Business and sport principles overlap, however imperfectly. For example, business seeks profitability and growth with risk management. This requires effective use of people, strategies, and operations to serve multiple 'stakeholders'.
Great businesses serve shareholders, employees, customers, and society. MVB doesn't have shareholders per se, but collaboration and trust act to serve coaches, players, families and the broad community.
MVB has worked to develop success measured by its graduates and their volleyball individual and team achievements, seeking sustainable competitive advantage.
Here's a digression to AI from ChatGPT (with some annotations)
Volleyball Program as a Business: An Analogy via The 12-Week MBA
1. Leadership = Culture + Purpose
Business lens: Leadership is about defining a shared vision, building trust, and creating an environment for others to thrive.
In volleyball, this plays out in how the coach leads both emotionally and structurally. The team culture, accountability, and tone-setting mirror a CEO’s responsibility to embody and communicate the company’s purpose.
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🏐 Example: A coach who prioritizes “we over me” and empowers captains is doing what a good founder does—creating culture carriers, not just enforcing rules.
2. Strategy = Game Plan + Adaptability
Business lens: Strategy is aligning goals with capabilities and making clear trade-offs to compete in the market.
A volleyball program’s strategy involves building a style of play that fits the players’ strengths—tempo, defense, risk tolerance—and evolves over time. Like a company adapting to shifting market conditions, a coach must respond to opponent trends, injuries, and team development.
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🏐 Example: A team that starts the season running a fast offense but adapts mid-season to a slower tempo due to personnel changes is practicing agile strategy.
3. Finance = Time + Energy + Opportunity Cost
Business lens: Finance is resource management and trade-offs—understanding where the money flows and why.
In amateur volleyball, you're not managing dollars so much as time and attention. Every drill is an investment. Every meeting has opportunity cost. Conditioning, rest, video—these are your budget lines. You must maximize return on rep, not return on capital.
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🏐 Example: Choosing to spend extra time on serve receive instead of blocking because it impacts more rallies is a capital allocation decision.
4. Operations = Practice Planning + Systems + Consistency
Business lens: Operations are the systems that translate goals into action, sustainably and efficiently.
In volleyball, this is practice design, logistics, team rituals, and how you manage the day-to-day. Great operations mean players know what to expect, how to improve, and what success looks like. A well-run program reflects operational discipline.
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🏐 Example: Using a consistent drill-feedback-reflect cycle is like a company running on OKRs and weekly sprints—measurable, repeatable, improvable.
🧩 Imperfect But Instructive
| Business Element | Volleyball Equivalent |
|---|---|
| Leadership | Coach and captains setting values and modeling behavior |
| Strategy | Game model, opponent scouting, player development choices |
| Finance | Allocation of time, energy, attention |
| Operations | Practice systems, schedules, feedback loops |
🏁 Final Take
A volleyball coach is like a founder-CEO of a startup with no budget but deep emotional capital.
They build a team from scratch, allocate resources under constraints, pivot in real time, and create culture intentionally. The analogy is imperfect, but useful: business builds products and services, sport builds people—but both are systems of motivation, decision-making, and execution.
Legendary basketball coach Don Meyer had a saying, "Every parent would rather have their son be All-State than win states." There's always the tension between individual and team achievement. MVB needs exceptional individual play to maximize team achievement. Work to embrace the meaning of the sign in the University of North Carolina Women's Soccer locker room, "EXCELLENCE IS OUR ONLY AGENDA."
Lagniappe. Perform better with more focus.
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