I’ve entered some zone of activity where all my time has magically been eaten up. We head off tomorrow morning bright early from Dublin to Bologna to spend a bit of time with the under 18 women’s national team and Manù Benelli at the Volley Academy from Wednesday through Monday. We’ll get to work on a lot of things in prep for Malta and other tournaments throughout the year.
Had some great takeaways from the Saint Patrick challenge, even though the result was absolutely heartbreaking. I’ve got to hand it to Karl and his girls, they never give up. They’re so resilient and just keep fighting the whole way through. We’ll be working at the mental game; drawing a bit of inspiration from Mike Herbert book called Thinking Volleyball (https://a.co/1n8u3Pi), particularly the chapters around Gym Culture and Team Trust.
It’ll be a great opportunity to get daily training with Manu and her team on position, specific stuff, and even some team tactics to prepare for our opponents in the upcoming tournaments. And then we have the gym to run some of our own sessions, some conditioning programs and some team workshops to work on all facets of the game to help these ladies grow as players and individuals.
On Thursday night will get a chance to see Ravenna the men’s Serie A2 team playoff match — it’s always great to see some high-level volleyball to watch how they handle situations you run into on the court too (just maybe a bit slower).
Coach Factor
Last year when we visited Manù I ran into Ciro Zoratti in the supermarket (nice little hotbed of volleyball activity, Ravenna’s like old school San Diego, when you’d run into the USA men’s national team on the beach). Ciro is one of the hosts of Coach Factor, a brilliant podcast on volleyball coaching, which is one of my key motivations to keep working on my Italian. They get amazing guests on, talking about a range of fascinating subjects, so it’s definitely worth your while.
Coaching Clinic in Dalkey
When we get back from Italy, we’ll have a last tuneup training session in Dalkey, coupled with a coaching clinic where I get to work on a few of those coach developer skills I’ve been picking up and polishing in CDC-41.
I’ll post more details and the topic when we get through our first few training sessions in Italy, but it will likely be a session on serve reception or setting technique and footwork.
After that last tune-up session, of course, we head to Malta for the Small Countries Association U18W championships to play Scotland, then Malta, then Northern Ireland again.
You can still donate to help fund the girls’ trip, of course, here: https://gofund.me/c2321e44
Hopefully I’ll have some notes up about the week with Manù and team, and my homework from CDC-41, which is due while I’m over there!