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 Medaille College Men's Volleyball team's season for 2021 is over. In this episode of the podcast I recap the campaign. You can also give a read to my Coaching Log for a more detailed examination. Support the podcast by becoming a patron. You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

How does a player become not just good, but great? That's the starting point of this conversation with Mark Lebedew. We wander from that topic a bit, but it is the main focus. If you followed the original Coaching Conversations series, you know Mark was a regular feature in those discussions. He and I also did a podcast series for the Volleyball Coaching Wizards project. And, of course, you can follow Mark's writing on his blog. In the conversation Mark and I talked about the...

As part of the Sport Marketing & Promotion class I've been teaching at Medaille College this term I'm including some guest speakers. One of them is Will Foley from Volleyball League of America. He was previously joined by Tim Falknor on the last of the original Coaching Conversations series episodes to talk more generally about starting and running a fledgling pro volleyball league in the US. Will spoke with my class about the marketing efforts of the VLA, and took several interesting...

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. Support the podcast by becoming a patron. You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

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,...

The core concept of Coaching Conversations has always been coaches simply getting together to talk. This episode is really just that - a recording of a pair of coaches talking about what's going on and what they're thinking about. In this case, it's myself and my friend Ruben Wolochin, who you may remember from Episode 20. Since it didn't have a specific unified focus, I was tempted to call this "The show about nothing". :-) Not surprisingly, the conversation wanders around,...

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...

One of the guys on the Medaille College Men's team wants to continue his career after college. I thought it would be good for him to speak to my friend Ruben Wolochin about that. Ruben has coached in several European countries, plus his native Argentina. He's also had several Americans in his teams over the years. As a result, he knows what that transition is like. You may recall Ruben from a pair of the Coaching Conversations series talks. He helped out with the Building a Consistent...

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...

University of Utah head coach Beth Launiere has led that program for more than 30 years. In that time she's won over 500 matches and led her teams to the NCAA tournament on 16 occasions, including four trips to four Sweet 16s. She guided the program through the challenging transition from the Mountain West Conference to the PAC-12, and in 2019 earned Coach of the Year honors in that conference. This conversation relates mainly to the book Stop Competing and Start Winning that Beth...

In this episode I'm talking about mini volleyball with Ruth Nelson. Ruth was recently part of an online mini volleyball congress along with four European coaches. They each shared their thoughts and methods for coaching youth volleyballers. Ruth is one of the Volleyball Coaching Wizard interviewees, and that interview is featured in the first Volleyball Coaching Wizards book. She is currently part of the MasterCoaches crew I work with on Weekly Buzz each Wednesday. An AVCA Hall of...

I'm rejoined for this discussion by Alex Porter, who featured in Episode 15. As a reminder, Alex is the head coach for the volleyball performance program at the University of Essex in England. Our topic for this episode is mentorship. As I note early in the conversation, this is a topic I wrote about in the early days of this blog. Unlike in the remote coaching talk Alex and I had, this was a much more freeform exchange. This is basically by design. We threw some thoughts, ideas, and...

Alex Porter joins me for this episode. Alex is the head coach for the volleyball performance program at the University of Essex in England. His teams have won a national championship and multiple cup competitions. He was with me on two of the original Coaching Conversations discussions. One was Coaching in the UK with Audrey Cooper and Simon Loftus. The other was Playing Opportunities in the UK where a pair of his former Essex players joined us to share their perspectives. This talk...

Tim Alaniz joins me again for this episode, after also being with me on Episode 13. As you may recall, Tim is currently the assistant coach at Southwestern College, an NAIA school in Kansas. He and I worked together at Midwestern State and at Charleston Academy. Tim also previously took part in the Coaching Conversation on Training Youth Volleyball with Loren Anderson. The topic of this conversation is how long we should run our practices. Here are links related to some...

Tim Alaniz joins me for this episode. Tim is currently the assistant coach at Southwestern College, an NAIA school in Kansas. He and I worked together at Midwestern State and at Charleston Academy. The topic of this conversation is whether you can be successful with players who put winning below other priorities. Tim previously took part in the Coaching Conversation on Training Youth Volleyball with Loren Anderson. Here are links related to some what we talked about in...

In this episode I have a talk with Geoff Carlston about how we treat ourselves as coaches, particularly in difficult times. Geoff is the former head coach at Ohio State, with prior stops at Ohio University and Concordia-St. Paul. Here is the article Geoff wrote for VolleyballMag.com that motivated the discussion. In this intro I mentioned the Coaching Conversation I did with Simon Loftus on stress in coaching. Support the podcast by becoming a patron. You can find...

In this episode I take a break from the normal conversation format to do a bit of a personal update. It begins with a discussion of the recently completed (sort of) 2020 AVCA Virtual Convention. From there I talk about upcoming plans for both blog and podcast content. I also provide an update on where thing are at with the Medaille College volleyball teams following the conclusion of the first semester. Here are things I referenced in this episode: * My daily reports for...

In this episode Jeff Liu joins me and my assistant coaches to talk DataVolley. Jeff is currently and assistant coach at Grand Canyon University as well as Technical Coordinator for the USA Women's National Team. He, along with Joe Trinsey, developed a Data Volley training manual titled The Unoffical Guide to DataVolley4 Mastery. We're looking at incorporating DataVolley into our analytical and scouting work for the Medaille College programs. In this discussion, Jeff gives us some...

In this episode Sue Gozansky, Mark Lebedew, and I continue the conversation begun in Episode 8. We talk some volleyball history, some rules, a bit about how the structure in the US compares to other places, and some other stuff as well. Support the podcast by becoming a patron. You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

Understanding how we got where we are today - both in terms of our sport and how we coach it - provides broad value. Sadly, there tends to be a lack of this knowledge in volleyball. This means we don't have the strength of culture seen in other sports. This is particularly true in the US. In this episode, the first of two, Sue Gozansky and Mark Lebedew join me to talk about our history. Mark and Sue did an episode of the original Conversations series talking on the subject of...

The business side of the sport of volleyball is something I'm very interested in and I don't think it tends to be handled as well as it should. This episode of the podcast starts what I hope is a series of conversations on that topic. In Germany recently the volleyball community had what they called a "Kongress". Business topics were among those discussed. My guest in this conversation - Daniel R. Schmidt and Oliver Wagner - both presented. I have them share what they talked about, and also...

One of the threads I thought to include in this podcast series is one where I include my assistant coaches at Medaille College. The idea is to make it a way for them to expand their knowledge and further their development. At the same time, it would allow me to hit on topics that are of interest to younger and/or less experienced coaches that I might not think of myself. In this initial conversation, we talk about the two teams heading into being able to get on the court with them....

This episode is a change from the norm. In it one legendary coach, Mick Haley, interviews another legendary coach, Brian Gimmillaro. This interview is destined for use in the Volleyball Coaching Wizards project (for which I interviewed Mick), but there are aspects of what Brian talks about that I think are interesting and very much of immediate interest. If you don't know Brian Gimmillaro, he coached Long Beach State to three NCAA Division I championships. That includes the first ever...