"Becks"... Part I

Volleyball Magazine recently profiled the current USA Men’s National Team Assistant Coach Andrea Becker. For those of you that missed it, Becker has a master’s degree in Sport’s Psychology and is currently a professor at Cal State Fullerton and has been working with National Team head coach John Speraw from his days at U.C. Irvine to his current gigs as the UCLA Men’s Head Coach and the USA National Team. Becker took some time with the Az. Region to give some more insight on coaching athletes, questions to ask in her own words. This is the first of two parts of our interview with Coach Becker. 

QUESTIONS FIRST

I always knew I would coach. My research was more geared toward the psychology of coaching and what makes a great coach and how you should design your practices and what kinds of relationships a coach should have with their players, what kind of environment should you create, what kind of culture should you create?

Just being indoctrinated into the volleyball culture and really, just studying the game from an external perspective is kind of what I do. Whenever they’re implementing a new system or talking to a player about a technique I’m really studying it from an unbiased position and really what I do is just ask a lot of questions. Why do you do it this way? Why is it beneficial? How can we make it better? Sometimes the answer is that’s just the way we’ve always done it. Maybe the way we’ve always done it isn’t the best way.

So maybe we can explore options and use researches to figure out what is the best way, and go with that.

I went to school for 11 straight years. Those 11 years were truly dedicating my studies to the psychology of the sport and understanding what makes a great performer, what makes a great coach to how do we learn best, how do we accelerate the learning process? How do we develop physical skills, mental skills, how do we change athlete’s mechanics?

A GROWTH MINDSET

I can get information from somewhere where you’d least expect it; a young child and their performance for example. I guess I’m always studying the psychology of performance no matter what I’m doing. It’s always in the back of my mind. I’m always thinking about it, I’m always thinking about interesting concepts and how they relate to volleyball, how does it relate to social dynamics, how does it relate to coaching better? But you can draw from all different fields. There are a lot of important areas. It could be a writer that’s writing fiction but they have a very good blend of ideas and thoughts and those thoughts might be relevant too. I think you always have to keep an open mind and you have to do what works best for you.

 COMMUNICATION

How do you talk to people? A lot of how you talk to people has to do with the features of the language rather than the words themselves: The inclination in your voice, the tone, the speed, the level to which you display confidence in them or do you not? It’s less about what you say and more about how you say it. It’s how you deliver that message.

In addition to that is the body language that goes along with it. We can raise so much more information with the body language and the feature of the words than what we actually say and that’s so important. I think I guess what I do is draw the coaches attention to those things. Little subtleties like that can make a big difference. And oftentimes when players don’t know what their coach is thinking, and their reading into their body language or their reading into something athletes often times think the worst possible thing. They automatically think oh man, coach doesn’t’ think I can do it or oh gosh, his head is down he must be upset with us, that kind of thing when it’s not necessarily the case.

COACHING STYLES

There’s no one coaching style that everybody should implement in order to be successful. You have to work within your own personality and your own comfort zone and you can be genuine and authentic with who you are so that you won’t be a different coach than you are a person but you can be the same person whether you are on or off the court so the players know who they are going to get and you can be consistent in who you are and how you do things. I think that’s really important. But there’s no one style where you’d say you have to be like this

 THE BIG THREE

The first thing I would say to club coaches is first of all the most important thing in coaching, #1, is be consistent in who you are, in what you do and how you do things. So when you come into the gym every day, you are the same person, over and over and over again. If you are an emotional person and you aren’t consistent with who you are, then your team will not be consistent. You have to be consistent in what you implement. So if you’re running a system and you believe in that system, you have to be consistent in that.

Consistency comes when the coach has a very strong sense of who they are and a very strong sense of what they believe in. Their actions and behaviors are based on philosophical beliefs which our stable rather than situations and circumstances that might come up during the course of a season that are unstable. So if you’re basing your decision making and behaviors on unstable circumstances, you‘re going to come off as very inconsistent. One time you’re making a decision in one direction, another time you’re making a decision in another direction.   But if you’re basing your decisions off of a core belief system that you believe about coaching and about playing volleyball then you’re decision should be consistent based on that philosophical system. That’s so important.

You’re basically creating a culture that is oriented about the team rather than the coach. It’s not about the coach; it’s about young people and helping young people realize their goals and their dreams and you can enhance their self esteem and their self worth and their confidence. It can be a pretty amazing experience.

One last thing is truly, you have to love them. You have to love the kids. If it’s fake you can’t create a genuine and authentic culture. You have to feel that for them.

So I guess if you go back to the big three I would say really know who you are and be consistent with who you are and what you’re doing and how you do things. Have a strong philosophy and the third thing is when we use the word positive it gets over used maybe incorrectly. The word positive doesn’t mean you give them pats on the back or tell them they’re the best thing to hit the court it the last 10 years. Positive doesn’t’ mean any of those things, positive means you’re instructing them, you’re teaching them, you’re spending time with them, you’re treating them fairly, you’re showing that you care about them, you’re getting to know who they are as people and players, you’re motivating them.

WINNING OVER PROCESS

 Coaches often times, they start to choose an out and especially at the younger levels that is truly about developing young people. They have very good intentions for developing young people and to build character and to make it fun. And you go and watch them coach and they respond so negatively to outcomes; whether we won or we lost or whether we got the kill or we didn’t get the kill, whether they served out of bounds, they respond to those outcomes. So their original desire to build character and develop young people is thrown out the window when winning and other outcomes and factors come into play.

That’s really disheartening at those levels because  the focus on those outcomes actually undermines the coaches desire to get what they want in the long run because the players start performing out of fear rather than performing to give effort and have fun. So over a period of time it actually creates more mistakes than helps them. 

Part II of this interview to follow next week. If you have any comments or questions, please contact Az. Region Outreach.