Coaching Conversations Archives - Coaching Volleyball

This is the second part of my conversation with David Gil, who leads up performance analysis at VERT. We talk about match warm-ups and what he’s seeing from the 2021 Spring season for the NCAA women’s programs competing. The season variability has definitely created its share of challenges for programs, which David talks about.

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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

The post Podcast 24 – David Gil from VERT continued appeared first on Coaching Volleyball.

David Gil has become a frequent conversational partner of mine going back to the Coaching Conversations original series. I had him talk with members of the Medaille women’s team about preparing for preseason. He was on with a strength coach from Florida State to talk about building athlete work capacity. And it started with him joining the head coach of James Madison to talk about using performance data in coaching.

The foundation of this conversation is the subject of warm-ups, whether pre-match or pre-practice. Because David had recently been looking at (and talking about) some concussion data, that ended up being a thread of our talk as well.

In the episode David refers to the work of Dr. Kerry MacDonald – Director of Sports Science & Sports Medicine for Volleyball Canada – with regards to the concussion topic. Although it’s not on that subject, here’s a conversation David and Kerry had on training periodization challenges.

And there’s that old blog post that stimulated the “controversy” that motivated David to email me: Are your warm-ups wasting valuable time?

David also joked about some conversations we’ve had before about using the mile run as a fitness test, which i something I’ve also blogged about in The mile run for volleyball players.

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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

The post Podcast 23 – Talking warm-ups and concussions with David Gil from VERT appeared first on Coaching Volleyball.

On February 24, 2021 the Medaille College men’s team played it’s first match of the season – an away fixture at cross-town rival D’Youville College. Ahead of that match the staff – who were in Episode 6 – jumped on Zoom to talk preparations for that match. The discussion covered in-match duties, preparations, line-ups, and more.

In the episode, one of the things that came up is the DataVolley training we did with Jeff Liu featured in Episode 10. You can see my discussion of the Medaille men’s season in my log entries.

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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

The post Podcast 21 – Medaille staff conversation leading up to our first match appeared first on Coaching Volleyball.

Back in March 2020 one of the early Coaching Conversations was with Chuck Waddington from Angelo State on the topic of marketing. If you’re in the college volleyball arena (or want to be), give it a listen. Chuck offers up some good info. Lately, I’ve been thinking about marketing in volleyball from a broader sense – perhaps a more global sense. How could a dedicated volleyball marketing effort, with good funding, move the sport forward? I ponder that question in this episode.

In the episode I mentioned my Coaching Conversation with the guys from the Volleyball League of American (VLA), and the MasterCoaches Weekly Buzz episode featuring Dave Shoji talking about a new women’s pro league in the US. I also mentioned a blog post about setters motivated by a Bob Griese comment.

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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

The post Podcast 19 – Thinking about growing the sport appeared first on Coaching Volleyball.

Spend any time in the arena of professional volleyball and you will come to realize pretty quickly that the majority of clubs operate year-to-year. There isn’t a lot of longer-term thinking (I’d argue we see much the same at the juniors level in the US, but that’s a separate topic). I have two guests join me for a discussion of this and how it might change moving forward.

One is Oskar Kaczmarczyk, who recently took on the role of something like General Manager for one of the clubs in the PlugLiga in Poland. I met Oskar during my 2019 European trip. At that time he was in his first year coaching at Näfels in the Swiss men’s league. Twice he took part in the original series of Coaching Conversations. Once was about Analyzing the Setter. The other time it was for the Developing the Libero talk.

My other guest is Mark Lebedew, who’s been a regular of both the original series and the podcast. Mark is heading into his first season at VfB Friedrichshafen in the German Bundesliga, where he previously led Berlin Recycling Volleys to 3 league titles and a 2015 CEV Champions League bronze medal. In between he coached for a couple of Polish clubs and lead the Australian Men’s National team. You can follow Mark’s writing on his blog.

In the conversation the term “Moneyball” comes up multiple times. This, of course, comes from Michael Lewis’ famous book, Moneyball. If you haven’t read it already, you definitely should. After we recorded this podcast, Mark actually authored a post discussing what he sees as the most important takeaway from the Moneyball concept.

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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

The post Podcast 28 – Bigger picture personnel management in pro volleyball appeared first on Coaching Volleyball.