COLLEGE MEN
YOUNG WIZARD: Scates was only 22 when he took over at UCLA.
The Scates way of teaching volleyball
from providing clear instructions on what the primary focus of that day’s training should be.
Much like how Bill Walsh changed foot- ball, Scates was ahead of his peers in train- ing championship volleyball teams. Decades ago, he did things that are now routine for many coaches. He kept detailed statistics, logging points scored by rotation and track- ing wins and losses in drills. He designed practices to replicate real game situations, and he devised systems that highlighted his players’ strengths and suppressed their weaknesses, often with an emphasis on two of his signature strong points: blocking and hitting techniques. A vivid image of Scates’ style came in the form of his white bag, which was not un- like bags that banks use to transfer money. Stuck to the side of it was a bumper sticker that read: “Great Statistics are the Best Sub- stitution for Judgment.”
“In that bag, he had clipboards and papers – a million different statistics,” says former Bruin Fred Sturm, who coached the U.S. Men’s National Team at two Olympics (1992 and 1996) and is now the head coach
of the Danish Men’s National Team. “When we played matches, he’d pass out stat sheets, and he had some of us take statistics. Then he’d collect them afterward and sum- marize and analyze them.”
One night in Hawaii, the statistics-fi lled notebook that Scates carried and glanced at from time to time during matches piqued the curiosity of John Fink, the play-by- play TV broadcaster for the University of Hawaii matches. Fink asked coach Chris McLachlin, who did color commentary, if he knew what the notebook contained. “It’s a big secret,” McLachlin said. “He keeps it close to himself.” But Fink was persistent, so he asked Scates directly, and Scates proceeded to open the book and give him a page-by-page tour of the diagrams, charts and tendencies he’d noted about the Bruins’ opponents. “It was not a big deal to Al,” Fink recalls. “He wasn’t hiding anything. He was a wily, competitive, strategic coach, but he had no voodoo or magic.”
Coach fi rst, friend later T 44 | VOLLEYBALLUSA • Digital Issue at
usavolleyball.org/mag
o describe Scates as “aloof” isn’t ac- curate, according to former players and
One of the most successful high school boys’ volleyball coach- es in Southern California is Mark Knudsen, who played for Al Scates – he was on four NCAA champion- ship teams – and also worked for him as an assistant coach. Knud- sen has built a dynasty at Valencia High, guiding the school to four CIF Southern Section Division II championships, a national title and a remarkable 102-0 league record. He credits Scates for teaching him how to coach young athletes. One big key: repetition. “Al would say things over and over again,” Knudsen says. “It was almost comical for me and my teammates when he would bring us into a huddle and tell us the principle or technique as if it was the fi rst time he had heard it.” It obviously worked. Knudsen says Scates presented the infor- mation in different ways and with an enthusiasm that resonated with players and shortened the process of skill development and mastery.
assistant coaches, but he is known for main- taining a distance from his current players. “It was quite clear from my fi rst semes- ter in the fall of ’77 that Al wasn’t going to be my friend or a friend to any of my teammates; he was our coach, pure and simple,” says Peter Ehrman, a former UCLA All-American who is now an executive at a fi nance company in Hawaii. “He wasn’t your enemy. He wasn’t going to make your life miserable. But he was not going to be your friend. (But) after I graduated, Al and I became good friends, and he always checks on players after they leave the program.” Another former player who has been
Scates’ longtime friend is current Bruins assistant coach Brian Rofer, who says Scates is “the single most infl uential person in my career and one of a handful of truly infl uen- tial people in the development of who I am as a person.” Among the life lessons Rofer says he has learned from his boss: “Always prepare and be prepared; the willingness to
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