AASP 2019 Keynote – Karch Kiraly

Karch Kiraly, Head Coach of the US Women’s Volleyball team, was our Keynote speaker on Day 2 of the 2019 Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) Conference and he did not disappoint.

Karch’s Mission: Play It Better Than We’ve Ever Played It Before.

I could write a whole other article on this statement alone, but I want to focus this article on Karch’s mental skills model, which consisted of the following five categories:

1. Mental Model
2. Puzzle…Solve
3. Stress…Rehearse
4. Failure…Respond
5. Expect…What?

Mental Model is a progression of three parts. The first is to take notice…be present. The second is understanding that thoughts are normal. There are productive thoughts and less productive thoughts. It is important to distinguish between the two. The final part is to get to what’s important and address “What You Can Control.”

Puzzle…Solve deals with the perspective that life is a puzzle. In the face of adversity, think of the event as a puzzle that needs to be solve.

Stress…Rehearse was incredibly insightful for me and something I’ve been so accustomed to while serving on operational commands in the Navy. We would routinely practice “casualty drills” every morning while underway. Sometimes there would be a fire or flooding casualty drill and the ship’s crew would have to rapidly respond in order to save the ship from catastrophe.

On a similar but lighter note, Karch intentionally puts players in high pressure situations. He discussed a level-up checklist method. He gives his athletes specific taskers to accomplish in a series of checklists. One checklist completed gets them to level up. When they fail the task they must start the checklist all over. The level-up checklist was new to me, but practicing game-time scenarios reminded me of coaching on Navy’s Varsity Sprint Football team. We routinely ran two-minute drills at the end of each practice. We would fabricate stressful scenarios and use conditioning as a consequence. A few select times, we randomly presented a 4^th down-play with no time on the clock and gave our place kicker one shot at ending the game, or in this case the practice. The consequence was simple, he makes it, practice is over. If not, then 30 minutes more of pure conditioning for the entire team. Talk about pressure!

Failure…Argh…Back to Work! I loved his story here about how Russian Volleyball Coaches down-select their premier athletes. Essentially, their philosophy is all about choosing the 12 best players who respond best to failure. Let me write that again, they choose the players who respond best to failure. It’s not about someone skating through on pure talent, it’s about the athlete who, not only gets up when they fall down, but also gets up quicker, faster, and with the most resilience than any other athlete on the court.

In Volleyball, Karch remarks, “There are always opportunities to fail. Every point lost is a failure. Players get very used to failing.”

Expect…What? Karch’s philosophy of expectations are influenced by Buddhism and suffering. He acknowledges two schools of thought to outcomes:

1. You have to expect it!
2. Choose not to have expectations of outcomes or results.

From a sports psychology perspective, neither is right or wrong. The first one can be applied in the form of self talk and trying to elevate an athlete’s self-confidence. The second thought falls in line with a major emphasis in sports psychology to concentrate on the process and not the outcome.

For me, the real gem in Karch’s talk, “The two expectations that I address with my athletes:

1. It’s going to be difficult
2. Parts of the experience will go badly.”

In other words, adversity is inevitable. There’s nothing here about having to do anything, nor is there anything here about the outcome of the event. The real question – How are you going to respond? How are you going to respond to challenges and adversity that are present in every competitive event? Or in the words of the Russian Volleyball Coaches,

“Who will respond best to failure?”