Mortimer we're BACK!

Finally it is time for a new word from my side of town.. :0) I apologies for the long wait, but I have been struggling a little bit with finding time and motivation these last few weeks, to write on my blog. Mainly because so many things have been going on all at the same time that it just looked to be an enormous article..;0)


Off the court...

Since we won the Cup Final late January, we have lost one of our starting outside hitters, Caley Cater Knudsen. Caley got an offer to join a Finnish team late in their season to try to help them avoid relegation. It has been a dream of hers to go play in a bigger league, and Finland has some of the best teams in Scandinavia, so when she decided to go there were no sour faces from anyone. The word from Finland is that Caley personally has been playing super well and has more than filled out the role she was brought in to play, but her team still finished in the lower half of the league so now they have to play to avoid relegation instead of playing for medals.

Losing a starting player with the skills Caley possesses is never an easy thing for a team. We have had to find a new plan A first of all. The new plan A was to give the chance to fill out the hole Caley left to a young outside on our team, Julie Pedersen so we got on it right away. Having a young and untried outside hitter in your starting line-up 2 months before the semifinals, you quickly realize that you need plan B and C ready just in case plan A does not work out from time to time… Let me start by saying that Julie has done a good job trying to fill in for Caley and she is working really hard. But even when you work really hard and feel like you do your very best, sometimes it will still be necessary to bring in plan B or C. As a coach it is my biggest concern to make sure it is always beneficial for the young player AND for the team to have her on the court, and that is a fine line between success and fiasco right there… So far we have beaten the league’s top team with Julie as a starter, but then we’ve also lost to the 3rd team in the league. Many things went really well in the win against Holte(now 18-1) including Julie playing a match at her highest level. Just as many things went bad in the loss against Brøndby(now 14-5) also really pointing out the situations where Caley could have been the difference between a win and a loss.

Status off the court is this… We are sure to finish 2nd in the base stage of our league and our current regular season record is 16-3. Finishing 2nd means that we will have to play Brøndby who is in 3rd in the semifinals beginning March 27th. We play best of 5 matches all best of 5 games.
So needless to say all our focus has been on getting ready to play this team that beat us 3-0 last time we played them, but ever since the Cup win we have been struggling with injuries on several players, although none of the players have been hurt seriously. This has made me change the line up several times over the last couple of matches and we haven’t played to our full potential as a team since the win against Holte early February. Something that could come back to haunt me the rest of my summer if it turns out we are not able to perform in the semifinals, but my money is still on us to get ready and that it has been the right way to go to get as fit as a team as possible.


On the court…

Plan A I have already mentioned. Plan B and C both involve 2 very experienced outside hitters who both only practices 2 times a week. Plan B is Maja Pilgaard who is an experienced passer and defense specialist who has played libero at the highest level in the league. Maja also swings pretty well at the net and she brings more experience to the team as well as fighting spirit. Maja has practiced with the team almost since the beginning of the season, but she has not been involved in matches before Caley left.

Plan C involves moving one of our middle hitters to the outside, but moving a starting player from one spot to another seems like moving the problem from one spot to another, and these last 2 months has more than anything else been about testing our squad depth, and finding out which plan will bring us closest to the gold medals. All 3 plans have been tested at different times and I think I need to listen to my gut feeling when deciding which plan to go with at which times. If the semifinals end up going to 5 matches there is no doubt we will need our full squad, but the trick is to find out how and when to move things around.


Back to “off the court…”

Having played volleyball myself for almost 16 years and more then a handful in the elitedivision, you start to trust your gut feeling more than anything else when it comes to the “money time decisions”. I feel more this season than earlier that I need to trust what I feel is right in the moment more than what a number on the stats sheet tells me, or if there might be another way to go that seems more obvious. I think that gut feeling is something shared between many coaches who have been playing a lot of volleyball themselves.
Now nothing comes without an opposite, and I have this year been faced with another way of doing things. In Fortuna they have won gold medal after gold medal over the last 5 years or so, and there is no doubt that many of the people involved in the club knows what they are talking about. This year I have been introduced to more video analyzing and stats taking than I could have ever imagined, and I have had a hard time letting it take over in my decision making what the numbers where telling me, if it was going against my gut feeling.

In the middle of where I came from and where I am right now I keep running in to Coach Mizuno who is the assistant coach in my team. Assistant meaning he is in charge of 2 practices a week but is never at matches. I feel Mizuno has found the golden middle ground between both sides of coaching. He is the Headcoach of a mens team on the same island and I have seen several of his matches. He has an amazing ability to see what his team needs right in this instant, and then make the changes needed. And talking to him after a match or a practice he is the one asking me questions about numbers on the stat sheet but also the one saying that some things just can’t be read from numbers.
I am definitely not as close to finding the middle ground as Mizuno is, but coaching with him every week and talking to him is getting me there. I know that Fortuna wants me to develop that side of my coaching much more than it is now, and I feel I am going the right direction it is just hard to go against your gut feeling, it almost feels like letting go of the control when really you are maybe gaining even more control if you can learn to use both sides and take the full advantage from each side.

There is no ONE STYLE OF COACHING and gold medals have been won and lost for several other reasons than the style of coaching, but I am trying my hardest to find my style and I hope one day it will help me and my team to win gold medals. I realize that we have won the Cup gold already, but it takes more than 1 gold medal for me to say that I am doing things the right way… I felt good about my own performance during the Cup Final and I made some decisions leading up to that match that could have gone both ways, and to my luck it went the right way. But reflecting over what more experienced people and players said after the match, the gold maybe didn’t taste just as wonderful as it did at first. And that is why I want to win more… When you lose matches or games from bad decision making people look to the coach and say “what were you thinking?” and for a while after the Cup Final some people outside our team and outside our club managed to take away that proud feeling I had from winning the Cup Final, and it was only during this last month of “soul searching” that I rediscovered the trust in myself that makes me capable of being the coach I am now and have been all season.
I want to develop every day and I am open to learn from the people more experienced than me and the opportunities to do exactly that in Fortuna, with all the experienced people in the club, are endless, but I will try never again to let anyone make me doubt myself, cuz the moment I do will be the moment I am letting down my team.


Back to “on the court…”

The last 3 matches we have won pretty easy. Our level however, is far from where it needs to be to win against Brøndby. We have had problems in passing, but more with stability than capability. We have 3 of the best passers in the league in our starting 6, so I know we have what it takes to give us the chances to win, but still 1 or 2 teams have been able to break down our passing and that is something we have to accept and then deal with. Exactly in this part of the game is where Maja can become an X-factor for us in the semifinals, and we work hard to get a good confidence and communication at its highest between our passers in different line-ups to prepare ourselves for a very strong serving Brøndby team.

At the net we have been struggling a lot with timing between setters and middles. Why the timing has been gone is hard to explain, but the hard work looks to be paying off finally… This week has been one of the best in a long time for our middle hitters and the time to peak is right around the corner so I couldn’t be more excited. Good job girls, we are definitely getting closer.!

Aggression at the net has been another issue for us.. With Caley leaving almost 1/3 of the points our team made left with her, so we have had to change our style of play a little bit to involve more players and dividing the load. Katherine was just like Caley making a lot of points in every match so we can’t really expect her to make more.. But getting Kristen involved a whole lot more and rediscovering our middle attack is what is going to carry us through to the finals. That has been our focus the last month and we are getting to a point where we all feel more and more confident that we can find that 1/3 we lost with Caley leaving.


That ended up being a really long article, but if you’re still reading then thanks for hanging in there.. ;0)

I would like to send a shout out to Kumo and Mr. Jeremiah in Louisville.. I hear stories of a big dog getting bigger with new fur and I thank you both for ready my tails here.. ;0)
Also a hello to Deb, Bill, John, Frank and Joel.. I hope you are all doing great.

Michael

“People ask me how we can win coming from where we were at not too long ago… We will make them an offer they can’t refuse”