Are You Practicing Coaching?

Provided by: AVCA

As assistants, we are often tasked with juggling a little bit of everything when it comes to job responsibilities. These tasks take up a huge percentage of our time. If not careful, they can pull from our ability to develop our own coaching methods and philosophies, which understandably fall primarily on the head coach's shoulders. Big-picture decisions can include match-time decisions, training philosophies, administration management and recruiting strategies, to name a few. How can we better develop our own philosophies while also completing our assistant responsibilities that are vital in serving our programs?

The best coaches are those that continue to put themselves in scenarios that allow them to do just that: coach. Here are some suggestions to make sure that you're getting this experience and that you're "practicing coaching" while also crossing off items on your to-do list:

• Meet with your head coach to discuss the how and why of handling certain situations and also training methods. Voice your opinion in a respectful manner and allow critical discussion on topics that you don't drive the decision making in. More often than not, head coaches are happy to help shape your own thoughts. You may also spark an idea for them!

• Coach a local club team. This is a wonderful opportunity to test your own coaching style as well as manage a team for eight months. It forces you to design every practice, from the way you want to teach a skill to how those skills are implemented into a bigger system. Trust me, after getting through a couple of club seasons, your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to coaching the game will be very clear to you. This will help you sharpen where your professional development needs to be done in the off-season. This experience also forces you to develop your coaching philosophy and be able to communicate this philosophy to your parents, club director and players. You will be forced to create motivation for every player on your team — starters and role players alike.

• Watch high-level volleyball and find a way to get involved. Volunteer coach with USA High Performance. HP is always looking for coaches to volunteer their time to help out USA Volleyball. This can be with clinics, camps or tryouts for the various teams within the USA pipeline. Get to know what's going on at the highest level of play — and find things that you can implement into the way you teach skills. Watching a lot of USA Volleyball and international volleyball will also force you to think critically about the way you're teaching your skills and systems.

• Coach camps at your local high school or college. Having your own court for a day or multiple days of camp can sharpen your ability to teach a wide variety of talent levels. You may have the best court at camp or the court that can't pass freeballs. As a coach, it's always important to sharpen your ability to adjust quickly to what's going to work for a lot of different levels.

Remember, developing your own philosophies and practicing coaching is just as important as completing all the other responsibilities we assistants have on our plates. Be the best assistant you can be now, and make sure you're developing skills that will translate to being a better coach for your team.