Background
Depending on how you define 'main focus' volleyball has been the main focus of my life since I started playing it. If you asked me in primary school what the main focus in my life was I'd have said football, and when I started playing volleyball it quickly replaced football as my main obsession. Similarly I went to university to study mechanical engineering but I went to Sheffield primarily because at the time it was one of the best places to play volleyball in the UK. Then when I played in Sweden, as far as the Swedish government was concerned I was in the country to be a teaching assistant, but I viewed that job purely as a means to an end of playing volleyball at a higher level.
The final two stops on my volleyball adventures were a year in Leeds coaching in schools and university, and then a season in Denmark coaching the women's team in Odense. Now I've settled back home in Norwich where there is a great community of volleyball, but nothing like the performance level in Scandinavia, or the enormous junior program in Leeds. And I don't have the lifestyle financial freedom of being a student or a kid at school. Meg and I are saving to buy a house and start a family, so to continue to keep volleyball as the main focus in my life is going to be challenging. But I'm up for said challenge, because I love what I've been doing in all it's different forms, and I also think that if I'm successful and do manage to muddle things together so that I can keep spending most of my time on volleyball, that I might end up making something quite special here in Norwich in the process.
The Plan
In short then and a bit more tangibly, the plan is this. In order for me to afford to do this I need to be paid to coach, I need enough coaching hours to get by, and then longer term I need to find other volleyball related revenue streams because there's only so many hours in a week one can spend in a sportshall before they go mental.
There's 3 main places volleyball is played, clubs, universities, and schools. Norwich has the first 2 already set up and they're great and I've gotten very stuck in and I think made some positive changes since being home. More on that next time. Schools is trickier as nothing really exists at the moment but there is hope, I learned a lot from my time in Leeds and hope to apply that, along with my experience as a kid (I started playing in school) to get this 3rd pillar going. I've also made decent headway here, again more next time.
Obviously this endeavour is partly selfish, I want to work in volleyball. But I also think and am driven by the idea that doing this will make volleyball and life better for a lot of people. The difference between a good and bad volleyball session in terms of enjoyment is huge. I was really obsessed as a kid, and would look forward to my training all day, and if I went and it was a stinky session, or our opponents had pulled out on match night because they couldn't get a team together I was crushed. Similarly I didn't get opportunities to compete as a junior because we didn't have enough players or the club infrastructure to support it. So I know even on this somewhat trivial level of just making a sport someone plays more fun, that when it's done well and there's lots of opportunities it can make a huge difference.
All my time then is split between the behind the scenes stuff to grow these 3 pillars, and actually delivering coaching. Naturally then I think a lot about coaching and want to do a good job. So that's another area I'll talk about a lot on here, my thoughts on coaching at different levels and what I'm working on.
The final thing I'm doing as part of this project is online work. Whilst in Sweden I started an instagram and later a YouTube channel all about my life with volleyball and I've seen moderate success with it. I now get quite reliably recognised in England when I got to a volleyball game, especially with younger audiences like BUCS games and junior GPs (I got recognised a couple times in Denmark by a few people which was very spooky). I'm lucky that I am getting a little bit of money from this project too, YouTube ad revenue, some very generous people supporting me on Patreon, and a couple of paid sponsorships. It's very modest income at the moment, <£100 a month but it has the potential to grow into something that could really take the pressure off having to earn more through coaching, which would free me up to spend more time on the bigger picture stuff. It's also pretty fun making videos and I've met some really cool people, so I'll definitely be continuing with it and think it could be a super impactful part of the project.
The Blog
So roughly speaking that's the plan, and I'm going to do my best to document things on here in the process. I somewhat am doing this already over on YouTube where I've got a series 'Road to Super League' where I'm covering the the NVL men and our mission to climb the ladder, and the other things mentioned above like UEA and schools I will cover on there too as it's all part of the picture. Road to SL is more just a narrative and packaging device to tie it together.
But I don't really get into the weeds as much there as much as I'd like to there's a bit of 'playing the game' that I feel like, maybe wrongly, that I need to be mindful of keeping things interesting to appeal to a wide volleyball audience. If I started rabbiting on about ecological dynamics, or how our CASC tax status application is going then I fear I may lose people. So I've decided that here will be the place I put that stuff, and to help keep myself sane I will switch off editorial part of my brain and prattle on about anything I think is interesting.
Anyone deciding to read... Good luck.