Basketball is my first love, but the athleticism of beach volleyball is amazing.
_____
Watching the men and women spike, block, and dive around a court that is almost impossible for two people to adequately cover makes one appreciate the elite level of athleticism necessary to be competitive on an international level. After basketball, it may very well may be the second-most exciting international sport.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Sport is often seen as a microcosm of society. It brings disparate groups come together to peacefully play, watch and cheer. Sometime it's a vehicle for highlighting social issues and even bringing change. Looking around more carefully you find more - teamwork is a good example and I'll go there.
People tend to have favorite events. My wife likes gymnastics, ice skating, and weight lifting (she lifted as an amateur). I like a few Winter sports, but my favorite sport is beach volleyball. Requiring little in the way of equipment and having simple rules it's a fairly clean sport. Easy for some people to get together and knock a ball around as well as being very difficult to master. Played at the highest levels it's a mental game of strategy and tactics. Successful two person teams require a set skills a single player rarely has forcing a mixture of specialization along with a generalist's skill. It's this difficult simplicity that attracts me.1
The real reason for the post is to focus on what makes a successful team. The best teams tend to have a mixture of physical characteristics, types of athleticism and approaches to the game play. Communication and reading the game and the other players are critically important. High level players develop court sense - they know where the other players and ball are as well as how that information is changing with time. And it's just them - they can't use a coach during the game.
Sarah Pavan is a friend and half of the current women's world champion team that was just named one of the most significant volleyball teams of the last decade. (the link is worth checking out as it shows some of what makes them an unusual and great team) They're an example of finding success by celebrating differences. Sarah is shy and somewhat introverted while Melissa Humana-Paredes, known in the sport as the smiling assassin, is a five alarm joyful extravert. Sarah is a strategic player, some call her the most cerebral player in the game, while Melissa is one of the most intuitive players. They manage to bring their differences together without changing each other.
Social scientists who study teamwork in the workplace, military and other areas regularly point out three main components of the most successful teams (individual skill is not one of them): the ability to communicate freely, empathy (that's a loaded word, but I'll leave it at that), and having women on the team. I sent a video link to a match to a professor who studies verbal and non-verbal communication. She noted Sarah and Melissa appear to have mastered an almost off-the-chart skill level. Empathy is more difficult to nail down, but these two seem to know what each other is thinking on and off the court. And, of course, they have women on the team nailed down.
There are probably lessons here and in other areas of sports applicable to teams outside of sports. I've had a couple of fascinating discussions comparing and contrasting the dynamics of physics collaborations, movie animation teams and beach volleyball.
__________
1 Not quite the whole story. There isn't a lot of money in the sport and the players are very approachable and enthusiastic. It's part of the sport's atmosphere. I'm also interested in the physics of what's going on, but that would probably happen in any sport - the first time I seriously watched curling I had to work out why the stone curled the "wrong" way.
Comments