Table Of ContentThinking
Volleyball
Mike Hebert
Human Kinetics
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hebert, Mike, 1944-
Thinking volleyball / Mike Hebert.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. Volleyball. I. Title.
GV1015.3H43 2013
796.325--dc23
2013023996
ISBN-10: 1-4504-4262-5 (print)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4504-4262-6 (print)
Copyright © 2014 by Mike Hebert
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I dedicate this book to all of the athletes who played
for me. This includes club, college, and U.S. teams. You
are the young people who motivated me to stay with it. I
extend my thanks to every one of you. It was a great run!
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Key to Diagrams xii
Chapter 1 Learning and Decision
Making 1
Chapter 2 Structuring and Running
the Program 25
Chapter 3 Embracing a Playing
Style 59
Chapter 4 Honing Vital Skills 79
Chapter 5 Thinking About Team
Defense 97
iv
Chapter 6 Drawing a Blueprint
for Offense 121
Chapter 7 Promoting a Positive
Gym Culture 143
Chapter 8 Strengthening Team
Trust 173
Chapter 9 Coaching the Match 203
Chapter 10 Thinking Outside
the Box 231
Index 255
About the Author 265
v
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aCknowledgments
Aside from the editing staff at Human Kinetics, only a few people read pas-
sages from this book before publication. I asked former U.S. national team
coach and current University of Minnesota head coach Hugh McCutcheon
and current U.S. women’s head coach Karch Kiraly to give it a test run. I
also asked my good friend Jay Van Vark and my longtime mentor Dennis
(Aame) Amundson to do the same. And finally, I leaned heavily on my wife,
Sherry. Many, many times I would hand her a stack of manuscript pages
and beg her to tell me if any of it made any sense. She always presented
a meaningful response, delivered while cooking dinner, feeding the cats,
tending to her gardens, or perhaps while lost in a book of her own. Thank
you, Sherry, for your love and patience.
I’d like to add a shout-out to all the guys on the first tee at San Diego’s
Coronado Golf Course for tolerating my lack of game and making me feel
like San Diego is now my home. And let me hear an amen for my beautiful
daughters, Becky and Hillary, and my grandsons, Mateo (who at age three
could identify almost any airplane that ever flew and is planning to be an
astronaut by the time he starts kindergarten), Farris (who has appeared as
Jimi Hendrix for the past two Halloweens and badly wants to be a motorcycle
daredevil), and Aliya (who arrived already poised to create her own future).
vii
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IntroduCtIon
I think I first questioned the status quo in the early 1950s when I was in
third grade at St. Bernardine’s School in San Bernardino, California. My
hands were in ready position, and I was about to take a swing at Panfilo
Rubio, the younger brother of one of my best friends, Jose Rubio. We were
arguing about something and decided to square off against each other out-
side on the school handball court. All the action fights took place on the
handball court, usually in front of big crowds. The “sissy” fights were in
the cafeteria courtyard.
I was a certified nerd. I had glasses, braces, and a lunchbox (with ther-
mos). In my front shirt pocket, I carried a book of bus tickets to get to and
from school. I also went to clarinet lessons on Saturday mornings. What
was I doing at the handball court gearing up for a schoolyard fight?
Out of the corner of my eye I was watching for one of the sisters (as in
Sister Marie; we didn’t call them nuns at St. Bernardine’s) to swoop in and
break up the fight before it even started. This was exactly how she had saved
my life a few weeks earlier when I somehow got in Danny Winker’s way
while he was running the bases during a kickball game at recess. He was the
toughest guy in school, and I knew it was only a matter of a few seconds
before I was going to get my lights punched out. I had raised my hands to
guard my face as Danny ran at me. But just as he was about to unload his
notorious straight right hand upon my nose, Sister Marie grabbed him by
his hair and pulled him into her classroom. He spent the rest of the day
sitting in the principal’s office, growling at everyone who walked by with
his standard greeting, “Who are you lookin’ at?”
This earlier episode was justice in its purist form, I thought. I hadn’t done
anything wrong. Sister Marie showed up just in time to prevent Winker
from rearranging my face. And on top of all that, he got suspended for three
days. I was beginning to believe that when things threatened to go against
me, all I had to do was wait for Sister Marie to appear and put things in
order. This is what I had taught myself to expect. She was the personifica-
tion of justice at St. Bernardine’s. There was no reason for me to doubt that
anything was about to change. I trusted the status quo.
Fast-forward to the scene at the handball court. At the very moment I
drew my fist back to smack Rubio, I fully expected Sister Marie to appear
and stop the fight. But she was a no-show; I was on my own. Rubio blasted
me with a left hook that came out of nowhere, and I was down. From then
on it was a flurry of fists from Rubio and a weak attempt by me to mount
a defensive strategy. The crowd started booing and, one by one, began
drifting away.
ix
x Introduction
It was a crushing defeat for little Michael Hebert. My glasses were broken.
My shirt was torn. Never mind that the street-savvy Latino kids had added
one more notch to their total while the hopelessly nerd-ridden white kids
had to suffer another humiliating loss. I could handle all of that. But what
really ate at me was that I had allowed myself to trust the system. I really
believed that Sister Marie would always be there to fix things.
My naiveté was exceeded only by my anger. I could not believe that I
had never questioned the legitimacy of my contrived status quo. It was
then and there that I promised that I would never let that happen to me
again. I would ask questions. I would carry with me a healthy skepticism
wherever I went. I would rely on Sister Marie (and all of the future Sister
Maries that would make an appearance in my life) only if I had researched
and evaluated the situation with a careful eye.
I stuck to that promise. I made a series of decisions that surely left friends
trying to figure out where I was going in life and why. I turned down a
college basketball scholarship to an eastern school and instead I enrolled
at BYU for a year even though I wasn’t a Mormon. Next, I transferred to
UCSB, joined a fraternity and, in the same year, was both a varsity athlete
(volleyball) and a cheerleader (don’t ask). After college I chose the Peace
Corps over the military. While in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, I taught my
cook–steward how to veer from the local culinary orthodoxy by showing
him how make tacos and burritos. Upon my return to the states, I married
an African-American woman and earned a PhD in philosophy of education
from Indiana University where I participated in an assortment of leftist
causes. After a few frustrating years, I left teaching to pursue a career as a
volleyball coach. At every stage of this journey, I asked the same questions.
Is this the right thing to do? Have I looked at the issue from all sides?
By the time I launched my coaching career at the University of Pittsburgh,
I was profoundly accustomed to questioning the status quo. It had grown
into a full-fledged instinct. It seemed that I always had to know what I was
getting into. It had become a way of life, for better or worse.
This book picks up my story in 1976, describing how I learned to apply
the principles of critical thinking to each of the decisions that my new job
was going to hurl at me. It is not a book that attempts to teach you how to
pass, set, and hit. There are several books on the market that do this very
well. Instead, this book will discuss ways to think about how to teach people
to pass, set, and hit. There is a difference, as you will see.
Chapter 1 asks the often-overlooked question “How does one find out
what to coach and how to coach it?” Chapter 2 suggests ways in which
a program can be erected and maintained on that foundation. These two
phases of development remind me of the sign I looked at every day in high
school as I entered the building: “As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined.”
As a high school student, I never knew what that meant, but now, as a
coach, it seems to express the very core of what I was then after.
