Jan 29: The most powerful person in Chennai

Jan 29


An early morning for us as we had agreed to train the Customs Team we. We worked with the previous week. What did the guys start to do as soon as got there? Yep, you guessed it, stretch. Although their coach is not at the clinic it's something we talked about the previous week as well. So after we quickly put an end to that, we got started and covered serving and blocking with the guys. The coaches all say they need help training at a higher level but when you only practice 2 hours and 30-45 minutes are spent NOT doing anything related to volleyball it's easy to see why.

After the practice we started the coaches clinic and covered a bit more of the theory: Specificity vs. Generality, the importance of proper bio-mechanics, learning how to coach watching players and not the volleyball and, or course, continued our vast discussions on warming up for practice some more. One great part of the Indian We then headed outside to work with the players on transition footwork, blocking and had the coaches work more with the players. Two things we are REALLY struggling with are we have too many kids on too many teams there (5 teams worth of kids) and too many coaches trying to coach. We'll ask 2-3 coaches to run a drill and when one player is trying to be corrected there are about 5-6 other coaches piping up with a cacaphony and the kid's head is just spinning around, no idea who to listen to. Mark and I are really on our toes making sure there is minimum conversation, only keys being used from one coach per player.

At night we had dinner with Martin and his wife. She is a line judge for the ATP and was in Australia for the Australia Open the past few weeks, even doing a few matches Centre Court. We had a phenomenal dinner at the one of oldest hotels in Chennai. It was a great evening and Martin's wife is hilarious. If Martin's the most powerful man in Chennai as we joke about, his wife is the most powerful person. She's a riot and loved our stories from the past two weeks.