Lessons from Volleyball Coach John Speraw
Practice planning, journaling, and the players' perspectives on feedback
Note: After tweeting about John Speraw and UCLA winning the 2023 NCAA Men’s Volleyball National Championship, I was asked about Speraw’s practices I attended. I replied that I would publish old articles from the newsletter.
I attended John Speraw and the U.C. Irvine’s men’s volleyball team’s first practice of the season [Update: They won the national championship this season] and liked several things:
1. Speraw explained the practice to the players before they started. He used a dry erase board to outline the practice, including some basic strategy they covered in practice. He answered some questions, which helped to maintain a brisk pace during practice. He also wrote the teams for the scrimmages and the starting positions for different players (setters) for the hitting drills.
2. He used visualization before practice. All the players left the gym after setting up the nets, and he used a brief visualization exercise to focus the players for practice. Players entered the gym when they were ready and immediately started their self-led warmup routines.
3. He used a journal. Players took a few minutes to write in their journals before and after practice. They wrote about their intentions or goals for practice beforehand, and evaluated their effort and planned for the next practice after practice.
Speraw is very interested in the mental side of coaching as you can see. These activities probably took 15 minutes of a roughly two-hour practice. There is no tangible measurement of their success. Some players did not take the activities as seriously as others.
Speraw is one of the few coaches who I have seen who believes in the importance of mental practice and actually coaches in a way that develops mental skills. None of these activities is unique; many coaches use visualization, prepare players for practice, and have players write in journals. I have done all three. However, he is the first coach I have seen place such importance on the activities and utilize multiple avenues for developing mental skills. It is clearly a priority for him, and the results speak for themselves, as few coaches get the opportunity to wear a championship ring and a medal around their neck.
Coaching for the Player's Perspective
I visited with U.C. Irvine’s Women’s Soccer Head Coach Scott Juniper, and we discussed society’s impressions of coaches. A comment on a prep sports message board criticized a coach because he did not yell enough; he was not a good coach due to the lack of yelling. I don’t know where or why society created the perception that the best coaches yell a lot, but I cannot see how it is accurate or positive. That night, at another U.C. Irvine men’s volleyball practice, Speraw started by asking players what they like to hear when they make a mistake, and I took notes because of the message board comments.
The NCAA Division 1 men’s volleyball players answered that they liked “encouragement” or “positive comments.” One player said he liked when someone said something that “made him mad,” which he later changed to mean that he wanted someone to fire him up. Another player suggested something funny.
When I coached volleyball last season, our girls started to say, “Shake and Bake,” after a player made a mistake (just after Talladega Nights was in the theaters).
The players also commented that they did not like generic comments like “Let’s go!” or “Come on!” which are frequent phrases from coaches and players (count the number of times a coach says “Let’s go!” or some derivative at your next high-school game if the coach is a vocal coach).
The Positive Coaching Alliance talks about coaches using specific comments and only praise that is truthful. That aligns with the comments I heard.
The players also said they disliked when someone “stated the obvious.” I hear this all the time. A player commits a turnover, and the coach yells, “Don’t make that pass.” Really? You didn’t want me to throw the ball out of bounds? I must have confused the objectives of the game.
The worst, however, is when a coach tries to embarrass the players to save his own ego. I watched a coach yell things like, “Don’t make that pass! We worked on that yesterday at practice,” throughout the game, loud enough for the people on the other side of the court to hear, just to make sure everyone knew he was doing his job as a coach, and it was the players’ fault when they made a mistake.
No player wants to hear this. This is not coaching. The comment did not help the player perform better the next time she faced the same situation. The coach did not explain the mistake (“take a dribble to get a better angle”) or attempt to build the player’s confidence by noticing something positive (“way to see the open player”). Instead, the player feels even worse about the mistake and loses confidence as she is afraid to make another mistake and be embarrassed again. When a player is scared to make a play because she does not want to make a mistake, she inevitably makes a mistake, as it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I liked Speraw’s approach because he wanted to learn about is players so he could coach better, and he wanted his players to learn about each other so they could help each other in the middle of the game.
Self-Monitoring
Originally published in Volume 4.7 (2010) and Hard2Guard Player Development Newsletters, Volume 4.
I attended several U.C. Irvine men’s volleyball practices and met Head Coach John Speraw after moving to Irvine last year. I enjoyed Speraw’s practices because of his mental emphasis and preparation. His players keep a journal, and he devotes practice time to the journal. He values the activity; it is not something for show or a great idea at the beginning of the season that is forgotten in the time crunch of the regular season. Naturally some players failed to use this time and acted like 12-year-olds, but others, including their leading hitter, took the exercise seriously.
In an article titled “Self-Monitoring, Human Nature, and Sustained Learning,” on Professional Sports Psychology Symposium, Adam Naylor cited a study of swimmers and the effectiveness of a training journal on performance.
Athletes were found to have increased adherence to practice training regimes, furthermore intentions to analyze one’s quality of training were increased (a nice sign of personal accountability).
Personal accountability is one great lesson sports teach young athletes, which is also a characteristic of successful players. A journal enhances personal accountability because players think about their effort and performance. The journal creates more awareness and mindful learning.
In college, I took an education class dealing with literacy. I was coaching, so I could not make the after-school literacy program that was a part of the class, so I talked the teacher into allowing me to do the class with my team. The class centered on taking and using ethnographic field-notes. As I coached, I wrote notes of how my instruction worked. The following semester I re-took the class and went to the after-school literacy program. In each case, taking the field-notes forced mindful learning. I was more aware of whether an instruction worked with a player or whether a drill had its desired effect. Rather than reviewing a practice at its conclusion or looking back at the end of the season, I monitored my coaching on a minute by minute basis.
While a journal does not have to be so involved, it can have a similar effect for players who take the activity seriously. If a player concludes practice and does not think about the lessons until the next day at practice, he is less likely to transfer the learning than a player who thinks about the lessons and writes about his perceptions and feelings at the conclusion of practice or prior to the next practice. This mental activity increases the benefit of the physical practice.
However, according to Young’s study, the journal’s benefits appear to taper after 17 days. Naylor speculated that at this point, concentration wanes and mindful learning becomes mindless. Rather than concentrating and taking the journal seriously, the journal becomes a mindless task players hurry through to complete rather than using the activity for their benefit.
For the journals to maintain their effectiveness, players need to maintain their concentration and see personal value in the journals. I developed the 180 Shooter program as a shooting log for players to track their progress and compile data in a form that is usable, as opposed to notes in a notebook that are hard to compile and sort. Unfortunately, most coaches and parents tell me that players are disinterested in engaging with their practice efforts off the court.
If a player spends an hour shooting, and he does not track his makes and misses during the shooting practice, how does he know he is improving? How does he discover his strengths and weaknesses? How many players overestimate the number of shots in a workout because they do not track their shots? If a player works out on his own and makes 50% of his shots, is he making progress?
If a player is unwilling to spend time tracking his practice efforts or if he is unable to maintain his concentration with a journal, how hard is he working toward his goal?
Naylor offers three suggestions to make the journal more meaningful:
Coach Involvement
Monitor with Purpose
Periodized-like Approach
Players who excel go beyond their peers. Typically, we see this effort in their physical practice. However, there is a limit to the effectiveness of more physical practice. At some point, one gets diminishing returns from just practicing more. A journal is one way to make practice more meaningful. Rather than spend more and more time engaged in physical practice, a better and more purposeful approach may lead to more meaningful practice, which means accomplishing more in less time on the court.
When players practice without a goal or self-monitoring, their practice may or may not lead to big improvements. However, if a player uses a journal to plan his practice and create a more meaningful practice, the same physical effort will lead to greater development.
If a player tracks his shots and knows that in Workout 1, he shot 50% from 15-feet, but in Workout 5, he shot 60% from 15-feet, he can see his progress. By tracking his shots, he can set goals and measure his progress and his effort. If a player says he will shoot 1000 shots per day during the summer, but he never counts these shots, how does he know? If he shoots 1000 shots at 30%, is his effort helping him improve?
Serious players track their practice. Coaches can assist their players in this process by providing some time during practice once per week or per month to write in their journal as a means to create more mindful learning and personal accountability.
Note: Parts of this article are included in a discussion of journaling for player development in 21st Century Guide to Individual Skill Development.
Naylor: http://prosportpsychsym.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/self-monitoring-human-nature-and-sustained-learning
Young et al. (2009). Effects of self-monitoring training logs on behaviors and beliefs of swimmers. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 21, 413-28.