The Golden Equilateral Triangle

I had to write this one down quickly after a conversation with my daughter.

From business/production, I know there’s the triangle of speed of production/quality/reasonable price. The axiom is that you can always have two of those but won’t ever get all three.

So we were talking today about how volleyball is going–how camps are, are the girls learning/working, etc. I mentioned one of the younger players somewhere within the program–and that she wasn’t the most athletic, but she was generally tall and was an absolute sponge when it came to working to improve her VB IQ.

That’s when my daughter said “Size, speed, IQ…it’s high school ball. If you get two of the three, you’ve got it made.” She went on to note, if you’ve got all three, you’ve got a D1/Power Five athlete.

I’ll take credit for her observation–I mean, I’m her dad…and it’s my blog after all.

It got me thinking–isn’t that a great way to evaluate the possibilities within a program? Obviously you can’t do much about size–though you could sub in strength, I reckon. But–you CAN create a triangle that works–maybe athleticism / skill / IQ. A coach can work on each of those three aspects.

If you created a scale 1-5 for each of those, you could then have altered triangle shapes…perhaps moshing them all together to find where your program currently stands, what could be worked on–and maybe help craft competitive expectations as well. It’s something that could be used regardless of sport…so now I have something MORE to distract me from daily life!

***Not relevant directly to the thought above–but I love sharing a passion for volleyball with my daughter.