The participants in Adam Grant's podcast argue that improv makes life better.
They say that your job is to make the other people funny. Just as in volleyball, your job is to make your teammates better.
What's an overarching lesson connecting improve and volleyball?
The game is not scripted. Preparation is.
After the serve, responders improvise on both teams. What percent of the game is improvisation? That's hard to know...anything instinctive is.
I asked ChatGPT to help on this on. It did. There's room for commentary.
Prepare to improvise. Improv isn't the absence of preparation. Good improvisers have accumulated patterns, structures and experiences that allow them to respond quickly. That's exactly your chess “chunking” idea. A coach can't anticipate every situation, but can build a large enough library that fewer situations are genuinely new. You don't prepare the answer; you prepare yourself to find the answer.
“Yes, and” beats “No, but.” The fundamental improv principle is accepting what your partner gives you and building upon it. In coaching, reality is your scene partner: your setter is struggling, the opponent has changed defenses, the official is calling the match tightly. Accept the new reality first. Then add the solution. Arguing with reality wastes possessions.
Listen to understand what happens next. Weak improvisers are planning their next line while somebody else is speaking. Weak players do the sporting equivalent: they decide what they're going to do before reading the play. Great players see → interpret → respond. That is essentially the foundation of your volleyball reading work.
Good players become excellent players by reading the play to anticipate what comes next. Excellent players will try to disguise their intention.
If a serve leads to a difficult pass or out-of-system pass from zone 6, it's unlikely that the passer can create a middle attack. Read early to see the pin attack.
Make your teammates look good. Improv collapses when everyone is trying to deliver the funniest line. Sport collapses when everyone wants to make the winning play. The best improviser gives teammates something they can use. In basketball: make the simple pass. In volleyball: give the setter a playable ball. Great teammates improve everybody else's options.
Whether you're outside or middle, you won't get every set and you don't want that because the defense will make your life harder.
Mistakes are information, not endings. An improv scene can't stop because somebody delivered a bad line. The performers incorporate it and continue. That's NEXT PLAY in athletic language. The question isn't “Why did that happen?” during competition. It's “Given that it happened, what do we do now?” Reflection comes later.
After a "mistake" it's either, "Next play" or "reset and keep this point alive." In League of Our Own, Tom Hanks says, "There's no crying in baseball." Feel sorry for ourselves on our own time, not during a match.
Constraints can increase creativity. This is counterintuitive but important. Improv performers aren't helped by infinite possibilities; rules and structures narrow the search space. Sport does the same thing. “We're running pick-and-roll until they stop it” reduces cognitive load. Your principles and systems don't suppress improvisation; they create the boundaries within which intelligent improvisation becomes possible.
Sabine is in East Texas, not Melrose. That allows for a more diversified and less predictable offense. Sometimes less becomes more.
Don't confuse control with leadership. Coaches naturally want control. Games relentlessly remove it. You can't control officiating, injuries, opponent adjustments, bad bounces or whether your best player has her A-game. You can influence the team's response. That's a profound distinction: coaching isn't scripting what happens; it's preparing people who can respond when the script disappears.
The game is for the players. Coach Celli can't think for everyone. Read the play and make the best decision available. Pro sports sees change in acronyms:
NBA = next best answer
NFL = not for long
Psychological safety enables improvisation. Players who fear mistakes become cautious. They stop experimenting, communicating and solving problems. An improv troupe needs enough trust for someone to offer an idea without knowing whether it will work. Teams do too. That doesn't mean eliminating accountability. It means players understand: a good decision that fails is different from a bad decision. Coaches who punish both eventually create players who wait for instructions.
You may have heard the expression, "Don't be a robot." Robots are improving fast, but there's no robot volleyball team yet...
