The other day I was in a conversation with someone with a decision taking role for a place I might want to start coaching/working at, but who has never been coached by me, or experienced my coaching in any other way.
I do know that I am an absolute world class coach in my specific niche within coaching (teaching adult players how to play better, especially though mechanics/technique changes), but I often rely on people needing to experience it themselves before they can fully understand the value/uniqueness of my coaching. I tried to explain sort of how I work to illustrate the value of my coaching to this person, but I was not 100% satisfied with how I did that.
Anyway, the day after our conversation, my mind had constructed a message that I sent to the person as a clarification/expansion of what I had said. I then realized that this message might be of value also to readers of my blog/followers of my project, so here is a copy of it!
”Hey! Yesterdays conversation made my brain think about this clarifying description of my coaching method/philosophy for adults:
So first of all, if an adult has inefficient technique/mechanics/coordination/athleticism (which is the case for basically all beginner and intermediate players, and also to some degree with higher level players) step 1 is sort of to figure out how they want to train. Basically ask if they'd prefer to just keep the mechanics and try to get better at the sport through smarter/better strategy, mental aspects, etc (basically a "making the most of what we have” type of approach), or if they'd want to actually work on changing the mechanics, actually “changing the engine in their car" so to say, so that they get new foundational possibilities in their movements and athleticism, in order to be able to play with different strategical solutions in the long term.
My specialty and what separates me from other coaches is that I have found ways to actually make these technique changes happen for people in an adult age, so that the changes that normally are more or less only possible for children through reps, are now also possible for adults. It's a methodology that is based on both needing to understand the learning process and psychology of learning new movements (as an adult), but also a deep understanding of the movements themselves. Sometimes for example certain movements require the player to learn to use certain muscles before the movement is possible, or learn to be tense in certain body parts while relaxed in others before the movement is possible, etc. So there is at times just discovery around new ways to use the body before the player can learn the actual technique desired.
But all in all, in the end, I have become known as someone who can actually facilitate these technique changes for adults also, in a fun, interesting and engaging way. It is also a way that doesn’t necessarily require “thousands and thousands of reps” like many coaches believe that technique changes do. I still don't have all the technique answers that I am looking for myself (especially in blocking and defense i have blindspots still, but I might very well have certain blindspots in the other parts of the game also), but I continually refine my own techniques and learn even more. And basically, anything I can do myself up to any specific point in life, I can also teach to others. This I know is very far from the truth for 99% of the beach volleyball coaches out there.
Another great part of my coaching is that it is actually the players (adults that struggle with technical aspects of the game) who many coaches don’t like teaching (because the coaches cannot facilitate satisfactory progress with them so it becomes frustrating for both the coach and player) that are my favorite players to coach. Simply because these are the players that my coaching style gets the absolute best results for, which means that my coaching fits perfectly in this gap that is left over from the coaching of most other coaches.
So in a sense, my coaching “method” or “knowledge” consists of the teaching method that gets adults to actually learn new physical movements (which has been roughly the same since I started coaching, with some smaller refinements over the years), and the teaching content (actual technical knowledge of the sport) which continually expands for me. Anyway, it is actually a very typical result that if someone has a 15-60 minute private session with me (or attends 1-3 group lessons with 6 people) that I am able to teach them the actual movements that many coaches over the years have told them they should do, but the players simply hasn’t been able to implement. The "normal coaches" have been able to identify the problem, show the solution to the problem themselves, describe the problem, describe the preferred movement, and all of that, but in the end they fail in actually teaching it to the body of the athlete - so for the player all of this just remains as "intellectual knowledge that they cannot implement", which is effectively “worthless” in terms of them actually playing the game better. So in short, people often learn in just one of my lessons the things that other coaches have been telling them for years and years that they should do, without being able to teach them the skill.
So, my coaching has been a solution to that, and once people experience it, and realize the power of how i do things, they usually basically become hardcore fans, at least when it comes to understanding technique and facilitating more technique changes.
Unfortunately I have seen that other coaches basically have no idea how my teaching methods work, so collaboration with other coaches has been a bit tricky over the years, at least in shared lessons. Sometimes collaboration has worked with basically me and the other coach focusing on different things on different courts (but still in a collaboration where people switch between the courts during the training), but running drills together usually clashes quite a bit because the decisions I make about what type of drills to do, in what order, with what instruction, and for how long, seem to be very counterintuitive for most coaches.
When it comes to the strategy of the game, of course I am interested in that also, but it is in no way a specialty of mine and there are most certainly coaches that are 100 times better at it than me.
Personally I believe that "whatever a person learned as an adult, they also understand how to make another adult learn." I find this to be a good explanation why so many professional players are so good at teaching the strategy side of the game (they usually learned the basic movements of the game as kids, and then learned the highest level strategies as adults while playing during their peak), whereas I started playing as a 24 year old and have been highly focused on mainly learning the foundational techniques of the game ever since, making my strength as a coach exactly what I have been going through, learning better foundational techniques as an adult.
I hope this description is valuable in some way! :)”