Interesting vs. Important

ESPN recently talked to a bunch of fired coaches. One of them had a great quote related to what he failed at during his tenure. That was Ron Rivera of the Washington NFL team. He said “You have to stay focused. Don’t get caught up in what is interesting. You need to concentrate on what is important.” **To be fair to Rivera, he was coaching a team with a horrible owner (Snyder) being investigated for abuse and harassment, permitting abuse/harassment of women by others…and other issues. In a situation like that, Rivera’s going to be distracted, 100 times out of 100.**

I see this regularly with coaching volleyball–and this is written by someone just as guilty as the next coach. We get caught up with something we like and miss things that should be priorities in the moment. The easiest thing to explain it with would be stats–is it critical to my team to know that the optimal speed for a serve is 92k/h with the ball struck 0.75m into the court at a height of 2.92m? If you’re coaching a club or school-ball team, this is interesting, but the reality is much simpler–>hit the toughest serve you can while getting a majority of them in-bounds.

Can we have a discussion of interesting vs. important on small ideas/details or do we have to work with generalizations?

So, to me what is important with VB?

• We need to score more points than our opponent.

  • We can score with aces, kills, blocks, and opponent errors

• We need to make fewer self-inflicted errors than our opponent.

• It is better to keep 100% of balls in play in mediocre fashion than 50% perfectly.

Is there anything else that is essential/important? It means then that anything which increases our points/% of balls still in play is critical. If not, doesn’t that fall into the ‘interesting’ category?

So…does it REALLY matter if a player uses traditional or swing-blocking footwork? What is the REAL advantage provided by one form over the other? Is there one?

Is calling zones important? –or is that actually just something coaches do?

And this isn’t chucking stones at glass houses–I’ve gone down plenty of side roads because they are interesting…but is it important to know the sideout % of jump float vs jump topspin serves? Is passing that knowledge on to younger players a good use of time?

I guess this is another one where I don’t have answers–but that it all gives me stuff to think about, ways to evaluate how and what I coach and why. Hopefully it is the same for you! So when thinking about your teaching and information–just consider, is this interesting or important?