{"id":14038,"date":"2016-03-01T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T16:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coachingvb.com\/?p=14038"},"modified":"2016-03-01T08:00:07","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T16:00:07","slug":"being-a-sponge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/01\/being-a-sponge\/","title":{"rendered":"Being a sponge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back in 2016, while I was waiting for my hiring to become official at Midwestern State<\/a> I had an email exchange with a coaching contact in Germany. In it I made the comment that I was ready for my vacation to end. He laughed that he couldn’t imagine anyone in their right mind would want a holiday in Southern California to come to an end (it was basically middle 70sF\/20sC and sunny every day, some days warmer). He was probably right, but I was ready to get on to whatever came next. It had been a month of relative inactivity, which was long enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, I wasn’t exactly doing nothing. I was active in the job market<\/a>. I’d also conducted several interviews for Volleyball Coaching Wizards<\/a>. In fact, just the night before I interviewed Terry Pettit, legendary Nebraska coach. The Wizards work kept me in developmental mode. Oh, and I got out to watch a men’s college match<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve written before about the value of watching other coaches in action<\/a> in terms of helping to affirm what you’re doing. Obviously, that’s great for learning new stuff and gaining a different perspective on things. It’s highly recommended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me – and I suspect my Wizards project partner Mark Lebedew<\/a> would agree – conducting those interviews served a similar role. Some of them got me thinking about things in a different way. Some of them gave me ideas for ways of dealing with different situations. Others helped to affirm my coaching philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A common recommendation from the Wizards to developing coaches is to be a sponge. During my time away from coaching that’s exactly what I was doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not in an active coaching position at the moment. What I am doing through work on Volleyball Coaching Wizards, though, is continuing my education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[98],"class_list":["post-14038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-n-r","category-volleyball-coach-development","tag-coaching-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}