Coaches should self-evaluate

In the aftermath of going the AVCA Convention and my drive home and the day after, I think it’s natural to do a lot of thinking.  That’s important and something coaches should do regularly–anyone involved in self-improvement OR some form of education, really–a critical self-evaluation of your own performance.  It’s uncomfortable for everyone to go through a performance-review, but ultimately, it’s rougher when you are doing it on yourself, not someone else.

If you have a year where you win a national or state title–you should still do this.  If you’re not working to get better, someone is gaining on you or perhaps you made mistakes along the way tactically in matches or in how you dealt with an assistant coach.

For me, I have no problem telling others when I’ve screwed up and realize it.  The problem for me is the self-evaluation.  I can’t doit in the immediate aftermath of a match or a season.  I need a couple weeks to compose my thoughts and think about what I got right and what I got wrong.

In terms of tactics, I screwed up by not adjusting our defense to a different system when our current one wasn’t working.  I allowed myself to be persuaded to stick with what we were doing, that it would get better (it didn’t–and I realized that in mid-September…ugh.)  That led to frustration on my part because I was failing to teach/get through to my players and in turn, I built enough frustration that it seeped through and my team knew I was frustrated on many occasions.

Coach-player stuff…that stays private.  I was good with individual meetings, but it sucked hearing about my frustration rubbing off on players–that in my frustration, I was missing teaching opportunities (…do you know how bad it killed me to admit they were right–and that I know those exact points where I missed those opportunities?  Ugh. Double-ugh.)

Recruiting–I thought that went well.  I mostly got it right–something I’m more sure of now with grades posted (multiple players on pace to be academic all-Americans and no ineligibilities), and we won 30+ match for the 11th time in my 14 years at LLCC.  This is a continual process in any event.  Since we have quite a few returning players (presuming those good grades hold true), we can be selective for the Class of 2020 if we choose.

Great, now you have the basics of my self-evaluation.  I’m really not happy about the defense/frustration, but that’s fixable, especially since I know now about it.  In the middle of all this introspection, I came across a quote that I’d heard before a couple of times but allowed to pass in/out of my brain.   The coach who said it was either John Kessel (USAV Grass Roots Director) or Mark Lebedew (Australian National Team Coach)–both write a lot on volleyball…it could be either, maybe even both.  In any event, the quote:

• “Make sure you coach the person, not the athlete.  Coach the person, not the performance.”

I want to be more consistent with that.  It’s an important distinction and I can look back and see I didn’t do that multiple times.  Would it have made a difference?  Who knows…maybe?

I worry about communication regularly–teaching is such a big part of things and if I’m self-evaluating, I can’t call it a perfect success–so it has to improve.  To that end, I need to implement stuff I learned this weekend from Nate Ngo on how to present statistics to athletes–some profoundly simple ideas…I felt stupid that I wasn’t already implementing his suggestions.  We are also going to emphasize the communication/feedback suggestions from Harjiv Singh…I was excited enough by some of his concepts that I called back to the ‘home office’ and talked with my athletic director about it–because those suggestions aren’t limited by sport and my A.D. is a coach with a track record of success, too–always wanting to get better.

A last thought on communication: I think I worry about this more now that five years ago or ten because I’m older.  It is stereotypical, but differences in age cause different frameworks of thought.  I still don’t rely on a cell phone–my athletes do.  I can’t make references to Mr. T. or Ferris Bueller let alone other old cultural touchstones like Monty Python.  I think if communication between player and coach is lost (or between coaches)–that’s going to cripple a program.