CLUB COACHING with Amir Lugo-Rodriguez (1 of 2)

And then I guess, like, what did you take from him? What did he do well? What did you use with your own team?

Yeah.

I think where they're-- kinda like MPJ as a club, um, they try to follow kind of, like, the ecological, like, dynamics model for, like, a lot of their training and-

Mm-hmm

... and how they do things.

And so that was cool for me to see at their clinics on how different, um, those are run.

And that was a big question of mine is, okay, if I'm gonna start leading these clinics for the club, and what direction do we wanna take? Um, a lot of times parents really enjoy watching a training, so to speak, where their kid is getting-

Mm-hmm

... like, a million touches, and that's all that matters is the amount of times that they're touching the ball, and that could be a coach on a box or a coach on the same side or whatever.

So I wanted to see somebody who may be, like, on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, um, would operate through that.

And then just talking about some of the stuff that, like, he was working on, how they measure certain things.

Um, a big one for them wa- we talked a lot about serving.

Um, and obviously radar guns, like everybody has those in college, but in club, like, everyone's limited from, like, a budget standpoint.

And so, um, they were using timers, and so they had kind of like an area in which, um, they wanted, um, their servers from, like, server contact to passer contact to be.

And then I kinda, like, took that idea, um, from Mike and then kinda like ran with it, like, this year, especially for club, um, where every drill that required a serve, like, we timed the serve, and the serve had to be under, uh, a second from server contact to passer contact in order to activate scoring for that side.

And this is the first team I've had where, I don't remember the exact number, but we had almost 100 more aces than errors-

Mm

... on the year, and that ended up being kind of like a big, uh, staple for kinda, like, this group was, like, our serve and pass game.

Um, as a result of seeing kind of, like, that trajectory and, and that speed, um, we ended up passing really well.

So it helped kind of, like, from, like, a language standpoint too, where- I mean, we've all heard, "Hey, you've gotta serve tougher," and then the next serve, like, hits the back wall.

Or like, "You gotta serve harder," same thing.

So we talked a lot about just, hey, what we're trying to do is we're trying to shrink the amount of time that passer has a decision.

And so we didn't talk about errors.

Um, we gave those kids kind of like that, that time, and then allowed them to kind of like create and find out, like, what movement worked best for them in order to kinda like hit that time.

Um, and I think that was, like, my bigg- one of my bigger takeaways, uh, just from kind of like messing around with, like, some different, like, instruction this year, was just how dramatic of an effect that that had.