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| Megan Collins and the rest of the Fredonia Volleyball team journal about their individual goals at Wednesday practice prior to leaving for New Paltz |
By Ryan Maloney
Fredonia Volleyball Ammendment #10: We will encourage our teammates to reach their goals and
push ourselves to reach our own.
Every season we ask our athletes to set goals for
themselves. Each girl gets a journal and she takes some time to sit and reflect
on what’s important to her.
This year, unsurprisingly, 14 out of 16 girls had the same
goal: make the NCAA tournament (see our previous post about how to qualify for
NCAA’s). Two girls said, “become a family” … more on this in a post next week.
These are examples of outcome
goals, goals that focus on results (winning a match, making the NCAA
tournament). It’s important for our team to have an outcome goal. It gives us a
vision and reminds us why we meet at 7 am in the weight room for lifting
sessions J
But outcome goals, though important, are largely out of our
control. We could have the season of our lives, and if we happened to be
playing in the Big Ten Conference against the likes of Penn State and
Wisconsin, it’s highly unlikely we’d make it to the NCAA tournament.
So we also set a performance
goal, a statistical marker we need to hit in order to reach our outcome
goal of making the NCAA tournament. A few of the girls set performance goals
for themselves (passer ratings, hitting percentage, etc.), but most did not.
So we as coaches decided to set a team performance goal to
shoot for. Hitting percentage is a statistic that is all-encompassing … we need
everyone playing well in order to have a high hitting percentage. The passers need to keep us in system, the setters need to have accurate location, and the hitters need to put the ball away.
For example,
if you take 10 attempts, have 5 kills, and 3 errors, you have a .200 hitting
percentage ((5-3) / 10).
It turns out that we
can roughly estimate what our hitting percentage needs to be, based on what
teams from New York hit who qualified for NCAA’s in 2014.
- Clarkson - .252
- Richard Stockton - .234
- Stevens - .231
- New Paltz - .195
- Average = .238
We know that we roughly need to come close to .238, or in a
range between .195 and .252, to make the NCAA tournament. Our current goal is to hit a .185 through the first third of the
season, which ends after our weekend in Hiram, Ohio.
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| Our hitting percentages through five games, written on the locker room white board |
Through five matches we’re currently hitting .162, though each match our hitting percentage has improved, culminating in a .215 against Rochester
But again, if we were to play Penn State or Wisconsin, it’s
highly unlikely we’ll reach our hitting percentage goal. We need something else
to focus on, something that’s completely under our control that we can get
better at each day in practice: process
goals.
- "Hit the ball hard with a fast approach"
- "Maintain a stable platform in serve receive."
- "Be loaded and balanced at the net when blocking."
I just pulled these right off our 2015 goals spreadsheet. Whether
we’re playing Penn State, Wisconsin, or a local community college, the process
goals are completely under our control. Focusing on the process helps us
achieve our hitting percentage goal, which in turn helps us achieve our goal of
making the NCAA tournament.
Most importantly, all the coaches and players need to be
aware of what everyone is working towards. It was a proud coaching moment when
the girls came up with our 10th team agreement.