“What is the Most Important Thing You’ve Learned About Beach Volleyball?” Presented by Baden

By Collin Wilson, Coastal Carolina Beach Volleyball Assistant Coach

A question I love to ask recruits: “what is the most important thing you’ve learned about beach volleyball?” Recently, a recruit I was talking to flipped that question back at me! I had to give it some thought and the answer that came to mind was that there is no magic key to being good at beach volleyball. I believe that whatever works for you and your team is the secret key, the way we communicate, teach, and challenge ourselves determines our success.

I’m pretty new to the beach volleyball world, but I have gotten the opportunity to learn from top-10 collegiate beach coaches, National Team coaches, former Olympians, old coaches, young coaches, and everyone in between! The one thing they all have in common is that they don’t have anything in common. At least not on the surface.

What they all do really well is they mold their practices and their coaching style to fit the teams they are working with. There are teams that want new and creative drills to stay engaged, there are teams that want a million touches a practice and teams that believe in quality over quantity. One player I worked with wanted to practice an insane number of hours every week while I’ve had players who needed to measure their workload to maintain a certain level of output without exceeding that level. One coach I know works books and team retreats into his teams weekly training program and they’re top 10 in the world. One coach sequences drills every week to build upon skills while creating a learning pattern. Another writes a practice plan every day and then is prone to change it if the practice feels stilted — they both have won championships at their level.

I believe that learning from so many people has provided a number of different road maps for me to pick from, but none of them is the golden ticket. I have set out to try different methods and strategies (both in communicating and on the court) that I believe in and then reviewing how they work with my team. Even the evaluation is different from coach to coach! I try to use a mixture of statistics (tracking game scores in practice and matches) along with athlete feedback (a mix of open-ended questions and numerical responses such as who’re the top three people you’d like to play with or who are the top five side out players on our team right now).

I wish I knew the secret key to being the best beach volleyball coach in the world, but after watching the world, all I’ve figured out is that there are a lot of ways to be successful in this sport. It’s up to each team to figure out what their way is.