8 Keys to Building a Successful Volleyball Program With US Men's National Team Libero Erik Shoji

Um, I know that kind of the theme of the, the weekend is building successful programs, and I think that's awesome, and there's so many different perspectives that we can get from players and coaches.

Um, kinda the, the way I wanna go today is actually, I think you guys are getting a lot of pers- perspectives from coaches and what you guys expect from players or from staff members.

I'm actually gonna come at it from the opposite direction.

So I, I wanna talk about what players are expecting from coaches, and what we believe or what I believe, you know, throughout my career, um, coaches should be doing for players to help build that successful program.

So I've kind of j- um, put down some bullet points here.

I have eight different things that I kinda wanna talk about and, you know, we can obviously ask questions, and I can help clarify them if needed at the end here.

So, you know, I'm t- I'm talking about what players should be expecting from coaches to help build successful teams, and how we can kind of, you know, work together to be successful and have a great program.

So the first thing I wrote down is that coaches should absolutely be having detailed practice plans, a lot with emphasis on the skills and team systems that we need to improve upon.

So for me, a practice that kind of just is aimless out there and doesn't have a point or doesn't have a structure or doesn't have something that we need to work on is basically useless.

Sometimes there are practices that you're gonna have that are simply just skill based.

You wanna rep it out, you wanna work on different systems, but I believe that a lot of the time we need to have practice plans that are detailed, they're concise, they're clear, and they work in a direction that the team needs to work on.

So maybe for example, our high balls aren't great.

Our hi- our high ball hitting percentage and non-setter setting isn't great.

That was a point of reference that we had for our USA team during VNL.

We really wanted to work on our high ball setting and our out-of-system hitting.

So we did that a lot in training.

It wasn't just in system all the time, all the time.

We really worked on that, and we got better, and I think that we're one of the best high ball hitting teams in the world right now, and we continue to work on it.

So anytime that you can have a practice plan that's clear, concise, and working on a certain goal that you guys are working on, it's great.

So have that ready, I think, before practice, and players are gonna be happy with that for sure.

Uh, number two, along those lines, I believe in a detailed and concise match plan.

I think that coaches absolutely need to study the other teams.

I know we're on different levels here in, in terms of age groups and, and access to other teams out there and, and video footage, but I believe that- Coaches need to put in, uh, just as much work, if not more, than the players heading into certain matches.

So, you can always tell when a coach is ready for a match or you don't feel like they're ready for a match because they kind of put it on the players, or they may, they may not know what the, the names are of the other team.

Certain, certain things like that.