AAGS 2021

42 idea of ownership, democracy, accountability. The team again, regularly had zoom meetings with our culture consultant coach Sue. For example, they wanted more accountability in our culture, in our program and so did we coaches. That’s one thing for coaches to remember is whatever you’re getting now, you’re perfectly designed to get that. So, something has to change if you want something different. If you want more of X behavior and less of Y behavior unless you change something significant, you’re going to continue to get what you’re already getting. You’re perfectly designed to get what you’re getting today, but if all of us want accountability, we want to be in it together. I told you when I played it was a year-round training program. Now, national teams work is much more let’s say, as in football, where players spend the vast majority of their time or a significant part of their time with their professional teams. Then they have the summer season or the summer and fall season for national team play. So early this year, we knew the transition between one and the other, getting our team back together, we would only have a few days in some cases before we would have to depart for a 36 day long competition called the Volleyball Nations League, that would happen in a bubble in Italy. We had to take care of a lot of the homework along the way, refreshing concepts, how we play tactically, lots of other things. We had a series, basically we did weekly homework. Starting as soon as the new year began this last January. From an accountability standpoint we would give them about a five-minute video on a topic and say, you have five days. By this day and this time to file your homework, your answers to the questions posed after watching the video. So, what happens if you miss that deadline? Well, we asked our team and our leadership council help us, what are the consequences? They said, we’d be glad to take that over. When somebody missed something, fell short, a transgression or missed a homework deadline it just made things a lot more unified because we coaches would say, okay, she missed this and this. Let us know how you want to handle that. The leadership council would let us know. I guess another example from a democratic standpoint is when our team wanted to make decisions or we asked them for help with decisions, the first decision they had to go through was okay, we’re 23 people. How many of us need to favor a decision before it becomes something that we adopt? They went through a whole democratic process on that to arrive at, okay, we need 60% of the group, that’s the line. And if we’re below that, then we don’t have agreement on any particular topic that’s discussed, but if we have 60% or more, we do. So those would be a couple of examples of how we upped the level of democracy, ownership, and accountability in what was already a good group but needed more.