During the off season I had the priviledge of attending a vball clinic called The Art of Volleyball at the UD Frerick’s Center. As I wrote about previously the equipment being used to serve, set, measure serves and sets was very very impressive.

Equally impressive was the list of coaches who were speaking at this seminar. Three legendary volleyball coaches Russ Rose (Penn State), John Dunning (Stanford) and Terry Liskevych (Oregon State) were the primary speakers. Joining them were Dayton’s new coach Matt Affolder and Anne Kordes from Louisville (most fans would remember her from St Louis).

As Matt Affolder pointed out Coach Rose, Coach Dunning and Coach Liskevych are polar opposites in personality but there is more than one way to achieve greatness. One thing that all of the coaches at this clinic had in common was demanding excellence in everything the players do. Coach Rose mentioned several times that “everything in our practice is a competition” and I have seen the same thing while attending UD practices. There are serving competitions, games to five, games to three etc.

I asked Matt Affolder about his experience in hosting The Art of Volleyball Clinic.

“I’m not sure there is way for me to fully explain how much knowledge and experience I was surrounded by for 48 hours. The Art of Coaching Volleyball is a clinic series implemented by three of the all-time greats in our sport – Russ Rose (Penn State), John Dunning (Stanford), and Terry Liskevych (Oregon State). And we were fortunate to hold one of those clinics in the Frericks Center here at UD. If you simply go to the Google search engine and insert any one of these names, you would not have enough time in your waking hours to truly understand how much of an impact each of them has had on the sport of volleyball. I learned some new training techniques and cue words that will become a part of our training All three coaches are polar opposites in personality, which is awesome – it gives people the chance to see different ways to manage a program. I learned about setting up competitive practice environments, making sure to every now and then train the “small things” that get overlooked, and take the time to really get into the specifics of technique”

“As you mentioned, we make it a point to compete against each other in many of our drills. We definitely track winners and losers in many areas of training, and then look at those results along with the overall effectiveness of the player. I can tell you this, we have some major competition going on for playing time this season and it is a lot of fun to watch the battles on a daily basis”.

Coach Liskevych from Oregon State mentioned that he used to believe it was possible to teach someone to become a great passer but has since decided that isn’t true. To be a great passer requires great hand eye coordination and muscle memory. When I asked Matt about this he replied:

“I’m certainly not going to get into an argument with a coach who has been training players at the Olympic level since the day I was born!!!!! All kidding aside, I do think you can work on improving passing and hand-eye coordination, but it is definitely a major challenge to teach someone to be a great passer. Most of the truly elite passers are the ones who have been handling the ball in serve receive since they were 10-13 years old. We have been fortunate to have a few players (Yvonne Marten and Rachel Krabacher) who were never primary passers, but they worked extremely hard in the off-season and then in-season to become very solid primary passers”.

What I learned from the great coaches in attendance and also from Matt’s comments is that there isn’t one particular method of winning championships.

Winning championships isn’t all about skill level. Coach Rose said that your best team is not necessarily made up of your best six players.

Winning championships in volleyball is no different than most other sports. You need to develop players who respond to competition and raise their level of play when challenged. That is why improving skills during practice must be competitive. It not only challenges players to do their best but it also gets them used to competition under pressure.

Each coach must challenge their players in every drill for perfection at all times. When you watched Anne Kordes running a defensive digging drill it was obvious why her teams play such great scrambling defense.

I’m sure Coach Affolder and UD’s Volleyball program will benefit a great deal from the experience of hosting this clinic.