Coach Chijo Podcast

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...

What can an experienced coach learn from someone in their first year coaching high school volleyball? Quite a lot. Coach Chijo met Coach Cameron Humble at the Texas High School Coaches Association Convention in Houston. After learning that she had just completed her first season as the head volleyball coach at Orangefield High School, he wanted to know how she approached the job. Coach Humble shares how she worked to change the culture of her program by giving players ownership, expecting upp...

Stella is heading into her freshman year and has a lot of questions about what high school volleyball is really going to be like. So she asks Coach Vicky and Riley. How do you handle walking into a gym with older players? How confident should a freshman be? What should you do at tryouts? What happens if you don't make the team you wanted? And how do you show coaches that you're coachable? Coach Vicky and Riley give Stella advice from their own experiences, including why communication matters,...