Glenn Hoag is canadian and one of the top volleyball coaches in the world, today.
Recently, he took Canada national team from group 2 to the top 10 of group 1 and made an impressive Olympic tournmanent in Rio 2016. As a player, Glenn is a former international as outside hitter for the Canada men's national volleyball team from 1981-1986. Father of great players like Nick and Christopher Hoag, Glenn advocates that the strategy to promote our sport is a strong world leadership that syncs with clubs and national teams. Glenn also believes volleyball is the ultimate team sport. Strong is the idea that, as a player, he needed other to succeed. Traveling world wide as a top athlete and coach, he learned perspective. There is always someone or something better. There is always someone or something worst. A team with many egos tends to fall, a team without egos tend to rise. He talks about a great book that is friend, the portuguese coach Carlos Prata (the next post here, in ThinkVolleyball, early 2017), gave him, about All Blacks. He also has a curious and "out of the box" view about the beauty of the game (opposites reveiving, setter striking, to stop boring games of serve and error). We learn a lot "seeing" Glenn Hoag thinking volleyball.
TV – 20 questions Think Volleyball Inquiry, version 1b
1 - Volleyball is the 4 or 5th sport in the world with a wider base of fans, even greater than basketball. What should be made to communicate and show better this sport that so many millions pratice and love?
Glenn Hoag: I think if our game would be understood better, then we would bring out the beauty of it. The actions we see in volleyball are all done by individuals without an opponent to restrain it. So execution becomes important for each phase of the rally and by each individuals involved. To me it is the ultimate team sport. Each player has a role and a responsibility and all this has to be synchronised in the most perfect way. When executed well, it is a great sport to watch.
2 - Concepts like NBA make the show and the sport themselves. Do you think volleyball, as a show, would benefit from concepts like those? If yes, how and where should it be built? World League? In a strong national league like NBA?
Glenn Hoag: I think there is a need to have a common philosophy on how we promote our sport. Right now, I don’t think it is the case. As a national team coach and a professional club coach, I can see an obvious disconnect between the two entities, federations and clubs. The NBA, the NHL are powerful circuits that are leaders in the promotion of the sport. We don’t have this in volleyball so leadership is spread to different small entities.
1 - Volleyball is the 4 or 5th sport in the world with a wider base of fans, even greater than basketball. What should be made to communicate and show better this sport that so many millions pratice and love?
Glenn Hoag: I think if our game would be understood better, then we would bring out the beauty of it. The actions we see in volleyball are all done by individuals without an opponent to restrain it. So execution becomes important for each phase of the rally and by each individuals involved. To me it is the ultimate team sport. Each player has a role and a responsibility and all this has to be synchronised in the most perfect way. When executed well, it is a great sport to watch.
2 - Concepts like NBA make the show and the sport themselves. Do you think volleyball, as a show, would benefit from concepts like those? If yes, how and where should it be built? World League? In a strong national league like NBA?
Glenn Hoag: I think there is a need to have a common philosophy on how we promote our sport. Right now, I don’t think it is the case. As a national team coach and a professional club coach, I can see an obvious disconnect between the two entities, federations and clubs. The NBA, the NHL are powerful circuits that are leaders in the promotion of the sport. We don’t have this in volleyball so leadership is spread to different small entities.
3 – Means and goals, strategy and principles. Are there any limits in strategy to the victory? For example, do you admit pressure inside the court, with your players bullying players from the opposite team? What are the limits? And when you want to hire a certain player, should there be a regulation to the way athletes are contacted and by whom?
Glenn Hoag: I like my players to focus on our game, on executing our volleyball. There is obviously moments where outside factors such as spectators, noise or an opponent players that can take you focus away from what you are suppose to do to perform. Our mental coach in Canada calls it “potholes”, they are situations that you need to recognize or else you will hit them again and again like a car hitting holes in the road. We try to make sure that our athletes recognize them and return their focus on what is important for our play, our team, our performance.
4 - How do countries like Italy manage to stay at the top for so many years, how did countries like Poland, Germany or France reach the top and how can countries with tradition in volleyball like Portugal and Spain, among others, get there?
Glenn Hoag: In Canada or USA, volleyball is not a traditional sport. I mean by this that for us it is a school base sport compared to Italy, Poland, Germany and France who all have clubs and professional leagues.
These teams have created systems of development for their youth that support their clubs and their national teams. The USA, like Russia, has the advantage of having a big population, thus helping with having more possibilities in having better athletes, the USA also created a common approach that fits their reality, that being a school base sport.
I think the best way for Portugal, Spain, Canada, who are smaller countries in population and where the sport is not traditional, would be to have a system adapted to the specific realities. This is why I often look at why countries like Slovenia, Serbia develop good athletes in many sports, they are small country in population.
You can take some lessons from traditional volleyball countries like Italy, Poland or highly populated countries with less tradition, like USA, but in the end you cannot copy that model, you have to think about how you can grow the sport in your own culture.
5 – When you travel with your team, to traineeships or competitions, do you defend that the team should be isolated in a bubble, with no contact with the “outside world”, or, on the contrary, you think that the team should promote the contact with local reality, including or not the adversaries, like we see, for example, before great matches in the ATP world tour? What are the advantages or disadvantages of each option
Glenn Hoag: I want my players to be exposed to local reality. When they will enter the court for the competition, they will be facing many destabilizing factors and environments. My players need to be used to this. I don’t believe in isolating the athletes. We have a set of rules and behaviours that we would like to be followed by the players when we are competing, but we don’t isolate them.
For me sport is a learning environment full of destabilizing moments, I need to educated my team to deal with these stresses. The game environment is uncertain, destabilizing I have to prepare the athlete to navigate these waters.
6 - Do you think that the sport taught in schools would benefit from specialized school subjects that could be an option in the pre-university and university years, like we see in some countries, like the subject “indoor volleyball” or “beach volleyball”, even if the graduation is different, in theory, like, v.g, Law or Architecture, and is it essential, like in the USA, that the sport in the university should be considered as a foreground to the main leagues, as athletes are much more mature than in the younger leagues?
Glenn Hoag: I think studying and playing is a great way to learn discipline and sacrifice. I think that through school athletes also can work on other aspects of their development and yes I believe it makes more mature athletes.
Athletes that are able to “multitasks” will be able to adapt faster to changes and also be prepared for the new challenges after volleyball.
7 - Something you learned in volleyball that you take to your attitude before everything:
Glenn Hoag: As a player, I learned that I needed others to succeed. When I was in a team that supported each other in hard times we performed well, but when I was with a team of to many egos it was a very difficult year.
As a coach I learned patience and leadership. I learned to be a better teacher.
8 - Something you learned outside volleyball that you bring into it:
Glenn Hoag: By traveling a lot across the world and meeting many people, I learned to have perspective. That although we worked hard to become elite athletes and coaches, we are still very lucky to do what we do. There are many people that will never have this chance. This is why I don’t like people that complain, I keep things in perspective always.
9 – Literature, Arts, Cinema, and volleyball: is there any fictional work that you know that puts us inside this sport? And what non fictional book is your “bible” in volleyball?
Glenn Hoag: I don’t know any fictional work for volleyball. I think some years ago French sport journalist Gilles Petit wrote a novel about the France national team, I think it was a work of fiction.
In non-fiction, I read many authors but mostly outside of volleyball. Recently my good friend Carlos Prata gave me a gift. It was the book “Legacy” by James Kerr. It is about the “All-blacks”, it is a great book fro any coaches or manager.
Most books on leadership and management are excellent and often bring good messages. The important thing is how I will use them with my reality.
10 - What changes in the game would make it better?
Glenn Hoag: I don’t know at this point if we could make any changes.
11 - Tell us a secret about your work that you think makes it singular:
Glenn Hoag: I believe in a global approach. It is by necessity because I always coach teams that don’t necessarily have the best athletes. So I usually analyse my potential and develop a growth strategy for the group. It is a lot of work but I like to see athletes progress and “fit in” to what we are trying to built. I don’t mind taking risks either and I am not scared of failure as I know that I am learning a lot from each experience with my athletes and teams.
12 - Can an athlete reach excellency without winning? Why?
Glenn Hoag: Yes, for sure. I was telling a friend the other day that only one team will win the World series in baseball…. that doesn’t make the other teams bad or losers. There are athletes that are so skilled and never win a title. The media need winners and losers to feed their stories, but for me after winning or losing the title, you go back and it becomes the past rapidly. This is life, so usually I move on to the next thing.
13-Which is the most important part of the game (give us a detailed view of each technical gesture and each part of the game) for you?
Glenn Hoag: I love volleyball when it is played globally. I like teams that play good block defence, great combination on attacks. I get bored when results are decided only on serves or errors. I like watching Brazil, Serbia, Argentina. I like to see athletes and teams that play with inspiration.
There is a trend right now towards serving as the number 1 skills to enhance. Usually you see teams adapt to these changes. I think we will see more opposites in reception to go 4 players reception formation. We are also training setters and attackers to set and hit “out of systems”. Basic skills to me remain important because although they are not statistically significant for scoring points they are an important part of helping my team reduce the opponent’s capacity to score. So I always try to keep these aspects in balance.
14 – What do you think about, and how do you manage, internal competition in the team?
Glenn Hoag: The international season and the club season are two things. From an international season perspective I see it very differently. The club season helps develop the athlete because the season is longer and you have time to work and modify or improve part of the athletes skills sets and game management ability. It is a more progressive environment to work with.
When the international season start, we usually assess the state of our athletes. We must assess injuries, fatigue, skill level, psychological level. Then we will remind them of our training culture with Team Canada. What are our guiding principles, training culture, roles and responsibility!!
With world league now it is harder to do training cycle and to get the athlete do have learning cycles. If we are in a world championship year or an Olympic year, I will try to design the training cycle to be ready for the main objectives. In Club, players play every week once or twice. In international competition you have to prepare the athlete to perform 3 matches in three days. Sometime the event is very hard such as world championship or world cup, so the volume and frequency of training for these events has to be high.
In order to perform consistently I believe that you need to establish a playing system and training philosophy so that the players when they come back from club have a common reference when they leave the clubs to get back to national team.
15
- Leave a message to athletes with the essence of what you think they
should put in volleyball and can make them and the sport great:
Glenn Hoag: If you have great passion for the sport, then you have the number one quality. Become a student of the sport and don’t be scared of failing as you are learning. This is one of the most complex sports in the world, because of the demands of skills and team work and synchronisation of actions. You will need your teammates to grow and you will help them grow.
16 - The same to coaches:
Glenn Hoag: “Coaching is the art of making someone better”. Coaches are teachers. Not all our athletes will be great, but all our athletes love the game and want to be good at it. Our focus should be to make them the best that they can be.
For me winning is fun but “performing” is even more enjoyable. If my team plays well, I will enjoy the match no matter what the outcome. In order for me to make them play well I need to dedicate my energy at finding the “key” to their improvement.
17 - Finally, the same to directive staff:
Glenn Hoag: It is sometimes hard for outside people to understand why teams win or lose. Unless they have insight in the every day life of the players or the team, then it's hard to understand why outcome are good or bad. I think that regular communication with the coach is the best way to try to understand what is happening with the team, so we can find solutions to keep growing as a group. This is even more important when the team is struggling. Everyone on the staff as a crucial role and responsibility.
Glenn Hoag: If you have great passion for the sport, then you have the number one quality. Become a student of the sport and don’t be scared of failing as you are learning. This is one of the most complex sports in the world, because of the demands of skills and team work and synchronisation of actions. You will need your teammates to grow and you will help them grow.
16 - The same to coaches:
Glenn Hoag: “Coaching is the art of making someone better”. Coaches are teachers. Not all our athletes will be great, but all our athletes love the game and want to be good at it. Our focus should be to make them the best that they can be.
For me winning is fun but “performing” is even more enjoyable. If my team plays well, I will enjoy the match no matter what the outcome. In order for me to make them play well I need to dedicate my energy at finding the “key” to their improvement.
17 - Finally, the same to directive staff:
Glenn Hoag: It is sometimes hard for outside people to understand why teams win or lose. Unless they have insight in the every day life of the players or the team, then it's hard to understand why outcome are good or bad. I think that regular communication with the coach is the best way to try to understand what is happening with the team, so we can find solutions to keep growing as a group. This is even more important when the team is struggling. Everyone on the staff as a crucial role and responsibility.
18 - Your Idol in Volleyball, and why:
Glenn Hoag: I don’t have any idol, but more people that have had a positive impact on the sport. Karch Kiraly, Bernardo Rezende, Stephane Antiga, Julio Velasco, Daniel Castellani, Giovanni Giuidetti, Doug Beal have had positive influence on the way I perceived the game, they helped me understand volleyball better.
They were “game changers” in the sport, they were all people that took on coaching after their playing career and modestly grew and impacted the sport in many ways, they shared their knowledge and that has helped the game grow.
19 - Your idol in sports, and why:
Glenn Hoag: John Wooden I would say was one of the person who had the most impact for me as a coach. He was a man of principle and accomplished great things. He was a “grounded” man that lived with important values. His words are simple but they are rich in learning.
John Wooden, 8 suggestions for succeeding::
Fear no opponent, Respect every opponent.
Remember, it’s the perfection of the smallest details that make big things happen.
Keep in mind that hustle makes up for many a mistake.
Be more interested in character than reputation.
Be quick, but don’t hurry.
Understand that the harder you work, the more luck you will have
Know that valid self-analysis is crucial for improvement.
Remember that there is no substitute for hard work and careful planning. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
20 - You idol in life, and why:
Glenn Hoag: Many people.
My parents, normal people who always let me follow my passions.
My wife Donna who was so patient having to live with a coach and raise a family, I hope I can become as good a person as she is!!!
Charles Cardinal. He is my mentor since I started coaching in 1993. As he said himself: “ he opened a window and he let me discover what was to see and to remember. In other words he taught me where to look but not what to see.”
Thank you for your answers. Let's make volleyball better. This in an independent inquiry, both in questions and in answers.
TV – Think Volleyball (from volleyballers to volleyballers) – PG-M Pedro Guilherme-Moreira
Glenn Hoag: John Wooden I would say was one of the person who had the most impact for me as a coach. He was a man of principle and accomplished great things. He was a “grounded” man that lived with important values. His words are simple but they are rich in learning.
John Wooden, 8 suggestions for succeeding::
Fear no opponent, Respect every opponent.
Remember, it’s the perfection of the smallest details that make big things happen.
Keep in mind that hustle makes up for many a mistake.
Be more interested in character than reputation.
Be quick, but don’t hurry.
Understand that the harder you work, the more luck you will have
Know that valid self-analysis is crucial for improvement.
Remember that there is no substitute for hard work and careful planning. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
20 - You idol in life, and why:
Glenn Hoag: Many people.
My parents, normal people who always let me follow my passions.
My wife Donna who was so patient having to live with a coach and raise a family, I hope I can become as good a person as she is!!!
Charles Cardinal. He is my mentor since I started coaching in 1993. As he said himself: “ he opened a window and he let me discover what was to see and to remember. In other words he taught me where to look but not what to see.”
Thank you for your answers. Let's make volleyball better. This in an independent inquiry, both in questions and in answers.
TV – Think Volleyball (from volleyballers to volleyballers) – PG-M Pedro Guilherme-Moreira
