tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-340602702024-02-08T04:58:21.255-07:00Minivann's DebriefingMy thoughts on Volleyball, Writing, and LifeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-7031075550747376022016-01-14T18:56:00.000-07:002016-01-14T18:56:03.443-07:00One Year In With Open Source VolleyballToday is the one year anniversary of starting the Open Source Volleyball blog. In that time I've managed to (as of today) write 52 blog posts. That's more than I thought I would get done, but even in that span of time and blog posts I haven't made the progress I thought I would have with the material I want to cover. I still have at least 2 and as many as 6 (or more) just covering rotations. SomeUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-32079441562323413562016-01-12T16:10:00.003-07:002016-01-12T16:10:39.827-07:00Olympic Lifts - A Rant - Sort OfProbably mostly due to the popularity of Crossfit, Olympic lifts are kind of big. Outside of the Crossfit mentality, I just don't get it. I have long heard of the value of Olympic lifts for developing explosive power for things like jumping and sprinting, but I think their value is overstated. Don't get me wrong, there is value to doing them, but they are not the end all be all of lifts, even forUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-91938848549789944032015-12-10T19:24:00.004-07:002015-12-10T19:24:46.759-07:00Twitter Experiment - Part TwoThe last couple days has been interesting. On the first day I set up a couple tweets linking to related posts for the next day, and another tweet linking to another post for day three. On day two I ended up writing a new post and tweeted it. The combined new post and the tweets linking to older posts ended up giving me about 10 times the page views I typically get on a day with a new post. The Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-44394516858092749892015-12-08T00:00:00.003-07:002015-12-08T00:00:54.091-07:00Twitter Experiment - Part OneBack at the first of the year, I decided to put all of my volleyball posts in their own blog. Eventually I will put them on their own domain and hopefully I will be able to monetize the site. Their is a place to tip through PayPal, and any books or products I review will have an Amazon Affiliate link, but otherwise I want it to be ad free. Eventually I'll sell tee shirts or print material from Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-77536167459429866642015-12-02T01:16:00.002-07:002015-12-02T01:16:17.786-07:00To Review Or Not To Review...Years ago I remember hearing a friend talking to someone about the fantasy series, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. I wasn't reading a lot of fantasy at the time, so I didn't pay a lot of attention. I think book 3 was probably the most recent release. They seemed like they were really into the series. I do remember thinking the premise was interesting, an epic saga that gets played out Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-12319614370464005272015-11-09T19:30:00.004-07:002015-11-09T19:30:58.199-07:00This Product Had To Be Designed By An Engineer
You know the old saying, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone"? I recently had to retire my shower puff. Because of a painful lack of foresight, I have been using a washcloth until I can replace my trusty puff. All I will say is the experience is wanting.
The shower puff is a truly wonderful creation. The more I think about what I'm missing, the more I am impressed by the elegant Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-34261476467096589422015-11-01T09:27:00.001-07:002015-11-01T09:27:25.922-07:00Exercise Bike ConfusionThere is an exercise bike I use at the gym, primarily because it is not a recumbent bike, that has a very confusing display. It has three categories of information it displays at a time, and you can toggle between two sets of information. The six pieces of information are, in what to me is the logical grouping, Speed, Distance, and Calories Burned in one group, and RPMs, METs, and Watts in the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-49739689991226311132015-10-23T14:35:00.001-06:002015-10-23T14:35:22.187-06:00The Talent CodeHere's my review of The Talent Code. I've read it twice (so far). I really enjoyed it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-90122707386974951752015-08-19T21:07:00.000-06:002015-08-19T21:07:18.925-06:00Mount Everest and MeProbably because of my experiences with the Boy Scouts, I entertained the idea of climbing Mount Everest at some point in my future. I used to love camping, hiking, and backpacking. I bought an expedition quality backpack (incidentally I bought this while in Ireland in 1993 right before the first successful Irish Everest expedition that same year). I was thoroughly enamored with the romantic Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-21959981432213506812015-02-07T23:48:00.000-07:002015-02-07T23:48:12.376-07:00Can We Please Stop Saying ToningA major pet peeve when it comes to fitness is the term "toning". It is possibly the biggest garbage term in fitness. Anyone who has studied in a health related field past high school should know this. Muscle tone has a very specific meaning. Your body doesn't act like a rubber chicken because of muscle tone. As it says on the wikipedia page for "Toning Exercises" (unfortunately without citation),Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-17800878685094586332015-01-14T20:08:00.005-07:002015-01-14T20:08:52.588-07:00Fork in the RoadI've been wanting to put together a volleyball website for some time. I am regularly frustrated by the lack of good, useful, and comprehensive information for players and coaches on the internet. There are some good places to get a little here and a little there, but it is so scattered and fragmented that it is hard to get to and use. I have been dragging my feet wanting to have the domain name Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-57866437507349374742015-01-10T22:27:00.000-07:002015-01-10T22:27:08.581-07:00Volleyball Shot Charts from the Opening Weekend of Men's Volleyball
With the start of the men's college
volleyball season, I am able to watch matches streaming on the
internet. Televised matches are getting more common every year,
almost to the point of being able to see all of a particular team's
matches. Some of the broadcasts are from the traditional sideline
view, but others are from a static camera at one end of the court. I
prefer this end view. It gives aUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-30662099286521834152015-01-06T23:51:00.003-07:002015-01-06T23:51:44.590-07:00Back Row Defense and Collecting DataLast month I came across this blog post about a back row defense idea championed by Gold Medal Squared. When I was working on my bachelors degree, I took a class taught by Carl McGown about coaching volleyball. The class was essentially a GMS clinic taught over a semester as a mix of class lecture and running through the concepts in the gym. Many of the other students in the class were not Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-77547102426929684982015-01-05T00:50:00.001-07:002015-01-05T00:50:34.625-07:00Index Stats - More Derived Stats FunI have been thinking a lot lately about what I'm coming to think of as index stats. Index stats are, in my ideal Sabermetrics meets volleyball world, what I call a comparison to a standard or the team as a whole. In its current iteration, index stats compare an average, like an average passing score, to the team average for that stat. Alternately, if could compare to an ideal, or par value for Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-18570461300131599532014-12-21T17:56:00.003-07:002014-12-21T17:56:39.986-07:00Getting More Out of Volleyball Stats - Derived Stats and Thinking Out of the Box
I like stats. I really like stats. Good
stats give you fairly objective information about how your team is
doing, how your opponents are doing, and inform your coaching
decisions both in game and in practice. The problem is getting good
stats.
While coaching high school volleyball,
I was required to provide the number of kills, blocks, aces and
assists for my guys after the match. At a Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-22530129502261201262014-11-19T23:06:00.000-07:002014-11-19T23:06:11.606-07:00Volleyball Heat Maps
The other day a
volleyball coach I follow on Facebook posted this link. It's an article
talking about the gold medal match in the recent FIVB Men's World
Championship, and a key difference between the teams. Looking at the
statistics Brazil looks like the better team by a slim margin in
almost all the stats they looked at. The lone bright spot was Polands
service error percentage, where they hadUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-13027583492784827332014-11-09T04:48:00.001-07:002014-11-09T04:48:18.228-07:00A Random Case of Gender Bias in VolleyballI was reading a blog post about a statistical comparison of men's and women's college volleyball the other day, and I saw a comment that displayed an interesting case of gender bias. The post looked at the difference in how likely an attack was to be dug between the two sides of the sport. The comparison was looking at a potentially useful derived stat called digging percentage. It is equal to Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-24154430124803174392014-11-03T23:00:00.003-07:002014-11-03T23:00:36.261-07:00How Football Enhanced My Volleyball Coaching
One of the greatest things I ever
learned about coaching is to learn from other sources and then
compare it to what I already know about volleyball and motor
learning. After learning about some new drill or information, there
are some questions I should ask (and answer). Will it teach proper
skills, technique, and/or tactics? Are the training goals important
within the context of a volleyball Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-31151709776786175082014-11-02T18:14:00.000-07:002014-11-02T18:16:14.728-07:00The Modern Evolution of Volleyball and High School Coaching - A Rant
I have been watching some old volleyball matches recently as I become aware of them on youtube or other similar sites. It has been a lot of fun seeing old matches that I have never seen, and in some cases that I haven’t seen in a long time. An old favorite is the men’s USA vs USSR gold medal match. It happened while I was a young high school student with dreams of growing taller than I Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-39125880574259987952014-10-29T19:43:00.000-06:002014-10-29T19:43:07.667-06:00Depression and Volleyball
Matt Anderson is a seriously good player. He was on the 2008 National Championship team at Penn State, and most recently he was on the US team for the 2014 FIVB World League and World Championships, where they took home the World League championship. On those US teams, he was probably the best hitter on the team, and would have been on the all tournament team if it wasn't for Taylor Sander's Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-27322302153571797072014-08-29T19:53:00.003-06:002014-08-29T20:52:53.672-06:00I Will Not Be Doing The Ice Bucket ChallengeIn the last few weeks social media has been bursting at the seams with videos of the ALS ice bucket challenge. People post a video of themselves dumping a bucket of ice and water on themselves and then challenge someone else to do the same in some amount of time. Do the challenge and donate 10 bucks to ALS research, or don't do it and donate 100. I had problems with it from the beginning, before Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-76683031061579480772014-08-20T02:46:00.002-06:002014-08-20T02:46:19.685-06:00The Third BrickThe third event that contributed to my depression is possibly the biggest. It certainly had the biggest financial impact on my life. To this day we haven't really financially recovered.
About 20 years ago with just my wife and our first child in utero, we pulled up our stakes and moved about 800 miles away. We did it for a number of reasons: school for one, to rely on each other as we built our Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-13607164680727877692014-08-12T00:44:00.002-06:002014-08-12T00:44:13.846-06:00Oh Captain, My Captain!I've been waffling on what to write about next. I was thinking about writing the next event that helped contribute to the depression I've been working under, but the news of Robin Williams suicide really struck me. I'm not a huge Robin Williams fan, but I have seen several of his movies and TV shows, talk show appearances, and some of his stand up. I think he may be one of the most universally Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-69333984449601262402014-07-23T20:14:00.002-06:002014-07-23T20:14:05.773-06:00Brick Number TwoThe second major experience I had that contributed to the depression I have been working through started shortly after I had my experience with applying for personal training jobs. I started exploring what it would take to become a seminary teacher. It was something that interested me some time before, and I already had most of the education I needed. After talking to the guy over the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34060270.post-50594780781135788962014-07-16T23:07:00.000-06:002014-07-16T23:07:32.637-06:00Another Tool in My ToolboxI haven't been able to write this as soon as I wanted to, but I have been feeling better. I haven't been trying to do too much, but I have been focusing on some modest changes to what I'm doing. I've already mentioned my renewed focus on faith. Here is another little change I've made.
Something that has worked well for me to this point are three supplements. They are fish oil, St. John's wort Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0