SHS Volleyball

I am coaching the Schweinfurt High School volleyball team this year. We are half way through our season and slowly making progress. I was real nervous the first week of practice. We had a lot of new girls that had never played before. We spent the first couple of weeks working on fundamentals. We really had to drill them into them.

I'm still getting used to coaching high school girls. They have a lot more attitude and mood swings than I'm used to. I can't keep track of who's fighting with who and who are best friends. Some days they are fighting with each other and the next day they are playing together. They are just typical high schoolers.

All of that has made it difficult to join our team together. We have decent skills, but we aren't playing as a family. We're been working really hard on that. I've tried to be nice, I've tried being mean, I've tried playing games with them, I've tried yelling, I've tried everything. This week I let some of the girls act as the coaches. I wanted them to get a taste of what we deal with everyday. By the end of practice, they were so mad and frustrated. They then made the comments that they see what we have to deal with. It worked perfectly! They saw how stressful our job is because of the way they act. They turned themselves around. Our past couple of practices went really well.

Yesterday we had two games in Ansbach. We WON BOTH GAMES!!! I was so excited and so happy for the girls! They all played together and played very well.  It was very fulfilling for me to see them do the things we drilled during practice. We worked really hard on coverage and they did it very well!

We have three more Saturdays to play and then Europeans the first weekend in November. I hope we keep getting better and peak at the end of the season.

Coaching this season has been a great learning experience for me. It has been very difficult, but I'm sure glad I did it. I have really grown in my coaching skills. The high school principal is trying to talk me into coaching track. I'm still debating. If it weren't for all the weekends we would miss of traveling, it would be a no brainer. But I know we don't have much time left over here and we have more places to see! I have two more days to think about it before I have to make a final decision!