My last day at the 2013 American Volleyball Coaches Association convention (see Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3) was all seminars. I went to four of them.
The first session was the only on-court one I attended. It featured USA national team setter Courtney Thompson. She gave a player’s point of view on setter training and development. She shared a couple interesting nuggets about coach feedback and setter-hitter communication.
Next up was a seminar on the Competitive Cauldron concept. That became quite popular in recent years. Basically, it’s a statistics driven approach to evaluate and rank players. The view was basically that while it has value, there are significant limitations. Do not use it in isolation.
Third was a session by coaching legend Mike Hebert. His book [amazon asin=1450442625&text=Thinking Volleyball] was just released. I picked up a copy. I read his prior books [amazon asin=0880115327&text=Insights and Strategies for Winning Volleyball] and [amazon asin=0915611775&text=The Fire Still Burns]. Here is my review. The talk came basically right out of the book. It was quite good.
The final seminar was a panel discussion. It was titled “When Winning is Your Job – Designing Systems and Training What’s Important”. It lacked much about system design. There was, though, quite a bit on priority-setting and other aspects of managing a team and program.
The NCAA Division I championship match capped the day. I had a ticket to attend. I opted to watch it on television, though. Not once did I get more than 4-5 hours combined sleep a day the whole trip. I was out of gas!
Final thoughts? The content was good. I just wish there was more of a social element. But that was a personal thing, and not the event itself.
