JNT team

[OverAndUnder]

Here's the deal: America has this Horatio Alger fixation on a college degree as the great equalizer coupled with a paradoxically opposing elitist fixation on a college degree as conferring a stamp of respectability.

It is the idea that everyone should bend and change their lives around to conform to the expectation of obtaining a college degree rather than learning a skilled trade (welding or pro volleyball) or performing community/military service or travelling to obtain cultural experiences which is absurd. The higher ed machine has hundreds of thousands of young people slogging through generic impersonal undergrad seminars taking notes on form and structure in the sonnets of John Donne in the hope that their eventual degree will earn them a starting salary of $40k+, when they instead ought to be figuring out how they are going to be employed at all in another ten years when the globe flattens completely and the foreign labor supply swallows whole industries the way the immigrant labor supply already has.

That college degree will only take you about ten years down the road, because like most people you are going to change not only jobs but careers several times in your life, and by your mid-30s are very likely to be working in a completely different sector of the economy. Guess what -- that's about the same as your pro career if you are an Olympic-caliber athlete: You're in your prime between 24-31, there's a trailing off period, and then by 35 you're transitioning into coaching or PR or business development.

Which is why more and more athletes in the major sports like baseball, basketball, or football began to leave early or bypass college altogether. Having a college degree at the end of your pro career is only useful if you haven't invested your salary wisely or developed an eye for management or a network of business contacts. And if you're that foolish or disorganized, the result will be the same even with a degree: you'll find the glow of that degree tarnishes very quickly in the real world, and you will join the ranks of the many degreed americans desperately fighting for a living in sales or scraping out a subsistence in retail.

[farmwatcher]

Listen to those TV ads: there are 300,000 NCAA athletes, and almost all are going on in life in something other than sports. USA has BY FAR the best post-secondary education system in the world, and thank god these kids are taking advantage of it. Very few vball players are making a real living playing ball anywhere in the world after college. To tailor the college experience to the dreams of the very very few who will get to play at the national level, is the tail wagging the dog in the extreme.

And to say that Kelly Murphy, no matter how good she is, is the only girl of the present generation who will ever be good enough to set the national team is absurd. Look at the make-up of past national teams and roll those girls' histories back to their junior year in high school and tell me how many of them were a total lock at that point. It does not compute.

[Deleted]

OandU, don't you think there's something to be said for a place that requires you to use your brain?

[OverAndUnder]

ruffda said:

OandU, don't you think there's something to be said for a place that requires you to use your brain?

R!, do you think that degreed workers such as doctors and english professors are required to use their brains, but non-degreed workers such as accounts payable clerks and police officers are not?

[Deleted]

No. What I'm saying is that it's a good thing. College.

And don't A/P clerks and cops go to college? I'm a firm believer in the value of a liberal arts education. No matter what career you eventually pursue.

[farmwatcher]

OandU: I agree with your argument for the handful who actually are going to make the Olympic team or the handful who can make a living on the beach tour or who know at age 18 that they want to spend 10 years in the volleyball world doing something that pays the rent. But for the vast majority of players this will not be the case. Even for the majority of those who are currently viewed as top 5 or 10 in their class, as has been pointed out on this thread, this will not be the case. Look at the list of girls who have been invited to the JNT; we all know that of this group of 24, no more than 3-5 have any realistic chance of making a real career out of playing volleyball or playing on the National Team. Throw in the 2-3 others like Hodge who did not try out and you still are below 10 players covering 2 years of eligibility.

So my point remains: volleyball in the U.S. is about clubs, high schools, and colleges; in the rest of the world it is about national programs. And I would never trade the education these thousands of kids are getting just so the U.S can finish a spot or two higher in international competition. You are right that a college degree does not guarantee a job and success and happiness in life, but life without a college degree is even tougher.

[Murina]

Right now, I'm not arguing about what should or shouldn't be priorities. I'm arguing about what is affecting the USA Olympic team. The argument about more subs lets more kids play is a separate argument, and I'm not arguing that here...

ruffda said:

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's not the rules. It's the amount of time spent practicing. These kids are IN SCHOOL and there are NCAA regulations on their practice time. You make it sound like the coaches are incompetent. They are doing what they can with the restrictions in place.

Here we go again

Time is absolutely a major issue. Probably as big a factor as the rules.

How you can say that unlimited substitutions v. very limited substitutions doesn't affect how coaches pick their teams, AND how they train their teams in the limited time they have is absurd.

Read my post again. I defended the college coaches. I didn't make them sound incompetent! I said that if the rest of the world played with unlimited subs, they would be producing the same kind of players America is producing now - and they would!

Silversurfer is exactly right, it's absurd to expect NCAA coaches to train their players in a way that doesn't maximize their own teams. The NCAA is completely separate from the national team. The NCAA is not a training ground for future Olympians.

And by the way, it's not just the NCAA. The fact that high schools and club play with unlimited substitution is even worse for USAV (NT development) than college playing with unlimited substitution. Kids who have the abilities to be good 6 rotation players are limited to 3 rotations early in development because they are big and gawky, or because their coaches just don't know any better. (for those with comprehension issues, I didn't say that high school and club playing with unlimited subs is bad overall. I just said it is bad for the USAV.)

Pessquenebeg:
I don't know anything about the rule differences in basketball & softball. I don't think they have any effect on how the players are required to play. Even still, the American men have been getting their butts kicked internationally for quite a while now.

Here is how the rule differences affect volleyball:

FIVB: requires 4 players to play both front and back row and never come off the court.
NCAA: requires 2 to stay on the court all the time.

If you assume one of the positions that has to stay on the court is a setter, the FIVB teams have to produce 3 players who are strong both in the front and back row. The NCAA teams are only required to produce one. True some NCAA teams do have more than one all arounder, but it is a function of who is on a particular team each year rather than an overall philosophy of how to build your team.

Assuming 3 person reception pattern:
In the NCAA it is possible for a team to receive serve in certain rotations with a libero and 2 DS's. This is impossible in FIVB rules. There is a big difference when you combine the skills of pass and attack, than if you perform each skill separately. FIVB rules require players to combine pass and attack constantly. NCAA rules only require this to happen 4 of 6 rotations. Fewer if you count back row players being required to pass to attack.

The FIVB and NCAA rule differences have almost as big an effect on how players are chosen, and how the game is trained as the differences between 6 person indoor and 2 person beach. There are some people you would sell the farm to get for your indoor team, that you wouldn't go near if you were building a doubles team. The same is true of the FIVB v. NCAA.

[StanfordFan]

Interesting, this topic about U.S. focus on college as opposed to other countries. Here's an article from L.A. Times last week:
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-athlete6may06,1,6448155.story?coll=la-headlines-world

Should still be available without the free registration, but if not, article, in short, talks about how thousands of Chinese athletes are left crippled by years of intense training, and without the ability to sustain themselves financially because of lack of education. Premiere athletes who end up in the most menial of jobs because they can't find anything else in China's rapidly expanding economy. It's a tragedy.

Do I think the U.S. puts too much focus on college just for college sake? Yes, probably. We have a perception in the U.S. that college is a magic pill for success. But truth is not everyone is meant to go to college or to thrive there. At a minimum, though, people should have vocational skills as a back-up in case professional sports don't work out.

[Murina]

stanfordfan said:

Interesting, this topic about U.S. focus on college as opposed to other countries. Here's an article from L.A. Times last week:
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-athlete6may06,1,6448155.story?coll=la-headlines-world

Should still be available without the free registration, but if not, article, in short, talks about how thousands of Chinese athletes are left crippled by years of intense training, and without the ability to sustain themselves financially because of lack of education. Premiere athletes who end up in the most menial of jobs because they can't find anything else in China's rapidly expanding economy. It's a tragedy.

Do I think the U.S. puts too much focus on college just for college sake? Yes, probably. We have a perception in the U.S. that college is a magic pill for success. But truth is not everyone is meant to go to college or to thrive there. At a minimum, though, people should have vocational skills as a back-up in case professional sports don't work out.

That's an interesting and sad article. It doesn't surprise me at all. In South Korea volleyball players become professional at a fairly young age and end their educations also. They play for teams sponsored by companies. In theory after they are done playing they are guaranteed a job in the company for life - I've often wondered how well this really works out. They're only going to show foreigners the success stories...

[Deleted]

Murina, the point is that training time is a much more significant factor than the ruleset. If college coaches had more time, there would be more all-around players. It is NOT an advantage for those coaches to have their best athletes on the bench. Coaches would prefer to play them all around.

But this is the real world with real limits. They do what they can do. What I object to -- what I always object to -- is the crowd that argues the college coaching community is incompetent and/or lazy. I don't believe it.

[silversurfer]

ruffda said:

Murina, the point is that training time is a much more significant factor than the ruleset. If college coaches had more time, there would be more all-around players. It is NOT an advantage for those coaches to have their best athletes on the bench. Coaches would prefer to play them all around.

But this is the real world with real limits. They do what they can do. What I object to -- what I always object to -- is the crowd that argues the college coaching community is incompetent and/or lazy. I don't believe it.

Cripes how much more time do college coaches need? ;-)

If I was a college coach, I just wouldn't be concerned about shaping my training to fit with USA Volleyball. That's not my priority, doesn't pay my salary.

[Murina]

overandunder said:

Here's the deal: America has this Horatio Alger fixation on a college degree as the great equalizer coupled with a paradoxically opposing elitist fixation on a college degree as conferring a stamp of respectability.

It is the idea that everyone should bend and change their lives around to conform to the expectation of obtaining a college degree rather than learning a skilled trade (welding or pro volleyball) or performing community/military service or travelling to obtain cultural experiences which is absurd. The higher ed machine has hundreds of thousands of young people slogging through generic impersonal undergrad seminars taking notes on form and structure in the sonnets of John Donne in the hope that their eventual degree will earn them a starting salary of $40k+, when they instead ought to be figuring out how they are going to be employed at all in another ten years when the globe flattens completely and the foreign labor supply swallows whole industries the way the immigrant labor supply already has.

That college degree will only take you about ten years down the road, because like most people you are going to change not only jobs but careers several times in your life, and by your mid-30s are very likely to be working in a completely different sector of the economy. Guess what -- that's about the same as your pro career if you are an Olympic-caliber athlete: You're in your prime between 24-31, there's a trailing off period, and then by 35 you're transitioning into coaching or PR or business development.

Which is why more and more athletes in the major sports like baseball, basketball, or football began to leave early or bypass college altogether. Having a college degree at the end of your pro career is only useful if you haven't invested your salary wisely or developed an eye for management or a network of business contacts. And if you're that foolish or disorganized, the result will be the same even with a degree: you'll find the glow of that degree tarnishes very quickly in the real world, and you will join the ranks of the many degreed americans desperately fighting for a living in sales or scraping out a subsistence in retail.

I'm not so sure you're argument works very well for a volleyball player in the USA...

There are certainly some trades that make a very good living in the USA without a college degree, but volleyball player isn't one of them. For a volleyball player to make their living they have to cross an ocean. If they do their contacts that they may develop in business and marketing are pretty far from the home that they would want to return to when they are finished being a professional athlete...

As far as the USA goes, I'm sure (R)uffda! can come up with some stats about average income of those with college degrees v. those without. I strongly suspect that in the USA there is a very big and growing difference. This may argue that in America a college degree, though no guarantee, is a strong path toward being able to worry less about future income.

I think it is really hard to argue (and I wish I could) that an American kid should pursue a pro volleyball career over a college degree...

[Deleted]

Any stats I come up with would be pretty biased:

Kids who go to college, in general, are from wealthier families -- i.e., they have a built-in advantage. I won't get into Racism.

Kids who are _not_ from wealthy families but go to college are, generally, highly motivated.

In both cases, it's hard to know just how much the college experience has to do with their "success."

[Murina]

ruffda said:

Murina, the point is that training time is a much more significant factor than the ruleset. If college coaches had more time, there would be more all-around players. It is NOT an advantage for those coaches to have their best athletes on the bench. Coaches would prefer to play them all around.

But this is the real world with real limits. They do what they can do. What I object to -- what I always object to -- is the crowd that argues the college coaching community is incompetent and/or lazy. I don't believe it.

I've never argued that the college coaching community is incompetent or lazy. I don't know where you get that from me... I've always argued that they are coaching to win the game they are playing. What's wrong with that?

I'll give you that with more time in the gym there might be more all around players - that is a hypothesis however, not a statement of fact... I agree that it is a likely hypothesis.

It is a fact that with FIVB rules there are more all around players.

"Best athletes" is a flawed concept from a motor learning and control standpoint. Abilities, skills and development of each is a pretty complicated field. It might be a good exercise for me to explain to the board current concepts in motor learning and control and how they relate to player development in volleyball... It will take several hours to write it though. Maybe I'll get motivated...

[Murina]

ruffda said:

Any stats I come up with would be pretty biased:

Kids who go to college, in general, are from wealthier families -- i.e., they have a built-in advantage. I won't get into Racism.

Kids who are _not_ from wealthy families but go to college are, generally, highly motivated.

In both cases, it's hard to know just how much the college experience has to do with their "success."

fair enough.