Players who have a winning history at the highest level of the game will tell you that reacting the right way when your teammates make mistakes is a big key to success.
By Don Patterson
I took a work break the other day to watch a few minutes of what may be the greatest beach volleyball match ever: the men’s quarterfinal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics between Karch Kiraly-Kent Steffes and Sinjin Smith-Carl Henkel. A few minutes turned into a few more minutes and then a few more. Yes, it was that good. Gotta love YouTube.
Part of why that match qualifies as epic was the massive pre-Olympic buildup, when bad blood brewed for a couple of years between Kiraly and Smith, who were that era’s two biggest names. When it came to the direction of the sport, they disagreed on plenty, and one of their biggest divides was over how teams should be selected for Olympic beach volleyball, which was included in the Games for the first time in Atlanta.
Heading into that summer, Karch hadn’t been shy about saying that Smith and Henkel didn’t deserve to be one of the U.S. representatives. Unlike the other two U.S. men’s teams, which qualified at a U.S.-based Olympic trials, Smith and Henkel earned their berth via the FIVB Tour, and Kiraly maintained that all teams should have come through the trials to prove themselves against the top American competition. Few of the sport’s insiders gave Smith and Henkel much of a chance in a head-to-head faceoff with Kiraly and Steffes, who were indisputably the dominant team of the 1990s. Smith was an unbelievable player – one of the best ever – but he was 39 by the summer of ’96, and the 27-year old Henkel wasn’t as experienced as the other three – nor did he have the same winning history.
As it turned out, Smith and Henkel gave Kiraly and Steffes everything they could handle – and Kiraly acknowledged as much afterward. At one point, the underdogs led 12-8, and they had four match-point opportunities before Kiraly and Steffes climbed back, eventually pulled out a 17-15 win and went on to win the gold medal.
I was there to see it live, and I have enjoyed the replay a handful of times over the years. That’s a handful more than it’s been viewed by either Karch or his wife, Janna. When I brought it up to Karch a few years back, he said this: “I don’t know if I could take watching that match again.” Sitting next to him on their living room couch, Janna added: “It makes me sick even thinking about it.”
For me, it’s like watching a classic movie. Pop the popcorn, put up your feet and enjoy. And one of the things I like best about each re-viewing is that I always notice something new. Which brings me to the main point of this column. When I watched it this time, one thing that caught my attention was how hard Smith worked during timeouts to make sure his younger partner didn’t get discouraged after their sizable lead was erased. It was nothing short of a positive-reinforcement clinic. When Kiraly roofed Henkel to give the favorites a 13-12 lead, the camera caught a brief timeout exchange where Smith said to Henkel, “That’s just fine,” and then, a few seconds later, added: “My fault.” Further into the match, Kiraly blocked Sinjin after Henkel delivered a set that was too tight. Henkel took responsibility for the bad set, but Smith said: “My fault. I’ve got to deal with it.” At the end the match, when a dejected Henkel was sitting with his head buried in a towel, Smith was there, in his ear, reminding him that they had another match and that if they played the same way, they would be OK.
My fault, not yours
When I called Sinjin to get his take on the importance of elevating a teammate’s emotions after a tough play, he told me that it’s something he has prioritized ever since his college years playing indoor at UCLA, where he was captain of an undefeated NCAA championship team in 1979. That was his senior year, and Karch was a freshman on that team. They were two setter/hitters in a 6-2 offense that produced a 31-0 season and earned Sinjin MVP honors at the championships.
“My ultimate goal was to win, and I needed the best out of every individual on the court, and I knew it wasn’t right to put pressure on them,” Smith said. “So if there was an out hit, I’d say something like, ‘No worries. I got you too close.’ You’ve got to know when to say, ‘Hey, it’s my fault.’” (On rare occasions, if a teammate isn’t responding to positive encouragement and the match is slipping away, Smith says it’s worth trying more of a kick-in-the-butt approach and maybe even getting a little loud to “wake them up.” But that’s a last resort, he says.)
Smith employed the same psychology with Randy Stoklos in a decade-long beach partnership that manufactured more tournament titles (114) than any other pro beach team in history, men’s or women’s. “I knew if Randy felt good, he was better than anybody,” Smith says. “So I would always try to make sure he felt good. If he made a mistake, I’d find a way to make him think it was my fault, not his, so he could come back strong on the next point.”
Your fault, not mine
In their first match at the Beijing Olympics, Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser, the world’s No. 1 team and the soon-to-be gold medalists, were upset by a team from Latvia that was seeded 23rd in a field of 24. Dalhausser had stood for hours at the opening ceremony the night before, and his legs were dead by match time. Not surprisingly, he was far from great – not even close to his usual dominance as a blocker. Rogers’ displeasure with his partner’s performance was fully evident on TV, and Rogers’ wife, Melissa, called him after the match and pointed out that his body language had been terrible. During timeouts, he had his back to Phil. On the court, he tugged his shorts in frustration and dropped his head every time one of the Latvian players tooled Dalhausser’s block.
Hearing Melissa’s feedback and the opinions of others who told him the same thing, Rogers knew he had to be a better teammate. In his words, he made the decision not to “be an ---hole.” Coincidentally or not, he and Dalhausser didn’t lose again the rest of the way, and they capped off the Beijing Games by beating Brazil’s Marcio Araujo and Fabio Magalhaes in the final and winning the gold.
It isn’t as if Rogers figured the psychology thing out for the first time in Beijing. He was an All-American setter at UC Santa Barbara, and he has also put in time as a collegiate assistant coach, so he knew plenty about the mind game. Which goes to show that even smart players at the elite level – as of July 1, he was sixth on the all-time men’s victory list with 78 titles – can lapse into bad habits. “I have a tendency to slump my shoulders,” he told me. “I do that a lot.”
Like Sinjin, Rogers realized in college that upbeat communication with those who surround you is a good thing. He realized something else, too. It’s always the setter’s fault. Even when it’s not, it is.
“Everyone blames the setter,” he says. His advice to hitters: Look inward after you’ve just hit outward. “Obviously, if the set is so bad that the hitter can’t even hit it in the court, then that’s one thing. But a lot of times a hitter will get a set that’s inside a little bit and try to crush a three-foot angle and the ball will go eight feet out. It’s better to get blocked, better to get dug. Give your teammates a chance to help you rather than trying to go Yahtzee and get a kill. Ninety-nine percent of the time the set isn’t going to make you hit the ball out, so take ownership of the fact that you hit it out. The setter didn’t make you hit it out.”
Filter your emotions
Part of being a good teammate is acting the part. Let’s be honest, sometimes you’re going to get ticked off at your teammates, especially when they do stupid things for the umpteenth time. That doesn’t mean you should wear your irritability on your face.
“There are days that you don’t feel good, days that you’re cranky, days that you’re more annoyed with your partner than others,” says Jen Kessy, a former indoor All American at the University of Southern California who won the 2009 FIVB World Championships of beach volleyball with partner April Ross and will represent the U.S. (alongside Ross) in London. “There are times when I want to roll my eyes and times that I get annoyed if she doesn’t do something that we’ve talked about over and over. But I catch myself and internalize it. You have to take the blame on yourself. It’s not always easy. But if you blame your partner, the game is going to go really, really badly.”
In Rogers’ opinion, staying positive – and not being afraid to put the blame on yourself – allows for more substantive information exchanges between teammates. Once you’ve taken responsibility, he says, it gives you a better opportunity to offer constructive feedback without it being taken the wrong way.
“A good teammate will say, ‘My bad. I shouldn’t have hit that ball out. Hey, can you bring the set off a little bit?’ That way, you’re letting the setter know that it wasn’t a good set, but you’re also letting him know that you made a mistake.”
Dialogue like that helps build healthy team chemistry, and, as Rogers notes, there’s nothing like knowing that your teammates are behind you when you’re trying to work your way through a rough patch.
“It’s huge,” he says. “If you’re having a bad game and your teammate is saying, ‘Oh my God, really? Commmmmme on,’ then you’re going to feel weighted down, and then it’s just you pulling yourself out. But if you’ve got people supporting you and saying things like, ‘Hey, we know what you can do, and we’ve got your back,’ you’re going to feel buoyed and that’s going to help you pick up your game.”
And maybe that’s the bottom line. Whether it’s two-person beach or indoor sixes, volleyball is a team sport, and if you can help your teammates understand that you’re all in it together for a common goal, good things are likely to happen.
Don Patterson is the editorial director at JDP Publishing Group, which owns DiG magazine and handles all content for VolleyballUSA, the official publication of the sport's national governing body. He is also an editor at CBSsports.com and a former sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times.