Do Coaches Score Points?

Dunno, but the question made me change

I’m aware that there are coaches who value themselves highly: “With any other coach this team would not have won as many matches or games.” And of course there are the opposites: “It’s all about the players. I’m just trying not to mess it up.”

So what’s the answer? How important is a coach to a team’s success?

Early in my coaching career, I remember talking with a longtime head coach who told me something that stuck with me. “You have two jobs,” he said, “recruit your team, and then organize your team.” He went on to say that good coaches can do one or the other, and great ones do both.

Clearly, we’re talking about college coaching here, or anywhere assembling a roster is a large part of the job. Call it talent acquisition and team structure. Most of us tend to think of coaching as the latter.

The experiment I would love to run, ignoring the rules of time and space, would be this: I coach my team for a season, then we rewind and start over with the exact same roster, schedule, injuries, and circumstances, but this time someone like Kirsten Berenthal-Booth coaches them. Who wins more matches? Who scores more points?

Since time and space work as they do, all we can do is speculate.

I don’t think we can quantify practice. Is one style better than another? Does the maniacal, detail-obsessed coach’s team score more touchdowns, more goals, more points? Maybe. But there is no way to isolate it. The same goes for scouting and preparation.

That’s the rub. Some things are not measurable.

I’d like to avoid being self-important. That can be hard in a profession where we are constantly trying to self-promote to recruits, administrators, and media. But for the most part, I want to give away credit to our team. They do the visible work. They train, compete, and perform.

At the same time, I want to work as if it matters.

Because if I’m worth one point in a set to twenty-five, and that’s all, then I want to earn that one.

More importantly, this question — how many points can I score? — has helped me shift my philosophy. I have steered away from the single-contact, technique-heavy, “there’s only one right way” mindset. In doing so, practice has opened up to more learning, more creativity, and more ownership from our players.

What I can say is that more games in practice, of all kinds, keep players engaged and ready for the randomness of matches. I don’t know if this is true in every sport, but in volleyball, if I’m only worth a point or two here and there, I’m going to try to create spaces for learning, competing, and figuring it out in practice so they can do it themselves on match day.

I’ve leaned into what’s often called a constraints-led approach, or CLA (there’s a good New York Times piece on it if you’re unfamiliar). It’s hard, and it’s fun. I once heard someone describe it this way — and the line isn’t mine — instead of showing up to practice and giving athletes the answers to the test, we ask them the questions and let them figure it out.

That idea has changed our gym.

So maybe I’m not scoring the points for our team.

But I can try to build an environment where our players score a few more than they otherwise would have.