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Think about it, how many times in a game does a setter start in the same place, perceive the pass coming from a passer in the exact same spot and set to the exact same attacker on the exact same tempo? It’s a one in a million chance with multiple variables. Practicing the same movement over and over again leads to athletes trying to solve problems with pre-set solutions, like a computer trying to solve a task. Except the brain isn’t a computer and the game isn’t a controlled environment.

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The FIVB just wrapped up its second ever U17 World Championships (weirdly this is still called the World Championships not the World Cup like the adult version next year). Team USA dominated the field to win without dropping a set, their opponents barely got into the 20’s in most sets.

The scary part is that USA didn’t do it by exploiting some new tactic, or by excelling in one area of the game. They did it because they have two athletes who are miles clear of everyone else in that age group and unlike American phenoms of the past, these two are set up to succeed in international volleyball. They aren’t just physical marvels who need to take advantage of the US’s liberal substitution rules in girls junior play, they’re fully fledged, six rotation monsters.

Kari Knotts - The Next Superstar Opposite

If one thing is clear about modern women’s volleyball, you don’t win without a point scorer at opposite. The world's superstars, Egonu, Haak, Boskovic, Antrapova, Vargas all play the position. In 15 year old Kari Knotts, the USA have the premier opposite of the next generation. Standing 193cm tall, Knotts plays at the A5 club in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the top junior development environments in the US.

Knotts is of the Antrapova archetype, a lengthy volume attacker with an outstanding serve who loves the big moments. After a slower start to the tournament, Knotts came alive in the knockouts, scoring 16 points in the round of 16, before back-to-back 19 point performances as the USA dispatched of Italy and China in the quarter and semi finals with ease.

Then came the final. Where Knotts blossomed with a truly special performance. Responsible for 23 of the USA’s 75 points, Knotts had 17 kills at 0.479% efficiency to go with 4 aces and 2 blocks. A superstar in the making, the recruitment circus around Knotts next summer is going to be a sight to behold.

Maya Ogbogu - The NIL Era Outside Hitter

When Karch Kiraly was on the women’s side of the curtain in Anaheim, he spoke often about athletes that graduated from NCAA colleges needing to go to Europe to learn the international game. With the growth of professional volleyball in the US and the continued Olympic success of the Senior National Team, more athletes than ever are wanting to graduate college with the skillset required to play all six rotations and step straight into the professional leagues.

Ogbogu is certainly one of those athletes, committed to Texas A&M, her game combines a lighting fast arm, incredible vertical leap with outstanding reception and defence. Knotts might’ve won MVP in this tournament, but Ogbogu is the athlete most coaches have mentioned to me in conversation. Ogbogu, the cousin of Team USA gold medal winning middle blocker Chiaka, has made waves on social media throughout her junior career, but this feels like an important point on her journey of maturing into an a top international outside.

Ogbogu was once again electric in the knockout stages, scoring 17, 13 and 15 points in the knockouts, before an 18 point performance to compliment Knotts 23 in the final against Turkiye. For the tournament Ogbogu hit at a barmy 62% efficiency. As Mark Lebedew famously says, volleyball is spiking.

The Two Faces of US Junior Volleyball

Knotts and Ogbogu, Babcock and Stafford, Thompson and Skinner. The USA pipeline is incredibly strong right now at all age groups. Girls junior volleyball is as popular as it has ever been, yet it feels like there is a two tier approach developing. Clubs owned by and affiliated to LOVB (plus a handful of non-affiliated clubs), seem to attract the best athletes, with other clubs just unable to compete. This new organisation of the system, way more aligned with how the rest of the world develops junior athletes, just on a far grander scale is paying dividends in the performance realm.

This isn’t me saying the junior volleyball system in the US is right, it is working at the top end. Many with much more experience than I in the junior volleyball world have flagged the rising costs, lack of opportunities and movement towards youth sports as a business as things hurting athlete participation and opportunity. Whilst this article isn’t about that, it has to be mentioned alongside the success.

LOVB spoke about wanting to create an elite pathway for athletes either side of the college experience, it’s clear that this performance shows that on the junior side, elite talents are being produced. It is up to the American volleyball community to ask if the price they pay is worth it.

There is a temptation in coaching to believe that becoming better is simply a matter of knowing more. We attend courses, collect qualifications, watch presentations, listen to experienced coaches, study successful teams, and build an ever-growing library of information that we hope will help us improve. We search for the next tactical idea, the next training method, the next piece of research that will give us an advantage. In a profession that is constantly evolving, this desire to learn is essential. Coaches who stop learning eventually become trapped by what they already know.

However, coaching is not an information problem.

The complexity of coaching comes from the fact that knowing something and knowing what to do with that knowledge are two very different things. A coach can understand the technical requirements of a skill, know the tactical trends of the modern game, and have a deep understanding of sports science, yet still struggle to create an environment where athletes can perform and develop. They can have the right answers but ask the wrong questions. They can identify a mistake but fail to understand why the mistake happened. They can understand the game perfectly while misunderstanding the people who are playing it.

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The idea that coaches need a preseason too came from my former mentor and current boss with the national team, Alex Porter.

It is one of those ideas that feels obvious once somebody says it. We spend months thinking about how our athletes will return to training. We plan their physical preparation, manage their workloads, introduce tactical ideas and gradually expose them to the demands of competition. We expect them to arrive ready to work, but recognise that they will still need time to reconnect with the game and rebuild the habits required for the season ahead.

Coaches rarely apply the same thinking to themselves.

We often reach the end of a season tired, mentally cluttered and carrying the residue of hundreds of decisions. There are things we are proud of, moments we regret, problems we never quite solved and ideas we have collected without properly examining. We then take a short break, open a new notebook and begin planning the next season as though the person leading it requires no preparation at all.

Alex’s point was that the coach should have a preseason as well. Not simply a holiday, although rest matters, and not just a period of producing practice plans and updating spreadsheets. A genuine preseason should prepare the coach physically, mentally and philosophically for the demands of the year ahead.

The more I have thought about it, the more important it has become. The athletes deserve to return to an environment led by somebody who has prepared properly. They should not have to wait for the coach to find their energy, rediscover their standards or work out what they believe once the season has already begun and so today 5 and a half weeks before my squad reports to campus, I started my pre-season.

Head Coaches Have to Make It Happen

There is an important reality attached to this idea. Head coaches, you are in charge. In most programmes, nobody is going to create this preseason for you. Nobody is likely to hand you a carefully designed development block, monitor your readiness or protect time in the calendar for reflection. There may be support around you, but the responsibility ultimately sits with you.

That is part of the job.

Head coaches are used to making things happen for everybody else. We organise programmes, coordinate staff, create schedules, solve logistical problems and make sure athletes have what they need. It is easy to become so focused on holding the environment together that we neglect the condition of the person doing the holding.

The danger is that we treat our own preparation as optional. Training happens when there is spare time. Reflection happens if the inbox is quiet. Professional development is squeezed into journeys or late evenings. By the time the athletes arrive, we may have completed every administrative task without doing much to prepare ourselves to lead.

Nobody else can take full responsibility for changing that. A head coach has to build their own preseason. It needs to appear in the diary with the same seriousness as the things we schedule for the team. That might mean protecting time for training, deliberately reviewing the previous season, reconnecting with staff or creating space to examine the philosophy that will shape the year ahead.

If we believe preparation matters, we cannot only apply that belief to the athletes.

Preparing the Person Behind the Coach

One part of my preseason this summer is physical. I am using the time to get myself into better shape, rebuild consistent habits and improve the energy I will bring into the new season. That means walking more, returning to structured strength training, using kettlebell sessions at the weekend and being more deliberate with my nutrition.

This is not about believing that coaches need to look like the athletes they work with. Coaching ability cannot be measured by body composition, running speed or strength numbers. There are brilliant coaches of every shape, age and physical capacity. However, it would be equally dishonest to pretend that our physical condition has no effect on how we coach.

A long season requires energy. There are late finishes, early starts, long journeys and weekends dominated by competition. There are practices in which a coach needs to remain alert for several hours, followed by reviews, meetings and difficult conversations. Fatigue can narrow our attention and reduce our patience. It can make us more reactive, more controlling and less capable of handling the inevitable uncertainty of performance sport.

When I am physically active and taking better care of myself, I think more clearly. I manage stress more effectively and have more capacity at the end of the day. I am more likely to remain patient when an athlete needs a longer conversation and more likely to bring consistent energy to the final part of practice rather than simply dragging myself towards the finish.

My preseason does not need to replicate the athletes’ programme. I am not preparing to play. I am preparing to coach. The demands are different, but preparation still matters.

There is also something useful about accepting a version of the responsibility we place on players. We would not want an athlete to arrive at the first session of preseason having given no thought to their readiness. We understand that they need rest, but we also ask them to take some ownership over the condition in which they return.

Head coaches should expect something similar from themselves.

Reviewing the Philosophy

The physical work is only one part of my preseason. The other major task is reviewing my coaching philosophy ahead of the first meetings with the team and the process of co-designing how we want to play next season.

A philosophy can become strangely detached from actual coaching. It may begin as an honest attempt to articulate what we value, but over time it can become a collection of phrases we repeat without investigating. We describe ourselves as athlete-centred, adaptable, collaborative or development-focused. Those words appear in presentations and applications, but they do not automatically tell us whether our daily behaviour reflects them.

A coaching philosophy should not be treated as a document that is completed once and then defended forever. It should develop through experience. Every season gives us new evidence. Some beliefs become stronger because they survive difficult moments. Others need refinement because the reality of working with athletes exposes their weaknesses. There are also times when the philosophy remains sound, but our behaviour drifts away from it.

That drift is understandable. Competitive seasons create pressure. Matches arrive quickly, injuries change plans and poor performances can make control feel attractive. A coach who believes deeply in athlete ownership may still take over when they become anxious. A coach who values adaptability may still become attached to a preferred system. A coach who talks about exploration may still interrupt athletes too quickly because silence feels uncomfortable.

The summer provides an opportunity to look honestly at those gaps.

Where did I genuinely share ownership last season, and where did I only create the appearance of it? Did our practice environments develop adaptable players, or did I occasionally solve too many problems for them? Did my feedback improve their ability to notice and act, or did it become a constant stream of instruction? Were our principles clear enough to guide decisions under pressure, or did we rely too heavily on the coach providing answers from the sideline?

These questions are not designed to dismantle everything that came before. A preseason review is not an exercise in reinventing yourself for the sake of novelty. It is an attempt to make the relationship between belief and behaviour more honest.

Clarity Before Co-Design

This review matters because I want the athletes to play a meaningful role in co-designing how we want to play next season. Our early meetings will explore the identity we want to build, the behaviours we want to see and the principles that will guide us through the year.

Co-design is sometimes misunderstood as the coach arriving without a position. That is not my view. The coach still has expertise, responsibility and a duty to provide direction. I cannot ask athletes to build a coherent performance environment from nothing while I sit back and avoid making decisions. That would not be collaboration. It would be an abdication of responsibility.

At the same time, there is little value in inviting athletes into a discussion when every meaningful answer has already been decided. If the coach arrives with a fully completed model and only asks questions designed to secure agreement, the process becomes theatre. The athletes may be allowed to choose a few words, but they are not genuinely shaping anything.

My responsibility is to enter those meetings with clarity about the things I believe, while remaining open to the possibility that the team will alter, challenge or improve the way those beliefs are applied.

I need to know which principles are central and which are simply preferences. I need to understand what I believe good volleyball looks like, but also recognise that this group may have different strengths from the one that came before it. I need to be able to explain why certain ideas matter without becoming defensive when athletes see the game differently.

Meaningful co-design requires a prepared coach. Without prior reflection, the conversation can become vague. The room fills with attractive words such as trust, bravery, aggression and togetherness, but nobody defines what they will look like when the game becomes difficult. The meeting feels positive, yet nothing changes in practice.

The challenge is to move from values to visible behaviour. If we decide that we want to be audacious, how will that influence the options athletes are encouraged to take? If we want to be adaptable, how will practice expose players to changing problems? If we value trust, how will we respond when somebody makes an aggressive decision that produces a poor outcome?

The coach needs to be ready to help the group make those connections. Preparation allows the questions to become more useful and the answers more consequential.

A Chance to Remove, Not Only Add

The summer naturally encourages coaches to collect new ideas. We attend conferences, listen to podcasts, read books and save practice activities that might be useful. Curiosity is important, and every coach should continue learning. The problem comes when development is understood only as accumulation.

Sometimes the most useful work of preseason is deciding what to remove.

There may be language that has become too complicated, meetings that no longer serve a purpose or activities that remain in the programme through habit. There may be principles that sound intelligent but offer little guidance when an athlete has to make a decision in a fraction of a second. There may also be parts of the coach’s behaviour that need to be simplified.

I am trying to use this preseason to make the most important ideas easier to see. That does not necessarily mean having fewer beliefs, but it may mean expressing them more clearly. It may mean reducing the amount of information athletes are asked to hold and creating stronger links between the way we train, the way we talk and the way we want to compete.

A coach can arrive at preseason armed with more drills, more presentations and more tactical detail than ever before while still being less clear. Preparation is not measured by the amount of material produced. It is measured by whether the coach understands what matters and can build an environment that reflects it.

Preparing for the Difficult Parts

The true value of a coaching preseason will probably not be seen in the opening week. Early practices usually carry their own energy. Athletes are pleased to be back, coaches are excited by new ideas and everybody speaks confidently about the season ahead.

Preparation becomes more visible later.

It matters when the first plan fails, when a player becomes frustrated or when results begin to influence the mood of the group. It matters when the coach feels the pull towards behaviours they had promised to avoid. Under pressure, we tend to retreat towards our deepest habits. The clearer and more rehearsed our principles are, the more likely we are to act in accordance with them.

This is particularly important because the head coach sets much of the emotional weather around a team. Athletes notice whether we become tense, defensive or impatient. They notice whether our belief in autonomy disappears after a defeat and whether our language changes when the score becomes uncomfortable. They notice the difference between the coach we describe in meetings and the coach who appears under pressure.

A preseason cannot make a coach perfect, and it cannot remove the emotional demands of competition. It can, however, improve our capacity. Better physical condition gives us more energy. Reflection gives us greater awareness of our habits. Philosophical clarity gives us something stable to return to when the environment becomes chaotic.

The aim is not to control everything that will happen. It is to prepare ourselves to respond more effectively when control is impossible.

Arriving Ready

When the team returns, I will not have a finished answer for exactly how we will play. That answer has to be shaped by the athletes, the staff, the qualities of the group and the experiences we share throughout the season. Co-design only means something when the outcome is allowed to change through genuine contribution.

I do, however, want to arrive ready to begin that process.

I want to be physically better prepared for the demands of the year. I want to understand the lessons of last season rather than unconsciously carrying every habit into the next one. I want to enter our meetings with a philosophy that has been questioned, refined and made clearer. I want to be capable of providing direction without shutting down the ideas of the athletes.

Most importantly, I want to accept responsibility for making that preparation happen.

Head coaches, you are in charge. You cannot wait for somebody else to design your development, create your routines or protect the time you need. The role comes with autonomy, but autonomy without responsibility quickly becomes neglect.

We expect our athletes to prepare because we know that the season will eventually expose what they have and have not done. Coaching is no different.

The team needs a preseason.

So does the coach.

I love a challenge. It’s one of the reasons I love BringIt USA’s Global Challenge Tournament, held every year in Pula, Croatia (the other is that I have met some of my closest friends at the event, our GC crew is second to none in terms of how wonderful the people are as human beings). The tournament brings together all-star style teams from the USA and pits them against European teams before the tournament enters a knockout format. The American teams are a mixture of athletes from different college or junior teams, one or two of them might know one another, but for the most part when you’re coaching these teams, you’re starting from scratch.

This year I was tasked with leading the BIP South East U20 team, put together by my good friend CJ Sherman. A two-day training camp and sightseeing trip in Berlin preceded the tournament in Croatia, usually my goal would be to get to know as much about the athletes as possible in those two days, whilst co-designing a system of play with them and my assistant coach, Madelynn Woodard, the current assistant coach at Brenau University, an NAIA school. However this year was far from usual.

I has a problem, whilst the team touched down in Berlin, I was in Portugal coaching my England U18 group, our travel schedule was also a little funky, this combined with airline schedules not aligning in my favour left me one flight option. That flight got me into Pula for the tournament on the morning of our first game. Not ideal preparation, but as I said before, I love a challenge. What follows is for me, one of the most remarkable experiences of what co-design makes possible in my volleyball coaching career thus far.

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We’ve all seen it, the scourge of AI practice planning tools taking over our social feeds. They promise a quick fix, an end to the hours labouring over the practice plan. It might seem like the easy option, something to automate whilst you crack on with other admin tasks. This thinking couldn’t be more wrong.

AI generated plans look slick, I’m sure the output would tick all of the boxes traditionally ticked in a practice. There will be a warmup, skill work and maybe some game play at the end. Your administrator that knows very little about volleyball would probably praise them as great work. But as we’ve debated time and time again when it comes to practice design. Soulless and clean is the enemy.

The research on designing great learning environments shows that clean, soulless, almost clinical environments look great to the outside eye. But rarely do these environments outdo the messy, information rich, problem solving environment. It also says coaches are performers too, just the athletes we work with. When an athlete takes a shortcut, it shows in their performance, the same will happen with us coaches. In the same way an athlete will lift weights, or dial in their nutrition, a coach needs to plan. Planning is not administrative work; planning is preparation for performance.

At the Heart of Every Session, a Problem

Before we can delve too deeply into the planning process, we have to understand what we want a practice to be. What is the reason our group is sweating it out after a long day of class or work. Some times, especially close to competition, it’ll be maintenance. However, the majority of the time, the group will be practicing to solve a problem ahead of an upcoming competition.

When we frame practice as a group attempt at solving a problem. New possibilities open up. Suddenly, the coach doesn’t need to arrive with all the answers. The possibility of co-design of solutions opens up for the athletes. Space can be created for exploration. Without that central golden thread, practice goes from being volleyball, to choreography that looks like volleyball.

When planning a session, I try to look through the following lens of questions.

• What problem are we trying to solve?

• Why is this the right problem for us to solve today?

• What are the athletes currently seeing?

• What aren’t they seeing?

• What behaviours need to emerge for the problem to be solved?

Now I have some advantages, I coach adult athletes, many of whom have a lot of experience in the game. We also have a host of video and a state of the art video suite that can be used to help diagnose the answers to the above. However, if you give any athlete the time to feel comfortable working in this way, they will surprise you. It has never been my experience that an athlete works less hard when they’re involved in the process of learning design.

Designing Learning, Not Filling Ninety Minutes

One lesson I learned the hard way when I was given the opportunity to step up levels and work former Team USA Head Coach Mick Haley, was the idea that everything in practice should have a purpose. At that time we had two practices and a scrimmage to turn a group of 12 NCAA D1 athletes who had never met one another before, into a team capable of winning a tournament that included the U21 sides from National Team programs and professional club sides in Europe. Working with Mick showed me that rather than start with the drills, session planning should start with the people involved.

We had a middle blocker, who had never before served in a competitive environment (for my non-American readers, the libero can serve in one rotation in the US). Most middles serve more balls in a game than they attack, so before we did any attacking work, we needed to make sure this athlete could serve. The outcome was solid, if unspectacular. Mostly due to the athletes ability to take on a new challenge and operate with a joy of the challenge of doing something new. Until they perfect a microchip that is wired into your brain, the AI practice planners aren’t going to be able to adjust these nuances when planning for you.

In a world where we as coaches should be exploring how to create specific affordances to help athletes process decision making. Incorporating specific representative learning design principles to protect perception-action coupling. Then we need to live in the nuance that is the different experiences of each of our athletes. The 6’3 outside hitter perceives different affordances from the 5’3 libero. Each of your attackers will have a different setter-attacker relationship with your starting setter and your back-up. Coaches design learning by surrounding themselves with these nuances, otherwise we’re just filling ninety minutes.

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Planning Is How Coaches Learn

We spoke earlier in this article about how coaches are performers to, but the arena in which we perform is different to that of our athletes. When I sat down with my England U18 coaching staff to set our priorities for the current qualification cycle, none of them spoke about competition success. The outcomes we are chasing include the development of strong minded, audacious, confident athletes.

For these outcomes to be achieved, we have to build an environment that supports their development. That environment exists at training camps, in competition and in any other team activities. When the team is together, we as coaches are in performance mode, making sure we are contributing to the journey towards the desired outcomes. Our problem solving time comes in the planning.

Every time we sit down to plan, we follow a similar pattern. As the Head Coach, I set the direction I want us to work towards. Usually it starts with a problem we want to solve, a recent example was how we can create more chaos for the opposition with our serve. I diagnose, prioritise and then come up with my preferred solution. Then one of my assistant coaches, a former professional setter and libero gives her perspective. She is the only person on our staff to have played professional volleyball. So her perspective is the most closely aligned to that of our athletes. Where with my university program, I would invite the athletes in to help with the co-design, here it is Maddie’s role to take that on.

Then you have Freddie. Freddie is the other assistant coach on the staff. A Head Coach of a rival university program, Freddie plays a pivotal role in our planning process, he exposes the holes in what we want to do. This begins by Freddie asking probing questions, about affordances, the problems the athletes will solve. Ranking where the exercises we are setting the group land on our scoring system for representativeness. Freddie is going to lead the delivery of the session, which positions him perfectly in this role.

I’ve learnt more about session design from going through this process twice in the last 6 months as I did in five years of reading books and shadowing others. Nothing beats trying and failing, the planning phase is the best time for coaches to do it.

The Cost of Outsourcing Your Thinking

Now of course, not every coach has the luxury of it being their full time job. Even fewer have the luxury of being able to call on a former professional athlete and current university Head Coach on their staff. It can be very tempting, perhaps even needed to outsource parts of the role to AI. However, when you outsource your practice planning process.

You aren’t just outsourcing planning. You’re outsourcing your development.

You’re outsourcing the hours of trial and error when attempting to find the right constraint to build the picture you want your athletes to see. You’re outsourcing the building of your coaching identity.

Practice planning is an art, not a science and just like an artist, as a coach you need time and experience to hone your style. Picasso and Da Vinci are both considered creators of great works of art, but you wouldn’t confuse one for the other and none of us have seen the thousands of failed attempts either made on their journey to the top.

Learning to Love the Invisible Hours

The best performers in the world are made in the invisible hours. Ronaldinho in the small sided futsal games in the favelas; Jonny Wilkinson in the hours of solitary constrained goal-kicking practice; Lady Gaga in the touring routes of the Southern States of the US. Their greatness is honed in the work that no-one notices. Where they have the space to innovate and really connect with their craft. The golden thread of top performers is that they live for the invisible hours, they’re when they feel alive.

My number one piece of advice to anyone wanting to hone their craft is to play it slow. Avoid the shortcuts, learn to love the invisible hours.

Planning is the Job

Great coaches are not separated by the quality of the plans they write. They are separated by the quality of the thinking that produced them. The session is simply the performance. The planning was the rehearsal.

And if coaching is a craft, then planning isn’t a task to complete before the real work begins. It isn’t something to outsources to an AI agent. It’s the lifeblood of what we do. It’s how environments are built and maintained. If you’re chasing efficiency, do it in areas where it won’t compromise your output, where it won’t put the experience of your athletes at risk.

A performer who thinks they can just turn up and be great is naive, one that tries to outsource the preparation needed will be exposed. The ones that succeed learn to love the invisible hours, for coaches, those are when we plan.

Planning is the job.

Some of the most important coaching lessons don’t come from your own training sessions or matches. They arrive unexpectedly, when you’re simply watching from the side lines,

Last week I was in Portugal with the England Under-18 squad, competing in an international tournament. Before one of our matches, we found ourselves watching an Under-15 game. It was a closely contested match, the type where every rally seemed to carry a little more weight than the last. Eventually it came down to match point. One serve would keep the team alive. One mistake would end the game.

A young athlete walked confidently towards the service line before her coach stopped her. Standing inches from the player’s face, she told her, emphatically, that she could not miss the serve.

In that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder what was happening inside the athlete’s mind. Moments earlier, she was probably thinking about where she wanted to serve, the tendencies of the opposition’s passers or the routine she had practised countless times. Suddenly, all of that had disappeared. Her attention had narrowed to a single thought.

Don’t miss.

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Welcome to a different kind of post, one that I’ll be writing sporadically throughout the year to share updates on what we’re working on and what it’s like travelling with and coaching the England U18 Women’s National Team.

These articles will have a slightly different tone from some of the other writing on this page. They’ll be a little more direct and a little more reflective, but they’ll also include far more real-life examples from inside our programme. Today’s article centres around our plans for the upcoming Cascais VolleyCup, a tournament we travel to in around 24 hours from the time of writing, but one that will already be underway by the time this article is published.

Using Tournaments for Development

The next major engagement for this group will be qualification for the 2028 CEV U18 European Championships. At the time of writing, our qualifier is scheduled for October 2027, assuming the much-rumoured changes to the qualification structure don’t materialise before then.

As a coaching staff, we’ve mapped out a broad plan of training camps and tournaments leading into that qualification event. Some environments will deliberately sit below the group’s current challenge point, allowing confidence and understanding to grow. Others will stretch the athletes well beyond where they currently believe they belong. Both are important. Development is rarely linear and certainly isn’t built by constantly sitting at one level of difficulty.

Ultimately, if we want to compete with the strongest nations in Europe in fifteen months’ time, our athletes have to begin believing they can play at that level long before they actually arrive there. That belief isn’t manufactured through motivational speeches. It grows through repeated exposure to environments that ask difficult questions whilst still providing enough support for athletes to find meaningful answers. In many ways, that journey begins this week in Cascais.

Priority One is Building a Psychologically Safe Competition Environment

As we head to Portugal, our primary objective has very little to do with winning volleyball matches. Instead, we’re trying to establish a competition environment where athletes feel safe enough to take risks, express themselves and ultimately perform closer to their potential.

I’m fortunate on this trip to be working alongside our Team Manager, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and brings a depth of expertise that has already had a significant influence on our planning. Her perspective has challenged us to think carefully about how we create an environment that supports performance without becoming overbearing, ensuring the systems we put in place reduce unnecessary pressure rather than add to it.

Together we’ve tried to strike a balance between providing enough structure to give the athletes confidence whilst deliberately leaving enough space for them to make decisions, solve problems and ultimately own their own performances. Psychological safety doesn’t emerge from removing challenge. It comes from knowing that challenge is accompanied by support, reflection and trust, and that’s exactly the environment we’re trying to establish from day one.

Throughout the tournament we’ll be using sports psychologist Dan Abrahams’ framework of Attention, Intention and Intensity. Rather than asking athletes to judge themselves on whether they scored enough points or made enough perfect plays, we’ll ask them to reflect on three things they can always influence.

Where was your attention?

What was your intention?

How much intensity did you bring?

Importantly, these questions are entirely self-assessed. There isn’t a coach standing over an athlete awarding marks out of ten. The athlete owns the reflection. That ownership matters because it builds self-efficacy. It reinforces the idea that high performance isn’t something that happens to you because of external circumstances, but something you actively contribute to regardless of the scoreboard.

We also intend to spend significant time developing behaviours away from the court. International tournaments involve far more than the two hours spent competing each day. Recovery, sleep, nutrition, conversations at meals, travelling together and simply learning how to exist as a high-performing group all contribute to performance when the whistle blows.

Perhaps most importantly, we want the athletes to have permission to be themselves.

Young athletes often arrive at their first international tournament believing professionalism means becoming serious all the time. They worry about saying the wrong thing, laughing too much or somehow behaving in a way that doesn’t look like an international player. In reality, the opposite is often true. Teams perform best when people feel comfortable enough to show their personalities, build genuine relationships and enjoy the experience together. Reducing unnecessary psychological load leaves more cognitive space available for the things that actually matter once the ball is in play.

Debutants Give us an Opportunity to Build

Ten of the twelve athletes travelling to Cascais have never represented England in international competition. That presents a remarkable opportunity.

Representing your country is one of the highest honours our sport can offer. It naturally brings two emotions that often sit side by side: pride and nervousness. Neither is a problem. In fact, I’d probably be concerned if neither existed. The challenge is helping athletes understand those feelings rather than attempting to eliminate them.

For many of these players, this tournament will become the reference point they carry into every England environment that follows. The habits they build now, the conversations they have with teammates, the routines they establish before matches and the way they respond when things inevitably become difficult will all become part of what “being an England player” means to them.

That makes this week about far more than volleyball.

Activation, Meditation and Gratitude

Every morning we’ll begin with a simple routine centred around activation, meditation and gratitude. On paper, these three activities appear unrelated. In reality, they work together remarkably well.

Activation prepares the body for the day ahead. It signals that we’re moving into a performance environment and helps athletes transition physically and mentally from rest into readiness. Rather than stumbling into breakfast half-awake before eventually arriving in the sports hall, we want the athletes to begin each day with purpose.

Meditation provides a different kind of preparation. International tournaments are noisy environments. There are unfamiliar venues, different languages, changing schedules and the emotional highs and lows that naturally accompany competition. Spending even a short period learning to settle attention gives athletes a valuable tool they can use throughout the week whenever things begin to feel overwhelming.

Finally comes gratitude. Elite sport often encourages us to constantly chase the next objective. The next selection. The next win. The next performance. Gratitude interrupts that cycle for a few moments each day. It reminds everyone involved that representing your country, travelling across Europe with teammates and competing against international opposition is a privilege rather than a burden.

Interestingly, all three routines reinforce Abrahams’ three pillars. Activation helps create the physical energy required for intensity. Meditation strengthens attention by practising where the mind is directed. Gratitude shapes intention, reminding athletes why they’re here and who they’re trying to become rather than simply what they’re trying to achieve.

They’re simple habits, but we hope they’ll become powerful ones.

There’s a Reason we Haven’t Talked About Passing

If you’ve reached this point expecting discussions about defensive systems, serving tactics or attacking patterns, you may have noticed something missing.

That omission is entirely deliberate.

Of course we’re working on volleyball. We have technical priorities, tactical ideas and clear action-based objectives for the tournament. We also have relationship-based goals around communication, trust and how we function as a team under pressure. Those things matter enormously, and they’ll form a significant part of our work over the coming months.

But right now, they aren’t the foundation.

The first job of an international programme isn’t to create technically perfect volleyball players. It’s to create an environment where talented young athletes are willing to learn, willing to compete and willing to become more than they currently believe they can be. If we get that right, the volleyball has somewhere to grow.

We’ll dive into the on-court side of our work later this summer. We’ll explore the action-based outcomes we’re chasing, the relationships we’re trying to strengthen between players and the tactical ideas beginning to emerge as this group develops. Those conversations matter, and they deserve the space to be explored properly.

For now, though, the priority is much simpler. Before we talk about how we dig, how we serve or how we attack, we want to establish how we think, how we connect and how we compete together. Everything else we build over the next fifteen months will rest on that foundation.

The environment comes first.

Then the volleyball.

Every coach has lived through it.

The referee misses a touch. The opposition catches the tape with three serves in a row. Your best attacker rolls an ankle in the warm-up. The crowd gets louder. Momentum swings. Suddenly the match feels like it is happening to you rather than because of you.

When that happens, most teams search for control in the wrong places. They become obsessed with outcomes they cannot influence, decisions that have already been made or moments that have already passed. Energy leaks away arguing with referees, replaying mistakes or worrying about the scoreboard. Performance follows soon after.

This season with the Essex Rebels women, we tried something different.

Rather than chasing perfect volleyball, we chased three controllable behaviours. Before matches, during timeouts and between sets, we repeatedly returned to the same three words.

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There is a phrase that has followed me around for years.

I can’t remember exactly when I first heard it, or even what we were talking about at the time. What I do remember is that it came from a long-time friend of mine who, almost in passing, said that coaches should be like magpies.

The image stayed with me. Not because i…

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Every pre-season begins with good intentions.

Coaches gather their athletes together, stand in front of a projector, unveil the values for the coming year and explain what kind of team everyone is going to become. The words are almost always familiar. Commitment. Respect. Accountability. Excellence. The athletes nod, perhaps contribute a few thoughts, and then training begins. By October the slide deck has disappeared into somebody’s downloads folder and those carefully chosen values have become little more than decorations on a wall.

I have done versions of this myself.

Like many coaches, I believed that creating culture meant defining it clearly enough that everyone else would simply buy in. The better I explained my expectations, the stronger our environment would become. Looking back, I am not convinced that was ever true.

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I hated my favourite author for nearly ten years.

At least, I thought I did.

Like thousands of students in England, I studied Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck for an English Literature exam during high school. In class, we dissected every chapter, analysed every symbol and searched every paragraph for the ‘right’ answer. I passed the exam. Throughout the…

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I saw a post in a coaching Facebook group that regaled one of the most persistent myths surrounding ecological dynamics. That the coach simply stands back and lets the athletes work everything out for themselves. Roll the balls onto the court, set up a game, stay quiet and learning will magically emerge. It is a criticism that is repeated so often it has almost become accepted as fact, even by coaches who have never spent any meaningful time exploring the approach.

It is also completely wrong.

The ecological coach is not less active than a traditional coach. If anything, they have exchanged one set of responsibilities for another. The hours are no shorter, the thinking is no easier and the attention demanded throughout practice is arguably even greater. The difference is not how much the coach works, but where that work is directed.

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Confidence has become one of the most misunderstood ideas in coaching. It is discussed constantly, pursued relentlessly, and yet often approached in ways that make it less likely to emerge. When an athlete struggles, the diagnosis is usually immediate. They need confidence. When a player hesitates in a key moment, we assume conf…

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One of the most common sights in volleyball is a coach who is working incredibly hard.

They are organising every drill, providing constant feedback, correcting every technical mistake, managing the tempo of practice, solving every problem that appears, and ensuring everything runs exactly as planned. From the outside, it often looks like excellent coaching. The session is organised, athletes are busy, mistakes are corrected quickly, and very little is left to chance.

The problem is that control and learning are not the same thing.

In fact, some of the most controlled environments produce some of the least adaptable athletes.

Coaches often say they want players who can solve problems independently. They want setters who can read the game, passers who can adjust to difficult serves, and attackers who can find solutions against unfamiliar defensive systems. Yet many training environments are built in a way that actively discourages those qualities from emerging. Athletes become extremely good at following instructions, but they never truly learn how to make decisions for themselves.

The result is a player who looks confident when the coach is standing beside them but becomes uncertain the moment the game asks a question they have not already been given the answer to.

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Most coaches spend their careers preparing for the wrong challenge.

We attend coaching courses. We watch international matches. We debate systems. We spend hours discussing offensive structures, defensive responsibilities and training methodologies. We obsess over technical detail and tactical nuance because that’s what we think coaching is.

Then one day …

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Heading into the 2026 Volleyball Nations League, many expected teams to zig. The trend towards taller, offence-first outside hitters suggested an even greater emphasis on attacking power. The teams that embraced that trend, however, quickly discovered that their opponents already had a counter ready.

Week 1 has produced some fascinating tactical battles around one key question. If your team has two huge pin attackers, how are opponents going to stop them? Increasingly, the answer has been another question:

How are you going to deal with us serving short?

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I had a conversation recently with an NCAA Division II coach that stayed with me for a while afterwards.

Not because we disagreed.

Actually, the opposite.

We were incredibly aligned in how we viewed people, athletes, and coaching itself. The conversation was never about whether athletes deserved respect, autonomy, or ownership. We …

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It’s officially the international season in the volleyball world.

The European League, the second tier for European nations outside the Volleyball Nations League, opened last weekend. The women’s VNL follows almost immediately, tipping off Wednesday (late Tuesday night for US viewers).

The club season wrapped with the Champions League Final 4 and domestic playoffs delivering more than just trophies. There were tactical shifts, selection gambles, and a clear signal from the top nations: nobody is standing still.

With just two years until the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, the race to define identity has already started.

Here’s what I’ll be watching this summer.

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