AAGS 2021

38 Round Table 3 - How to manage the athletes Rhodri Williams (Journalist, Al Kass TV Channel) was the moderator of this discussion and opened by asking if winning as a coach and as an athlete was innate. You are a born winner as an athlete, a born winner as a coach. Was that something that was instilled in you, or you had to work hard at? Where did it come from? I will completely disagree with your contention and say no, I’m not a born winner. I’m not a born great volleyball player or a good volleyball coach. It’s not something that comes in genes. It comes in something that’s probably used far too often these days, but it’s a hunger to learn and a growth mindset. Just like we’re not even born with the ability to crawl or walk, we’ve got to acquire all those skills. I would never speak of anybody as a born this or a born that. I think it detracts from the work that goes on behind the scenes, especially as I made the transition from player to coach. You can see it across sports that when somebody has a lot of success on the field of play, on the pitch or on the court as a player, especially in team sports, the norm is they make lousy coaches. Because they see things and have an understanding of the game intuitively that most people don’t. They can get really frustrated or impatient when other people don’t see it, recognize it or make good decisions like they did. I recognized from the beginning that I’m swimming upstream, and I have to approach this thing called coaching with a very different mindset and with a beginner’s mentality. Who, and what was part of that growth into your success? I think it started with my parents, they both pursued not only university degrees. My father came from Hungary and escaped in 1956 after the peaceful revolution there, where the students especially tried so hard to win the country’s freedom back. He had to leave or probably not survive, as the Soviets sent in their tanks. He came to this country, to America, and made a new life for himself and worked really hard in college. That’s where he met my mother and they both ended up with postgraduate degrees. Education was a huge factor for both of them and was really important. They both modeled for me how important it is to be a lifelong learner. You got to play at the age of 11 with your father against other men and you realized at an early age that you could compete at the same level with grown men. Was that a significant development in your own volleyball prowess? Absolutely. In fact, you’re giving me goosebumps. Our team laughs at me, or with me, because I get those a lot, I just get excited about little things. That was a great gift. We actually read in one of the larger sports magazines in the United States called Sports Illustrated. We read a rare article about volleyball. One of the all- time great Americans was a player named Larry Rundell, and it was just around Olympic time, so they featured him. They said he was the youngest ever to play a tournament at 11 years old. At that time there were no age group tournament, there was no junior volleyball, no club volleyball of any sort. So, my dad and I decided that’d be kind of fun, to tie his record. I think that the gift in playing in that tournament, and I remember it very clearly, in beach volleyball, they play double elimination tournaments. So, you keep playing until you’ve lost twice. We lost the first one, a very close game and lost the second one. And I had the time of my life because it’s so difficult for boys to grow up, to be good men. And for girls to grow up to be good women, that’s a long, difficult process. But on this one sliver of life, this gift gave me the idea that I could already stand toe to toe Karch Kiraly