What's up everybody? Welcome to the Coach Chijo podcast. Real conversations about volleyball, coaching, growth, and the journey behind it all. So let's get into it. Just go. Alright, I gotta sit down here in front of my teepee where I've been sleeping in the wilderness. Oh yeah, surrounded by wilderness. No guest today. And I want to tell you about my last 24 hours. Have you ever had 24 hours in your life where things have been turned upside down? You met somebody that caused you to change your pretty much your entire mindset about stuff, especially about volleyball, or had an experience where you're first wondering what the heck just happened in the last 24 hours, and what does that even mean for my life? So I had one of these paradigm shift, mindset shift. My brain is spinning around and around in all different spherical directions, I guess, because I met John Kessel. Some of you may know John Kessel, he's been doing volleyball for about 55 years playing volleyball, coaching volleyball, talking volleyball, promoting volleyball, I think in like a something like 102 countries. Oh, there's a bunny running across the field. Oh, and by the way, the other thing that's happened to me in the last 24 hours is I'm sleeping in this teepee behind me, and I'm trying to go to bed and there's something running around my bed. Uh so I took my phone and put it in flashlight mode, and there's a bunny, a cottontail, inside my teepee running around my bed. So I figure, well, if it got in, it could get out. So I kind of let it be, tried to go to sleep. I still heard it running around back and forth, back and forth. Well, I got up in the morning. Bunny was still in there. I spent the night with a cottontail bunny. But, anyways, yeah, just really, really different 24 hours than I've had. Different than any other 24 hours that I can remember, at least right now. So I met John Kessel. Uh, I'm on his property actually, it's surrounded by wilderness, it's on like 300 acres. I can't even keep up with the different things he's done in volleyball. He's seen a lot, he's seen volleyball all over the world. So, with all these varied experiences, he has a lot of stories to tell. You can tell I'm having a little bit of difficulty telling getting to the point. You're probably like, get to the point. Why is my brain spinning? Why am I questioning most of everything that I've been doing in volleyball and teaching and coaching so far? And he says the number one problem in volleyball is that in practices, the players are practicing for practice. They're not practicing for performance for the game because we're running drills that are not game-like. Hitting lines for practicing hitting. So these players, these kids, are hitting from a ball that was first tossed in by a coach from one position on the court. And I can probably safely say that a lot of these coaches are tossing imperfect balls, trying not to put spin on them. I don't think so. Now that's my answer. As we were talking over the last 24 hours, I was challenged to figure all this out. And I thought, I gotta share this stuff. So, how are you training your athletes? Are you training them for the purpose of practice or are you training them for performance in a game? Like, for example, how do you make a hitter better? How do you train hitting? Biggest takeaway. And the reason why it kind of blew my mind in the last 24 hours, the way to train hitting is to have pass set hit. How do you train a passer? Pass that hit. How do you train a setter? Pass that hit. Or block even, and then dig. How many components can you put into the training so that whoever you're focusing on, if you're focusing on the hitting, there has to be something that happens before they act. And this is now even more important than the fact that you have to pass that hit to teach hitting. The most important skill in volleyball. Out of all the skills, the most important. Guess what it is? I'm gonna pause here. We'll sit here in front of my teepee at sunrise, and you think about it. What's the most important skill in volleyball? Have you had time to think about the answer to the question? What's the most important skill in volleyball? Here it is. Reading. It's reading. The hitter has to be able to read what is happening one or two touches, even, before the hitter has to touch it. To gain as many clues as possible to determine as to what kind of set am I gonna get? Or am I even going to get set based on the past and where it went? So you may not even get a set. And including the block. When you're hitting, you're not gonna have a clear pathway over the net. You have to read the blockers. What are they doing? How many are there? What's the angle of their hands? It's reading. What's the most important skill for a setter? Can the setter read the dig or the pass? Or better yet, can the setter read what the digger or passer looks like? What is the body posture? Standing up, diving to the floor, reaching low, reaching to the side? What does that look like? So that the setter can be in a more optimal position to get the ball that's gonna come from that passer or that digger with that ball in that one instance. So no, don't use machines. Don't use rebounders. When is there ever gonna be a rebounder sitting on the court in a match? When is there ever gonna be like a hitting machine or a serving machine or one of those spikets? Oh man, there's one sitting in our home gym. What is a spiket teaching a hitter? Is that even anywhere near game-like? When is a hitter in a game ever gonna have a ball presented to them that's completely stationary? Okay, in the air, not moving, not moving laterally, not moving from high to low, not spinning, just sitting there, static, and they hit that. When does that happen in a game? These are the things that were happening over to me over the last 24 hours. And then I said, Can I even effectively do private lessons? Whoa, okay, so this is where it really hit me hard. He basically told me private lessons are a waste of time. What happens when you're teaching an athlete how to serve? Well, there's a bucket of balls behind the inline, maybe near the wall. The athlete gets the ball, serves the ball, and then what is the very next thing that that person will do? Watch the serve. Go, oh, there it goes. Oh, it's over the net. Oh, it's in the court. Yes! When does a server ever, ever, in a match, serve a ball, stand there behind the inline, and just stand and watch the serve? Never. What do they do next in a game? They go into the court. So the discussion included: let's put the ball cart in the middle of the court on the side, same side as the server. So now, instead of just serving and then reaching for a ball next to the player, how convenient is that? And that's never gonna happen. The player serves. She serves, and where does she have to go to get the ball? Into the court. Maybe it's even in base. What a concept. That blew me away. That simple, simple change. Here's another one. Hitter hits the ball in a private training. There's no blockers. So if the hitter has to shag the ball, what's the most common thing that happens? Like this. Under the net. So then I wish I had a video of John Kessel doing this, but he goes, We're training a lot of players to get better at what? At better at this. They're getting better at that at doing what I just showed you. Is that anywhere near what volleyball is? No. When in volleyball do you do this motion? Ducking under something over and over and over. If you're in a hitting line, you can be doing that for 10 minutes. But if you even had six kids training to hit, they're all hitters. There's no setter, there's no blocker, it's just one coach training a handful of hitters. They're all gonna be hitting and then ducking, running back from the other side of the court around the pole, and then way off the court in a line. How is that game like? Holy, you know what? It just blew me away. Last 24 hours. Because remember, the best way to teach hitting is pass set hit. The best way to teach setting is pass set hit. If the best way to teach defense and digging, pass set hit dig or set dig hit. But it's gotta have more components. So I gotta have at least three or four players in a small group to teach hitting. So then I was thinking, okay, do I have to plan this out? I have to recruit a setter and make sure there's a setter in the mix and a DS in the mix and a hitter in the mix, and then another person to block so that we have all these different components. And the answer was no. Just put them in trios and make them do, make them all do everything. Just rotate through. Maybe one's focusing on the hitting, and it is a hitting training, so most of my instruction and focus is on the hitter, but somebody else is blocking so that the hitter can read the blocker. There's somebody else setting. Yes, this could be a non-setter, it could be another hitter, or even a middle blocker. Yes, just make them bump set, ugly set, whatever. Because you know what percentage of the sets that hitters get are perfect, anyways. So again, it's still game-like. Yeah, it might happen. A middle blocker might have to set a ball, could happen. So why not train for it? And then a hitter who maybe never even sees the back row in a game, put him as a digger. So at least you have all these components. Okay, so even if you, as a private lesson coach, you can initiate the ball to a DS. So the setter now has to watch that passer's platform angle, shoulders. Are they upright, down? What do they look like? Where's the pass or the ball most likely to go? Is it gonna be pretty much where I am as a setter, or am I gonna have to move six steps? Is it coming in low? Because their platform angles shows me that maybe the ball is gonna come in low. Maybe I better move faster. You gotta put all those components.
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SPEAKER_00My brain goes nuts again. And then just rotate them through. And then thinking, okay, that's what I gotta do. I can't have one person private lessons anymore because it's not game-like, and it's not gonna translate into the game when they hit the court during an actual game with a ref. So, again, the best way to train a hitter and train hitting is pass that hit, maybe even block. So there's things to read, and they're getting real-life more game-like balls that they have to deal with. Not a perfect toss from a coach. And you wonder, I've heard this before. If you're a coach listening and you do privates, and you go, they do so well in a private or a lesson, but it's not transferring to the game, it's not transferring on game day. Hmm, I wonder why. I want to take the stick and hit myself on the head. I'm not gonna do it too hard because I've had a couple concussions, so that would be pretty dumb. Yeah, think about it. Game like play. So getting back to what he emphasized, he said too many gyms. Players are practicing for practice, they're not practicing for performance. Here's another thing that really blew me away. Anyone do the butterfly drill? How many balls are in play in butterfly drill? Probably two if you have a whole team, right? So you got two balls going. He diagrammed out a butterfly drill variation. Guess how many balls are in play in his version? Not two, not three, but four. Four balls are in play on one court with 12 players doing butterfly. Yeah. But the drill itself is not the main point here. The main point he was trying to make is when you have two balls in play and all of a sudden add two more, that's double the number of touches in the same amount of time. The team that has double the number of touches is guess what? Getting better faster, more reps, more touches on the ball. Sometimes coaches I hear them complaining, oh, I only get an hour and a half for practice, or I'm doing rec or whatever, I only get an hour of practice. Boo hoo. Or even with my club, you know, I would have two-hour practices, and I would have two of those a week, so a total of four hours. And I would have conversations, and I would I'm always curious, so I'm asking coaches at tournaments, how many practices do you have? How long are your practices? Three hours. We practice three times a week, and then there's weights and conditioning. It's like, is this a halftime job for these kids that are 12 years old or even younger? Can't they have a life? Like, is that worth it? For me, it wasn't the four-ball butterfly drill because I didn't know about it until the last 24 hours. But for me, it's about the speed of initiation of the ball so that the drill moves 25% faster than others, 50% faster than others. Sometimes I think my drills might run 75% or even a hundred times faster than some other drills in other gyms somewhere else in the world. But now I'm thinking I can combine the efficiency of not having so much downtime plus more balls in play. So here's another concept. He has this uh uh ribbon that I I guess he gets at Costco or some I don't know where. It's about the the width of net tape, and he carries that when he travels to these places that don't have equipment. I mean, we're talking countries and locations where they've never even seen volleyball before. And he'll put up the ribbon and he goes, if you have one court, yeah, you can split the net, but that's limited. So he goes, take a rope or a ribbon and anchor it on the wall behind the end line, and then take it all the way through the middle section of the court and I anchor it to the other side behind the other end line. So this line is now going vertically through the court, like splitting it into half. And then you have you split that line. He's telling me you can fit four courts. Yeah, they're not regulation courts, but you can be playing twos or threes. How many balls are in play? Well, you can have three, maybe four balls in play. And if you're playing triples, you gotta play everything, you gotta read fast, especially if the court is constrained and smaller in a small space. Man, you can get really good. And then he says, How good are your players at playing balls inside the three-meter line? He uses three-meter, not ten-foot line, because he's more international. Because, you know, how often do players and teams practice playing balls inside the three-meter line? No wonder they're not that great inside the three-meter line. So you can have short court, you can have four or five courts, mini courts, and you're reading and you're playing different positions. Kids should be playing game-like, otherwise, you're just practicing for practice, and it's not going to translate into the game. Do you practice passing? He relayed this story. I forget what the school was, but came to John and said, I think you can help me. Our team has outstanding ball control. Great ball control. But it's like it's not translating into the game, like service eve. So John goes, Describe to me what you're doing in your practice. Tell me why your ball control is so great. They can pass the ball back and forth across the net 1,050 times or something like some crazy record like that. So, yeah, there's half the team on one side of the net, half the team on the other, they're in a line and they're playing tennis like ball, ping pong, back and forth, back and forth. You pass it, you go to the end of your own line. 1,000 times. That's not game like. Of course, they can't serve receive, they can pass, and also the problem is they're passing over the net. Do you want your passer to pass the ball over the net? No. So there's no one problem. The other is they're getting great at passing, but the problem is they're not getting good or better at serve receive because the ball that they're contacting is not coming from a server. If you want to practice serve receive, there must be a server serving to that player. If there's a server practicing how to get better at serving, there must be some serve receive players on the other side of the net. Because guess what? If a server stirs with nobody on the other side and gets it in with what looks like a great serve, and they go, yes, he calls this false confidence. It's false, it's totally false. It's not reality. More than likely, some player on the other side at least moved, okay, towards the ball, and then a lot of times will touch the ball or you know, get a serviceive contact that's playable. Then where does the yay go? There is no yay. Somebody made a playable contact off that amazing serve that otherwise looked amazing with no serve-seed players. So that's false confidence. Hitters, no block, perfect toss from a coach, maybe a set, but it's a it's a coach self-tossing and then setting it great. No blocker, no defense. The kid puts the ball down on the floor. False confidence. So then when they get to a game, guess what? Guess why it does not translate? Because now there's blockers, now there's defenders, now there's more noise, there's more chaos, and they tighten up, or they get nervous, or they don't know what to do because they've not experienced that. They haven't been training for that. They've been training for hitting with no block and no defenders. That's practice for practice, not practice for performance. God, that's blowing my mind just out into the open sky here across the 300 acres I'm on. Here's another thing coach the person, not the player. Think about that. What does that mean? So it can't just be about left foot here, closed step, hip rotation. It's all technical, it's all training the athlete. But you have to understand the person. There has to be an effective, educational, positive working relationship between coach and the athlete and the person behind that athlete so that the player can train more efficiently. It's not just some random athlete being asked to just go through some rote motions. Understand the person. What makes that person tick? You know, that's why team bonding is important. Team bonding activities are not just for fun. People want to be a part of something. They want to feel that they're a part of a community, part of a team. So here's another one he did with me. I'm gonna get closer. He goes, make a circle. I said, okay. Poke your nose through it. I went like this. Now poke your head through it. So I went, uh how am I gonna get this circle around my head? And so I kind of went like this and made a circle. I said, This is a circle, and I poke my head through it. That was not what he was waiting for. I was not poking my nose through the circle. So he goes, Poke your nose through the circle. Oh, I'm poking my nose through the circle. And then he goes, Poke your head through the circle. And I already had it by then. I just moved my circle up here on my bald head and I tap my bald head through the circle. Do these things with your players on the bus, at a water break, at a lunch break at a camp. Then you can make human connections, and then you can start your journey towards coaching the person, not the player. Here's another one he did with me. He goes, make a circle. So I made a circle. Okay, maybe I'll go closer for this. I said make a circle, and this is what he literally did in front of me. Put it on your chin. What did I do? I copied him. I did this. Is that my chin? No, it's right here. Why didn't I do it? I had an audio and a visual clue. He said, put it on your chin, but he showed me put it on his cheek. So his whole point was talk is cheap. You can't just yell at your players. You have to model, you have to show. Because they don't know. You can't just tell them, hey, reach, reach higher, hit it harder, get the ball. How do I hit it harder? So it's the coach's responsibility to demo. Aren't these mind blowing? Oh, here's another thing. I'm gonna tell everybody right now. Maybe some of you have been to my clinics or see my clinics on my website, and I have hitting clinics, defense or DS clinics, or serving and passing clinics. So I asked John, what do you call your clinics? Volleyball clinics. They're not just working on one single thing because it's not game-like. A lot of you have watched a lot of my videos with single players in training. So then I challenged, I said, it can't be a complete waste of time. Okay, so they gave me that. But then I said, Oh, now I get it. It could be many, many times better. So if I can train a kid on how to serve and hit and block and dig and serve receive, better? There's a better way to do it. Why wouldn't I do it? I'd be an idiot not to take advantage of that better method. Oh, I'm gonna finish with a bonus thing that he mentioned to me. He says there are three words that should be struck from the vocabulary. The first one is but the word but. You might say, that was a great hit, but, and no matter what you say after that word but, you've already taken away the recognition and the value of that great hit that you were trying to praise. Because whatever what comes after but bad news, something else less important. Here's another one. Don't get rid of that word. So he tells me this story. He was playing in Italy. Two rotations prior to John's rotation, the two servers, they hit the ball into the middle of the net, one after another. Two servers, two rotations in a row. Then they rotate eventually, and John is up to serve. He's literally trying to serve. He's left-handed, so he's like this, holding the ball, ready to go. His coach yells at him in Italian. I can't remember what the Italian is, but he essentially said, Don't hit into the middle of the net. Now, when you say that to a kid, what is the kid thinking? Hitting into the net. Those are the words that that player's hearing. So, what did John do? We had a box of cookies on the table, like a giant box of cookies. He takes one of the cookies, chocolate chip cookies, he puts it on his hand, okay, like on his right hand, because he's a lefty, tosses it up and then backhands it, blasts it behind his head, and crumbles are flying everywhere. And I'm going, what the heck just happened in front of me? And it hit me. The coach told him, Don't hit into the middle of the net. He hit it backwards out into the crowd. Now, luckily, they won the match. And after the match in the locker room, his coach in Italian, because he speaks John speaks Italian, he's multilingual, so he's speaking in Italian. But I kind of get the already idea of what the coach is upset about. What the heck were you doing? John's answer, you might already be guessing it. Well, coach, you told me not to hit into the middle of the net. He said, Don't do that. So I didn't do that. So he was trying to make a point. Don't tell players, don't do something. Teach them, guide them with the things that they should be doing, not what they should not be doing, because they're gonna be thinking about that error. And the brain is a powerful thing, and they're probably just gonna make that error. Okay, so we got but and don't. Get rid of those, never say them. Here's the third one. Try. Here's a rock. Imagine that this is a his cell phone. So he puts a cell phone on his hand and then reaches it out to me. He goes, try to lift my phone. I go like this. He goes, No, try to lift the phone. And I said, Okay. No, Chicho, try to lift the phone. I'm not trying to lift the phone. I'm actually lifting the phone. There's no try. Like Yoda says, do or do not. There is no try. You're not gonna try to lift it and go, oh, I can't lift it. Oh, I'm trying, I'm trying. No, you're gonna lift it. So he's advising to eliminate the word try, like try to hit better. Or players should not say, Okay, coach, I'm gonna try to hit harder. What does that even mean? Trying to hit harder means that they're not hitting hard. Just like I wasn't trying to lift the phone, I was lifting the phone. There's either do or do not. There is no try. I wish I had Yoda sitting right here. It'd be perfect out here in the wilderness next to a teepee. That would look cool. So the words to avoid but, don't, and try. Definitely, these are the most incredible last 24 hours I've had in my life. And now I'm gonna commit myself to always, constantly, just like John does, because he showed me how hard he works to analyze. Can something be better? Can something be better in practice so that it is more likely to translate into the game? Practice for performance. So my two takeaways are prioritizing the number one skill in volleyball that's reading. And number two, equally important, is practice for performance. Train for performance. I'm gonna leave it at that. I'm gonna head down the hill to go have coffee with John Castle and have him continue to just boo with my brain. See ya. Appreciate you being here today. Keep learning, keep growing. And remember, let's play volleyball because it's fun. And we'll see you in the next episode. Just go.