New Coach: Adam Ewart

Introducing a New coach to the Academy. Adam Ewart

Adam was a setter that played high school, club, and provincial team. He left the province and played on various Military teams while in the Canadian Navy. He played one year of college before moving back to Saskatchewan. He has spent the past 26 years coaching at various levels in the province. Highlights include: spending 8 seasons as an assistant coach with the U of S Huskie Men’s Volleyball team capturing a bronze and silver medal at the U Sport National Championships, 2004 NTCC gold medal with Team Sask , 2012-2015 Chaos Volleyball Club 4x Provincial Champions, 2015 SHSAA 5A High School Boys Silver Medalists, and most recently 2019 U14 Boys Div. 1 Tier 2 Western Canadian champs. The first session Coach Adam will be offering is the two days of Serving on November 25 and 26th.  The unfortunate thing is that this session is also sold out, however, it does not have a waitlist as of yet.

A wild week at the academy.

Wild time this week we have five private lessons and four days of sessions and a pickup game on Friday.
The week of volleyball skill session is new this year designed for older athletes and is four days of two-hour sessions. 
It starts with coach David Chuong doing Defense and Freeball on Monday
Then coach Darren Cannell doing transition, hitting and blocking on Tuesday 
Wednesday has coach Michele McKeown doing Serving and Serve Reception
Thursday is coach Toako Chie Imamura focussing on Setting and Hitting
The Friday winding up with a pickup informal gameplay night.

It was well-received and sold out quickly, which is awesome but it also has a waitlist of 14 athletes and with cancelations, there will be 11 athletes who will not be able to attend.
This just reinforces the need for athletes to register early to avoid the disappointment of missing out on a session.

Fantasy Future

Wow, would it be cool for a session on the beach in Mexico?  Answer no way it would be hot...lol.

Fanatic Volleyball Players.

Full-time athletes at the academy is a question I get often.  We are trying to avoid the subscription academy model where you pay X amount of dollars to attend a daily session.  It is not a bad model, I just believe that it attempts to place the sport above everything else in their life.  Family, school, religion, other sports and many other aspects of the busy youth of today should be placed higher than my academy.  Other sports teach skills which are transferable to volleyball, I have found soccer players to have very fast foot speed, tennis players have great spike and serve technique and eye-hand coordination, while dance and gymnastics athletes have good jump training and body awareness and video gamers are good at strategy, communication, and sometimes leadership.  The athletes who select a single sport too early in life tend to be lacking in some elements to make a well-rounded athlete.  For all these reasons, the “come to the sessions” you want model put the ownership in the athlete and their support group to make a skill development plan which fits into their busy lives and into their ongoing skill development.  Only pay for the sessions you attend and only pick the ones that fit your skill level.  The skill level is determined by the athlete and their support group and not the academy coaching staff.  Some athletes will attend every session for a year to try to prepare for a future tryout to a team, some athlete use the academy to supplement the coaching they are getting on their current team, and some athletes just want to hear a different coach’s view on how to do as skill.  Exposure to a variety of different coach styles is important in an athlete”s development.  In short, fill your life with music, arts, sports and people and a well-round human will emerge...too much of one sport, art, Fort nite or any aspect of life will create a fanatic single-dimensional human, variety is the spice of life.

But as a businessman, I welcome the fanatic volleyball players who attend every one of my sessions.

Session selection

 I just realized that the clinic on the 28th is for advanced.  My daughter is not quite 14, and is not what I would consider 'advanced' in her hitting technique.  Is this going to be a problem? Will she be in over her head?  I know of another one of her teammates that is the same skill level as my daughter, and was also interested in this clinic.  Please advise!

We never stop someone from attending a session or not as we are trying to not evaluate the athletes in that way.  They get enough of that from tryouts and team play.  Each session is designed to be individual training so athlete at all different levels can benefit from the session.  The hitting harder session builds on the basic hitting style and is considered advanced as it is meant for the athletes who have the ability to spike but just want to increase the power.  Athletes who attend a session too advanced for them do tend to be frustrated attempting what the coach is asking them to do and they are physically not there.  However, it can allow a more mature view of where they should be heading in the skill as they progress which can be used to form goals.  Each athlete is different in their approach to skill development.  Some are very skilled at development on their own and take the instruction given at sessions and go home and will work on it until it becomes muscle memory others will only strive to better themselves when in front of a coach in a formal practice setting.  Some athletes are very self-motivated and others are peer-motivated and then their are the coach-motivated athletes, each brings a style to the Academy session.  This variation makes it difficult to develop an evaluation or suggestion for individuals who have only been seen in a few sessions.  When working in developing a team a coach needs to work hard in determining a current skill level in each athlete to allow the use of said skills in a unified team.  At the academy we look at the athlete’s current skill level and suggest changes based only on the focus of the session without comparison of the athletes skills to other athletes or a team’s need.  This is a unique coaching perspective but does force the ownership of which session to attend to each individual athlete and their support group, like their parents, team members and team coach.

Now if that is not the best non-answer I have given today I don’t know what is...lol

FAQ -Frequently Asked Questions

1. What happens if the Athlete cannot make the session in which they have registered? The registration fees can be transferred between sessions and between cycles. Flexibility is the key and will allow athletes to work around their playing schedule and their busy lives.

2. The ratio of athlete to coach is 10 to one. The coaches will be selected based on the skills at coaching individual skills. Dr. Darren Cannell is the head coach and will be in attendance for most of the sessions but he is aware that there are better coaches out there for some of the skills.

3. How is information communicated with the participants? Everyone who registers for a session is added to a mailing list. Anyone on the list has the ability to remove themselves at any time from the list.

4. How do I decide which session my offspring should attend? Sessions are all designed to be individual instruction which means participants can attend any session they want. The academy has had sessions in which 50 years old Master National team members are in the same gym as grade seven participants. The sessions for the same reason also have males and females in the same session.

5. How are the costs of a session used to cover the costs in the academy? Firstly, the sessions have taxes added to the cost, which is GST and fees which are used to cover the software costs and credit card fees. Secondly, the biggest cost for the academy is the gym rental fees. Third, the coaches who are the major reason why the sessions are successful are paid as it allows the academy to attract the best of the best. Forth, insurance, equipment, software development, accounting fees, lawyers fees, corporation fees, and other fees. The goal has always been to try to keep the cost of the session as cheap as possible but at the same time covering the costs of running the academy.

6. What are free or open sessions? The academy believes that participants need to touch the ball as often as possible for them to reach their potential. The academy runs many open and free session to reach this end. The costs for these types of sessions are the free or minimum cost to cover the gym rental costs.

7. Is the academy seeking sponsorship? The academy is a for-profit corporation but is attempting to bring down the costs of sessions so it would embrace sponsorship. Keeping this in mind the greatest need would be to gain sponsorship to cover the pickup game nights gym rental fees so we can offer those events free.

8. What are the reasons for canceling Sessions? Sometimes the school gyms that we rent are needed by the school and it can happen on short notice, so we send a memo out to the participants to the email with which they registered. For this reason, it is important that you use an active email so you will get these notices. The other reason sessions might be canceled is due to lack of registrations, the academy does not cancel sessions when there are enough registrations to cover the gym costs. In fact the few participants the better the ratio of coach-to-athlete and according to Head Coach Darren, he enjoys those sessions more as you see the changes with the participant's skills when you can pay more attention to their skills. This is also the reason private lessons are so popular.

Waitlist email full of code what is going on?

To get on a waiting list you need to go to the session in which you are interested in attending then registers for it.  If it is full it will state as such and then it will allow you to add your name to the waitlist.  If and when a spot becomes available due to a cancellation or the academy finds another coach to help in a session then the waitlist people will be contacted via email.  The email

will state that a spot has been open for them and they can confirm they are interested in attending by payment for the session.  It costs nothing to be placed on the waitlist but when the email is sent stating the spot is open, interested parties have to pay a quickly as possible because if payment is not made the open spot will be given to the next person on the waitlist.

It has been stated that some people do not see the necessary information on the email stating that they have been transferred from the waitlist to a participant email due to a setting on their phone.  If you run into issues with your phone displaying a whole pile of coding, then try a desktop or laptop to see if it clarifies the issue.

Here is the more technical answer to why this happens sometimes…

This is an issue on their PC and how their email program is interpreting the email message. Some email programs will display multi-part messages as garbled code. Anti-virus programs will sometimes “break” multi-part email templates up and cause them to display as raw HTML code.

This is not a common issue, but if they are using an anti-virus program, then to fix this problem they may need to change their anti-virus setting so that it accepts multi-part email messages. If they need more guidance, they should refer to or contact their anti-virus software company directly.

It is not something we can figure out for them on our end, but doing a web search like this would reveal that this happens to PC users in some circumstances or versions of Outlook or other email programs. The point is not to let the email program or anti-virus program to modify the content of the email coming in and allow the email program to display exact formatted message correctly. That is why if they use an online email service or a mobile device, they would see the correctly formatted email we send.