EP 36Player development
What Basketball Coaches Can Learn from Volleyball with Kasey Crider
Alex Sarama and special guest Kasey Crider delve into an ecological dynamics framework and its impact on basketball coaching.
39 min
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Alex Sarama and special guest Kasey Crider delve into an ecological dynamics framework and its impact on basketball coaching.
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In this episode, Alex Sarama and special guest Kasey Crider delve into an ecological dynamics framework and its impact on basketball coaching. They discuss the series' new focus on bringing in leaders from different sports to share insights and takeaways that can enhance basketball coaching strategies. Kasey provides valuable thoughts on how relationships and environment play a critical role in skill acquisition and performance.
Key Takeaways:
01:35 - Origin of Casey's Interest in Ecological Coaching
11:39 - Overcoming Coaching Challenges
17:42 - Examples of Constraint Manipulations in Volleyball
24:51 - Unintended Developmental Constraints
29:00 - Observations of Italian Volleyball Practices
35:48 - Conversations with Basketball Coaches and Experts
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この文字起こしは英語のオリジナル音声に対応しています。
This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast, and I'm your host, Alex Sarama. This is the podcast where we help coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to create the ultimate resource to help make sense of how contemporary skill acquisition ideas can be applied within the basketball world.
Throughout the podcast, we'll unpack how an ecological dynamics framework alters our perspective If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, then this is the podcast for you. Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball podcast. This is the first episode in a new kind of series that we're doing where we're really, uh, getting leaders of an ecological approach in other sports onto the podcast to discuss some of the takeaways for basketball coaches.
Explore Transforming Basketball membership and continue your coach development.
So on that note, really delighted to welcome Casey Kreider, the head coach at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Casey, thanks so much for joining us.
Yeah, Alex, thanks for having me. And I still— I look a little older than I am. I don't know if I'd be experienced enough yet to call myself a leader in anything, but thanks for the kind words and I'll try not to screw this up too much.
No, I mean, I listened to a few podcasts that you've been on. And I loved it. And I knew you were one of the first kind of, when I thought about doing this series, you were immediately one of the first names that came to mind.
Thanks again, Casey. So I guess to start today, I'd love to hear about, and for the listeners, how you came across an ecological approach and what led you down this path.
Yeah, probably like so many of us, especially anyone who's interested in anything with some academic rigor to it, whether it's sport or not, coaching or not. It was driven by some version of insecurity, I'm sure. I wanted to be good and the ways that I was doing it weren't having the results that I thought they should, that I wanted, that the athletes wanted to have.
And so it really came from a place of just not feeling satisfied with the ways I was doing it. I come from a relatively academic family. My dad was a dentist and my mom has a master's in exercise physiology and my brother has an MBA and I was a terrible student, but I did grow up in an environment where there was some expectation of academic merit to whatever it is you did.
It took me a while to convince my dad that coaching was a legitimate profession because he felt that, hey, it's something that people that can't hack it in the academic world would do. So from a young age, I think I just had an appreciation for what research told us and theory and stuff like that.
And I happened to be fascinated by coaching. I was heavily influenced by a lot of really, really high-level coaches in our sport and had access to them probably unfairly, just having played for some of them and being in the right place at the right time.
So I had gotten exposed to some academic stuff, some scientific stuff through my college coach, my university coach, a man named Marv Dunphy at Pepperdine, who was a gold medal-winning coach 3 or 4 times over now in the Olympics as an assistant and as a head coach.
He coached one of the greatest men's volleyball teams in the history of the world in 1988. And he had his PhD in exercise science. And he, I know you're a basketball guy. He was very close friends with John Wooden, the famed UCLA basketball coach.
They lived down the street from each other and he did his doctoral dissertation on Wooden's coaching process. There's a book this thick that Marv wrote on What his process was for developing those famous UCLA teams. So I got exposed to a lot of the real basic 1970s and 1980s in vogue motor learning stuff through him and thought that I knew the science of coaching because I was a sophomore in college who had a coach that used the term contextual interference.
So I did that for a while and found that I wasn't good enough at it or it wasn't working for me or whatever, and just kept going back to Google Scholar. And came across one, a paper that Keith Davids co-wrote, and he was talking about this kind of funky ecological psychology, direct perception, constraints-based approach.
And I thought he was a lunatic. So I emailed him and I said, I, this is wacky stuff. And he was really gracious and kind of said, yeah, maybe, and maybe think about it like that and this, and here's some stuff, go talk to that person.
We struck up a friendship that to this day has been probably more fruitful for me than him, but nonetheless, it's been wonderful. And kind of that rabbit hole was opened and I haven't stopped falling down it since.
Amazing stuff. We spoke about it offline. I had the chance to meet Keith Davids for the first time at the Sheffield Symposium, and I was just— for me, it was like meeting a famous— it meant more to me than meeting any famous basketball player or coach in my life because You know, just the work he's done in this field and just how down to earth he was.
It was incredible. And that's the thing, a lot of coaches have asked me, you know, can you send us the papers? But it's so easy to go find this stuff for yourself. And then like you, like a lot, all these researchers, they want to help.
And if they're one email away, and I think most of them will reply. I guess then, Casey, early on, it's— I certainly went through the same struggles when you come across the research, the words, It's a big barrier just understanding some of these things.
I believe it's important to go into it and spend time trying to learn about it. But would you have any advice for coaches listening who maybe they're on the early stages of wanting to dip their toes in the water of an ecological dynamics approach?
You know, what would you recommend to them to maybe help them as they're exploring this path?
This one's— that's an easy one. That's just some of these questions are gonna be tough. This one's easy. Just grow up and write to these authors. I know it's scary because they— it's their material, and it took me a little bit to work the courage to write an email or a message on Twitter or something like that to these researchers, whether it's, you know, Keith or Rob Gray or, you know, Ross Pender or any of these ecological people, just write 'em a note and say, hey, here's where I'm at with my coaching and I've come
across your material. I'm extremely grateful. I think that's probably a good place to start, but I'm extremely grateful for the work you do and also your time. Can you help me understand this a little bit better? Because there's some things I don't understand.
90% of the time you'll get a response. I mean, maybe 10% of those will go unanswered, but when I started writing to these professors, these researchers, these scientists, these academics, I was even less of a nobody than I am now. And they responded almost at a 100% rate.
And so just write to them. They're proud of their work. I think it took me a while to realize that, but they're proud of what they do and they're proud of the impact they believe it can have. And they're not typically super interested in adding barriers.
A lot of those papers are written for each other. They're written for a particular audience that requires an extreme degree of nuance in the language. So we can't make it too casual in writing those papers because the audience that it's written for. And, but these are people who understand this stuff the most fundamental level.
So they'll, they'll be able to help translate it a little bit. They'll have some analogies. They'll probably be able to go, yeah, we use this term because of this, but you can also probably approximate it with this much more accessible term. And just be an adult and write these people a letter or an email or a carrier pigeon or whatever, and they'll, they'll help.
I haven't come across anybody who's been unwilling to help so far, so it's pretty straightforward to me.
100%. On this note, Casey, this is something I'm thinking about a lot, and I think the message applies to any sport, whether it's volleyball or basketball. But imagine that maybe you were in a room with volleyball coaches for the first time, and obviously you're coaching at a very you know, one of the highest levels, NCAA Division 1.
But whether it was college coaches or high school coaches, would there be an analogy you would have, or is there a way that you would introduce ecological dynamics to coaches being first exposed to this for the first time?
I think there's like a philosophical analogy. Maybe if you tend to conceptualize human beings as machines, computers, whatever, and the brain is in a central processing unit, then you're going to subscribe to an umbrella set of theories and concepts and models and stuff like that.
And if you instead conceptualize human beings more as organisms, like from an evolutionary sense, that evolve and adapt to stressors and changes in the environment and changing goals and stuff like that, there's probably a different umbrella set of theories and stuff like that.
So I would recommend to anybody before we talked about what an affordance is, or before we talked about what differential learning and stochastic resonance mean, and I would say, hey, just how do you consider human beings from a philosophical standpoint, if that's the dichotomy presented, but also what does quality learning look like to you?
And the second piece of this puzzle, which we can maybe talk about more, it's like, what does quality learning look like to the athletes that you're charged with? Developing, because their perspective is going to matter a lot too. But just to start with the coaches, what does quality learning look like?
And if quality learning to you, if the image that you have in your mind's eye is there's going to be some model or some instruction, some knowledge from an external source, overwhelmingly the coach, that's going to be prescribed to the learner, and their job is to faithfully recreate that model or knowledge in their movement behavior.
And spend a lot of time just perfecting that external knowledge or prescription or whatever. That is, that's what you think good learning looks like, then there's ways to go about fostering that. If you instead think that good learning is, looks a little bit more like what we'd probably think children, like young infants and toddlers learn like, where there's just like a lot of trial and error and then parents' responsibility, because they can't instruct and communicate, is to curate a series of tasks and environments to keep things safe but challenging and all that stuff.
If you think that that's what good learning looks like, then you have to appreciate all that comes along with that, the failure and the tears and the scraped knees and stuff like that. It's going to have a fundamental change or impact on the way that you go about designing learning environments.
So the first thing I'd say is volleyball coaches, basketball coaches at all, is just take a moment or probably more than one moment to consider what you believe good learning looks like. And it's okay for it to change, you know. Yeah. If you think about it for a long time ago, man, I thought about it like this and now maybe it's more like that.
That's okay. We're not static. We're organisms too that are evolving and changing and growing and stuff like that. So that'd be the first place. It's a little abstract and philosophical, but just what does good learning look like to you? And I surprisingly few coaches are able, I think, to well articulate their thoughts on what good learning looks like, what it feels like, and what the experience is like for them and for the athletes.
Absolutely. So I'm really interested by this, and I don't know if it's the same in volleyball, but I can very easily say, Casey, that there's not one basketball program, NCAA men's or the women's side basketball, using a CLA yet. I think there's maybe one program who's exploring it, but we're not close to it at all.
And there's obviously hundreds and hundreds of programs. And, you know, for me, it's so cool to see that there is an NCAA program In a sport, you know, you guys all in on this. Did you have to navigate any barriers? Because we have a lot of NCAA coaches listening to this, but were there any barriers you had to overcome with maybe administrators, recruits, or other kind of personnel within the athletics department to be like, this is, you know, the approach and this is why we're doing it this way?
Yeah, certainly there's been barriers. That's why I get paid more than the assistant coaches, and that's my job, is to navigate those barriers and It's been a really wonderful experience becoming a head coach. It's different than I thought in a lot of wonderful ways, some ways that I wish it wasn't, but a lot of what my job is like vision articulation across a number of domains.
I know that you have a particular distaste for like the siloed model. I would be right there with you.
Yeah.
And so a lot of my job ends up being, how do I articulate this unique vision that is not going to be familiar to an athletic trainer or a strength conditioning coach? Or an athletic director, how do I articulate this vision in a way that gets them on board, that gets them excited, that makes them feel included, all that stuff?
The major barriers. So at the administrative level, I think our sport's probably not quite in a place yet where athletic director or hiring committee is going to be too concerned with methodology. And I can certainly speak to it articulately enough and with enough depth that they're going to go like, all right, he knows something about methodology.
They're not going to be able to confirm or deny it. So at the, at the administrative level, it's not a major concern. Certainly at like the sports medicine and sports performance, strength and conditioning level, that's been a huge element. And fortunately I've been able to be, to have wonderful people involved.
But yeah, the, one of the first things I did was purchase a dozen copies of Rob Gray's 2 books, How We Learn to Move, and I forget the title of the second one. It's on the shelf over there.
Optimizing how we want to optimize movement, I think.
I think, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And as a staff, we sat down and read that and it's awesome. But getting those people to have some depth to their understanding of what I like, the, here's the things that are gonna drive my behavior as a coach, my decision-making process as a coach.
And you understanding that is gonna be important because there'll be moments when you come to me and say, I wanna do X, Y, and Z. And there's gonna be probably some moments where I go, absolutely not. Because it isn't congruent with this other stuff, and those points of friction are always part of the job in terms of the challenges of navigating that.
But I think the bigger one is I alluded to it earlier, particularly when I took over, but even in recruiting some too. What do the athletes believe quality learning looks like? And that is a huge consideration as coaches. We have a really bad habit of making ourselves in our own mind.
This is human nature, but. The star of the show. We think of ourselves like this will work all these ways because I have all this knowledge, and the program will be great because I have all this. I know if we do this drill at this time of day and lift like that, then we're going to win.
And the problem is we have unfortunately a comparatively little small impact on winning and losing in comparison to some of the other parties, namely the players. So we have to understand. The circumstances that they're coming from and that their perspective, what do they think good learning looks like?
Overwhelmingly, team sport in our country, I'd imagine around the world, is governed primarily by this, what I would call, and I don't mean it pejoratively, but this traditional model. You will be given an instruction, you will be given some knowledge by a coach via demonstration or instruction or prescription or whatever, and your job is to faithfully as faithfully as possible, recreate or reproduce that knowledge in play through dozens and dozens of kind of— this is pejorative— mind-numbing reps.
And most of the kids come from that place. They come from that perspective. That's, that's what they've been conditioned to believe about their own development. And if we go out and we go, hey, I believe this, and we discount what they believe, It just like, it just doesn't work great.
Like you're gonna lose 'em. And so the major barrier is kind of acting as a shepherd from this one point of view to a different place. I can't say that all of 'em end up at my point of view. I don't force 'em to do that to begin with.
And, but even still, like, can we get 'em somewhere closer? And then I meet 'em the rest of the way. So sometimes people will come in, like we had a coach stay for 5 days at the beginning of our season to observe our practices.
But we have a couple new players, so we spent a lot of time instructing 'em. Hey, no, no, no. Like this, like this. And he goes, hey, I, what happened to all the ecological stuff? And I go, well, you see the older kids over there that hopefully that makes a little more sense.
But this girl, if I come in and say, hey, I'm gonna put you in this challenging situation, figure it out. And I'm gonna point stuff out and then change stuff right when she feels like she's getting comfortable. And like, there's not enough money in this relational bank here for me to make that kind of withdrawal yet.
I have to deposit a lot first. And that's going to be giving her some stuff that she's familiar with because she's already in this overwhelming, overstimulating situation as a freshman. 2 of them are from different countries. You know, they're in college for the first time.
They're seeing all these good players for the first time. They're, they're stressed, they're overwhelmed, they're nervous. And me just meeting them where they're at and going, hey, try holding your hands like this. Do I care if they hold their hands like this? No, I don't.
But it gives them something that is more familiar from a methodological standpoint. And then we wean them off it, or, you know, like I said before, shepherd them elsewhere. That's the biggest barrier, is going to be just culturally the people that we're in charge of helping develop, where they come from is the biggest barrier because it is typically pretty different from what we expect.
I think that's the major barrier for sure. Absolutely.
I love just that practical kind of idea of giving books to the staff and just, it's such an easy way to ascend out of that siloed approach if you're just having that shared, if you start having that shared theoretical framework, it's so easy.
Yeah.
So I guess shifting a little bit to the practice environment now, and we got into it a little bit when, uh, you're talking right now about the differences where you have a 4-year player and a freshman, and obviously it's an enormous difference with an ecological approach.
But have you got any examples of constraint manipulations? And I know it's— this is a tough one because We're manipulating constraints for a reason. It's not going to be generic, but I think basketball coaches could learn a lot from what maybe a CLA environment looks like in one of your practices.
So like, I do a lot of things where I'm changing the start positions, I'm playing with like variable shot clocks, different defensive coverages, different triggers. Would there be any examples of some common constraint manipulations you're using, Casey, on the volleyball court?
Yeah, there's— you'd probably pull up a bunch. Practice plans here from the last couple days. One of the ones I'm thinking of last week, we looked at our performance. We had a relatively nice start to the season. We really challenged ourselves with some tough opponents and have— we're at 5-3, I think.
We were favored in 2 of those 8 matches. We've won 5 of them. So we're doing a nice job. One of the things we noticed as we're playing these really tough opponents were our relationship with the block. And you've discussed this elsewhere and on your social media stuff that To me, skill is probably more relational than mechanical, if that makes any sense.
And one of the skills in volleyball, quote unquote, is the relationship that an attacker has with the blocker and vice versa. One of the skills in volleyball is the relationship that exists between the blocker and the attacker. And our relationship as attackers with the block was very poor, like as bad as any team in the 330-something Division 1 teams, 337 Division 1 teams.
We were near the bottom. We were a good team near the bottom in this statistical category. Meaning we're getting stuffed a lot. We're getting— they're blocking us a lot. A little bit of that maybe just strength of schedule and stuff like that. And we anticipate that that'll even itself out.
But it's a little bit the nature of the way we— like the game model we use for the philosophy we have around attacking. We want to go for it. We want to go for it inbounds. So one of the things that you do when you hit hard inbounds is that you give the blocker a chance to block it.
But we wanted to figure out a way without saying, hey, just, you know, hit it higher, hit it off the block. You know, we wanted to figure out a way that we could Kind of amplify that interaction both in frequency and intensity, if that makes any sense.
So we have this activity we call composure, which is an attacking— it's kind of, I'll try to explain this as best I can. On the defensive side, you have 6 players, just like regular volleyball, 3 in the front row, 3 in the back row.
On the offensive side, you have 3 players. In our sport, there's an outside hitter who's going to probably be, depending on the level, the most Important's not the right word, but most prominent attacker. They're gonna be the most prominent attacker. Then we'll have next to them, we'll have a libero who's a defensive specialist.
They're excellent typically in reception. When the ball's served, they, they're good at receiving it. And then we'll have a setter, and that's the person who takes that reception and puts it to that hitter. So it's those 3 against the 6 on the defensive side.
And what we use that activity for, we, we manipulate the scoring a little bit. If I attack it, And I score. So I'm the out— that outside hitter. I attack it and I score, +1 for me. And I'm the one being scored, the outside hitter or the offensive side being scored, +1 for me.
If I hit it into the block and get stuffed, it's -1 for our side, -1. And if I hit it out of bounds, -3. And the goal is to get to +5 within the time limits, but there's also a backdoor at -5. So if I make my first 2 swings are out of bounds, I lose.
I'm out. That's a normal version of that. And oftentimes add in little stacked additional constraints. For example, instead of just tipping the ball right over to the opponents, we say, hey, if this player in this zone over there is the one who defends the attack, they only get 2 contacts on the defensive side.
So you'll get an easy ball back. But if the person over there defends it and you don't kill it, they get 3. Now you have to defend this full attack coming back with 3 players. And so we're trying to shape their decision-making towards maybe more advantageous situations.
Well, we took that drill a step further. So what we did is we played the same activity, composure, but we called it frame the edges of the block or frame the edges composure. So we put 8 players on the defensive side and 3 of those players were fixed in the attacking zone for blocking.
And we took— there were our 3 male practice players. That are 6'6 and 6'2 and 6'1 and good jumpers, good athletes. So there is this literal human wall of people blocking. And what that's then done is forced this interaction to happen. There is no way to avoid, like it's, we've amplified the size of the block.
We've amplified the width of the block and we've amplified the frequency. It's just going to be there all the time. But we said the defensive side only gets They only get 2 attacks no matter who defends it. So no matter what, if they, they only get 2 touches.
So you're gonna get a lot of balls coming back easy. And it's same scoring if you hit the ball. And then at one point we flipped the scoring. If you get stuffed, minus 3. If you hit it out of bounds, minus 1. So we're trying to draw their attention to, hey, just go for the edge of the block.
If you miss, it's not the worst penalty in the world. But the one that can't happen is the one that you hit down low and it gets in their arms and it gets stuffed. So we do that 3 times last week across our 3 main practice blocks.
And then we go play 3 matches Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And in 2 of the 3 matches, our relationship with the block was outstanding. The last one was poor. The development is not perfect and performance is not linear and all that stuff. But we had a much improved intentional relationship with the block.
That's the one that comes to mind recently. There's, I could probably—
I think it's so good for basketball coaches to hear this in other sports because also I think When it's not in our sport, we, especially if we have a barrier maybe to some of these ideas, we're less defensive. And I think it's when you can learn about the application and you just consider how this is done in another sport like volleyball.
Yeah, that was such a good example of just amplifying affordances just with that scoring system, how you're really educating that intention, attention just through how you've designed that game. That was awesome.
And I think the other piece to this, Alex, which is really important for people to consider Rob Gray kind of helped me with this a lot. When I first got into the constraints-led approach or the ecological stuff, I just like everybody, I don't even think it's a trap.
It's just a normal stage of development in terms of learning about this stuff. But I was very quick to go like, oh, let's change the size. Let's change the scoring. Let's change the amount of people. And I was manipulating these constraints, which is valid.
I mean, that's part of the constraints-led approach. It's not anywhere close to the whole thing, but it's part of it. I think you have to be conscious of the difference between a diagnostic constraint and a developmental constraint. And what I mean by that is a diagnostic constraint is going to give you really good information about your team.
You'll learn some really good stuff, but it isn't inherently changing behavior. So the, the example I use is if we score, if we want to get better at blocking, Right? We want to get— we want to come better at blocking. And we say, okay, fine, we're going to change the scoring that only stuff blocks count as points.
So if you kill it, doesn't count, and you get an ace, it doesn't count, hit the ball out of bounds, it doesn't count, only stuffs. And we go, we're—
we—
one of two things happens. Either it becomes a diagnostic constraint where the only— it doesn't change the way anyone blocks. It just tells us that we're either good or bad at blocking, or this person's good or bad at blocking. Or it becomes a developmental constraint in an unintended area, because if I'm playing a game Where the only points are getting stuffs.
If I'm attacking, I'm never hitting in a way that would allow me to get stuffed. I'm gonna hit it outta bounds or just make sure I hit it way over the block. And then now ironically, we're getting less opportunities to do the things we want to get better at.
And so be really sensitive to, or really attuned to, be a little too on the nose there, to what these constraints that you're manipulating, are they diagnostic? Are they just giving you more information about your team? Which is fine. You just probably don't want to spend all your time diagnosing.
Yeah.
You want to spend time developing more than anything. Is behavior inherently different? And so to go back to that example of the frame, the edges, composure, by putting those blockers there, at some point we're going to hit different shots.
Yeah.
And that's meant to develop. It's not just changing the scoring or changing the amount of people. It has— you have to be able to identify differences in behavior, or we're just diagnosing. We're getting good information on what this player or this team is good at or not good at.
But the developmental piece is where I think we have to be really considerate.
It's— I actually did a podcast about this with, uh, one of my colleagues at Transforming Adam, and we spoke about how it's basically exactly what you just said, where it's not going to be forceful enough. You know, I don't want to say maybe change someone's behavior, but actually acting on different affordances if you're just using generic constraints.
And like, the best example of basketball is, let's say we're doing a pick and roll. Okay, if you award an extra point or something for some type of behavior, you play in a smaller space, Changing numbers, whatever. Okay, fine. But it's not often going to be enough if you really want the offense to become more aggressive in their behaviors, creating an advantage off that pick, or the same for the defense negating it.
You have to be more forceful. So something I did last year is we said, you have one chance on the pick and roll, and if you don't— haven't created an advantage off it, it's done. The rep's over. The defense gets the point. It's finished.
And immediately, just doing that, it was ridiculous, the difference. And the same thing, it was actually my practice yesterday, Casey, in London, where we were running this get. It's like a pass, go get it back, like a stationary handoff. And every time the players were catching it with their back to the basket and they couldn't see the basket and like the affordances to create an advantage were just completely diminished.
And, you know, I was saying, I was reminding them about it and then I said it for the maybe 3 times in 3 minutes and then I was like, all right, that's enough. Now we've got to change the game and make it a constraint.
And all— maybe I was over-constraining in a short dose, but we just said it's a turnover if you catch the ball and you— and your back is to the basket. And it changed completely. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about, right?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's exactly it. And, and it's just something that I think it's a part of the development of coaches as they learn this, this model. At some point you come across the idea of like, man, I'm doing the constraints-led approach, And then you look and the behavior is not changing.
The behavior is the same. All you've done is identified like, here's what we're good at and or not good at. Typically when we're designing this stuff, it's because we're not good at it. So we just get frustrated. We're like, oh man, we stink.
But no behavior has changed. So when you're designing and, and people ask me, well, it's like, well, does that mean I can't change the scoring or I have to change the scoring? And he goes, no, no, no, it just start at the end.
Does behavior change preferably in a way that's positive? But even if it's just changing And becoming less stable. And all of a sudden, like, there's like what, what we, what they were doing doesn't work anymore and it forces them to try their stuff.
Like, just identify that the behaviors are different. And if you can do that, then you're in a good spot for development for sure.
So true. That's a really, really great point. I think that's so relevant for coaches. So relevant. Last question, Casey. So I've had the, I can't say if I can have the pleasure of saying I've been watching it, but I've been watching my girlfriend's, some of my girlfriend's volleyball practices and games.
Over the last season when I was in Italy, let's just say seeing some of the traditional coaching behaviors, I found it very difficult to not say things to my girlfriend. So I guess it would be things like the passing. I think it's called pepper passing.
Pepper. Pepper.
Yeah. And, you know, they'd be doing that in practice, unopposed serving, and it was just very generic. And it was interesting to me because they had one court, but I often felt they could use it more creatively, like whether trying to put up some of our nets to create other small-sided games or whatever.
But it was drills, drills, drills. Just so I have some ammunition for the next time I talk to her about her practice methods, what would be the alternative to pepper passing? It seems to me like the 3-man weave of volleyball.
Yeah. So pepper, it's a really common one. For the listeners who aren't familiar with volleyball at all, it's iconic volleyball. I would consider it like it's a way to kill time. But essentially, it's just we do this little pass-set-attack sequence back and forth.
And because there's 2 people and 3 contacts, We actually get this nice little churn of where I pass, then you set to me, then I spike, and then you pass, then I set to you and I spike. And we get to just— but yeah, it's not a real good developmental tool.
Mostly what it is, is like, I think the warmups in the NCAA are way too long. They're 60 minutes. It's insane to me. We need 20 minutes to get ready to play volleyball. We don't need 60. But like when you have that extra time and you don't have the full net, the other team's on the other side, the girls like to do it.
I don't fight them too much on that. One of the things about Pepper, not to go on a rant against Pepper, it's not a war, you know, against Pepper, but I think one of the things that is often poorly considered when you do an activity like Pepper, and this is not just Pepper, there's a lot of activities in volleyball and sport in general, we don't consider, like, our game is extraordinarily relational.
We don't get to possess the ball like you guys. You guys can hold the ball and manipulate timing. We know that some of the, probably the best, great quality of elite basketball players Is that they have the ability to manipulate timing. You watch Luka Dončić and just the way he moves at these different paces to create space or eliminate space or create angles to pass or shoot is really impressive.
And I'm not a basketball guy, but even I can observe that. We don't get that opportunity. We don't get to ever hold the ball. We have— everything is— we are beholden to the timing of the contact that precedes ours. So we are exclusively relational in our game.
We are— there is no way around, like, I don't get any control. I have to play the game through the lens of a relationship based on the contact that precedes mine and comes after. Like, how am I going to deal with this contact that came before me?
And what am I going to do for the contact that comes after? So this, it's very interactive. There's not really such thing as a volleyball action. There's only volleyball interactions. And so I think it's really critical to appreciate in training, in the way you think about the game, the nature of these relationships, these interactions.
In the sense that some of them are protagonistic or cooperative interactions. One of the things that's interesting about our game and unique to other sports is we have, it's a team game, so there's multiple players on each side. And also it's multi-contact. It's not like tennis.
Every interaction in tennis is antagonistic. It's, I'm trying to make life harder for my opponent. Ours, we have to differentiate. So some of these interactions are making life harder for my opponent. If I'm serving to them, I want it to be tough for them.
If I'm blocking them, I want to stop them from scoring. And some of them are protagonistic or cooperative, where like when I receive the serve, I want it to be better for the setter. And when I set, I want them to be easier for the attacker.
One of the things that just bugs the hell out of me with Pepper is it just completely disregards that idea, like so many things do. But when I spike to you in Pepper, if we're going back and forth and I hit it to you and I miss, like I don't hit it great, And it goes just to the side or in front of you, and you have to go chase the ball.
What's the first thing I do? I immediately apologize. I go, hey, sorry, my bad. I meant to hit it to you. And never in the history of competitive volleyball has any opponent ever hit a ball away from a defender and gone, oh, shoot, my bad.
Sorry, I meant to hit it to you. And we've bastardized the nature of the relationship between spiking and defending. And we do it in coaching all the time. Where we just bat— we don't consider the relationship between the server and the passer. How do I know if my serve is any good if I don't have a passer over there getting screwed up or not?
So if I do— you mentioned unopposed serving. If I serve into an open court, I'm just playing a guessing game, which isn't super valuable for development. It's marginally better than not doing anything. Serving to an open court is better than not serving at all.
But it is way, way worse than serving and getting some information and having this little interaction, this antagonistic interaction between the server and the passer. And you see this across our sport constantly. People don't appreciate this, the nature of these interactions. And coaches will do it.
Hey, I need to help this girl with her passing, so I'm going to serve these easy ones to her. And if I serve it too far from them, I'm going to go, my bad. No, the nature needs to be preserved. So let's make the game way harder, the task way harder for the server, which comparatively makes it easier for the passer if they're not at the right challenge point.
If the passer's really not great, then just make it way harder for the server. You can only serve underhand, or you can only serve from your knee, or you have to back way up or move way forward, but you're still trying. You can only hit it into this little space right here that's inbounds, but they're still trying to screw the passer up.
They're still trying to beat them because that nature, the nature of that relationship matters a lot. Psychologically, from a coordination standpoint, it matters a lot. And so I've completely ignored your question. I apologize. To go back to what activity would be better than pepper, we start almost every practice, we call it mini court.
It's not new. Lots of volleyball teams will do this in some form or fashion. I hate the cooperative version. It would be better than pepper. It's essentially pepper over a net with partners. So I'm just going to hit it to you, you dig it.
I hate that. I think it's silly. We're just getting good at hitting softly to opponents right where they're standing, and that's nonsense. I like competitive versions of where we're trying to compete now, then just manipulate the hell outta the rules and the, the space and the game and the scoring and all that stuff if you want certain things to pop up more often.
But we don't pepper ever in our practice. Now, before the games they do because they want to, and I'm not gonna fight 'em. But in our practices, we never pepper. We go right into the first thing we'll do after we come down from the weight room.
We'll run into the gym, they'll go to the board, they'll say, okay, here's my team, here's the rules. And they're— by the time I get into the gym from the weight room, they're already playing and they know the rules. It's different some days.
It's the same a lot of days. It's different. We manipulate the rules based on what we're trying to get in place that day. But you also mentioned a lot of volleyball coaches are coaching with one net, so it does get a little tough depending on how many players you have.
But we use pool noodles. We throw them up in the middle of the net. We split the court into 2 courts. You got this little narrow court here and a little narrow court there, and you got 2-on-2 or 3-on-3. And You got different rules and they're— it's a way better way to learn because the deal is you have to learn the interactions, the relationships, not learning the skills.
It's not I spin it to you so I learn how to dig. I need to learn how to relate to the attacker as a defender. I need to learn how to relate to the setter as a defender. How do I defend in a way that makes my setter most comfortable?
Because that's a protagonistic, cooperative relationship. I want her to be really comfortable. I don't want this attacker to score. So how do I relate to them? Me just standing here chipping a bunch of balls at you is not going to help you relate to an attacker that's trying to blast it.
It doesn't work. So we use that little 2 versus 2, 3 versus 3. We call it mini court. I think it's got a dozen different names around the world, but I think that's way better than pepper.
Casey, that was awesome. And I just, the whole time I was just thinking about all the basketball kind of comparisons. And, you know, for the coaches listening, I'd encourage you to listen to that segment again. And just for me, the key theme, which I think is a great note to end the podcast on, is especially in our sport, it's an interaction between an offensive player, the defensive player, and their teammates.
That's what our sport is. And you gave the analogy of, you spoke about in pepper, they'd hit the ball and say sorry.
Yeah.
And I actually see that in basketball where maybe a coach is playing defense in a scripted manner. It's the same every time. And the player finishes because maybe they bumped them accidentally or they lose the ball. And they'd say sorry to the player.
I saw that at the pro workout last week. Or a zigzag drill where the defender is waiting for an offensive dribbler to get to the spot before they turn, and they're not even trying to steal the ball. And it's— that's it. So much of the basketball world is not based on this premise that our sport is an interaction, and it's actually artificial interactions that we're creating as coaches just because of our practice design.
Yep, agreed.
Casey, I want to say a huge thanks for, for coming on the show. That was an awesome podcast. Just so many takeaways for coaches of any sport. I guess Twitter is the best place for coaches to follow you, right?
Yeah, my mom used to say I had a face for radio, and now she says I have a face for Twitter, not Instagram. So Twitter has been my wheelhouse more than, than anywhere else. Yeah, I think the little name, username or tag or whatever it's called is @AlexSarama.
Show notes.
Coach KCVB. KCVB, those 4 letters. Coach KCVB.
And I'd say too, Casey, you have, uh, one of the best Twitter bios in the whole of the Skill Act practitioner/researcher community. Yeah, you could probably burn Steve's.
Yeah, yeah, I, I didn't come up with any of that stuff, I know that, so I can't claim anything.
Thanks so much for taking the time, especially at the start of your season, and really grateful for all the stuff you share, man.
Yeah, thank you. Really, really appreciate chatting with you. It was fun.
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