Coaching Conversations Archives - Coaching Volleyball John Forman

Spend any time in the arena of professional volleyball and you will come to realize pretty quickly that the majority of clubs operate year-to-year. There isn't a lot of longer-term thinking (I'd argue we see much the same at the juniors level in the US, but that's a separate topic). I have two guests join me for a discussion of this and how it might change moving forward.







One is Oskar Kaczmarczyk, who recently took on the role of something like General Manager for one of the clubs in the PlugLiga in Poland. I met Oskar during my 2019 European trip. At that time he was in his first year coaching at Näfels in the Swiss men's league. Twice he took part in the original series of Coaching Conversations. Once was about Analyzing the Setter. The other time it was for the Developing the Libero talk.







My other guest is Mark Lebedew, who's been a regular of both the original series and the podcast. Mark is heading into his first season at VfB Friedrichshafen in the German Bundesliga, where he previously led Berlin Recycling Volleys to 3 league titles and a 2015 CEV Champions League bronze medal. In between he coached for a couple of Polish clubs and lead the Australian Men's National team. You can follow Mark's writing on his blog.















In the conversation the term "Moneyball" comes up multiple times. This, of course, comes from Michael Lewis' famous book, [amazon text=Moneyball&asin=B000RH0C8G]. If you haven't read it already, you definitely should. After we recorded this podcast, Mark actually authored a post discussing what he sees as the most important takeaway from the Moneyball concept.







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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

The Medaille College Men's Volleyball team's season for 2021 is over. In this episode of the podcast I recap the campaign. You can also give a read to my Coaching Log for a more detailed examination.















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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

How does a player become not just good, but great? That's the starting point of this conversation with Mark Lebedew. We wander from that topic a bit, but it is the main focus. If you followed the original Coaching Conversations series, you know Mark was a regular feature in those discussions. He and I also did a podcast series for the Volleyball Coaching Wizards project. And, of course, you can follow Mark's writing on his blog.















In the conversation Mark and I talked about the idea of risk, which is something he's recently written about here. It ties in with the idea of decision-making that I outline in this post.







We also mention Mark's look at the Athletes Unlimited scoring system. There was a Weekly Buzz episode related to this as well.







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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

As part of the Sport Marketing & Promotion class I've been teaching at Medaille College this term I'm including some guest speakers. One of them is Will Foley from Volleyball League of America. He was previously joined by Tim Falknor on the last of the original Coaching Conversations series episodes to talk more generally about starting and running a fledgling pro volleyball league in the US. Will spoke with my class about the marketing efforts of the VLA, and took several interesting questions.















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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

This is the second part of my conversation with David Gil, who leads up performance analysis at VERT. We talk about match warm-ups and what he's seeing from the 2021 Spring season for the NCAA women's programs competing. The season variability has definitely created its share of challenges for programs, which David talks about.















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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.

David Gil has become a frequent conversational partner of mine going back to the Coaching Conversations original series. I had him talk with members of the Medaille women's team about preparing for preseason. He was on with a strength coach from Florida State to talk about building athlete work capacity. And it started with him joining the head coach of James Madison to talk about using performance data in coaching.







The foundation of this conversation is the subject of warm-ups, whether pre-match or pre-practice. Because David had recently been looking at (and talking about) some concussion data, that ended up being a thread of our talk as well.















In the episode David refers to the work of Dr. Kerry MacDonald - Director of Sports Science & Sports Medicine for Volleyball Canada - with regards to the concussion topic. Although it's not on that subject, here's a conversation David and Kerry had on training periodization challenges.







And there's that old blog post that stimulated the "controversy" that motivated David to email me: Are your warm-ups wasting valuable time?







David also joked about some conversations we've had before about using the mile run as a fitness test, which i something I've also blogged about in The mile run for volleyball players.







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You can find a complete list of the initial series of Coaching Conversations here.