Coach Chijo Podcast

Sometimes you have to get out of the gym. After running five volleyball clinics in three days in Alaska, Coach Chijo heads into the Alaskan wilderness for a completely different kind of adventure. The trip includes hours in four-wheel-drive side-by-sides, glacier melt rivers, incredible scenery, and eventually a glacier. Then comes the big question: Is Coach Chijo actually going to jump into the freezing glacier water? This episode is a reminder for volleyball players and coaches to occasiona...

Why is high school volleyball different in Texas? Coach Chijo sits down with Libby Pacheco from the Texas High School Coaches Association while attending the association's massive coaching convention in Houston. Libby explains why Texas takes high school athletics so seriously and how having coaches working on campus changes the relationship between coaches and athletes. They dive into Texas volleyball culture, why the level of competition is so high, the relationship between high school and ...

How do you reduce drama on a volleyball team? This is Part 2 of my conversation with Coach Blase. In Part 1, The Playing Time Problem, we talked about fairness, equality, winning, development, and why playing time creates so much conflict between coaches, players, and parents. I ended that episode by asking Coach Blase what advice he would give young coaches struggling to handle playing-time issues. This episode begins with his answer. And that answer leads us into a much bigger discussion ab...

Playing time. Few topics create more tension between coaches, players, and parents. In this episode, Coach Blase and I tackle one of the most difficult questions in youth volleyball: What does fair playing time actually mean? Coach Blase shares the story of a parent who used a stopwatch to compare her daughter's time on the court with another player's and even counted how many times each athlete touched the ball. That leads us into a much bigger conversation about equal vs. fair, winning vs. ...

Coach Mehdi played volleyball for 25 years in Iran, including years in the Iranian national-team system. Now he's coaching in the United States and passing everything he learned on to the next generation, including his own daughter, Asal. In this episode of the Coach Chijo Podcast, Mehdi takes us inside the life of an elite volleyball player. He talks about training three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, living in national-team camps, playing professionally, traveling in...