Our Great Coach on this episode is Mark Lebedew.

Mark is an Australian volleyball coach and former player.

He started coaching in the early 90’s eventually joining the Australian Institute of sport as a coach in 1997, where he also served as an assistant coach of the Australian men’s team at the Sydney 2000 Olympics

In 2010 he became a head coach of Berlin Recycling Volleys and in 2012, 2013 and 2014 he won the German Champion title. In 2015 the team also won the Bronze medal in the European Champions League.

While In 2017 he led Jastrzebski Wegiel to the bronze medal in the Polish league, and

From 2017 to 2019 he was also the coach of the Australian National Team and led them to a silver medal at the 2019 Asian Championships.

He has also coached teams in Italy, Belgium and Poland and is currently the head coach of German club VfB Friedrichshafen.

Mark is a coach with a truly global perspective, his teams are made up of many different nationalities, his present one has 8, and he has coached 5 different countries as well as in the Olympics, World Championships, World League, Volleyball Nations League, and this gives him a unique insight into the dynamic that shapes and propels high-performance.

He is both a student and practioner of the craft of coaching, in fact he helped translate one of the greatest texts on volleyball coaching from Russian to English, and believes that the great coaches are playing a game inside their heads 24 hours a day.

He believes that team work from the 6 players, all usually well over 6 feet tall on the 9*9 court, is more important than jumping 2 centimeters higher or hitting with 5kmh more of attack speed. And to achieve this, he is focused on helping players understand their role and execute it to best of their best of ability.

Some of the other key highlights from this discussion were:

His views on how human history has evolved through the act of getting better, and how he applied this to his own views on innovation and developing new techniques.

The importance of controlling your emotions so the team members can have faith in you to lead them through any situation they may be facing.

How he doesn’t mind people having egos as it is an intrinsic motivator, as long as they don’t lose the ability to work with others within the team.

If you would like to send us any feedback or if you know a great coach, who has a unique story to share, then we would love to hear from you, please contact us at paul@thegreatcoachespodcast.com or contact us through our website thegreatcoachespodcast.com

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