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Scheduling and Coaching at the All Nations 2016
Introduction
I always like the All Nations Volleyball Tournament. It’s always a fun atmosphere and it’s great to reconnect with players that I may have not seen in a while. In addition to the usual coaching duties, I was charged again with scheduling the tournament this (see last year for my experience).
Scheduling
I used last year’s excel spreadsheet as a template for this year. I designed it so when I assigned the teams in the pools, the list of matches are generated (screenshot 1). From those list of matches, I would drag them into match slots in the tournament schedule (screenshot 2). I also created the teams’ individual schedules so I can see how tough their schedule is and where they can referee (screenshot 3). One difference from last year’s excel spreadsheet was I added a “Test” row. This was because when I dragged matches into the tournament schedule, there was a “#REF” error in the individual team schedules. Since the “Test” row was untouched, I could just use that formula to fill the rest of the individual teams’ schedule. I also created a macros that dropped fill the formulas for all the pools so I didn’t have to constantly do it.
One other change I did was to the player/ coach clashes, i.e. so if a player is coaching another team, they are not playing and coaching at the same time. I modified the player-coach schedule from last year by adding a formula for clashes (screenshot 4). If there was a clash, it would show up as 1 and if there wasn’t a clash, it was show 0. I added conditional formatting so the 1 shows up clearly. I was then able to calculate the total number of clashes. Some of the strategies to reduce clashes was to move those teams into smaller pools so they had less matches and thus less likely to clash. Also, rather than moving matches up or down in the tournament schedule, I would change it from the base. For example, in screenshot 1, its Macau vs Poland (W1) and UK 2 vs Italy 1 (W2). I could swap Poland and Italy 1 around to see if I could reduce the number of clashes. In the end, I could only get it down to 26 clashes compared to 9 last year.
Coaching
I coached Germany women at this year’s All Nations. I wanted a new challenge having coached Asia women for the past four years. I really didn’t know what to expect from the team or how far we could go. I had 13 players on the team and enough players in each position, which was good (one year I had to coached a team with no setter!) The only position I didn’t have was a libero player. I hadn’t seen 10 of the players play until the very first match of the tournament so it was a bit of an evolution to find the best system and starting seven including finding the best libero. We had a 5-2 record in the first weekend, only losing to the top two teams. We actually had the same record as two other teams but finished fourth due to a lower set ratio.
In the second weekend, we were in the Division 1/2 pool stages. We finished second in our pool of four teams with a 2-1 record. This meant we reached the Division 1 Finals. We faced Italy 1 in the Quarter Finals but we couldn’t get past the team that would go on to win the whole thing. So by losing in the Division 1 Quarter Finals, we finished joint 5th overall. This is the highest position I ever had in the tournament so I was super happy with that.
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