Hi
everyone!
I had a discussion with my coach recently which kind of depressed me. I would like to share it with you and ask your opinion on this...
A bit of background first: I started 2months ago playing in a women's division 4 team (lowest division here in my country). I am playing with women who have played volleyball for at least 10-15y. From my side, I played volleyball for 1.5 year around 6 years ago. I stopped due to injury and finally decided to get back into it.
Overall I lack technique in everything (mostly because I never had technique coached to me so I had to learn a bit on my own).
Here is a bit my status:
- My serves are not too bad (e.g. they are annoying to get if you're defending) but technique is horrible. They are floaty a bit and quite straight.
- My spikes are good and probably on par with the spikes from my team (I have a bit of a timing issue which means they could be stronger). Technique is not too bad on this one.
- Defense (bump) is horrible. I cannot do a bump . Every time I do this I never know where the ball will go. Technique is horrible / non existent to say the least.
We just got a new coach (he trained us for 2 practices and went to 2 games so far). Yesterday he told me that I had a huge potential to be one of the top players of the team. But for this, I would need to catch up (especially on my defense) to the rest of the team. So far, this makes total sense (at least the fact that my defense is terrible). He told me that however the gap was so huge (e.g. 10 y of playing basically) that he thought that I would never be able to catch up in my current team because the girls there are not very serious in practice. They come to practice for fun and as such do not train seriously and hard enough like for instance division 2 teams. He said the only way for me to catch up would have been to go play with division 1 or 2 teams.... Of course this is not possible for many reasons (one being that never would the division 1/2 coach allow someone like me to train with them).
I asked him then what I should do considering that if first option was not feasible. He told me that the only thing left was to give my best 10000% in practice (which I've been doing since I hate being the weakest link) and watch YouTube videos.
I'm a bit depressed... Not because he told me that I was far behind the other girls. This I knew. I cannot expect to be as good as people who have been playing 10 y. I'm a bit depressed because he basically told me that there is nothing I can really do and that I'm a bit f***d... I used to swim competitively for 11y so I know about high level sports and practices. As such I'm a bit surprised by his words...
Before him we had 2 coaches that coached us very briefly. The first one coached me for 2 practices and said that if I focused on technique I would catch up in no time. The other one also told me that yes my technique was not good but that my motivation and determination were amazing and that in the few practices I had done I had improved a lot. Each one of those coaches only coached us 3-4 practices.
Just wanted to know if some fellow volleyball players / coaches could help me figure out how true this is... Regardless of the outcome, I will continue to give it my best as even if I can't catch up, I hope to be able to improve . I just want to know if I can ever catch up to the other girls or if I'm doomed like my current coach says...
Thanks a lot!! Cheers