USA Volleyball seminar gives coaches game plan

The same thing happens every time Diana Cole teaches coaches the basics of volleyball.

She tries to convince them to understand the “awesome responsibility” of coaching, then she gets into the technical aspects of the game. Before her lessons are finished, before she even steps on a court, coaches tell her, “Just give me drills. Just give me practices.”

Instruction from Cole, the USA Volleyball director of coaching education, often stretches deeper, and nothing will change during a seminar by the Colorado Springs-based national governing body that began Friday at Big House Sports.

About 40 coaches, mainly at the high school and club levels, will learn how to work with kids, how to improve communication skills, how to pick which systems are best for their teams, how to develop players so that they’ll “never be a kid’s last coach,” how to “instill a love of the game and make it fun, so that the kids will want to come back,” Cole said.

“Many of us start coaching the way we were coached,” she said. “If they weren’t coached by somebody who is very savvy about different ways to do things, they perpetuate the old traditions and the wrong concepts, and they can’t break out of that pattern.”

The motive for USA Volleyball to produce quality coaches? Cole said it’s to ensure “the kids are going to be trained better. It’s starting at the grassroots level, and hopefully we’ll see some of those kids rise to the top.”