...Playing with your all...

This is a guest blog by a high school senior who has been through several sports in her High School career and is reflecting on her coaching. She has an amazing insight and one day, will make a wonderful coach with what she has learned these past four years. Congratulations on your graduation and thank you for the insights!

What do you think most players think about coaches? I am always trying to think without thinking about my personal feelings toward a coach because I don't think you learn anything or actually analyze situations if you are thinking about everything from a personal standpoint. I also think that a good player will be able to learn from any coach (that actually knows their stuff) because they will be able to separate personal feelings toward the coach and focus instead on the information they're trying to pass on.

I can see it when coaches are coaching more with ego or looking for those specific moments where you lost the game. When we played our rival this year it was a great game. I think our Coach was expecting more because we were so close to beating them last year, so when we lost he said we weren't playing hard enough, and we weren't playing how our team can play. 

I never believed that because playing in that game and thinking back to it I never felt like we were playing bad. Volleyball is a sport based on mistakes and this year our rival did not make many mistakes. They covered the floor really well and their hitters were looking for the gaps in our defense. I know that winning is winning and losing is losing but personally I judge a game, my teams, and myself based on if we played our hardest. The way I see it you can't win every game but if you are playing with your all then there is nothing to regret. I also think a lot of coaches make winning such an important part of the game that when a team loses they don't think about how they played, just that they lost.

I think our school, because it is smaller, is constantly playing the underdog. People are always saying other schools have an advantage because they have so many kids, and we are too small to be in the top division. But I would bet those are the same people that think playing smaller schools is dumb because they aren't even competitive. I think anyone can win if they work hard enough but in our program, we are so used to losing to bigger teams that even when our team has the potential to win we are so used to losing that sometimes some players don't even care enough to try.

Our volleyball Coach doesn't punish anything. He always said in practice that if you are not taking a drill seriously than the drill will punish you by not letting you be apart of it. I understand what he means, it makes sense. My sophomore and freshman year, another team I was on lost to a team that our coaches thought we could beat so we rode the bus back to the school and ran suicides and sprints for 30 minutes. 

Having experienced both I think a lot of coaches give consequences for the wrong things. I think making a mistake isn't something that always needs to be addressed every time. I do think not putting effort is, having a bad attitude, purposefully not trying; those are things that shouldn't be allowed, but instead they are. 

One thing I have never understood is if there are a lot of people making the same mistakes why do coaches make them run rather than working on whatever it is to help them not make the mistake again?