92. John Cook: Wrapping up Nebraska's practice videos
In this 'in-between' article we cover the outro we've recorded with John Cook at the end of the Nebraska practice session recordings.
I asked coach Cook a few more questions at the end of the recorded practice sessions. In this mini article, we'll tackle those.
Intro to the outro ;-)
Throughout the two practice session articles, we’ve seen how Nebraska’s training is built with precision—every drill, every role, and every adjustment serves a purpose.
We had a few more questions to ask to coach Cook.
Matias: The coaches in your program—a nice thing to highlight is how you work together and divide responsibilities between them. I remember in our first VolleyBrains recording you talked about how you hang out after practice and they come to you with pro game clips, and so on.
It's not just "John Cook telling everyone what to do", like it was in the old days, but it's really about listening, conversation, and debating. Did something change there? What responsibility do you put on assistant coaches?
John: Yeah, let me show you something here. (John takes out a practice plan) You won't be able to see it on video, but this is our practice plan. All of our guys and all of our coaches meet a half hour before practice, before we start setter training. This breaks down the whole drill.
I do this every day and outline what we're going to work on. So everybody knows what we're doing. When we talk about this in our meeting, everybody knows what they're focused on, what the theme is that day, certain things we're working on. So we're all organized and we're kind of divided up.
One coach is looking at middles, one coach is looking at setters, and one coach is looking at outside hitters and liberos. That's kind of how we do it, but this is our system.
I'm very particular about making sure everybody knows what we're doing. Our players need to feel like we know what we're doing.
And we're very organized because, again, we only get so much time. So how efficient can we be and how many reps can we get?
Matias: I don't want to impose takeaways on people—but what I took away is:
We don't really need to watch what other people are doing. Of course you have game prep, but as you go through the sequence of building on top of stuff, letting players rotate, playing with everybody in your team, being meticulous about your practice, it is more about yourself.
Yes, it is important to know what other people are doing. It is important to have some insights, have some sparks or motivation from pro leagues or the best players in the world. But in the end, it's the thing that you do well and it's the thing that you do day in day out. It's less about influences from outside. That's what I got here. Does that sum up a bit about how you approach things?
John: I think so. But I rely a lot on our assistants for feedback. And then of course I've watched every one of your videos. I've watched football practice. I watched basketball practice.
We send our coaches out in the spring—in the past, I've sent them to other gyms that will let us come in and watch. So we study what other people are doing. I've been to Japan and China probably five times with college teams. When you're with those guys, they know how to train, so a lot of this stuff has come from them.
We didn't do defensive bursts in this practice, but we do a lot of digging drills, coach-initiated drills in different ways that I picked up from Asia. I've watched national teams practice in Europe. I've watched USA practice. We're always looking for ideas and ways to adjust. But you're right.
At the end of the day, I'm going to design the practice plan and this is what we're doing. And everybody's all in.
Matias: So this is what we do and this is probably what we're going to do next year, but we can fine tune it. It's not completely set in stone, but it's pretty much set in stone.
But if we see something better, let's swap, let's try something out, but let's not throw away everything we have. Cause that's never a good idea.
John: We'll always try new things. Like a lot of the men are doing some of the quick attacks where they're drifting away from the setter, drifting toward the setter—we will always try that.
Now, if it doesn't work, we're going to punt it, but we're going to try it.
And the players have fun doing that. But at the end of the day, we're going to do what we do really well.
John: I'll pump you up a little bit. My wife asked me today, "Why are you gonna do this podcast?" And I just said, "Matias is trying to do this great job from Europe, sharing volleyball with the world."
I just applaud you for that. I think it's really good. You've done an excellent job. You've had some great people on there and you tackle everything from practices to philosophies to how people got into coaching. I don't know anybody else that's really doing that. And I applaud you for it. And it's an honor to be on here.
Matias: Really appreciate it. I think you touched the two things that are important. And we talked about it before off recording. It's not only the thing we did today. It's also the thing that we did four years ago. And it's about people. It is people and it is the nitty gritty—it's both of them together.
You cannot be just the greatest statistician in the world and then expect to win with a team. No. You cannot be the best people-person or the best teacher but you're stuck in your fundamentals and don't know where the game's going. And I think that's what we try to bring.
I just know that it's about that. You have people that want to see more practices. Okay. Let them watch more practices. But in a way, like this, we're talking about practice, but we're not talking about practice anymore.
It's important that there is this duality. It's not that college volleyball in the States is the be-all end-all. You can pick up something everywhere.
Everything can be interesting, if you love the game.
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