If you are seriously going to make the plunge and become a volleyball coach, your first step should be to become state and nationally certified. In the state I live in, if you are not a teacher and you want to coach, then you need to take a one-day class called Coaching Principles. In this class, they give you a copy of the famous book, entitled "Successful Coaching." At the end of the day, you take two tests, one for state certification, and one for national certification. They then mail you back the results. After taking the class, I left wishing I had taken the class, before my first season as a coach, because I had learned so much from it. Here were some items from the class and that I have learned, that were very helpful to me, as a new coach that I want to pass onto you.

1. Create a Season Plan

The book covers this in very good detail. A season plan is taking the time to write down every aspect that you would like to teach the players. Then, prioritize them. Then you need to associate the item with a particular practice where you will cover the item. This ensures that you cover each item that you would like to teach and that you feel is important. Sometimes as coaches, we can get overwhelmed with the amount of items that we feel we need to teach our players. By creating a season plan, this helps to relieve some of that stress and also helps you to prioritize what needs to be taught and when it needs to be taught during the season. Remember, the purpose of practice is to prepare your kids for the games. Check out this weekly Junior Varsity season plan.

2. Create an Outline for Teaching the Skills

As I had mentioned earlier, there is a difference between playing the game and teaching it to new players. One of the predominant theories on learning currently is teaching skills (for any sport or job), in parts. Another term for this is called (do not laugh) "digestible chunks." You have to give the kids amounts of information they can handle. If you give them too much, they may get overwhelmed or feel like it is "too complicated" and give up. That is what the purpose of the skills outline is. It breaks the skills down into parts that the kids can learn and build on, through progressions. The progressions aspect is building on the initial part of the skill, by adding the next step (where at the end, they put it all together). Take for example the skill of serving. You have the stance, the toss, shifting of weight, ball contact and then the follow through. These are all the various parts of the skill. You first teach them each part individually and allow them to practice the part. Then starting from the beginning, you add the next part. Eventually, they get to the end, where they "put it all together." If you would like to download the skills outline that I use, just click on the link. The skills outline is from college coaching clinics I have been to in the last 5 years.

3. Use Stats to Help You Quantify Who Can Do What

This is something that I continue to learn, as a coach. I have found the phrase "stats don’t lie" to be true. Now I do agree that rotations and match-ups play a factor in statistics. However, the key is, if you can figure out which rotations are giving you trouble, and then you can use the statistics to put your best passers in those rotations. Here is a basic stat sheet that I use. Ideally, the next step is getting to the point where you can chart your rotations, to determine their effectiveness vs. your opponent.