Mark Burik:
Okay, everybody, we're going live and yep, we are. Ready for Facebook? Facebook's a go, Instagram's a go, YouTube's a go. Fantastic. Hi everybody. My name is Mark Baric and we are good on sound. Great. My producer, my lovely wife, just told us that we're good on sound. So we're gonna get going today. And today is Monday, August 7th. That's when we're filming. And what we're doing today is we're gonna talk about developing your philosophy as a coach, developing a coaching philosophy. Now, this is important, not only for coaches. So if you're a player, I want you to listen to this too, because it's going to actually help shape the partners that you play with, how you behave on the court, how you go to practice. And eventually, if you have a long-term partner, you're gonna have to discuss this with your actual teammate and have a team philosophy. So this is a crucial step for any sports coach and it provides a foundation for your coaching approach and it guides all of your decisions and actions, okay? This is important if you're running a company, if you're running a team, if you are just coaching a couple people, you have to understand what you're doing, where you're coming from. So we're gonna get into that today and if you are listening to this as a podcast or you're watching it on YouTube or Facebook, we have an entire coaching course. that we would love if you wanted to take. So if you don't, if you want to improve as a coach, if you are in a coaching role and you're not really sure what you're doing, or if you used to be an indoor coach and now you're getting the beach volleyball coaching role in your club or your school, this is going to be a great program for you. It has a lot of videos that take you from the ground up, in other words, developing your philosophy, something like this, but we also talk about how to fix. different techniques and pretty much add to your toolbox and add to whatever coaching tools you have at this moment. So that's what that course is about and in order to complete that certification, we actually invite you to one of our camps so that you coach in person with us. So that comes included in the coaching certification. And if you guys have any questions, just DM me at Mark Burick on Instagram. and we would love to see you become a certified veteran beach coach. And then maybe at some point, running lessons, running classes, running a location for us, and coming to our camps and vacations as a coach. If you've heard this before, if you've listened to this podcast before, you know that we're always looking for people to hire. We just have a wide range of what we can hire and it has to make sense. So. If you want to be a coach, hopefully you have another skill set because we do have a bag of great coaches, but we need people with some other skill sets that can help us with a little bit of sales, marketing, video editing, or apparel development. So get in touch if that's your thing. Okay, this weekend, just before, again, before we get into the meat, this weekend I ran a fundamentals class, six hour fundamentals for... Hermosa Beach and it was awesome. We did have a lot of beginners. We had a lot of people who were really athletic and just starting volleyball. So I think it was perfect for some of them. And then we had some people who just wanted a refresher on some of their skills and we had an indoor player who needed to make some conversions to Beach. But it was a fun Sunday so it's everybody who was here Sunday we did that six hour that was awesome. and thank you guys for coming. It was hot and you guys survived and you were absolute troopers, so I appreciate you guys. It was a good time. If somebody from right now, somebody from Long Beach has been texting me and trying to get us to coach one of her groups, if you ever have any ideas like that where you want us to come coach a group, coach your club or run an event in your town, just get in touch, just DM me at martburke and we will try to build it if it fits for us. We do have a three day event coming up in Florida. So August 25th to 27th, let me make sure that I'm going here. You can always check our dates and upcoming events on bitterbeach.com forward slash events. But August 25th to 27th, we have a big three day event in St. Pete Beach and there are a lot of people signed up for that. So I know that it's gonna be a fun weekend. And August, September 8th. to 10th, we have an advanced camp for our A and AA players, men's and women, it's a couple weeks after that. And Brandon is running in Virginia Beach, the 24th and 25th of August, he's doing a two day clinic out there. Finally, August 20th, advanced defensive techniques and tactics for women's B and A players. Bring it out to Hermosa Beach and let's hang out. Okay. So, let's get into this episode. We're gonna start it like this. Developing your coaching philosophy is just massively important. Why? Because it actually guides all of your decisions. Now, I wanna make sure that you actually know what that means. A coaching philosophy means what type of goals are you actually going for? What type of community are you developing? Who are you as a person? And how are all of your actions going to match that? If you show up one day as like a Bobby Knight kind of angry coach that's throwing chairs, and the next day you want everybody to be lovey-dovey and super best friends and nice and calm, you're giving them conflicting messages. And when a leader gives conflicting messages, it's hard to follow suit with that. So we wanna make sure that we're giving consistent messages to our teams and that... We're doing what we set out to do. Sometimes you get lost in all of those daily battles and you end up chasing too many rabbits, but in the very wrong direction. And you end up in a place that you didn't want to be when you started out on this coaching adventure, or like I said, for the teammates out there, on this team adventure. And I wanna make sure that I help you develop this coaching philosophy for yourself. So the first thing that I want you to do is do a little bit of self-reflection and values identification. So I want you to, if you have a pen right now, I want you to start writing this down. What are the things that you value and that you consider important in sports and coaching? You're gonna have to identify some principles here that resonate with you. Is teamwork important? Is discipline important? Sportsmanship. Competitiveness. What's the most important, what are the most important things for you in terms of your values? And I want you to just start, if you have a pen, great, use it. If you don't have a pen, start wrapping your head around it or just write this down for later in your phone. How do I identify my values that I think are important for athletes and for teams? Now I will tell you this. The way that I coach for Better at Beach as a company where we have people who are paying us as customers and we don't always see the same people on a regular basis, we might see them for a week at a time and then say goodbye. The way that I coach there is going to be quite different than the way that I would coach if I had a long-term team. If I had a long-term athlete, there would have to be some more serious discussions. There would have to be a lot of diving into their personality and who they are. As it is right now, we touch on it. We touch on those things during our classes and during our camps. So we do talk about communication, interpersonal, interreaction. Hey, I noticed that after you lose points, you always turn away from your partner and you start thinking in your own head about what you did wrong. I just want you to be aware that might look like a negative reaction to your partner. Your partner might think that you're shutting them out at that moment. And I know that you're just being tough on yourself and when you're tough on yourself, you don't like to talk to anybody, but your partners don't know that. That's one example of something that we can give during a camp and we can touch on that really quickly, but we would really dive deep into that and have better expectations if this were a long-term team. Likewise, you know, I'm not going to go through a ton of disciplinary actions with our people who are just getting off of work and need this for exercise and need this to make their lives better or an escape for athletes that are chasing some sort of title or some sort of goals, then again, we get into those high expectations. And there might be a little bit more discipline, hopefully not. Hopefully you just got a gang of athletes that are, you know, rock stars on their own in terms of people. But as coaches, as leaders anyway, for both, whether you're running a company or whether you're running a club, you have to help create better people. But my version of a better person might be different than your version of a better person. So in order to find that, you have to start writing down. some of your values, okay? Write down if it's very important to be disciplined, if it's very important to be physically fit, if it's important to be level-headed, or if you want absolute fire, and that's the way you love coaching and you love competing. This does not have to be a one way, and that's what you have to choose. This has to be your way so that you enjoy coaching. You, again, have to create that environment so that you can enjoy. coaching. Okay, now how do we do some of that? How do we actually find some values or get some idea flow? Well, let's do some study and research. Okay, so start looking at different coaches, start following different coaches, watch some documentaries on Netflix that only talk about coaches and how they act and how they react with player situations. start going to some coaching certification courses and hearing them. Visit colleges, high schools, friends, call them and start saying, how does this person run their gym? If you've never gone into a gym or onto a court to watch how another coach coaches, you're definitely not doing your part in becoming the best version of yourself for your athletes, for your team, or for your team. club. This has to be mandatory. You have to get your own coach education, and not just from books on X's and O's and technique. You have to see how other people are running their gyms, their beaches, their facilities, so that you can have a good idea of where you want to be. Because if you've never seen a pure example of the type of coach that you want to be, it'll be hard to replicate certain versions of that. So make sure that you're actually studying and researching. And right now, if you have a pen at home, I want you to write down some coaches or universities or schools that you think you would like to learn from. You would like to see the inner workings of their team. Maybe you could send them an email today. Maybe you could send them a text today. Find a way to get in touch with them to say, hey, I really respect your program. I would love to shadow you and see what it's like on the inside. And I don't know about most, but I would say many coaches would be like, yeah, absolutely. And it never hurts actually to have an extra hand for feeding some drills. Yesterday, Maykai, one of our campers who moved down to Hermosa beach, just to take our classes and play some more volleyball, he ended up finishing his gameplay and he was hanging out. He's like, Hey, two hours. left, sorry, I had two hours left in the clinic and he's like, do you need any help? And I said, what are you serious? He goes, well, I have nothing to do. I just want to be around volleyball and I'd love to help out these beginners and, you know, be around for some coaching. And so he got some free coaching lessons through helping me. So he found maybe I'm a mentor, maybe I'm just the guy who runs the company, but he found somebody who he wanted to coach with and coach next to and he was able to help our community. Of course I said yes, bought him lunch and said thank you very much. A lot of coaches will be open to that. So if you say hey, do you need an arm at practice? Do you need somebody to feed or shag? Not too many people would turn that down. So go and do that study, go and do that research and make sure that you're doing it both in the books and you're reading some good coaching and leadership books but at the same time you should see it happening in person. Okay, now. The next thing that we want to touch on here is defining your purpose and your goals. What do you want to achieve through coaching? Are you developing well-rounded athletes? Are you developing specialists? Again, do you want them to be super competitive and learn to compete? Do you need these people to learn discipline? Do you need them to learn that there are better adults or better communities in their life? Okay, you have to define the purpose of your coaching and your team. For some of us, it might be championships. For some of us, it's a better community, a place where we can... lie on each other and have meaningful relationships. But let's write down first draft right here. Start defining some of your purposes, some of your goals, some things that you would want your players to be or to remember when they are done working with you. This is going to shape everything that we do. For Better at Beach, again, not the team, but for Better at Beach, one of the things that I wish when I was coaching teams previously and now that I'm just coaching a company, right? I wish that I had learned more about the community aspect and how much it helps your team to be able to go out together, do things, have events, have secret handshakes. All of these things become important for you to develop long-term success. So one of the things that I know that I want every player to walk away with when they're done working with me for a long time is have they become a better communicator and a better community person. That's some of our important goals for Better at Beach and for our coaches. Next thing I want you guys, in terms of developing coaching philosophy, next thing I want you guys to remember is that you have to understand your athletes. We've talked about this before. We've talked about it in other courses and in other episodes. But first of all, you gotta know how old they are. You have to understand their skill level. You have to know their individual goals, what they're chasing. You have to know how those goals apply to maybe your club director or athletic program, you have to know where they come from, what type of homes are they coming from, if you're coaching juniors. what type of homes are they coming from? Yeah, you have to know the environment so that you know how to talk, how to address them, how to get on their level and then help them shape. Because if you set unrealistic expectations and you're just going too high level, if you're talking about elite and what it's like to travel the world and play professional volleyball and you're talking to four and five year olds, they're gonna be like, uh-huh, can you throw the ball? So it won't work, okay? So you have to understand. First of all, understand your athletes and that will start informing some of your coaching philosophy, okay? So make sure you know how old they are. Make sure you know their goals. Make sure you know the goals of your club if you're coaching for a club or a school. And this has to start aligning with that and matching it. Developing some coaching principles. This we talked about last time, so I don't wanna spend too much time on it, but you have to develop some principles and ideas and expectations for yourself and your staff that you will make sure you hold yourself to. Okay. Use your research, use sitting in with some other coaches, come to one of our camps, see how we do it, and then start creating a set of principles. And like we said in previous episode, we want you to actually start writing this down as if you were your own employee. What's acceptable? How do you want them to coach? What tonality do you want to use to address athletes? Most of the people who work with me at Better Beach, they know that I'm a high rep guy. I do have high expectations. You know, I'll throw a shot in your ribs if you're not diving, if you're not hustling. So I have a very, very tiny bit of sarcasm. But I learned early on that sarcasm was not working for me when it came to coaching. So I had to release that from my athletes. They just felt insulted or as if I was mocking them instead of attempting to help them. Most people don't like being made fun of. Shocker. But that took me a while to realize that. And I don't want. to take too long for you to realize that as well. So you have to say, if you were watching yourself and you were an employer, no, I do not want that person talking to my customer or to my players or athletes like that, okay? No, if I were hiring or creating a program, I wouldn't be wearing that to practice. I wouldn't be talking about these things, or I would be talking about way more of these things. So. We talked about that in the last episode, but I just wanted to touch on that today. Now, the next is balance and flexibility. And that's, now that we're developing these philosophies, you also have to understand that there is wiggle room and there's time to retest and restructure. So even though you're developing this big binder filled with your own coaching rules and. everything that you want to do and repeat or not repeat next year. Remember, every day is different every week, every month is different. And for sure, every athlete is different. So that means that next year you might have an entirely different set of athletes and you might have to talk to them in a completely different way. You might move from one city to another and you might have to adapt. I'm not saying completely change or overhaul. but I am saying adapt. So make sure that you have some flexibility within your philosophy and within your structure and the things that you teach because the ultimate skill in sports and I think in life is adaptability. How fast can you change what needs to be changed and when it needs to be changed? That becomes important and you want your athletes to do that as well. So you as a coach should be able to do that as well. Communication and feedback is the next thing about developing your philosophy. You don't know how you come across to other people. And there are some people that are really bad at this, where they have zero self-awareness. And there are some people that kind of understand how they influence people. And then there are other people who, like sociopaths, who can basically use people as tools without feeling any sort of guilt or reaction or any sort of negative feelings that come with that. And they're actually able to, hmm. slightly different definition of sociopath but without feeling any sort of remorse or how they're feeling they influence or they push people so sociopaths are often not very empathic which means that they're not feeling what that other person feels so maybe I'll just backtrack on that and say that sociopaths might not be great coaches either way you have to make sure that you know how people are feeling. So a couple of ways to do this are some blind, blind surveys, which means that you give this stack of papers to your captain or to somebody outside your team, you have them fill it out and you say, hey team, I want you to answer these questions, just so you know, I will not see who answered what. Some people become too shy. They won't give you honest feedback because they feel like they're gonna hurt your feelings or it's going to impact them as a customer or a player and that's going to hurt. So what you should do instead is line surveys. You know, for us, we attempt that at Better Beach. If you've come to one of our camps, you know that what I do is we try to adapt. We create programs based on what people ask for. Yesterday, I gave this speech and I give the speech at a lot of the end of our camps. I say, you're gonna get an email that asks for a review on Google. If I gave you a five star performance, please go ahead, show that review, it's very helpful. If I did not in any way, if this didn't live up to one expectation, or you think there was one thing that you were really wishing was there and it didn't happen, or you say, hmm. You know what, it was a five-star experience, but I think if he added this, it would be awesome. Send me an email, come back again, let me show you that I can improve and that our company can adapt to your needs and see what can happen there. But without getting feedback from your players and from the people who you're coaching, you can't change, you don't know what's going on. So please. Please, find a way to have effective communication and feedback and talk to them. Ask questions. If you are going through practices and you're only telling and you are rarely asking, you're making a mistake and you're hurting yourself. They are your students. They should be leading with questions. Of course you have the topic, of course you have the answers, but if you're too busy talking, and they never get the chance to ask, well then you're not going to teach them. You're going to announce what you know. So I want you to teach them and I want you to make sure that you're opening that pathway for communication. So find a time during the week, find a time during the month, maybe at the end of the season or at least twice during the season, and make sure that you are finding a way for your players to give you feedback on what's happening in your gym, on your team, et cetera. Okay, now knowing all this, you have to lead by example. Coaches, I've coached in a lot of gyms and a lot of facilities around the country and around the world. And here's what I notice, when I have conversations with adults, parents and coaching staff. I will put money that I know how the kids are going to behave and how they present themselves as people. No matter what they say, the kids are following what coaches do, what parents do. So when I go and I sit with a nice friendly bunch of people at dinner somewhere and two of the moms or dads are complaining about the coach. or about this player on the team. And, you know, kids right there. I guarantee you when I work with that team, all of those kids are going to be caddy. They're going to put external blame on people. They're gonna blame the coach. They're gonna blame the school. They're gonna blame athletes, and it's gonna be a toxic environment because your athletes will follow your emotions. They'll follow your behavior. So if you want them to be a certain person or a certain type of athlete, that's the one that you should be presenting. Not all of them will follow exactly with your persona or everything, but the majority will. And so if you're creating this whole philosophy, but you don't live by it, sorry, not gonna happen. This is very similar. You know, if you walk into a personal training studio or there's a personal trainer and they're really overweight and they're unhealthy and you can see that they have terrible habits. How are you going to trust them with your health if they don't even trust themselves with theirs? Or if you can't even trust them to keep their own health in order? So we have to set that example as leaders, as coaches, and make sure that you're living by the philosophies that you're giving. Check yourself and see if you are living up to the rules, principles, and ideals that you want in your athletes and find a way to calibrate your behavior to do so. We talked about continued learning, but I do wanna touch on it again. Make sure that you're still doing this research. Make sure that you are constantly open to receiving new tips. If you're taking this course with Better at Beach, of course, you're already in there, right? You're doing your job. So that's great. You're... improving yourself. If you ask your athletes to improve and research and check out this video and check out that video and do reps at home, you better be doing the same thing. Okay, it is your job to have continued learning so that you can become the best version of yourself for your athletes. When you're doing this, when you're developing a philosophy and you're allowing people to get into it and you're creating this routine, just remember that it's going to take a long period of work. You cannot install a philosophy in a week. This becomes a body of work over months and years, if not decades. So be patient. Know that consistency counts. And just keep repping it out. Whatever you want to emulate, whatever philosophy you're creating, just make sure that you are repping it out and you're staying consistent, right? We don't, you don't get jacked by just lifting or bench pressing for one session. It comes over years of you lifting consistently, little piece, little improvement by little improvement. So if you're going through a tough time coaching right now, I just want to make sure that you know it's gonna take time. and it's okay that it does. And you being consistent for yourself and having some grace for yourself is also going to pay off with those athletes because we all know that athletes can't just pick things up in one day and you're encouraging them to do the same thing. Like, hey, this is one of those things, I say this all the time at camps, you know, kind of sucky answer is this is one of those things that's gonna take you a few thousand more reps and you'll find it. I'm doing that with my back end in tennis right now, I'm just taking out the machine and I am just hitting hundreds of balls. with my backhand every time I'm on that court because I know it'll come, I know I'll start looking at the technique and I'll pick some things up, but I also have to feel it and I have to understand it fully in my body. You have to do the same thing with your coaching. You just have to put in those conscious reps to make sure that you're getting the best out of it. Okay? And like we said before, just be adaptable and make sure that you are making these changes. Okay, a coaching philosophy is something that lives. That means that it constantly changes. So you need this book, you need to have this written down so that you can make edits. There won't be a finished copy until you decide that you're done coaching and you wanna write your coaching book, and there is the copy. But even five years after you retire from coaching, you might say, hmm. You know, I learned something in life that I really wish I had applied during my coaching years, maybe you wish you could go back and edit that book. So I want you to know that once you've written this thing down, just make sure you know what's in pencil. You can erase it, you can modify it, and you can write versions. Cause the more you coach, the more you can create these if then scenarios, because you'll come to a point where one piece of your coaching philosophy or one tip doesn't work. a certain athlete or a certain group, but because you were so adaptable, you found a way to solve that problem or somebody else gave you a way to solve that problem. So be adaptable. Make sure that you know that this is a living document. Your philosophy will continue to mold and change throughout your life and that's okay and it's encouraged. That's what we do. We constantly improve and we constantly adapt. That is our episode. for today. So I hope you got a lot out of it. I hope this is helping the coaches out there. I know that this is not necessarily for the athletes, the players, but if you are a player, you need this same kind of document to know what type of athlete you are. Who do you want to be on the court in practice and in tournaments? I've played with some different version of that person showed up each day. So I didn't know who I was getting, so I didn't know how I could interact with that person, and I'm sure that I was not perfect either, okay? If you are going to be a certain type of player, show up and encourage yourself to be that person every day. All right? Athletes also need their own persona, and you have to live by your own. principles, you have to live by the guidelines that you set for yourself, and the only way to really start that is just start by journaling, start by writing some things down, or talking and recording, or just talking with somebody and saying, hey, what kind of athlete do you think I am? What kind of persona do you think that I play best with? All right, and if you can ask that, and somebody says, dude, every time you've dominated, It was because you were walking around with a big chest and super fiery and that's what I see. I mean, it's not an attitude thing, but you're dominant at that phase. Every time you calm down or you try to become this, you know, stoic version of yourself, you ended up dropping a few points and your energy came down. This might be you, this might have nothing to do with you, but see if you can get some feedback and say, do you notice what mood I play best in? And try to find that answer for yourself as well. Okay, and that will start your player philosophy. And then of course, live by that. If you're the grinder, you grind every day. If you're the thinker, you make sure that you are watching film and you are figuring out and you're listening to high level strategy conversations like we have on this podcast. And the Sandcast is great for that. So that's what we have for today. All right. That's all. Thanks guys, appreciate your time. And if you ever want to reach out or you have any questions, you can post it if you're a member. You can post it on the Facebook group or you can just DM me at Mark Burrick. Thank you so much. We'll see you on the sand.
