KANGA Volleyball was founded to help raise the level of volleyball in Massachusetts through teaching proper technique to dedicated players and coaches.
Technique is Everything
“The game teaches the game, but coaches need to teach technique.”
Coach Pat has spent ten years running volleyball clinics, experimenting to find the most efficient ways to accelerate player development. He is passionate about coaching and has spent dozens of hours watching and studying top collegiate and Olympic coaches to understand and communicate proper technique for each skill.
An effective volleyball clinic is not just about doing drills – it is about doing the right drills, in the right order, for the right amount of time, with the right mind frame, with the right coaching feedback, with total focus and intent.
Meaningful Repetitions
Our clinics are designed to give athletes as many meaningful repetitions as possible in order to accelerate player development.
A meaningful rep has three parts:
- The player knows what the skill should look like (and what keys to focus on)
- The player performs a rep and gets immediate feedback (from themselves or a coach)
- The player gets a chance to perform another rep as soon as possible
All three of these parts are needed to strengthen the neural connection in the athlete’s mind and improve at a skill.
Our drills are set up to be as close to game-realistic as possible, in order to increase the transfer from practice to game.
The Five Lessons
Our coaching philosophy and teaching methods are centered around the works of John Wooden’s pyramid of success, Pat Summitt’s definite dozen, John Bradshaw’s family unit, Terrence Real’s relational therapy, and Erik Erikson’s stages of development.
There are five developmental lessons we all must learn in order to enter adulthood as functional and well-adjusted human beings:
- Trust/Hope
- Autonomy/Will
- Initiative/Purpose
- Industry/Competence
- Identity/Loyalty
Our club strives to give each player these five lessons by modeling from our coaches and through implicit teaching. We work to create whole human beings – with full access to the entire range of human emotions and the ability to express them in healthy and functional ways.