On a suprisingly warm and relatively sunny day 12 candidates arrived to the SVA 2016 Beach Volleyball Seminar at at Portobello beach.Vaggelis Koutoueas shared his knowledge and competence gained from his international national coaching posts in England, Greece and Cyprus.
The seminar started with Vaggelis emphasizing the importance on the Pyramid Notion for sports development. He argued that is essential to start with the foundation stage made up of junior players for sustainability and future. The beginners ,through massive participation ,can allow for the selection of few elite, top class performers who may take part in international competitions. Focusing on the juniors also provide another advantage,it is easier to bridge the gap with traditional strong teams whereas with the seniors it is much more difficult. For example he referred that his success finishing 5th in Europe with the Junior England team is very hard to replicate on the senior level.
Differentiation to how you work with the athletes and their should be taking into consideration; that every individual has a unique movement fingertip as well as appropriate ratio of sand time to gym. In simple words, you will do a different training schedule for the blocker and the defender.Coaches and athletes had the opportunity to experience a high intensity training planned by Vaggelis with emphasis on creating a lot of repetition testing the mental skills of the participants as well as their ball control. The drills involved the use of assistant coaches who had to work and think at equal measures to help the training.It was great to see our National team coach Barry Mcguigan discussing with Vaggelis and at the same time running the training smoothly. It was enjoyable to see our national team players working hard, responding to the challenging practices. It was inspiring to see everyone together. Summarizing one of our candidates wrote “Great insight into performance pathways for beach volleyball .. The practical session was a great example of how to create rhythm within your session, kitting us all out with useful content for training sessions”
A lot of gratitude is due to Vaggelis Koutouleas for his excellent delivery and also to all players and coaches who supported this event. On the way back home, reflecting on the difficult journey for Scottish beach volleyball to compete against countries with better weather and facilities i could only think of this: Let our dreams be bigger than our fears, our actions louder than your words, and our faith stronger than our feelings.
Ioannis Panayiotakis
Coaching manager
