I remember sitting in the lobby of our volleyball club during the summer, talking with a few coaches while players filtered in and out of the gym. I do not remember much about the conversation itself, but I remember the question that was occupying my mind at the time. How much time should I dedicate to 6-on-6 play?
At first glance, this sounds like a simple practice-planning question. In reality, it was a question that had been bothering me for months because I suspected there was something deeper hiding underneath it. Every practice felt like a tradeoff. If I spent twenty minutes on technical training, that was twenty minutes I could not spend in game-like situations. If I spent twenty minutes playing the game, that was twenty minutes I could not spend isolating a skill that I believed needed improvement. I kept asking myself the same questions. If I teach a player through drills, will they become a better volleyball player? If I teach a player through the game itself, will they learn faster? What skills matter most? What types of learning actually transfer into competition?
I remember asking other coaches how much time they spent in live play. The answers gave me information, but they never gave me certainty. Some coaches preferred more drills. Others preferred more competition. Everyone seemed to have a philosophy, yet I left those conversations feeling as though the question itself remained unanswered. Looking back, I think this was because I was asking the wrong question. I thought I was trying to figure out how to organize practice. What I was actually trying to understand was how people learn.
That question eventually led me toward ecological dynamics. Like many coaches, I stumbled into the topic through a mixture of curiosity, frustration, and luck. I found a community of coaches discussing representative learning environments, constraints-led approaches, and motor learning. One article in particular stopped me in my tracks. It was called How Pretending to Coach Steals the One Resource Kids Can’t Replace by Rolf Götz. In it, he discussed what he called the drill lie: the belief that if players master the drill, they will naturally master the game.
The idea resonated with me immediately because it explained something I had observed throughout my coaching career. I had seen players dominate drills and struggle in competition. I had seen athletes execute technical movements beautifully when the solution was obvious and then fail to reproduce those same movements when they were forced to make decisions under pressure. I had seen players who looked exceptional in controlled environments and average in actual volleyball matches. There always seemed to be a gap between what was being practiced and what the game was actually demanding.
That article did not instantly change my coaching, but it did change the questions I was asking. Instead of asking how I could explain things more effectively, I began asking how I could create environments that allowed players to discover solutions for themselves. Over time, my practices became increasingly game-like. We played more volleyball. We used scoring systems to reward specific behaviors. We manipulated constraints to encourage certain decisions. A clean kill might be worth extra points. A missed serve might cost a point. Players might only be allowed to use a specific type of attack or solve a problem under unusual conditions. The goal was not to force learning through instruction. The goal was to create conditions where learning emerged naturally through interaction with the game.
The results were difficult to ignore. My players seemed more engaged. Competition in practice improved. Decision-making improved. The game looked more like volleyball and less like a collection of disconnected exercises. Perhaps most surprisingly, there were stretches of practice where I barely spoke at all. The environment was providing feedback. Success and failure were providing feedback. Teammates were providing feedback. Players were learning things that I previously would have attempted to explain through a speech or demonstration.
For a while, this felt liberating. Then it became uncomfortable.
The more convinced I became that the environment was the primary teacher, the more uncertain I became about my role as a coach. If players were learning through interaction with the game, what exactly was I contributing? This was not a practical question. It was an identity question. I had spent years assuming that coaching meant providing answers. Now I was watching players learn without many of the answers I thought they needed. There were moments during practice where athletes were communicating, adapting, competing, solving problems, and improving with very little input from me. Initially I viewed this as success. Eventually I started wondering if I was becoming irrelevant.
This uncertainty followed me into tournaments. There were periods where I intentionally talked very little because I wanted players solving problems for themselves. I wanted them reading the game instead of looking at me after every point. The results were confusing. Sometimes we played well. Sometimes we played poorly. Then there were tournaments where I was far more vocal. Sometimes we played well. Sometimes we played poorly. The relationship between what I said and what happened felt incredibly noisy. I would occasionally tell a player something and see an immediate improvement, only to watch that same adjustment disappear weeks or months later. Other times I would say almost nothing and observe similar outcomes.
At the same time, I was running into a different challenge. When you intentionally coach this way, you do not always look like a coach. Parents expect coaches to coach. Players expect coaches to coach. Most people imagine coaching as a visible activity involving instructions, corrections, speeches, and solutions. When much of your effort is invested in designing environments instead of delivering answers, a large percentage of your work becomes invisible. I found that frustrating. Not because I wanted recognition, but because I genuinely believed I was helping. I just was not helping in a way that most people could easily see.
The breakthrough came from Micah.
Every coach remembers talented athletes. Micah became one of the most memorable. He was the player adjusting the safety nets before practice started. He was opening the garage doors when the gym became too hot. He communicated constantly, not because a coach told him to, but because he genuinely cared about helping the people around him.
What fascinated me was that the environment I had worked so hard to design did not really know what to do with him.
The environment was doing a fantastic job teaching volleyball. It rewarded successful decisions. It rewarded points. It rewarded winning. If our objective was simply to determine who was better at volleyball, then the environment was providing useful information. Yet the more I watched this player, the more I felt there was something important that the environment was not capturing.
The scoreboard did not reward him for adjusting the nets. The game did not reward him for helping create a better atmosphere in the gym. There was no statistic for leadership. There was no statistic for ownership. There was no statistic for making teammates feel supported. There was no statistic for being the first player willing to sacrifice his body for a ball when everyone else hesitated. Many of the qualities that made him valuable were nearly invisible if you were only looking at outcomes.
That realization forced me to reconsider my own thinking. Up to that point, ecological dynamics had largely taught me humility. It had shown me that many of the lessons I thought I was teaching were actually being taught by the game itself. The more representative the environment became, the less I needed to stop practice and explain what was happening. The game was teaching. Success and failure were teaching. In many ways, the environment was a more patient and consistent teacher than I was.
Yet standing there watching this player, I started to recognize a limitation in my own thinking. I had become so focused on the question of how people learn skills that I had neglected a different question entirely. What do people learn to value?
Those are not the same thing.
The environment was teaching volleyball. It was helping players learn how to read, decide, move, communicate, and solve problems under pressure. What it was not necessarily doing was teaching everyone what deserved admiration. Without intervention, people naturally noticed the obvious things. The missed serve. The hitting error. The overpass. The ace. The block. The win. Their attention gravitated toward outcomes because outcomes are easy to see.
The challenge is that many of the behaviors that create long-term success are much harder to see. Communication is harder to see. Leadership is harder to see. Ownership is harder to see. The willingness to consistently do small things that help a team function is harder to see. If nobody deliberately directs attention toward those behaviors, they often disappear into the background despite being critical to the health of the team.
That was when I began to think differently about the role of a coach. Perhaps the primary value of my voice was not that it allowed me to provide answers. Perhaps its value was that it allowed me to shape attention. If I consistently pointed out communication, players would begin noticing communication. If I consistently pointed out effort, players would begin noticing effort. If I consistently pointed out courage, ownership, and resilience, those qualities would become more visible to everyone. The environment could determine who won the game. The coach could help determine what the team learned to admire while playing it.
A few months later, I experienced another moment that reinforced this idea. We had a terrible first day at a tournament. Players were frustrated. Parents were frustrated. I was frustrated. Looking back, I think I had become so focused on development that I had overlooked something obvious. People need appreciation.
Around that same time, I had been reading about systems thinking. One idea that stuck with me was the concept of stocks and flows. If I wanted more appreciation in my environment, I needed to put more appreciation into it. So I started experimenting. I began publicly recognizing specific behaviors. Not generic compliments. Specific observations. I would point out a player’s effort. A player’s communication. A player’s willingness to attempt something difficult. A player’s resilience after making a mistake. A player’s leadership.
The reaction surprised me.
I remember the smiles. I remember the body language. I remember feeling the atmosphere shift. Players seemed lighter. Parents seemed lighter. I felt lighter. After matches, I started telling players exactly what I appreciated about their performance. I started telling parents what I noticed about their kids. I started highlighting things that normally would have gone unnoticed.
Could it have been because we made lineup changes? Maybe. Could it have been because we started winning more? Possibly. I cannot prove that appreciation caused the shift. There are too many variables involved for me to make that claim with confidence. What I can say is that something changed. The environment felt healthier. Relationships felt stronger. People seemed happier to be there.
Later that same tournament, I pushed the idea even further while watching one of our top teams compete. I made a conscious decision to only point out positive things that I observed. A powerful swing. A disciplined block. A courageous defensive effort. A quality pass. A smart decision. I remember players looking over and smiling. One athlete eventually walked over and asked me for feedback.
What struck me was not the question itself. It was the trust.
We barely knew each other. He had never seen me play. We had almost no relationship. Yet somehow he felt comfortable enough to ask for advice. That moment stayed with me because it forced me to confront another possibility. People trust people who see them. Not flatter them. See them.
There is a difference.
Flattery is cheap. Recognition is earned. When you specifically acknowledge something a player has actually done, you are telling them that their effort mattered enough to be noticed. Over time, I began wondering whether public praise was doing more than creating positive emotions. Perhaps it was also directing attention. Perhaps it was teaching the team what mattered.
Eventually all of these experiences started converging into a single idea.
The coach’s voice is also a constraint.
In ecological dynamics, we spend a great deal of time discussing constraints. Rules, scoring systems, equipment, court dimensions, and task design all influence behavior. We talk extensively about the ways environments shape learning. What we discuss less often is that the coach’s voice shapes learning too.
Every criticism changes what athletes pay attention to. Every compliment changes what athletes pay attention to. Every story changes what athletes pay attention to. Every expectation changes what athletes pay attention to. The coach’s voice is not separate from the environment. It is part of the environment.
For a long time, I thought ecological dynamics was teaching me to talk less. Maybe it was. But I think what it was really teaching me was to become more intentional. The environment should do most of the teaching. The game should do most of the teaching. But that does not mean the coach becomes unimportant. It means the coach has to become more careful with the moments they choose to speak.
Today, my philosophy is simple. Design the environment first. Praise publicly and specifically. Correct privately whenever possible. Intervene immediately when safety is involved. The less I have relied on my voice to teach volleyball, the more I have realized how important my voice is for teaching everything else.
The environment can teach players how to play the game. A coach can help players understand what is worth valuing while they play it.