"We all have a thousand excuses for why we don’t achieve our goals in life. There is one reason: because we failed to prepare properly. There are no excuses." - Erik Kapitulik, The Program
Being part of MVB means commitment to "not average." Excellence requires "more," more time, more discipline, more effort, and more will. Average players never make an MVB roster.
Think about professional athletes. Most were the best player on their team for most of their lives. Even if they outworked others, they still have limits.
Consider former Celtic Henry Finkel. He averaged 27 points a game in his senior year at Dayton, was selected an All-American, and became a second round NBA draft choice.
He was a journeyman center in the NBA, traded to the Celtics in 1969. Later, he was understudy to Dave Cowens, helping the Celtics to an NBA championship in 1974. During his nine year NBA career he averaged five points and four rebounds a game. He is a champion.
Don’t do the easy wrong; do the hard right. You have to go against your nature. It’s not in everybody’s nature to get up every morning & work. When we don’t have a challenge, we are not our best. That’s what drives us." -Geno Auriemma 📽️@WDWconvopic.twitter.com/cFDO5Isnuz
— The Winning Difference (@thewinningdiff1) April 7, 2025
Excellence is hard. Do hard better. You're not average.
Lagniappe. Develop 'refocusing' habits.
"Develop better habits so that when we are under stress, we don’t have to make good mental or emotional decisions—we do them habitually." - Erik Kapitulik in The Program
Some refocusing ideas:
Focus on a fixed point (e.g. a point on the net)
Dot b. "Stop and take a slow, deep breath" (cleansing breath)
— Coach AJ 🎯 Mental Fitness (@coachajkings) March 24, 2025
"Here's something I know I'm supposed to do that I really don't want to do...can you make yourself do it...here's something you know you're not supposed to do...can you keep yourself from it."
Quotes don't make players. Actions do. Make choices that promote success.
"We make our habits and our habits make us."
"Discipline defines destiny."
"Leave your comfort zone."
I heard it a thousand times. "There's nothing to do for us in Melrose." Don't make bad choices because you think you have none.
Don't text and drive. Studies also show that using your phone to send a text while driving can have the same effect on your reaction time as drinking four beers before getting behind the wheel.
Be intentional about sleeping at least eight hours a night. "Prioritizing sleep in athletes’ preparation and recovery routine is not an easy task."
Historically, MVB is at its best against better competition. It's never perfect. "Chase perfection."
Every match has potential for growth. Even opponents who are not as strong present an opportunity to work on something - serving to zones, setter dumps, hitting off fingertips or try for tools at the pins.
Step up in the moment. Against Lexington last year, Emme Boyer made a number of game changing plays. Leverage that experience, carrying it forward to 2025.
Lagniappe. Play with purpose in your offseason volleyball. Have intent to improve every practice and every match.
"The mental to the physical in basketball is four to one." - Coach Bob Knight
Ask players about their strategies to fortify their mental game.
Entrepreneur Sara Blakely shared in her MasterClass that her father asked the children each Saturday dinner, "what have you failed at this week?" Failure is our companion on life's journey.
Kelvin Sampson said, "The first step on the ladder of success is always failure."
Growth starts when you stop avoiding failure - And start learning from it.
"Immature people don’t understand that there is going to be failure."
— Coach AJ 🎯 Mental Fitness (@coachajkings) April 8, 2025
Examine a few well-known techniques:
1) Visualization. See yourself succeeding. In "Ten-Minute Toughness," Jason Selk proposed a three minute mental "highlight reel."
2) Mindfulness. Most professional athletes and teams have a mindfulness program. Mindfulness reduces stress hormones, increases focus, and decreases anxiety and depression.
3) Self-talk. We behave as we believe. Train ourselves to deliver positive thoughts, positive identity and performance statements.
4) Body positioning. Expansive body positioning is controversial. Studies by Amy Cuddy show that increases in testosterone and decreases in cortisol (stress hormone) occurred after two-minute expanded body positioning.
Actionable: a three minute "body scan" from Chat GPT
A three-minute body scan can be a powerful tool for athletes to enhance performance, recovery, and mental focus. Though often associated with mindfulness practices, a quick body scan is particularly useful in sports because it helps athletes develop body awareness, reduce tension, and improve movement efficiency. Here’s how:
1. Heightened Body Awareness
A short body scan encourages athletes to check in with their physical state—where they feel strong, where they feel tight, and how their body is positioned. This awareness helps with injury prevention by identifying small discomforts before they become significant issues.
2. Enhanced Recovery
By systematically relaxing different muscle groups, athletes can release tension built up from training or competition. A brief scan can promote muscle relaxation and circulation, aiding in recovery between efforts.
3. Improved Movement Efficiency
Athletes often carry unconscious tension in areas like the shoulders, jaw, or lower back. A quick scan helps detect these inefficiencies, allowing them to move with greater ease and coordination.
4. Increased Focus and Readiness
A body scan doubles as a mental reset, helping athletes clear distractions and direct attention to their bodies before a game or practice. This can be especially useful in high-pressure moments.
5. Stress and Anxiety Regulation
By pairing the scan with controlled breathing, athletes activate their parasympathetic nervous system, reducing stress and fostering composure.
How to Implement a Three-Minute Body Scan
Find a quiet space (or use it courtside or in a locker room).
Close the eyes (if possible) and take slow breaths.
Move attention from head to toe (or vice versa), scanning for tension, discomfort, or asymmetry.
Release tension where needed, adjust posture, and refocus.
Finish with a deep breath and a moment of intention-setting.
5) High, low, gratitude. Each evening review the day for event highs, lows, and gratitude. Highs reinforce our capabilities. Lows allow us to make physical and mental changes. A gratitude practice increases our motivation, resilience and positive culture. Shawn Achor advised the '21-day Gratitude Challenge'. Write down three things each night for which we are grateful.
6) Stop sign. Don't double down. Pressure to perform often becomes anxiety. Anxiety can translate to mental or physical mistakes, tentative play, or sequences of errors. Think about how often one mistake (e.g. a turnover) turns into a second (frustration foul).
Pressure degrades performance.
Use more tools to reduce anxiety and improve play.
Lagniappe 2. Lee Child explains Jack Reacher's mentality in Never Go Back. "When it comes to fear, my DNA is the same as anyone else’s. I trained myself, that’s all. To turn fear into aggression, automatically."
Lagniappe 3. Everything that matters requires quality decisions.
With your children, when they disagree, be thankful. Don’t expect them to agree with everything. Decision making is lonely, suggestion making is simple, anybody can make suggestions. Decision making when it affects others is difficult. You have to do it with courage. pic.twitter.com/X2EkaQBMGu
— The Winning Difference (@thewinningdiff1) March 28, 2025
Culture and coaching provide sustainable competitive advantage. And these depend on both the implementation from coaches and the reception from players and teams. Don't tune your coaches out or roll your eyes. Listen and adjust.
Shape your journey. The beauty of adolescence is the lifetime potential to craft a long, meaningful life.
Learn every day. Embrace gratitude and contribution.
Here is advice from author Sahil Bloom from his "10 Favorite Ideas."
Identify Situations: Identify the situations where you'd like to show up as the best version of yourself. This can be as big as performing in front of millions or as small as having dinner with your family after a long day. Any situation where you want to be your best.
Envision Your Character: Envision the character you would like to embody in each situation. What traits do they possess? How do they appear and interact? What is their mentality and energy level?
Get in Character: Nothing works without practice. Get yourself some reps by turning on this character in those situations. See how it feels to show up as your best self in these moments.
Remember that daily actions shape your identity. When you embrace this, your whole world changes.
Decades ago someone reportedly asked legendary journalist Walter Cronkite how to be trustworthy. He said something like, "act like you are trustworthy and eventually you will believe you are trustworthy."
The quote misattributed to Aristotle is Aristotelian. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore is not an act, but a habit."
As a former coach, I loved practice. Practice is the laboratory, the proving ground where theory becomes reality.
"Make practice hard so games are easy."
Make practice competitive so you know who the competitors are, the kids you need on the court when it matters most.
"Don't cheat the drill."
"You can't practice like hamburger and play like steak."
"The best teams play harder for longer." - Dave Smart Be that team.
Years ago a coach asked why I kept hyping this kid, Cecilia Kay. Then he coached her for three days at a camp. "Best prospect ever to come out of Melrose." Make Coach Celli and the staff see you with 'coaches' eyes'. Make them put you on on the court.
Image from Two Thoughts: A Timeless Collection of Infinite Wisdom
Players get in trouble when they say they are bored, that there is nothing here for them. As children we heard this a lot, "bored people are boring."
Tell them what you're going to say, say it, and summarize what you said.
You want improvement:
Build skill (play and practice)
Raise volleyball IQ (play, read, watch video)
Become more athletic. Do the work.
Lift your mental game.
Imagine that you live surrounded by an apple orchard. And then you tell me "I'm not hungry" or "I don't like apples." Apple turnovers? Apple crisp? Apple pie? The Baby Apple (pancake)?
Whether it's volleyball, math, or psychology, knowledge surrounds us. But we have to pick it.
Lagniappe. This is culture.
Pat Riley said, "A culture is simply a shared vision of what it is you want to do to get to where it is you want to go."
Culture isn’t what you say—it’s what you reinforce daily.
— Coach AJ 🎯 Mental Fitness (@coachajkings) March 21, 2025
Lagniappe 2. Coach Dave Brady told the player. "I'm the second most hated person in the Middlesex League. You're the most." She was All-League in the Middlesex League twice, the North Shore Volleyball Player or the Year, and an All-State player. Toughness plays.
"Our ultimate success in mountaineering (and life) is based not on our performance when everything goes well, but rather in those moments when little or nothing does; when we are faced with adversity." - Erik Kapitulik et al. in The Program
Toughness is a skill. Commit to becoming tougher than you are and tougher than your opponents. Tough players and teams summon the physical and emotional resources to do more when adversity arises...which it always does.
Part of toughness is elite physical conditioning.
1) Make conditioning part of your training. Long rallies and long matches require conditioning.
2) Toughness is focus, "being where your feet are." Focus allows you to read and execute "low probability" plays.
The 2022 team showed maximum resilience during a postseason match with Billerica.
Set 4, Melrose leads 23-22. Ruth Breen slows an attack, Emma Desmond makes a running one-handed save going out of bounds, and Chloe Gentile gets a kill with an athletic adjustment.
3) Toughness is doing what must be done, the right way, when it needs to be done. Go back to the video. Watch the bench. They are engaged.
Toughness means doing the work. Toughness means leaving your comfort zone. Toughness means sacrificing what you want now for something you want more later.
Be conditioned. Learn to anticipate plays and get to the spot. Be focused and relentless.
Great players don't desire the star role. Great players focus on starring in the role that their team needs. Most players want to be the best, but many fail to figure out how to be the best at what the team needs to win. pic.twitter.com/vnOUq6fXXU
— The Winning Difference (@thewinningdiff1) April 3, 2025
"There is always a pecking order." - Erik Spoelstra, Miami Heat coach
"Star in your role." Whether you are the 'star player' or a role player, know your job and add value to the team.
Make your teammates better to impact winning. That is the ultimate mark of exceptional players.
Jeopardy has been a longstanding quiz show favorite, first premiering on March 30, 1964. The current syndicated version has aired since September 1984.
As you know, your answers should be in the form of a question.
"Most things in life-that are worth having-are hard. You have to work for it. The other side of hard is usually something really good, but most people can't push through it."
Many want to be great, but few want to do what greatness requires. That’s the difference. pic.twitter.com/4QsItT2CHh
— The Winning Difference (@thewinningdiff1) April 2, 2025
All opinions expressed in the blog are solely my own. Not an official publication of any organization. "Excellence is our only agenda."
Seize the power of today. Invest in yourself. In math, English, or history class ask "what did I learn today?" and "how can I apply this going forward?"
Read great books. Director Werner Herzog shares a simple message. "Read. Read. Read. Read. Read." The opening line of Anna Karenina summarizes the following 1205 pages. "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Understand that topic sentence. You can skip the rest.
People ask, "what books do you highly recommend?" Jon Gordon's Positive Dog resonated about the power of positivity. "The Boys in the Boat" weaves a narrative about the Great Depression, the rise of fascism is 1930's Germany, and the true story of a boy who grows up to row for the 1936 US Olympic team.
Then, "What are you reading now?" I always read multiple books, currently "The Innocent" by David Baldacci, "Originals" by Adam Grant, and "The Program" by Eric Kapitulik.
Learn every day. "Learn five things every day and soon you know a lot." Of course at your age you learn far more. Once volleyball was summarized as "dig, set, spike." That evolved to "pass, set, hit." Score with service, attacking, and block-kills. Read the play to CARE - concentrate - anticipate - react - execute. The only way that matters is how your current coach wants it done.
Make friends with the dead. Only about seven percent of the people ever born are alive today. Ignoring the wisdom of past lives misses out on a lot. Look up Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Herstory.
Sport is a microcosm of life. Your primary team is family. You have other teams - school, community, volleyball, workplace. Years ago I complimented Kayla Wyland to her parents. Her mom said, "she's every bit as nice at home." How you do anything is how you do everything.
Choose to invest your time instead of spending it.
Your effort today tells your coaches everything they need to know about how prepared you are to help the team tomorrow. Great teams aren’t made of players who get what they want — they’re made of players who give what’s needed. pic.twitter.com/w9fKoHrbgP
— The Winning Difference (@thewinningdiff1) March 31, 2025
With a little more than four and a half months until tryouts, how can players get the odds on their side?
1) Commitment. Commit to Anson Dorrance's continual ascension. Should volleyball be important to you? That's entirely your call.
2) Collaboration. "Look for the helpers." - Mr. Rogers It's hard to do the work unless you know what work is needed. Find an MVB resource or another player to attach yourself to like a remora on a shark. Watch and learn from the shark.
3) Command. Work to master the fundamentals. Make consistency your brand. Refine the relevant core skills - serve/receive, attack/block, set, and pass. Break them down into the pieces such as footwork, armswing, et cetera. Then play as much as you can.
