What drives the decision to start in a certain rotation? That is the question addressed by Mark in this clip excerpted from his interview. Ideas such as matching up on the basis of serve reception and other factors, and starting with the strongest rotation are discussed. The post Determining the starting rotation appeared first on Volleyball Coaching Wizards ..read more

What does your preseason training structure look like? That is addressed by Mark in this clip excerpted from his interview. He addresses some of the challenges that coaches in the professional game have to deal with in terms of player availability. He lays out the primary objectives of preseason development and provides a basic framework of how he looks to plan things. One of the potential surprises for many volleyball coaches is that Mark doesn’t do any of what he calls traditional conditioning. The post Structuring preseason appeared first on Volleyball Coaching Wizards ..read more

Both Volleyball Coaching Wizards and the Wizard Wisdom books appear on a list of The 16 Best Volleyball Books for Coaches and Players by the Volleyball Expert website. There’s a bit off a goof on that they flipped the descriptions of the two book on the page. We don’t mind, though. After all, they said this about Wizard Wisdom: “…this book should be treasured by volleyball coaches of all levels and categories.” We totally agree, of course. :-) Oh, and the list includes some other pretty good titles. One of them is by Wizard Joel Dearing. Yup. Top coaches can be authors. The post A review two-f ..read more

In this excerpt from his Volleyball Coaching WIzards interview, Vital Heynen talks how sometimes the things you try in your coaching can have unanticipated effects. Vital led the German National Team to a bronze medal at the 2014 World Championships, then Poland to gold in 2018. He won numerous league and cup titles coaching in his native Belgium, and has also coached professionally in Germany, Poland and Turkey. The post Things not working quite as expected appeared first on Volleyball Coaching Wizards ..read more

Last week we posted about looking to expand our base of interviewers to help us move this Wizards project forward. We’re still looking to hear from people who are interested in taking that on. In the meanwhile, though, we’ve had a noteworthy hand raised in response. Wizard Mick Haley has expressed interest and we’ve talked about what that could look like. It’s starting to take shape. Pioneer Wizards An idea dating back to the early days of the Wizards concept was to help share with people some of the sport’s history. It’s something we’ve certainly accomplished to a degree with the interviews w ..read more

This is the third of the three big updates we have on the Volleyball Coaching Wizards project. The first was about our new approach to making the interviews available. The second shared our plans to expand the interviewer pool. In this one we’ve got news about a new sub-project that’s currently underway. Of women, by women, for women For a while now we’ve wanted to create a new series of Wizards interviews focused on women. They would be interviews of women coaches (not to be confused with coaches of women) conducted by a fellow female coach, being sure to address elements of the profession es ..read more

In the last update we talked about our new approach to making Wizards interviews available to coaches around the world. In this update the focus is on how we actually produce new interviews. Expanding our interviewers A major limitation to the project up to this point is John’s and Mark’s availability to conduct interviews. Scheduling, recording, and producing them are quite time intensive efforts. I can be 6-8 hours of work for each of them when you put it all together. With the increased demands on our time seen in recent years, it’s hard to be able to get them done, especially when factorin ..read more

There are some developments we need to share with you with regards to the Volleyball Coaching Wizards project. Enough that we need to use a couple of posts to do so. In this first one we’ll focus on the first part of the new approach we’re taking to things. Using Patreon We decided to shift our model for distributing Wizards interviews to one mainly focused on Patreon. If you’re not familiar with it, Patreon is a platform which allows people (patrons) to support content developers through small pledges. The platform features a donation-per-creation structure which fits very well with our proje ..read more

In this excerpt from his Volleyball Coaching WIzards interview, Vital Heynen talks about the approach he takes to putting together the best possible coaching staff. His comments are likely to prove useful not just to head coaches, but also to assistant coaches in how they approach working in their position. Vital led the German National Team to a bronze medal at the 2014 World Championships, then Poland to gold in 2018. He won numerous league and cup titles coaching in his native Belgium, and has also coached professionally in Germany, Poland and Turkey. Note: John & Mark expand on Vitals ..read more

Keeping players who are not in the starting team happy, or at least not causing problems in the team dynamic, is a key factor in coaching success. In this excerpt from his Volleyball Coaching Wizards interview, Paulo Cunha talks about how he manages the psychology of non-starters and how he deals with professional players who find themselves watching things from the bench. From 1987 to 2007 Paulo was a coaching education lecturer and course director for the Portuguese Volleyball Association and Portuguese Volleyball Federation. He coached his nation’s Junior National Team from 1986-1992. His c ..read more