UK Volleyball Coaching Symposium 2024 report

The weekend of September 14-15, 2024 Volleyball England hosted the UK Volleyball Coaching Symposium at its National Volleyball Centre. In attendance were coaches from England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. The theme of the event was juniors performance coaching. Thanks to funding from the FIVB, we had Jim Stone as our lead presenter. Jim won a U19 World Championships gold medal coaching the USA women, so he suited well the event’s focus.

There were four off-court sessions:

• An examination of sport and exercise medicine in volleyball and the prevalence of different injuries in volleyball based on recent research run by the V.E. Chief Medical Officer.
• A discussion of developing and sustaining confidence in players led by Alex Porter, the head coach of the University of Essex, which is one of the UK university performance programs (with a bit of contribution from myself).
• A look at performance metrics and how they relate to winning from the England Men’s National Team analyst (he actually did his own “takeaways” post here).
• A State of the Game session run by Jim looking at how the game is being played now, and where it seems to be going.

All the sessions generated good conversations with insightful questions. The session on confidence, though, could easily have carried on for quite a bit longer than it did. The main thrust was that there is are two types of confidence. The first is self-confidence, which is general. As such, it is subject to the influence of day-to-day events in a player’s life.

The second is self-efficacy. This is domain specific. In other words, it will be different for receiving serve vs. hitting vs. serving. This is heavily influenced by the player’s sense of competence and their prior experience. What we see is a feedback loop where self-efficacy (confidence) allows the player to take risks to try to improve, that improvement leads to increased competency, which lifts self-efficacy, and so on.

Of course, we also had a bunch of on-court sessions.

The first of those was connected to the look at volleyball injuries. An S&C coach from TASS with experience working in the volleyball space (not an easy thing to find in the UK) ran a session that featured activities to warm-up athletes up, help them avoid injuries, and generally improve their physical capabilities. This was all court stuff. No discussion of weight lifting or anything like that.

The remaining sessions were all run by Jim. They went over:

• Early-Practice Activities (ball-handling and other warm-up type exercises)
• Serve & Pass
• Developing Tempo in Attack
• Integrating Front and Back Row Attack
• Out of System Offense
• Block & Defense

We had juniors players on-hand to be demonstrators for the on-court stuff. On Saturday it was a group of girls, while on Sunday we had boys. I invited players that I thought would probably be fairly representative of the level of players the coaches in attendance would be working with. In other words, I didn’t want to just bring in a bunch of college players so it would all be nice and neat.

This approach ultimately had pluses and minuses. I think it went according to plan on Day 2 with the boys as we had a decent level of capability throughout. With the girls, though, we were lacking in the setting position. We had a couple, but they were inexperienced. That made Jim’s “tempo” session a challenge. On the one hand, it was frustrating that Jim couldn’t do what he probably would have otherwise. On the other hand, however, attendees saw Jim adapt to the circumstances in a situation probably quite like what they’d face in their own gyms.

One of the funnier elements of that whole scenario was that one of our England U19 players – a Middle – actually demonstrated some interesting setting skills. This had our national team coaches looking on with mouths open (we could REALLY use more height at setter) and asking her club coach, who was there, why this is the first we’ve ever seen that. His argument was that if he didn’t have her hit he wouldn’t have any offense. That does, though, beg the question of running a 6-2.

The other thing that stood out was Jim’s concentration on players’ focus of attention.

Of course there were a lot of other takeaways. Based on the comments we collected at the end, different people took a variety of things away from basically every session. Exactly the sort of thing you hope for.

Overall, the event went very well. All the feedback we got during and after the Symposium was extremely positive. One of the coaches from Ireland in attendance shared his thoughts and takeaways in a post on the Volleyball Ireland Facebook page.