After 7 weeks coaching a youth league volleyball team, I remain unsure who was more novice – the rising freshman girls playing or me coaching. By the end of the season, I’d wager they knew the fundamentals about as well as I do…but they had 10.5 hours of practice across the season compared to my dozens of hours playing the game. (Notably, not hundreds or thousands of hours; I’m not much of a volleyball player!)

I’m a deep study of elite coaches. I listen to their interviews, read their articles, and intensively study their books. Well before I expected to coach this league, I had read the late Mike Hebert’s “Thinking Volleyball” twice. It is frequently called “a must read for coaches at every level.” I have to disagree. There’s no room for Thinking Volleyball with a coach ignorant to the sport. I learned that intimately during this league.

Beginners Don’t Need Strategy

There is no value in positions on the court for a beginner. There is no value in having specific defensive plays. There is value in teaching, drilling, rehearsing, and reinforcing the fundamentals. There is value in simplistic, concrete, and immediately measurable goals.

With the exception of middle school hurdlers and Masters hurdlers, I don’t coach beginners. It’s not because I’m special, it’s because beginners need different guidance than I am expert at providing. But I also don’t coach elites. You see, next level is truly “next level”. My level as a coach is serving the athlete who has achieved on the field despite their lack of speed development and strength training. My level as an athlete is state-wide or Masters nation-wide competition.

I help athletes master critical positions for accelerating, for changing direction without losing momentum, and for landing safely. I help them choose the minimum exercises and optimal load that makes them stronger, more powerful, and harder to break without teaching them dozens of options in the weight room. I help them communicate with their coaches and captains to clearly define their role on the field, so they can deliver extraordinary performance on demand within that role.

Beginners Need Fundamentals

But watching Olympic competition in sports I don’t know well, like field hockey and judo, was just as illuminating to me as watching these girls learn volleyball under my questionable guidance – a low-level player cannot SEE what a high-level player sees. Further, a low-level player cannot execute, at any level of effort, any of what a high-level player can do effortlessly.

My beginner and low-intermediate volleyball players needed to learn ball sense, creating a stable platform for contact, and what to communicate with teammates. Olympic volleyball players work on (and make use of) targeted aggression, positioning and angles on the court, and strategic distraction. I sat with my oldest daughter, a novice volleyball player, to watch many hours of Olympic volleyball. I have the advantage of experience in many sports and a philosophy of coaching, thus I know how to see a sport. Coach Hebert’s book gave me the language and basic mental model for reading the court. But my daughter has the advantage of many, many recent reps being on the court during league.

We saw nearly every point completely differently. But for all that I know and for all that I could communicate and for all that I could teach about tactics and strategy in volleyball (hopelessly parroted from Thinking Volleyball, mind you), she has far higher odds of executing any skill I suggest than I have. And yet…she didn’t see movement on the court like I did. Contrary to the classic advice in hockey to “take your eye off the puck,” she was watching the puck.

In most events in track & field, I’m somewhere in the middle – I know how it feels to perform at a high-intermediate level and I know how to coach at an advanced or sub-elite level. That’s why I can serve athletes in the middle. I both know what they see and I know what I see and I know how they differ. The major point here is that race modeling and competitive strategy mean something at the middle level. You have to learn to run rounds, how to warm up the second and third time in a day, and how to manage nutrition to maximize energy availability for your main events.

A beginner doesn’t need any of that; they need to understand starting commands, what a lane violation is in the 200, and how it feels to block with the free arm in a throw. Then an elite athlete doesn’t need any of that either; they need to manage psychological arousal when competitors are trying to get in their heads. An elite athlete has to be able to put away the pressure to fund their trip to the meet while lining up for a purse race like the 100 meter final.

Fundamentals Lead To Strategy – and New Strategies

When your goal is to level up in your sport, you’re trying to expand your vision in the game. Your technique in the fundamentals needs to become rote and automatic. You need to create mental capacity for analyzing defenders’ movement and compensating for teammates’ fatigue. You need such trust in your positions and your touch that you can dare to take risks. You need such a reliable routine with your equipment that you can adapt to changing conditions without extra thought.

First, you get there by working your basics again and again and again. The goal has never been technical perfection; the goal is 95% consistency. When your input produces the same output 19 times out of 20, introduce variation. Play with your balance, play with your movement before executing, play with the direction of your attention. Being comfortable with technique variation sets you up to execute tactical moves because you know how to change your technique to make different things happen on the field.

Consistent tactical execution enables new strategies. When you know how to deliver great acceleration from the blocks whether on the straight or the curve, whether in dry conditions or in the rain, you can decide which part of the race to press hardest to affect your competitors. You can decide whether to make your first throw an all-out effort or to take conservative marks into finals before letting it rip. You can communicate with your teammates whether to defend man or zone off the mid-field sideline because you know your own strengths.

Playing strategically completely changes your performance. You’re no longer “all gas, no brakes” in every competition. Instead, you ration effort and intensity according to the situation. A low-level athlete rarely has rounds to run and when they do, it’s all-out every time just to have a chance. A mid-level athlete has adequate technique and power to start hard then cruise home in prelims, hoping to save energy for finals, but may not have good enough recovery habits to deliver in finals anyway. An elite athlete may choose to send a message in semi-finals by walking away from the field, then only need a few mind games to take victory.

Elite Performance Doesn’t Look Like Intermediate Performance

This is why elite 1-on-1 sports like boxing or fencing are such cat-and-mouse games. Everyone has the physical ability to go flat out, so dominating physically isn’t an efficient way to win a championship.

At the elite level of any sport, the same is true: mental game and strategy become more important than physical capacity. It’s not like you can get to the elite level then survive slow and weak. Even though P/1/2 criteriums sometimes have a lower average speed than some Cat 3 races, the 500 meter leadout before the sprint in a pro race is faster than most Cat 3 athletes can sprint for 50 meters.

When strategy has more to do with wins & losses than executing technique, you’ve leveled up. What’s ironic about all of this is once you’re that good, the most important thing you can do is continue to refine your technique! For many elite athletes, doing something new or uniquely intense with sport technique is often limited by a foundational quality – absolute strength, flexibility, power capacity, maximum speed, stability, etc. So elite athletes go back to the gym for exercise variations that find, exploit, and fix those limiters. Then, as absolute qualities improve, they work basic technique again. Elite athletes are chasing 1% of 1% gains, but every tiny advantage is worth that effort.

As soon as the new technique is stable, new tactics are available for use, which changes strategy and the cycle repeats.

My Daughter and I Both Leveled Up

That brings us back to where we started: after 7 weeks coaching a youth league volleyball team, I’ve dramatically improved my own fundamentals in the game. I pass better, I set better, and I read the ball better. I could probably go back to the beach and grass leagues I used to play in and be an obviously, meaningfully better player because my technical skills are better aligned to my game sense. After many hours watching and talking volleyball together, my teenage daughter can see court movement better, can appreciate the types of effort needed to dig aggressive attacks, and can comprehend the energy demand of playing 6 sets in a day. She will show up to school tryouts an obviously, meaningfully better player because her game sense is better aligned to her technical skills.

But neither of us needs a defined position on the court. Neither of us benefits from play calls. For all that we’ve improved, we can’t see the game the way a high-level player can. Thinking Volleyball isn’t a must read for either of us…yet. But I’m excited we’re building up our foundational qualities and practicing sound fundamentals so we level up again anyway. Novice or elite, drill, rehearse, and reinforce your fundamentals. It says a lot that “the elite are just better at the basics than everyone else.”