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Post by itsallrelative on Dec 19, 2014 10:47:00 GMT -5
Attended a really excellent session on developing Mental Toughness in today's athlete by Greg Dale of Duke. Really excellent info and presentation. Gave me lots to think about. He did a great job articulating the problems and categorizing the different manifestations of the entitlement syndrome in kids. Very well attended. Saw a couple of so-so presentations on the courts. The vendors were doing their damnedest to fill my suitcase up with swag. Not that I am turning them down or anything. For all of my misgivings about certain things the AVCA do, they know how to put on a party. The events are well organized and does a good job keeping structure. Their app dedicated to the convention is excellent. All the session feedback is being done through the app. Attendees can reach out to everyone who attended through the app. Really slick. Rampant speculation and guessing going on about TCU and Baylor. Right now TCU is the hottest rumor generator in town. Mississippi State and Notre Dame are engendering less speculations. Everyone seems to know someone who's second cousins with the neighbor of TCU's AD's dog groomer. Any rumors on who is interested in the MN assistant coaching position? I thought jobs on that level work the other way...not who is interested, but who they are interested in?
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Post by ugopher on Dec 19, 2014 10:50:57 GMT -5
Any rumors on who is interested in the MN assistant coaching position? I thought jobs on that level work the other way...not who is interested, but who they are interested in? Must be why they haven't returned my calls!
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Post by psumaui on Dec 19, 2014 11:34:02 GMT -5
Love the press conference I need to find the one for the other Final Four teams. If you find them let me know. I haven't been able to find any videos on the other three for Semi-Finals; just transcripts.
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Post by MsRSV on Dec 19, 2014 12:30:00 GMT -5
Fav quote from POY brunch "I am getting an getting award for having the time of my life." -Amy Westsen, Biola
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Post by Phaedrus on Dec 19, 2014 12:52:58 GMT -5
RR in a suit! Powder blue tie to match. Very sharp.
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Post by Phaedrus on Dec 19, 2014 13:06:14 GMT -5
Briana Holman of LSU not here to accept her first team AA award.
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Post by MsRSV on Dec 19, 2014 13:06:23 GMT -5
Best dressed AA is Savanah Leaf... Word.
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Post by Phaedrus on Dec 20, 2014 18:37:02 GMT -5
I'll get my notes in order and post some synopsis next week. The schedule here is pretty tough, all the sessions, exhibitions, and networking is pretty tough on the circadian rhythm and livers.
One problem has been that the demo players are of varying skills, so some are very skilled and some are not. The rhythm of the drills being demoed were such that is was hard to maintain continuity. IMHO.
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Post by Phaedrus on Dec 25, 2014 11:11:27 GMT -5
Shelton Collier's Session: Success Coaching: Managing Challenging Team and Staff Dynamics to Increase Winning
Shelton Collier's presentation on how to reach your players and circumvent some of the problems that you have with a large team was fantastic. He went into the great details on the what motivated him throughout his career at Wingate in order to take a hard look at communicating with the team. This was something that he said he could not have done while he was younger in his other other stops in his successful coaching career. The talk was very humorous in a very self deprecating way.
He started the session by talking about how coaches interactions with players matter and the coaches skill at communicating with the players also matter. He figured the following:
Happy players=winning Reduced tension=Happy players=more winning
He decided that there needs to be a systematic way to address this.
He got deep into his own psyche as he talked about his wife's battle with breast cancer, which was partly what motivated him to be thinking about the way men and women communicate with each other and he applied those lessons to his communications with his team. In fact he recommended a book by Marc Silver called Breast Cancer Husband. He cited this book as book that is structured as a how-to guide for clueless males as they go through the process of supporting their wives. He said it was helpful and kept him ahead of the next stage of the evolution of the treatments. So this is what got him to start thinking about this systematic way of communicating.
He carries a relatively large team so those kids who are not in the starting lineup or not getting regular playing time are often neglected just because there's only so many hours in the day for you to worry about your team. He asked sincerely about how to come up with ways to make them part of the group. He talked a lot in terms of communicating with the kids and little things like active listening and just having the kid vent serves a great purpose and sometimes that is all they need: some way to get themselves through the problems and reason things out.
Another book he recommended is: Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars. He also delved into his psychology background and how that help him with his communication skills. He mentioned his assistant quite a bit just because she apparently understood these issues and he sits down with her and they talk about the meaning based issues and how they work themselves out in a working relationship which I think is very important for the staff. He gave a lot of cues and examples as well as ways of thinking about getting through to the players. He also recommended Gender and Competition by Kathy Deboer as a good guide to understanding gender differences.
He goes into details about how to systematically plan and look ahead at some possible situations that may occur with a team and be ready for the eventual occurrence of a difficult situation.
It is evident that Shelton has thought through this a lot. But even when the subject matter is very serious, Shelton has a way of being self-deprecating and introduce various elements of humor in his presentation. This was a pretty hard slog as it was a 60 minute Power Point presentation. There is no toys for him to show off, no videos to keep the audience occupied and entertained. It was just him. As a friend of mine said he could listen to Shelton read the phonebook and still learn something. Even though Shelton style is pretty serious with a lot of gravitas he is also very very good speaker and very humorous and is able to pull the audience into the subject matter as he has done before. This particular talk to me is a magnum opus. It really close to home, he has had to open himself up, not just professionally, not just about the coaching, but about his personal life and how he deals with emotional and issues with his team and his players and his staff and his family so this was a very deep dive into the inner workings of a coach and that's very much appreciated by everyone in the audience.
The full talk will be available on the AVCA website sometime in January/February.
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Post by InTheKnow on Dec 25, 2014 11:26:54 GMT -5
Thanks for the info. Very insightful.
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Post by Not Me on Dec 25, 2014 13:26:12 GMT -5
Shelton is the best presenter in the volleyball world, bar none. Just seeing him do one or two is worth the price of the convention. They are always well thought out, laid out, and presented
The best part is he is very, very honest about the mistakes he has made and how he has learned from them. He doesn't rely on anecdotal stories from others or made up scenarios. He speaks from experience.
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Post by bkedane on Dec 25, 2014 20:01:48 GMT -5
If he's really recommending *Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus* then his psychology insight probably isn't especially deep.
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Post by Phaedrus on Dec 25, 2014 20:49:23 GMT -5
The Super Panel on How to Win is a continuation the same panel for the last number of years of successful coaches that are being interviewed by a moderator. The responsibility has shifted from the the shoulders of Kelly Sheffield to Dr Mike Hebert, the grand guru of volleyball. Dr Mike has some pretty interesting insights and since he's not in the profession anymore he could pretty much say what he want, ask what he wants, and no one would actually get mad at him because he's held in such high esteem.
The panel consisted of Doug Beal, the CEO of USA Volleyball; Salima Davidson the associate head coach at Penn State; Shelton Collier, the head coach at Wingate University; Laurie Corbelli, the head coach at Texas A&M University; and Karch Kiraly, the national team head coach for womens.
To start, Dr. Mike asked Karch do his signature move , he not only obliged, he even whipped out his gold medal from the FIVB World Championships and passed it around the audience. I would have been worried that that thing would disappear in the crowd but apparently it did not. That was a great opening but then as soon as the crowd settled down, Dr. Mike fired off the first and what was probably the toughest question he asked throughout the entire session.
He asked Karch why Logan Tom and Destinee Hooker were not on the NT roster right now. Karch was very diplomatic and eloquent. You can tell that he's very good at this. He just said that well he wanted a certain kind of player that more team oriented, ones that are pulling for each other and he's trying to build the bonds of everyone on the team and what was left unsaid was that these two players did not quite fit into his definition. Although I don't think he completely closed the door on the prospects of them coming back, I don't think he left the door wide open for them either.
Dr Mike had questions for everybody, and this is not in chronological sequence. He asked Laura Corbelli about training with Arie Selinger during he years on the NT. Since Selinger had an extremely technical and extremely tough training philosophy, his Women's NT would work 6 hours a day whereas Doug Beal's men's NT would be working 4 hours a day. She said that the training time was pretty brutal, the womens team would be doing all the hard grind work, getting multiple reps, the hard reps. The midday respite for lunch was well appreciated. She can put it in historical perspective now because at the time the teams that the USA was trying to catch was Japan and China, Japan to China were at work 6, 7, 8 hours a day and that's the way they train so we're going to try to catch up to them then we need to be working that hard. The follow up question from Dr Mike was about how does that experience affect her coaching style and she mentioned that her husband is the main trainer for her team and they do go hard and do a lot of work with fundamental in the morning, working on technique and working on with just the sheer reps and block training but in the afternoon it's all six on six. They do a lot of scrimmaging, a lot of playing so it's not just technical work. I thought she did a pretty good job of defending her style of coaching in the face of the pressures from the others who don't believe in that kind of training.
OK, this was in my notes and I have no idea who said it. It was right after Corbelli's section so I assumed it was her. The coach should take people out of their comfort zone if they have seen success but need to protect the team and pull them into the comfort zone if they are losing.
Dr. Mike turned his attention to Salima Davidson, asking her what her perspective is on coaching since she has the unique perspective of having seen it from the inside from two different NC campaigns: Penn State and Texas. She view point was very interesting, she said Jerritt Elliott is very different from Russ Rose. Russ Rose was more this is the one way to do this, the only way I want to do it. He creates a culture in his gym and that culture is very tough. His relationship with his players are that they know he will take care of them so there is a critical component of trust in the relationship. He also makes sure that they understand the process, the why of everything. He also runs drills that create competition. He puts his teams in a relaxed and good place mentally when they are in competition. The games are not as hard as the process. Elliott is more flexible in the ways of doing things, he didn't have the one way of doing things and his process was more elastic, yet the Texas gym is also competitive and allows the players to play relaxed. She and Eric Sullivan have been friends for years, and since he is the main trainer for Texas, she learned about what he did in the gym.
Dr. Mike turned back to Karch and made the observation that Karch the player behaves nothing like Karch the coach, that he is cool, calm and collected as a coach and the polar opposite as a player. Karch made a point of saying that he needs to be the calm one because he is the coach. A lesson he learned from his wife when she observed that most coaches give off an aura that states: "How can there stupid women screw up my perfect plan to win." So he makes sure that the body language, the little detaisl of his reactions don't inadvertently affect the mental approach that he worked so hard to attain in his practices. Doug Beal said this of Karch: "Be supremely confident."
Dr. Mike then turns the limelight onto Shelton Collier about his transition from Georgia Tech, a Division 1 volleyball program that he built into a Top 25 powerhouse and then going to Wingate to build the program into a top 25 program as well. he asked Shelton to name two coaches that he views as ideal. He said Anne Kordes for her charisma and Kevin Hambly for his ability to view the big picture. He said that he tries to not waste time in the gym, he doesn't have generic drills whose existence is just to waste time. He emphasizes the need to aim toward winning the next match. He likes to remind his team to let it rip every time they have a choice and to take the same approach every day. He likes treating practices like a rehearsal rather than just a practice, so that the players are more mindful of what they are doing. One main key is for the coach to give the players what they need to play. Finally, he said: Peoplewin championships, not technique, not tactics, but people.
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Post by Phaedrus on Dec 25, 2014 20:53:05 GMT -5
If he's really recommending *Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus* then his psychology insight probably isn't especially deep. Take it up with him, he did some graduate level course work and trained as a counselor in psychology when he was at University of Pittsburgh.
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Post by Phaedrus on Dec 26, 2014 8:58:06 GMT -5
On court sessions
I used to go to the courts at the beginning of the day and just hang out there for the duration. I stopped doing that as my interest changed.
The court sessions are a dodgy enterprise for anyone to undertake for two reasons:
1) The PA system usually suck bananas and there is a very narrow sweetspot for anyone to hear properly. I usually can hang in there for three quarters of the session but then I get tired of listening so attentively.
2) This is the biggest beef I have with the AVCA in this regard, and it isn't all their fault. The way the demonstrators are selected and paired with the presenters are pretty hap-hazardous. Some times the demonstrators are more skilled than the drills being demo'ed which makes everyone feel good but it also disguises the nuances inherent in the drills, then it makes the drill seem much simpler than it is. What si worse is that the demonstrators are not able to demonstrated the skills and drills that the presenters are presenting, it creates a bad situation, the presenter is trying to get across a point and the demonstrator is placed in a position of embarrassing themselves in front of a bunch of coaches. Previously, I thought that Brian Gimillaro did a fantastic job working with the dmonstrators and by the end of the time slot actually improved the skill of the demonstrators. Karch did it this year when he did his presentation.
As I looked back on this year's on court session, I realized that I didn't really stop and sit and watch a whole lot. I kind of walked by and audited the action.
There was a time that the NT members came to do the demos, and that didn't work when we were deep into the quadrennial, and the players are now playing overseas so getting them to come in and do demos are probably not the most effective use of their time and body. AVCA also used to pay coaches who volunteer to demo, as a way to offset their registration fees, I don't know why that stopped. I don't knwo the status of high school or college players that are already living in the area, paying them might be an issue. Anyhow, that is part of the problem.
The courts sessions are always well attended though.
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