April is right around the corner!
We are so close to the end of March and moving onto April.
The weather is getting nicer and athletes are looking forward to being able to move them out of doors and gather in bigger numbers. The Canadian Elite Academy moves outside in June so we still have two months of indoor activities before we head into the sun for beach volleyball.
The Five Days of Volleyball camp was all sold out and we had a single cancellation in the last few days. Which means we have one spot left for a girl between the age of 11-13 years of age. It will not stay empty for long before anyone else grabs it. For us, this is exciting as we have not had a Youth Volleyball activity in many months. We are very lucky to have Adam Ewart and Terry Graham as the head coaches for these two groups. Darren Cannell will be around as an assistant to help out.
School Day and Jump in April
We have the School Day Academy, and Jump Training sessions for April, May, and half of June then we head outside for the beach volleyball sessions.
The School Day Academy sessions have been awesome for the last months to allow us to train and get better at our volleyball skills. The School Day academy sessions are broken into two groups, one for athletes grade 10-12 and one of the groups for athletes grade 7-10.
The one-hour session is at 3:00 pm twice a week and is harder for athletes in Elementary school to get to than high school students. Many of the athletes in elementary school have gotten permission to leave school early to attend. The sessions are on Monday and Wednesday for the grade 7- 10 and Tuesday and Thursday for the grade 10-12. Every second Friday we have a 4vs4 game day. The concentration on skill development has without team and game development has been an interesting exercise and it will be very exciting when the athletes step back onto the competitive game court. It will be interesting when they get a chance to see how much they have improved. I see it every day and the return to competition will be a rewarding day for these athletes that have put in the time.
Jump Training
If you match this with Jump training sessions and the athletes are going to be well prepared for tryouts, gameplay, and competition when we get a chance to enter back into this phase. The jump training session has been an eye-opener for me as a coach. The coaching of volleyball skills is fun but a change of focus to just training the technique of jumping, strength training, and agility for me has been an interesting change and challenge. I am enjoying the sessions and will look forward to doing them consistently for the next couple of months before we get to head outdoors. Increasing your vertical jump will greatly improve your volleyball skills.
Thanks to the IceBox Training Facility
The Ice Box Training Center has been a very positive move for the academy allowing us to stay open during the pandemic. The smaller groups are interesting to work on but have forced a change and flexibility in our approach to skill training as well as strength, agility, and jump training. We would like to thank the center for its support.
Beach Volleyball starts middle of June
Beach Volleyball starts in June and we will offer Beach training for the 2’s competition. The competitions in the province will be offered by the Provincial Governing body and VOGO volleyball. We also have camps coming up during the Summer holiday so look forward to them.
My ART journey continues
I have been working hard on my art, during the pandemic as it has been a perfect time for this skill development. As I got the opportunity to draw a lot on my tablet, I began to share my techniques with others around the world who were also working on their artistic hobby. My following is made up of artists from around the world and weekly I do a two-hour streaming session of Drawing on the Tablet. Each Thursday at 6:00 pm it is possible for artists to follow the sessions through Youtube and Facebook as well as three or four other social media. I would also like to open these sessions for free for anyone who wants to draw from home to join in and check out these streaming sessions.
I do offer the opportunity to follow along in a face-to-face format, an Artist Elite Academy session. This is when I draw but will be able to assist artists when they are in the same room as I am. These are two-hour sessions and participants need to have a tablet to participate and register for the opportunity, the face-to-face opportunity is not free. Any age, any talent level are welcome as the step-by-step process will help an artist develop their skills. The face-to-face sessions also will force you to take the time to draw by having a scheduled time that you must set aside to create. Hope to see you either face to face or on the streaming session with the artistic group from around the world. The streaming is still in the development stage and continues to grow every week.
Darren's Thoughts
Many of the athletes who attend the sessions are very physically talented, coordinated athletes who are naturally good at most tasks put before them The school day academy and Jump training has created a situation never seen before as the athletes are just skill training, strength, agility and jump training and not applying it to their volleyball games. It has allowed me as a coach the opportunity to push them past their comfort zone and watch them respond to the lack of gameplay. Normally as coaches, we train our athletes for the next games, but over the last couple of months, we are just training to get better skills. The only competition is the comparison of their skill to the level of skills of the other athletes in their group. This is not an easy situation for athletes who are in groups with the opposite gender, older athletes, and physically taller and stronger athletes. Each athlete responds to this differently.
Some athletes have problems accepting this lack of gender, age tiering which is present in the traditional game competition. Many respond with a lack of focus and drive to get better when they do not have games to measure their success. As I coach I can see the growth, but as young athletes, they do not have the benchmarks to compare themselves against without games.
Athletes will feel they cannot compete against the other in their group and resort to covering their lack of confidence or success in skills by altering the activity to make it easier for themselves, talking or using humor or playfulness to cover her inability to achieve the objective. This is not abnormal or strange we all do not want to look like we cannot do something. But is an indicator that it is my job to work on developing a mature approach in the athletes to get them to compete against themselves, to motivate themselves, and strive to be better each day.
My son and many other athletes respond the same. It is a coping mechanism to cover their lack of ability to achieve a task and to not be the best. My son’s natural athletic ability allows him, like many of the athletes to be very good at most sports almost immediately. Until recently he did not have to put in a lot of effort to be seen as a really good athlete. He now is considering playing at the next level, (University) and has matured to the point where he is putting the necessary effort in to attempt to achieve this goal. It has come with maturity and age but it was not always there. It is a major part of the Elite training. Many of the academy athletes have the natural talent to be good athletes in almost any sport they choose to tackle, but they have to accept the challenge that some skills take time to master.
When athletes are placed in a group of older, more talented volleyball players or opposite gender they become embarrassed and don’t feel they belong working with the group. This shows up when the athlete loses focus and covers their lack of success with talking, not following instructions, not working to attempting to change their approach to the skill, joking, and behavior that was not in line with the activity.
This is a natural and normal reaction to being the only person in a group who could not achieve a task. My son's response to his lack of success in this type of situation was that he did not like the activity, it was stupid, it was someone else's fault for his failure, excuses, and an attitude that made him hard to coach. He was not aware that he was even doing this coping mechanisms and to this day, (he is 17) he still at times falls back on his coping mechanism when pushed into a skill that he is not able to achieve through his natural athletic ability. Most athletes work in this fashion. So rest assured that your daughter and sons do as well. Last year I worked with 400+ athletes and the move to internal competition, motivation and confidence is a big part of what we attempt to do at the academy. Athletes need to learn to compete against themselves and no one else.
My son is working hard on the mental aspect of achieving the next level. This can only be done with him removing his coping mechanism when faced with a lack of immediate success when attempting a new skill. His internal self-talk has to be the embracing of the challenge and doing the task until it is mastered. He needs to work on the few things that do not come naturally to him, he needs to focus, acceptance of mistakes put in the effort, and hard work.
My son, your sons, and daughters, and a handful of other athletes that I have worked with are blessed with natural talent. They have gained their self-image from their sports success and their confidence through being better than most other athletes. When good athletes stop comparing themselves to others, stops attempting to please a coach, and works on being better today than they were yesterday, and challenging themselves, major athletic growth happens. They need to learn to push themselves, with no excuses or coping mechanisms to cover failing and believe the challenges are something they can do, they just need time, effort, and hard work to master them, this will be when they enter the Elite athlete level.
I have been lucky enough to work with and coach, National caliber athletes and they all have the natural athletic ability, mental toughness, and the belief that they can achieve anything with effort. They accept mistakes, and learn from them and continually challenge themselves. They never accept defeat, they never make excuses, they never deflect they put their energy into mastering challenges. They do this for themselves, not for others, not for teammates, not for family or coaches. This maturity takes time and a perfect storm of friends, peers, family, coaches, learning, challenges, self-talk, self-confidence, and opportunity.
I will continue to work with your daughters and sons to push them to accept the challenges, focus, and help them mature into athletes who strive to be better tomorrow than they are today. Most of the athletes I have been lucky enough to coach are great kids, good sense of humor, confident and strives to please people around them. I hope to enhance these positive attitudes, challenge and help the athletes to develop the mental aspect of the sport to allow them to achieve their goals.
I will continue to share and keep you in the loop as the academy philosophy develops. Thanks for your interest in the academy.
I apologize for the rambling thoughts but I will try to be better tomorrow at writing these than I am today and if you got this far into the newsletter, good for you.
