Thank You for Reading

I sent a note this morning to the people who had chosen to become paid subscribers here, letting them know that I don’t plan to continue writing on Substack and encouraging them to cancel their subscriptions.

But I also wanted to say something to everyone who has spent any amount of time reading what I’ve written here.

Thank you.

When I started writing these articles, I wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a content creator. I mostly had a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head about volleyball, coaching, learning, athletes, and the strange things we coaches sometimes convince ourselves are unquestionably true. Writing gave me somewhere to work through those ideas.

And apparently some of you were willing to work through them with me.

You’ve read articles about ecological dynamics, representative learning design, constraints, perception and action, movement variability, motivation, expectations, perfection, coachability, and plenty of other subjects that probably don’t come up at most people’s dinner tables.

Some of you agreed with me. Some disagreed. Some sent messages or left comments that caused me to rethink things I had written. And some of you took an idea into your own gym and experimented with it.

That last part has always mattered most to me.

I’ve never wanted these articles to become another collection of coaching commandments. In fact, I wrote an entire article arguing against doing exactly that. My hope was always that something here might make a coach curious enough to ask a different question, design a different practice, listen to an athlete a little more carefully, or reconsider something they had been doing simply because that’s how volleyball has always done it.

If some of that happened, then this was worthwhile.

But I’ve also increasingly realized that my own attention is a constraint.

Every hour I spend writing, editing, publishing, thinking about what I should write next, or wondering whether I ought to publish something this week is an hour that isn’t going somewhere else.

And right now I know where I want those hours to go.

I want them in my gym.

I want them with the players I coach, the coaches I work alongside, the families in our program, and the volleyball community around me. I want more time experimenting with practices instead of writing about practice design. More conversations with athletes. More opportunities to help young coaches. More time building environments where people enjoy showing up and becoming a little different because they were there.

There is also something wonderfully immediate about local work.

You can write an article that reaches thousands of people and never really know what happened afterward. In a gym, you get to watch what happens next.

You see the confused look when a constraint doesn’t work the way you thought it would. You hear the athlete explain something that completely changes how you understood the problem. You watch a player struggle with something for weeks and then suddenly discover a solution that belongs entirely to them.

And then, if you’re paying attention, they change you too.

That feedback loop is where I want to spend more of my energy.

So I’m going to leave everything I’ve written here. I don’t feel the need to erase it or pretend I’ve reached some final version of what I believe. In fact, I’m sure there are things in these articles I would already explain differently today. Hopefully that remains true. A coaching philosophy that never changes is probably a coaching philosophy that stopped encountering the world.

What I’m most curious about now is what happens after these ideas leave my hands.

Maybe someone who read something here will build a better practice activity than I ever would.

Maybe another coach will push ecological ideas in a direction I haven’t considered.

Maybe someone will challenge an assumption I’ve been carrying around without noticing it.

Maybe a young coach will take one tiny piece of something they encountered here, combine it with twenty other influences, and create something that looks nothing like what I would have done.

I hope so.

Because that seems like a much healthier way for ideas to spread than everyone simply repeating the person who wrote them.

Take what was useful from these articles. Question the parts that weren’t. Change them. Experiment with them. Combine them with better ideas. Throw away whatever doesn’t survive contact with your athletes and your environment.

Then make something of your own.

I’ll be doing the same thing—just a little more quietly, and mostly somewhere inside a volleyball gym.

Thank you for reading.

Loren