore. So I was trying stuff, I had some funny moments where I said completely the wrong thing - when you jump in and make mistakes you learn from them. If you don't, you won't pick up the language. It's the same for anything else.
If you're afraid to make mistakes you'll hold yourself back. We have to be models for that. We have to be willing to try new things.
If I'm asking that of my athletes, it's the least I can do for them to do the same.
(Again, pretty inspiring to have one of the greatest players of all time talking about holding himself to the same standards of his players instead of 'flexing his muscles'. One of my favorite quotes that relates to this is "Leadership is based on inspiration, not intimidation" - Coaches: Do you take this approach when working with your athletes?)
Do you have any superstitions or must-do pre-competition rituals as a coach or for your players?
I played for lots of coaches who were not big on 'rah-rah' pumping people up, emotional super-passionate fiery pregame speeches. Our players have enough adrenaline already because they're playing a gold medal match every time they put the uniform on. They don't need me to get them 'over-activated'. Our sports psychology discusses this: If you're essentially dead/catatonic you're at a 0 level. if you're about to have a heart attack, you're at a 10 on the activation scale. We want people to be at a 5 - that means different things to different people. We don't want to be overly-activated. We won't have the motor control we need to be great. So it's a pretty calm environment. They have rituals, they have music they play before I step in and they talk together on their own. I'm sure they have their own things. I fight superstition, so I tried to do something different every single time.
My superstition was to fight superstition!
The reason we have superstitions is the fact that it's scary to go lay it out there on the line and risk losing. I admire people who do it over and over again. And people in the program do it, so I admire our athletes. It's scary because: 1) You can do everything right and still lose - there's a chance that can happen. 2) We don't ultimately have full control over the scoreboard, over making it finish our way and getting a win over a defeat. So we try to control things by having these elaborate routines/superstitions to make things happen our way. 3) Losing - the emotional difference between winning and losing is huge. Losing hurts.
Ultimately, the best way to have control over the situation is to forget about the scoreboard and to focus on what we need to do not to win the next point, but all we can do is maximize our chance of winning the next play. The more we do that consisitently, the more we have a chance of influencing the scoreboard the way we want to.
(This was one of my favorite parts of the webinar. Very John Wooden-esque!)
What was the best piece of advice you ever got from a coach/teacher?
Be a learner. Don't be afraid to ask questions, don't be afraid to look stupid, don't be afraid to make mistakes. Usually the ones that people think are the dumbest questions are the best questions - we encourage people to ask questions. People are hesitant to ask still, but if you want to know why we do things, ask! Lots of people have told me that. I hope that I never stop learning until my heart gives out. It has to be a continual learning process. If you're not afraid to make mistakes in front of your team, you're going to be a better coach. We tried it, it didn't work, I'm sorry - It's OK to apologize. The ones that are more willing to fess up and laugh at themselves/acknowledge it will have an easier time setting up an environment where people can make the mistakes comfortably.
Tell us more about your advice in a timeout - it's almost unusual compared to many coaches.
My wife describes it well as she watches other coaches out there who have a look of frustration/exasperation, or kind of a frowny face/rolling eyes/raising hands.
Lots of coaches out there make their body language exhibit the statement "What are these stupid people doing ruining my perfect plan". I don't think that's the best way to get good performance out of a group of anyone on a team. I'm not an eye-roller, I'm not a put-your-arms-out
and ask "WHAT ARE YOU DOING??" coach. I have a lot of trust and belief, total trust in this group and I'm fortunate and blessed to work with them. I have an amazing staff. I played for some fo the best coaches I could possibly imagined.
It was not about berating us on what was going wrong. We know what's going wrong. So we don't need to dwell, let's focus on what we're going to do starting right now.
I like the rhythm of our timeouts. Acknowledging that other teams are going to make great plays, as well as that we'll make great plays as well. That's part of the back and forth when playing against good teams. People would get bored if they won every time. People are going to put together stretches of good ball against us. That's good - that's facing adversity. Jamie Morrison is our master planner for defense. In an effort to focus on the positive, we plan to finish our timeouts with me turning it over to Jamie, we focus on the next play and have a specific plan in place on how we'll score the next point. Al Scares was the master of instilling in us to move forward no matter how good/bad things looked. Maximizing our chances to win the next point.
(LOVED this. I think of everything he covered, this was the most useful piece of information for juniors coaches.)
Suggestions to communicate on reading or spotting the "Hinkey"? What should a player be seeing?
How do we make the most of the minutes to transfer things from practice to games? We don't 'drill' volleyball - we compete/play. The more you make it look like a game the better.
If it's a coach on the box or a coach serving or a coach hand-tossing/feeding to start the play, there's not going to be as much transfer. If I get a little bit more transfer in my gym than you do in yours, that's going to add up to a big advantage over time. We have to get people seeing live hitters.
If we don't give our defense the opportunity to see this, we're robbing them of thousands of reps to see this and begin to develop what I call a "Visual Encyclopedia". You kind of flip through your mental file cabinet and start to narrow greatest possibilities. But we have to give our players lots and lots of chances to do this, otherwise they're going to be learning slower than the other team.
Hinkey is a term I originally learned on the border patrol. When you're standing there waving car after car through, at first you have no clue as to what you're doing. If you're a new firefighter, you just don't have the experience of seeing hundreds/thousands of situations. As you see more and more, it becomes a sixth sense. You can't put words to it, but that's ok - it's a visual/perception thing. After seeing 9,000-10,000 cars go by, you start noticing things that aren't right. Maybe you see one riding lower, maybe you start seeing one lower on one side. Maybe the driver is sweating a little more than they should.
Lots of times the border agents can't tell you what it is, they just know something's fishy or 'hinkey' about that car. Same thing with firemen. Get your people out of there before the building collapses. They can't tell you what it is, but something's off. As a volleyball player, if a hitter doesn't get their feet to the ball, if a setter in the front row drops an arm, they're going to dump it.
We have to see those situations a lot to see the 'hinkey'.
What are your thoughts about punishment, physical or otherwise, in your gym?
Marv (Dunphy) did his doctorate on John Wooden, one of the greatest coaches who's ever been a part of the sporting world.
Discipline is not something you do TO someone, it's something you do FOR someone. We don't have punishment per-say, but if we didn't go for a ball or didn't do something and exert effort on a play, then we do what is called a "OTI" - Opportunities to Improve. If you didn't go for that ball, that's simply not what we do. So I'll throw a few balls all over the gym, you have a chance to chase them, then go back to work. If we hit out of bounds when we HAVE to aim 2-3 feet inside, we do an OTI. A few tosses, a few chances to improve, then we go back to work.
It's not a punishment. It's holding people accountable, giving people the opportunity to do what they need to do. We have small consequences for winning/losing. Diving and sprawling on 3 different lines if we lost a drill. We want to get better at sprawling anyways. But there's not beration/denigration. We're trying to get better, so we're holding ourselves to high standards.
How have you evolved as an international coach?
(skipping to the point he talked about that had the biggest impact on me)
We're still getting better at teaching and setting up the best environments to teach. At the World Championships, we were using the term 'block straight', and it wasn't working. They asked us to adjust. When we changed it to 'block area 6', it made it easier for that group to learn. A good question was asked, and a change was made. Some learning was done.
(Coaches, how willing are you to adjust YOUR teaching approach in order to compliment the methods of learning that work best for your athletes? I found it impressive that a National Team coach was so willing to adapt specifically for his players.)
What skills should always be practiced?
We have to spend time on serving, we have to always spend time on passing. We have to make those as game-like as possible. You can't always do that fully, because most game-like would be server on the service line, five people on that side of the net, and six people on defense. We can't have that many people standing around. You can't always be perfect with that, but
we have to spend a good chunk of time on serving, especially at younger age groups. A team with a good serving group has a MASSIVE advantage. They can have a lot of success without great blockers/hitters. So we have to spend a lot of time at those skills, and we do it every single day. We have to do things like volleyball with a serve/pass/set/hit. We try to have blockers and limit the amount of times hitters hit on an open net as much as possible.
One last story - The way you treated the two players who were up in the stands (for the World Championships) but not playing on the roster. Can you talk about how you made a very tight team? (They won the World Championships this year - the first World Champion the Women's National Team has won in 62 years).
We are very fortunate to have such a deep team, and that depth was critical for our success in Italy.
Every athlete played important roles for USA, which made us into a fresher team in the semis and final. Also, we got huge contributions from more than just the six on the court at any given instant; more than just the twelve we were allowed to suit up, and more than just the fourteen who earned the right to travel. We had more than fifty people wear a USA uniform this year, and they ALL made a real difference in our group effort, along with our fantastic staff who dedicate so much time and energy to this effort.
(I think this is a HUGE thing we need to drive home to our juniors teams. Players/parents get so hung up on playing time - we need to convey that for a team to be successful, it takes more than just the starters, and every player has an important role on the team).
If you'd like all the notes I took, feel free to email me at ProgressionVBConsulting@gmail.com and I'll send it to you. I know I took a lot from this interview, hopefully it helps you too! Special thanks to Karch for his time and John Kessel for setting up the webinar.
