I feel like nesting...

My roommates think I'm a perv. Or a stalker. When we first moved in, they helped me haul up more than two crates worth of VHS tapes.

I have tapes. Lots and lots of tapes. As of yesterday, 188 to be exact. Not including movies. And that pilates series I ordered that night I got really drunk. Now that I know what's on a good number of them, it could be a little frightening for people that don't know me.

I swear it's not porn. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not porn. I'm not that interesting.

Honest.

[3/10/06 Edit: The following is my full-blown volleyball nerd breakin on out.]

Tapes 1-30 are all volleyball games. All together, I think I have something to close to 200 matches. I'm a volleyball nerd. I've admitted as much for a long time. I know I've scared more than a few professional volleyball people with how much I can remember. Like the starting lineups of each team in every D-1 women's national championship match since 1988.

Then again, when I was in 3rd grade I could recite the introductions from Miss Alabama to Miss Hawaii from the Miss America Parade of States. With proper inflection and regional accent. That was the year Miss Texas won with a cheesy baby blue poofy prom dress.

I probably should have kept that one to myself.

But really now. I just found the 1988 National Championship match between Hawaii and Texas. The one where Martina Cincerova pretty much just set Teee Williams and Carolyn Taetafa. Anna Vorweck (Fer-verk), Karrie Trieschman and Mary Robins were pretty much just observers.

In that match, Teee Williams showed that very few other American women had what it took to go from the American college game to the international game. I believe she had something like 25 kills in the 3 game loss, .400 hitting percentage and most of the team's digs and blocks. In '88 that was absolutely unheard of, especially in a national championship game. Nobody else was hitting the ball so high over the block and so hard that the opposing defense didn't even make a move for the ball. Since then, only 4 other players have come close to, but not equaled, that performance: Kerri Walsh ('96), Lauren Cacciamani ('98), Logan Tom ('01) and Ogonna Nnamani ('04). Others had spurts of greatness: Tara Cross ('89), Natalie Williams ('91), Danielle Scott ('91, '92, '93), Kristin Folkl ('94), Terri Zemaitis ('97), Cacciamani ('99), Sherisa Livingston ('00), Tayyiba Haneef ('01) and Keao Burdine ('02, '03).

[Of course, none of those compare to watching the Unified Team's Irina Smirnova getting 56 kills in 130 attempts in ONE match or 16 year old Eugenia Artamanova's 14 kills, hitting almost .900 while only playing 3 rotations per game in the same match against the U.S. in Barcelona Olympic pool play.]

But, in that 88 match, Williams was the most dominant player in a national championship of all time. And, she barely said a word.

As much as I learned to hate Texas (and even more so when my team lost to them in another national championship), they really shaped how I see the sport. I do have to admit that Texas team and the matches they played against UCLA and Hawaii, showed me what it looked and felt like to play with nothing to lose. The underdogs that nobody gives a second thought to before, during or after the match. The kind of team that, after a match, leaves their opponent wondering, "Did we just lose? How the hell did that happen?"

Maybe it's not necessarily an underdog mentality. There are times when I'm watching a match -- or even a practice or an open gym or a tryout -- when I see that one player who has a certain aura about them. Most often, it's that quiet player who isn't afraid to talk or yell or push someone out of the way. It's the player who's found a way to channel all of their emotion and grit into something that looks calm. Except when you look in their eyes. It's that player who plays like they have something to prove to him/herself. It's the player that has a hard time taking a compliment because, she/he thinks, it was exactly what they were supposed to do. It's the player whose baseline is 90%, but can push it to 110% because they just couldn't do anything less.

Which brings it back to that '88 match.

There was a quiet, fiery and almost-but-not-quite angry demeanor about setter Sue Schelfout. And yet she was still very much in control of every part of that match in a way that can only be described as "you know it when you see it." I remember my dad telling me, in his wisened coach-like way, "That is what a true leader looks like. Doesn't matter the sport, that's what it feels like."

Since '88, I've only seen a handfull of setters like Shelfout in that championship match: China's Kun Feng, Hawaii's Robyn Ah Mow, UCLA's Stein Metzger, Lewis' Jose Martins, Pacific's Melanie Beckenhauer, Ohio State's Laura Davis, Long Beach's Joy McKienzie and Keri Nishimoto, Michigan State's Courtney DeBolt and Cuba's Marlenis Costa and Lilia Izquierdo. Those 12 setters are my benchmarks. None of them are flashy, except maybe Metzger and Davis, but they all have this intangible (something) that comes across just by watching them.

I've got a lot of volleyball matches, and the dorkhood that goes along with having watched all of them over and over again, because I was never really taught how to play the game. Even as early as 7th grade, the school's coaches weren't there to teach a player how to play. You were already supposed to know how. Then again, I guess Punahou is a different kind of volleyball program.

I tried out for my 7th grade with 50 other 7-9th graders. I got cut. First. No really. First. The coaches were like, "Brent. Thanks. Uhhh, good luck with something else." Then again, thinking about the people on those two intermediate teams, it's not surprising. That year, my dad took me to the state championship game between Punahou and Kamehameha. Punahou's starters were, I believe: Kevin Wong, Stein Metzger, Sean Scott, Mike Lambert and three other guys who ended up being D1 All-Americans. On the bench, were four future D1 All-Americans.

In the 8th grade I tried out again and, somehow, made it. Well, actually, the coach pulled me aside after the first practice and told me that I was 13th of 13 players on the team and that if I wanted to pursue other interests, he wouldn't hold it against me. I ended up staying with the team. And starting. Still pretty humbling.

In the second week of practices, our coach took us to watch a varsity practice which pretty much freaked my shit out. For the first twenty minutes, the balls stayed in the carts and the team did a "shadow pepper." I watched Stein Metzger and Mike Lambert the entire time. About two minutes into it, Lambert dove to his left to get a ball Metzger had "hit" to some spot. Stein went on a full-on basketball-court-length sprint over to where we were sitting and watching. He yelled "MOVE! Get the fuck out of the way!" as he came barrelling at us. He dove and slid about ten feet until he crashed into the wall we had been sitting against. Then, he got up and full-on sprinted back where Lambert had dove and was "watching" the ball go to the ceiling. Twenty minutes later, everyone was at a full-on-have-to-change-shirts-cuz-it's-too-dangerous sweat. Then the coach unbagged the balls. If I was going to play volleyball for Punahou I was gonna have to get a lot better really fast.

I watched as many televised games as I could and just copied what those players did. Every once in a while, my dad would say, "she's good" or "he's good." And, I would watch that player do whatever they did well, pause the tape, go through frame by frame, and then copy it.

I used to back my dad's car out of our driveway and take my dingy little outdoor volleyball and try to copy the way Lyman Lacro set or Teee Williams passed or Cheri Boyer served. On more than a few occasions, the police would show up. Apparently my senile old neighbor would call the cops because he was old and senile and needed something to bitch about. The police would show up and, after a few minutes, walk over and ask me how it was going. "Five more minutes, okay? But, it looks like your serve is getting better. When you start jump serving, your dad is gonna have to build a bigger garage." I would agree, thank them and head back inside.

The thing I realize now is that I wasn't just learning how to play the game. I was learning how to coach. Or, more accurately, how to act like a coach. There were coaches I loved to watch. Dave Shoji, John Dunning, Brian Gimillaro, Andy Banachowski, Mike Hebert, Don Shaw and Lisa Love. Al Scates, Carl McGowan and Marv Dunphy. And, more recently, Russ Rose, Jim Stone, Jim McLaughlin and Christy Johnson.

I remember so clearly the night my dad took me to a men's game in Klum Gym to watch Mike Wilton's first match as head coach. They lost. Bad. But, after the match, my dad walked over to Coach Wilton. I followed. Dad shook Coach Wilton's hand and asked, "How much longer?" I didn't understand. Coach Wilton smiled, looked my dad in the eye and said, "I really don't know." My dad smiled. Coach Wilton smiled. I wondered what the fuck was going on.

Back in the car, I asked dad what it all meant.

"Did you see the look in his eye?" he asked.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You can tell by the look in his eyes. It's like fire. He doesn't show it because that's not what a coach is supposed to do. But, you can see it. He's into the match so much. Into what the players are doing. Into what's happening. The way they're playing. How hard they're working. And you can just tell by looking at him that he's so invested in all of it. He's going to get them all to play like winners because they'll want to follow him there."

Three years later, they were in the Final Four. Four years later, they were in the National Championship match. My dad called to tell me, "I told you so." I laughed. Then reminded him that I told him to bet that Michigan State would beat Hawaii in '95. He laughed.

My dad taught me to watch coaches during matches. You figure out a lot about their teams. There are some teams that have a hard time adjusting to situations they're not used to -- usually their coaches are up off the bench and giving advice after every play. There are some teams that always win the broken plays -- those coaches are usually the ones that sit back and watch carefully. it's not always true, and there're a lot more examples, but it kind of pans out in the end.

Every once in a while, the camera and microphone people will catch some snippet of a coach's speech during a time out. It's always been interesting to hear what they say. Some are all about effort and emotion: "Come on ladies, the game is in your hands." Some are all about systems and responsibilities: "Our transition game is slowing down too much. Let's really focus on where you're supposed to be." Some are who-the-hell-knows-where: "We really need to get that touch on the block. Come on 5'6 girl, Bibi Candelas is killing us out there." Or some, and I'm not naming names at all are...well...: "Okay, it's 28-14. But don't look at the scoreboard, let's get some momentum." No really. I heard that once. About starting laughing, I did.

So, even though I have no idea what they're actually doing or thinking, I have copied a few coaches from what I've seen of them.

I have NO FREAKING clue what or how Russ Rose or Al Scates keeps in those damn notebooks, but I have found my own stat tracking quite useful. Plus, it keeps my ass in the seat and away from telling my players things they already know and would feel annoyed or patronized if I actually said to them during a match.

I don't actually know what Russ Rose or Jim Stone or Mike Hebert is saying when they pull one, just one, player aside. But I've learned why it can be necessary. Sometimes one player is off about a certain thing and doesn't need it pointed out to the whole team. And I've learned why it's important for that player to walk away either smiling/chuckling or feeling really confident.

I wonder what was going through Chen Zhonghe's mind when he had that goofy grin on his face watching his Chinese team. I remember seeing that same smile on Bond Shymansky's face when his Georgia Tech team was playing Kim Willoughby, I mean Hawaii, in the regional finals in Honolulu. I guess there are times when players do something that seems so unlike their norm that a coach has to laugh it off. Brain fart, I guess. No harm, no foul. It happens. But the thing I've noticed is that I can only find the humor in a player's brain fart on the court when I -- as a coach -- know that the team is so well-prepared and well-practiced that one error really doesn't make a difference.

I have no idea what Russia's Nikolai Karpol or Cuba's Eugenio George or Brazil's Bernadino are saying. Or, except for George, what they're yelling. Screaming even.

I once read that Russia's Karpol told a reporter that in a gold medal Olympic final ('88, I believe, though I might be wrong) he spent an entire timeout yelling at his star, Irina Smirnova, something like: "After this match, you will be known as a failure and a national disgrace. I will personally tell your mother and grandmother that your pathetic performance was the only reason we did not bring home to the Soviet Union a gold medal and you will live with that shame for the rest of your life." And, hell if Smirnova didn't single handedly win the next three games and the gold medal. Now, I'd never do that or say that or even think that. First off, I've yet to coach a team or a player or in a situation where that may even seem possible to think. Second, as unlikely as it is to ever happen, not even an Olympic medal is worth that much. Third, I could never say that to a woman. It's not sexist, it's just completely defeatist and unnecessary. I have, however, said (not yelled) something close to that to a male player. And, I'll never do it again. Ever.

I love watching Brazil's Coach Bernadino. In the '04 Olympics, he was right up on the sideline in every match and basically threw a tantrum every time one of his players did something wrong. Again, I'd never do that. I've got too much else to worry about than getting caught up in every single contact or every individual rally. I like to think about big picture stuff: Are we competing as best as we can? What are the weaknesses in our system that nobody has thought of yet? What is our mental state? But, I guess it's my dad's voice I hear when I watch Bernadino. It's all in the eyes.

Cuba's ex-coach George gave me a totally different feeling. Similar to Karpol's without the red-faced hysterical yelling. Once, I watched on television as he sat calmly in his chair and called out, "Marleny..." raised his hands and narrowed his eyes. And then crossed his arms again. The Cuban setter, Costa had hit into the block, gotten tooled several times and trapped a couple of sets. With just a single look and a name, he showed the power of a coach's expectations. Set an achievable goal (play well) and expect the players to play at that level. There isn't really a need to go on and on about specifics or motivation. Just a reminder of the expectation that the players completely understand.

But, it wasn't until I watched Lang Ping coach the Chinese women in several Grand Prix matches before the Olympics, that I finally understood something I had read in Mike Hebert's book. During China's match against Cuba, L.P. sat in her chair and watched her team very carefully. She didn't say much, except the occasional snippet that obviously was her telling her young outside hitters what to look for when hitting against the huge Cuban block. Somewhere near Cuba's match point, a free ball came over the net and four Chinese players let it drop between them. As less-experienced players do when they make a mistake at a really bad time, they were visibly shaken. L.P. sat quietly in her chair and watched her players. They lost the next point and the match and she stood up, grabbed her folder and smiled as Coach George came over to shake her hand. "Good match," she said, smiling and shaking with both hands.

I had read something similar in Mike Hebert's book about the process of building the programs at Pittsburgh, New Mexico, Illinois and (although long after the book's writing) Minnesota. He said that sometimes a team or specific players need to learn for themselves what winning is. Especially teams and players that aren't used to winning or success. In my first few coaching gigs, I was more than fortunate to coach teams with very expereinced and successful players. The next few taught me what it's like to be on the other end. There were times in those next few years that I couldn't understand why players wouldn't do the simple things they normally do to win a tournament or a championship, instead of just being a "participant." I would scrutinize the little things I thought they weren't doing. But, when I finally got to my last coaching gig, I understood how much more important it was to sit back and watch a "failure" or deficiency than to coach it not to happen.

I think, now, that Lang Ping was watching how her players reacted to blowing an important point. Watch and listen. See what happens next in the context of the whole picture. See how individual's react to adversity. Don't be obsessed with winning at the expense of how the players and the team think and feel and do.

In a way, it's been a "fake-it-till-you-make-it-and-then-you'll-figure-out-why" kind of thing.

Or, I really really really have no life.

Yep. Dork. Full-blown, inescapable. Dork.