Send it over the net in 1, 2 or 3 contacts and don’t let the
ball hit the floor on your side.
She started with that simple formula. She was a college
basketball player who was offered a job coaching High School basketball BUT was
told she would also have to coach volleyball.
She didn’t know anything about volleyball. She had never
played the sport. So she enlisted the mother of her best friend who was a
volleyball coach, travelling hours to her home the day before the season
started to copy drills, learn the game and come up with any idea on how to
coach something she didn’t know at all.
Another coach described his journey. “I became
involved in volleyball when I went to college with the intention of being a
basketball coach and happened to go to a school … that doesn’t exist any
longer, and it happened to be a school that was very good in volleyball. Just
randomly got involved in volleyball because of that. I never took a volleyball
class before I got to college, so I transitioned from basketball to volleyball
while I was there. I just took a couple classes and learned how to play and was
on the team and had terrific mentors that were open to sharing their passion
for the game with people who knew nothing about the game.”
Another coach graduated from a high school in Indiana
and a classmate was coaching the JV team at their alma mater. This coach casually
offered his services not thinking she would ever call. This fan of the game,
who used to go watch his sister play, he got hooked as the JV team he was
helping with went undefeated as did the varsity. The next year he jumped to
another school and a coaching journey saw the rubber hit the road.
How did you get started? Your daughter played? Someone
at your city or park program needed coaches? Maybe you just wanted to assist
and got caught up in the excitement and rewards of coaching young people?
The why is important. The who is important. The how is
most important.
Coaches must be flexible, chameleons of social and behavioral
changes in their athletes. Cultures change, society changes, attitudes, and
influences change. Coaches must change with them to survive the profession.
The coach who graduated from a high school in Indiana
won his first NCAA National Championship last season as coach of the University
of Wisconsin Badgers. Kelly Sheffield is heading into his 35th year
of collegiate coaching and is one of the preseason favorites to repeat as
National Champions.
The coach who went to college to coach basketball
retired last season after 43 years, 7 National Championships and leaves the
Penn State volleyball program as a perennial powerhouse. Russ Rose embraced the
sport as both a player, a coach and an official and his ideas and strategies
are DNA for many coaches and programs across the world.
The high school basketball player who boiled down the
game to two mantras is starting her 41st year at Dorman High School
in South Carolina. Paula Kirkland has won 14 S.C. State High School
Championships and is poised for another this season. She admits it took her 10
years to be comfortable with what she was doing as a coach, but she has been a
cornerstone of both club and high school ball in South Carolina since.
All three of these legends had to change. The things
they practiced, the way they practiced. They opened their minds and never
thought they knew it all. They continued and continue to learn from others,
gather more information from different sources and read and listen to make
themselves better.
Chances are you won’t see 35 or 40+ years coaching. But
your athletes deserve nothing less than a coach who is a lifelong learner. A
coach who doesn’t think they have all the answers. Your athletes are asked every
practice to get better.
It’s a standard we should hold ourselves to as well.
Paula, Russ and Kelly have.
