That is the primary of my periodic updates in my function as Indoor Efficiency Director for Volleyball England. I laid out the excessive stage priorities below which I’m working in my preliminary publish.
We’ve had three main actions since I launched this journal in mid-March.
Easter camp
Over Easter weekend we had U18 and U20 males’s and ladies’s teams. The U20s had been there for 2 days, whereas the U18s every did two days. This isn’t how we plan to do camps usually, however we wanted to do extra expertise ID with the youthful youngsters than for the older ones. That required bigger cohorts for these youthful age teams. Thus the shorter camp for them.
We went Friday to Monday. As a result of our settlement for the Nationwide Volleyball Centre (NVC) mainly limits us to about 8 hour days on weekdays (no actual restrict on the weekend), we had every group do a 90 minute morning courtroom session, then 2 hours within the afternoon. Throughout a part of their off-court time every group did some sort of informational or developmental session, although we made certain to permit for true down time for restoration.
My massive priorities for the camp had been to start out transferring the ENG applications towards extra of a efficiency focus and to make sure each participant there (and their membership coaches) obtained helpful suggestions. The latter is fairly self-explanatory (although it was one thing seen as missing beforehand). Let me clarify the primary half.
For the final variety of years the age group England camps had been weekend affairs most months all year long. The main focus was usually on ability growth. My angle – and the teaching workers largely agrees – is that we merely don’t get sufficient contact time with the gamers to count on the nationwide workforce surroundings to be the primary supply of ability growth. That has to come back from the golf equipment, which see the youngsters much more than we do (which is why coach growth is such an enormous focus). We, as an alternative, ought to concentrate on efficiency. In any case, we discipline groups in worldwide competitors the place it’s all about efficiency.
In fact you possibly can’t simply flip a change on one thing like that. It’ll take time to actually set maintain. Easter camp was an affordable begin, although. We filed away a good bit of suggestions and ideas to make use of transferring ahead.
August camp choice
Popping out of Easter camp, we pretty shortly turned our consideration to our subsequent camp close to the top of August. The August camp is one the place the primary focus can be collection of U17 and U19 groups for the October NEVZA tournaments. NEVZA is our zonal affiliation throughout the European Confederation (CEV). It’s mainly England plus the Scandinavian nations. This yr’s NEVZA match isn’t a Euro qualifier because it was final yr, so we’re it from primarily a developmental perspective.
Once we began the choice course of we set the clear goal of solely inviting to camp these gamers we felt had a legit probability at being chosen for NEVZA. We needed to not solely evaluate the youngsters from Easter camp, but in addition a lot of coach referrals, and gamers who’d missed Easter camp for one cause or one other (many did so as a result of their membership groups had been at a match in Italy).
Invites went out in mid-Could. We might add a handful of gamers seen in competitors since then, however that’s anticipated to be it.
New athlete administration system
The opposite massive piece of labor was setting up a brand new athlete administration system (AMS). To date we had been mainly simply utilizing a sequence of spreadsheets. That plus the final V.E. registration system. Positively not an optimum arrange for monitoring participant growth over time. We wanted a correct AMS with significantly extra performance.
After researching the choices, we selected Perfbook. We signed up in April and have been working to get issues arrange since. The platform goes to have a serious replace in July, so we haven’t rushed to place it into motion. That might simply require retraining. The plan is certainly to have every thing up and working by August, although.
We’re extraordinarily excited on the prospects of utilizing Perfbook. It’ll, in fact, make it far simpler for us to maintain tabs on the gamers. It’ll additionally present us with a ton of extra performance. There’s a great deal of potential round athlete wellness. And the chances round coaches having the ability to monitor participant growth and supply suggestions are large.
Senior Nationwide Groups
Whereas my function undoubtedly includes oversight of the senior nationwide groups in addition to the age group ones, I’m not as hands-on with them. Final yr we determined to start out fielding U22 groups for Euros competitors. The selection was made to take a seat these squads with the Senior coaches to provide them a possibility to teach in European competitors at a time when the Senior groups themselves aren’t doing so for value causes. The subsequent U22 Euro qualifiers are Summer season 2025. We plan to enter.
The lads have been pretty lively over the previous couple of months. The Seniors did a coaching journey to Austria just lately. A U22 group went to Northern Eire in April to play towards their Senior males, and have had another actions as nicely. The ladies are anticipated to get issues rolling later within the yr. They only acquired a brand new supervisor earlier within the yr.
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