The dark ages of volleyball coaching — Learn Beach Volleyball Fast

What I'll talk about in this post has been on my mind for years, but I have not gotten around to creating any sort of content (blog post/podcast/video) around it, but a little occurrence the other day got me inspired to finally start putting these thoughts onto paper (or well, screen!)

The reason I want these thoughts recorded is at least two-fold: Partly for my ego because I want to be able to point to this post a few years/decades down the road if/when my prediction turns out to be true/widely accepted, and partly because I have some hope that this could get some people out there to think a little bit deeper, possibly reconsider their convictions and look further into the matter. This again could in the long run lead to a healthier volleyball community as a whole, producing better, happier, and healthier players as well as coaches, which in the long run could even grow the sport, make it more engaging for fans, have more money circulating and all that good stuff.

And just for clarification, even though I mostly coach beach volleyball and at this point not much indoor volleyball at all, this opinion piece of mine applies to both main versions of our sport, as well as probably many other sports in the world as well.

Ok so for the timestamp part, today is the 21st of November 2022 as I am writing this. I've had thoughts like these for some years now, it was probably around 2018 when I mentioned "the dark ages of volleyball coaching" in a discussion forum for the first time.

What inspired me to finally write this

The other day I was on a long bus ride and decided to once again kill some time (while educating myself in my profession) by reading around a bit in my favorite volleyball coaching discussion forum.

I found a post, that for the millionth time went something in the style of:

"I saw this coach do this type of drill, which I learned in my coaching course is unscientific and will not be good for the learning of the athletes."

Sometimes I reply to posts like these in a slightly offensive manner, because I have over the years unfortunately learned that many coaches have convictions so strong against what I tell them, that I, unfortunately, have to be a bit more aggressive in my language for them to even start considering what I am saying. Regardless, aggressive or not, here's what I wrote:

"I'm curiously sitting here and waiting to see how many years/decades it will take for people to realize that learning happens when you do the right activity combined with the right thoughts/mental processing, at the right time, all based on your previous experience. There is a time and place to do, and not do, "everything." Gamelike, non-gamelike, coach-initiated, player-initiated, over a net, not over a net, etc. Stop looking for "what should not be done" and start understanding when to do what instead. This is my opinion of course."

I expected nothing of the post, because quite often when I write stuff similar to this they get no comments/reactions. If they do, it's usually just one skeptical person asking me how dare I say stuff that is counter to what the motor learning (the science of how humans learn new motor skills) researchers apparently say (I write "apparently" because not all the motor learning researchers disagree with me.)

However, to my surprise, this comment of mine both got a fair amount of what I interpret as genuinely curious questions (that wanted to understand my opinion better) and a surprising amount of both "thumbs up" and "hearts" that some of these forums allow us to give each others comments.

I believe this was the first time I wrote a comment that is skeptical towards the "widely accepted narrative/science" in our profession and it received curiosity and positivity from a big number of people.. So I started thinking: Maybe the world starts to be ready for that "Dark ages of volleyball coaching"-blog post I have been thinking about writing one day?!

What has happened in the volleyball coaching world in the last decade or so

About 8 years ago I attended my first volleyball coaching course. I liked a lot of the stuff I learned there, but there was one "teaching" of the course that got stuck in my mind with a lot of ambivalence:

"There is no scientific proof that the skills you learn in drills where the skill is broken down into parts does transfer to the actual game."

One way to interpret this sentence is simply that no one has so far run a study that could "prove" the existence of this effect (that skills can be transferred from broken-down drills to full gameplay), while the effect, in reality, might or might not exist.

Another way to interpret this sentence is to think that running drills that break down skills into parts is "unscientific", doesn't work, a waste of time, and should be avoided.

I cannot read the mind of the instructor of this particular coaching course, and I haven't asked the instructor after the fact either, but for me it felt like he had directives to teach us new coaches that we should not use broken down drills in our coaching. At the same time, the instructor admitted that there were parts of volleyball that he himself didn't quite know how to teach without broken-down drills.

Regardless, this whole thing made me confused. I felt that to coach "correctly" according to the course, I should not use broken-down drills, because apparently, they don't work. At the same time, I had at that point a 17-year-long background in skateboarding and snowboarding where I reached a semi-professional level, and one of my main strategies to learn some of my best tricks had been to use broken-down drills. So according to my own experience, the broken-down drills definitely worked.

This whole ambiguity made me want to understand things better, so I eventually started reading more about all this science that was the basis for these claims. However, before we jump into that, I will stay on the topic of "what has happened in the last decade or so", and explain one more thing:

What I have noticed since I did this coaching course, is that other coaches have also attended coaching courses that have taught the same thing: "Don't use broken-down drills, the skills do not transfer to the actual game so therefore they don't work."

This belief has today spread so widely that anyone who even dares to question this "scientific fact" quickly gets dismissed and laughed at by hoards of coaches who according to themselves "are in the know", "follow the science" or "have evolved beyond how they themselves were coached as players."

Now please just mentally entertain this hypothetical case: If there actually were some mistakes somewhere in the scientific process that has ended up in the conclusion that "broken down drills do not transfer to the actual game and therefore do not work", and that in reality these types of drills DO work and even better than alternatives, what would this mean?

This would mean a reality where suboptimal coaching methods are systematically and widely taught within the volleyball coaching world, to the point that today a big part of the coaching community feels "educated" and "not ignorant" for knowing these scientific insights, and these people then form a perceived "educated elite" who laugh at the so-called "uneducated coaches" who believe something else, regardless of what their reasoning is. This "educated elite" also scares beginner coaches away from thinking critically – meaning a big part of these new coaches will join this "educated elite" that will then even further strengthen this type of social pressure for others to have the same opinion as they do.

If all of this is true, that this loud "educated elite" actually is promoting something that is sub-optimal, this is actually a very bad thing for the athletes. It almost guarantees that the athletes won't get the best possible training, the only way they could get it is by having a coach who goes against the narrative of the majority, and those are few and far between.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I believe this IS true, and I'll explain more why in a second, but first:

This effect that I have just explained is why this blogpost is called "The dark ages of volleyball coaching." This effect has been going on for a while, we are in the middle of it, and it will likely continue being this way for some more time (years or decades I'm not sure.) We have coaches unconsciously making each other use suboptimal methods, which means players systematically get a lower quality of coaching than what is possible, meaning worse athletes, meaning the level of the sport being lower than possible, meaning less entertaining for fans, meaning less money for the sport, meaning ultimately that the sport is smaller than it could be.

What I figured out from actually reading the science

So I wrote earlier that the ambiguity that followed taking my first coaching course made me want to investigate things further. One of the things I did first, was to go to the library and get a thick university textbook on motor learning and read it cover to cover – to understand the experiments and studies that were the basis of the claim that "broken down drills do not transfer to the actual game and therefore don't work."

And here is where we open up a real can of worms, there are so many directions I could take things from here, but I am trying to write a blog post and not a book. I'll cover a somewhat short version to hopefully illustrate my point, but comments will be open for this blog post and I might write follow-ups or record a podcast episode as a follow-up or something like this in the future if there is interest for that.

Anyway, I believe most people will agree with me that "learning to play volleyball" is a long-term battle. It is something that is done over years. Very seldom (probably never) does anybody go from complete beginner to elite level player in the matter of days, weeks or months.

This could lead to the mental conclusion that when we are trying to figure out what "works" in terms of volleyball coaching, we should look at a longer perspective. If we only look at short-term perspectives we might end up looking at the wrong thing.

What I learned from reading the textbook was that most of the studies that backed up this claim against broken-down drills used relatively short study periods – similar to "practice skill on day 1 and 3, and then see how much of the skill has been retained on day 5 and 10." In fact, I have never seen a motor learning study that followed the athletes for a relatively longer time, like a few months. (If you happen to know of one I'd love to read it, please comment below or email me at alex@learnbeachvolleyballfast.com)

So in short, short-term studies have been done that show that transfer is not happening so much, and this is then applied to the whole space of learning volleyball (which is a long-term battle.)

I do agree that the transfer of skills from broken-down drills to the full game can be tricky, both in the long and short term, especially if neither the coach nor the player understands the mental process of how it is done. This is another weakness of the studies, I have never seen a study where some of the experiment participants were guided on how to transfer the skills from the drill to the game. How that is done is another way I could go with this blog post, but won't for now. Those who are curious will find it sooner or later if they have a look at my "Learn Beach Volleyball Fast"-project.

Ok so let's leave the weaknesses of the studies there, with 2 main ones: The wrong length of follow-up, and no guidance on how what should be done (transfer of the skill from one setting to another.)

Let me give you an example that will help you picture how grave these mistakes are. Let's say we agree that a broken car can be fixed by a skilled mechanic. The mechanic can open up the parts that are broken, realize what is wrong, change some parts and reassemble the car. Having a broken car that after some skilled mechanic work starts working again is fully possible.

Now, let's say we had a group of humans who have never seen a car or done mechanic work before coming into the picture, and we let them run scientific studies on whether or not it is possible to fix a broken car.

We know, that if these humans would receive guidance on how it is done, and enough time to go through all the parts of the sequence (disassembly of car, troubleshooting, changing of broken parts, and reassembly), they would land in the same conclusion as we have – a broken car can be fixed.

For us, it actually wouldn't matter how many hundreds of studies these humans would run where they concluded that a broken car cannot be fixed if we when reading how they did the studies realized that they have done some grave mistakes in their study methods. These mistakes could be for example that they either didn't go through the whole necessary sequence (let's say they only disassembled the car and did the troubleshooting, but didn't bother to change any parts or reassemble which for sure will leave them with a car that is not fixed), or that they didn't receive the right guidance on how to fix a car (let's say they let a completely unskilled person do the reassembly part so that the cars were always assembled wrong into something that wasn't driveable.)

We would still for sure know that a broken car can be fixed, even if at this point there would be "no scientific proof for that being the case", and these humans could point to hundreds of scientific studies where the broken car didn't get fixed.

We would end up in sort of a laughable situation, where we just simply know that a broken car can be fixed, no matter how much these humans would cite from their studies, get angry at us, bully us, or call us names. We would just know that they designed their studies wrong.

Now, according to me, this is basically what has happened in the volleyball coaching world. A bunch of studies were run for too short of a time (so that the whole sequence of things that happen when you practice over time didn't have time to happen) and with no guidance on how to make the transfer happen, which leads to study participants not knowing how to transfer the skills – which unsurprisingly leads to skills not transferring.

Conspiracy theorist?

I have over the years when trying to convey these thoughts in various ways on volleyball coaching forums been called a bunch of different things. Conspiracy theorist, science denier, quack, and flat earther are some that come to mind. I guess people have a hard time with people who question widely accepted narratives, no matter what their arguments are.

However, this last point I'd like to highlight in this blog post comes from a conversation with an academic friend I have. I explained roughly the points of this blog post to him, and concluded with something like "If that makes me a conspiracy theorist, then I guess I am one."

My academic friend quickly corrected me and told me "That is not a conspiracy, that is a system error. They happen all the time."

Systems can make systematic mistakes without there being any "evil plan" behind them. Big masses of people can make mistakes (we are social animals that have a much easier time behaving in a way that is accepted by our peers compared to thinking for ourselves about what is the right way to behave) without there being an "evil plan" behind it. It just is how systems and groups of people work.

According to my friend (and I agree), a conspiracy is planned by someone. A "system error" is just an unfortunate effect that ends up happening when many interacting parts interact with each other in ways that happen to be unhelpful.

An easy-to-grasp example would be 4 friends deciding to go to a restaurant that nobody really likes, while none of them dares to say they'd actually enjoy going to the restaurant on the other side of the street much more instead - for fear of breaking the "vibe of agreement" that the group has. In this example, all 4 end up going to a worse restaurant than they actually could go to, simply because of a "system error." There was no person with evil intentions that planned this effect to happen, it just happened.

To conclude, I believe we are in the "dark ages of volleyball coaching", not because someone planned it, but because of a "system error."

It would be awesome if this blog post could be a stepping stone in the work needing to be done to get us out of this "system error" and these "dark ages", I believe we would all benefit from that.

If you found this blog post thought-provoking, or good in some other way, please consider sharing it with someone you know who finds this topic interesting.

And again, if there is interest, I might create more content around this idea at a later point (there are many different directions one can dive deeper into.) If you'd enjoy that, let me know in the comments below or email me at alex@learnbeachvolleyballfast.com. Future courses that I will create will explain my methods for making skills transfer (how to make them transfer first of all, and then how to make them transfer easily and effectively), I also offer coaching/consultation, both online and offline.

Note that I have not cited any studies or gone into any actual scientific details in this blog post, to save space and time. My whole intention with the post is to make you more of a critical thinker rather than taking people's words for "truth." This also means that even if I believe what I have written here is true, I do not wish that you simply just start believing what I say. What I wish is that you curiously and open-mindedly investigate the matter further until you form your own opinion of it, rather than just accepting someone else's opinion as yours. If you on this journey would end up finding arguments against mine that you believe I have not considered, I'd love to hear them, because I aspire to be a curious and open-minded investigator as well.

Now to wrap things up, here again, is the post I made the other day in the coaching forum which ended up inspiring me to write this blog post. Read it again with these ideas in mind, it might make more sense this time around:

Thanks for reading! // Alex