ABOUT
PHILOSOPHY
Resilient Volleyball may be a newer club in southwest Florida, but it is built on Master Coach Kike and Coach Carmen’s many years of playing and coaching experience. Due to their many club championships, professional team championships, and international championships over decades, Resilient’s philosophy is well established. When you’re considering what club your daughter should join, understanding each club’s philosophy is important.
We outline our philosophy below in our Core Values and Core Beliefs. Core Values are the values that our coaches were taught by their parents, which they have carried with them and have led them to their own personal successes. Core Beliefs are how Resilient’s leaders believe in running a club. These are not marketing talking points; these are who we are, how we were raised, and what is most important to us. We share these in detail here because we want parents to see, before they ever attend a practice, that we are not your typical volleyball club. Your girl’s experience at Resilient will be beyond what they expect from volleyball.
CORE VALUES
RESILIENCE (PERSEVERANCE)
Volleyball is hard. School is hard. Life is hard. While volleyball is fun, there are challenges along the way that help prepare the players’ mindset for future challenges as well. Whether players encounter an injury or are fighting to make the starting six, struggling with their serve, or working to overcome a team losing streak, it is important that they stay focused, keep their eyes ahead, and persevere. This is so vital to us that we named our club Resilient Volleyball Academy.
INTEGRITY
Do the right thing. It sounds so simple, but in the real world, sometimes making the right decision can be hard. We have found that when we commit ourselves to always doing the right thing, decision-making suddenly becomes easy. We believe integrity should be taught to everyone, and we commit to teaching it to our players.
RESPONSIBILITY
To us, responsibility means our volleyball players take ownership of themselves. We expect our players to be responsible for themselves and to embrace and grow in this value. Mom, Dad, and Coach will not always be there to make or guide their decisions or to tell them what to do or how to do it. We believe in teaching and expecting our players (and parents) to be responsible.
WORK ETHIC
Being successful at volleyball requires hard work. So does being successful at everything else. We expect our players to work hard at practice and games and to begin developing the attitude that hard work delivers results and builds our sense of self-worth.
EXECUTION
Doing things the right way is critical to succeeding on the court as well as to protecting our bodies from acute and long-term injury. Whatever our players do, we teach them to do it the right way, and we expect them to embrace this value. In sports, executing means doing your job, and in particular, doing it the right way.
DISCIPLINE
One of the first steps in creating a successful volleyball team is creating a disciplined team. Executing good form, communicating every time, playing within our positions vs. all over the court, practicing hard, listening to coaches, and being punctual are all important for each individual player to commit to so that the team can succeed. When we assemble new teams, discipline is a major focus area because an undisciplined team cannot be successful.
LOYALTY
Volleyball is our life, and our club is our family. We are loyal to our players and expect them to be loyal to their teammates and the club. Loyalty means we can count on the players, their teammates can count on them, and all of us have each other’s backs.
There are certainly clubs that players can join where they pay their fee, go to practice and games, and that is that. This is not us. A family culture requires buy-in, and to get buy-in, we must, as coaches and directors, earn it. While playing for Resilient, players must be all in for their team, coaches, and club just as we are with our players. This does not happen by the end of the first practice but grows over time as all of us embrace and live by our club’s Core Values.
ATHLETES VS. VOLLEYBALL PLAYERS
Mindset is critical to any form of success, and our players embrace the mindset of an athlete. An athlete plays multiple sports or has an intense agility training program. Athletes prepare their bodies through proper sleep, nutrition, water intake, stretching, and foam rolling. Our players embrace this mindset change so they can perform at peak in any competition and build the foundation for a healthy lifestyle as an adult.
HUMILITY
At Resilient, our coaches’ volleyball careers have been highly successful, including gold medals and professional league championships. What makes these successful moments beautiful is when players and coaches are humble. Staying grounded, exhibiting sportsmanship, and remembering who we are and where we are from are critical to the culture of our club. Whether we beat another team in two sets holding them to five total points or beat a team in a tournament, we remain humble in success.
FAMILY
Obviously, the core of the club is a family unit. Coach Kike, Coach Carmen, Coach Barbara, and Coach Esai (and little Brielle) are a family unit. But when you observe the players who have been around the coaches for a while, you will notice how close they are. Whether it’s volleyball at the Pughs’ house or Christmas at the coaches’ house, there is a family effect that happens to many of the players and their parents/siblings.
In most clubs, parents are fans. At Resilient, players and parents are family. Our coaches involve the players in a way that bonds them as sisters fighting for the same goal.
CORE BELIEFS
VOLLEYBALL IS A TOOL
For the Resilient coaches, volleyball is and has always been their life. But for the club itself, volleyball is not the end game. Coach Barbara’s quote says it best: “I live for the girls who play under my coaching. I’m passionate about helping girls become strong women anchored in confidence, grit, and determination. Like my parents, I pour everything into my girls, using volleyball to help them become the women they aspire to be.”
PLAYER AND PARENT EXPERIENCES SHOULD BE POSITIVE
Over the years we have heard many complaints, not just about travel volleyball but about travel sports in general. Most of the players we have worked with have siblings who play different sports. What we have found is that the complaints seem to be mostly the same by sport.
We think playing at Resilient should be a joy. We want our girls to play all-out for the club and their teammates, and we want parents to be our biggest fans. To achieve this, we focus on eliminating the things from our club that parents seem to be frustrated about at other clubs:
We don’t hold late practices for younger players.
We don’t load up our teams with 12 or more players.
We don’t put anyone on a team who is not at the skill level to get significant playing time.
We don’t ban parents from practices.
We don’t tell parents their 12-year-old is responsible for telling the coach when they are uncomfortable with something. That’s way too young and the relationship dynamic is way to unbalanced to expect that.
We hear all of these things that parents complain about, and we focus on not doing these things so our players and parents can have the best possible experience with Resilient.
FUNDAMENTALS ARE FUNDAMENTAL
Volleyball is a game of fundamentals. When we execute the fundamentals, we win. Our focus is not on complicated drills that players have trouble understanding or executing. We focus on what we know works and what has won championships.
WE CAN WORK HARD AND HAVE FUN
There is nothing more fun than playing together as a team, synchronized and at a very high level, competing and winning. To be able to do this, we must work hard in practice. When our players bring a 100% work rate to practice, we can let them flow in games, and when this done at a high level, it’s a magical experience for the players.
COLLEGE IS A GOAL, NOT THE GOAL
Many of the players whom Coach Kike and Coach Carmen have coached (including their daughter, Coach Barbara) have gone on to play collegiate volleyball. They are very well connected with American college and university coaches, including coaches at the most successful programs in the country. They have seen many girls play volleyball at colleges they would not be able to afford otherwise.
If your daughter plays at Resilient and goes on to play collegiate volleyball, she will be prepared! However, this is not our goal in and of itself. Our main goal is to build the character, strength, and passion that will carry her as a woman in her career, in her own family, and throughout her life.
TROPHIES ARE A GOAL, NOT THE GOAL
If we’re all honest, winning trophies is fun. You put in a lot of work, compete hard, win a tournament, and receive your reward. We love that! But it is not the goal of our club to stack trophies. We are, and always will be, about developing the individual girl/woman. We compete and play to win, but it’s not our primary drive. We are way more about your daughter than we are about the trophy.
WE BUILD COMPETITORS, NOT JUST PLAYERS
We want our girls to compete. The fighting spirit is so important for them to have as they grow up and enter the real world. Learning to give 100% to winning the game and competing in practice for their position leads to the ability to compete for a promotion and the drive to thrive as an adult. When we play, we play all-out.
TEAM SIZE AFFECTS PLAYING TIME
We know it’s frustrating to sign up for a “top class club” only to watch your daughter spend the majority of her time on the bench. While we can’t promise specific roster sizes as every team and every season is different, we can tell you that we like to keep the team small so every girl on the team plays a lot.
In fact, we focus on placing players on the appropriate team so that they can compete for playing time, and we keep our rosters small. Because of this, every player at Resilient will get equal opportunities to play.
PRACTICES ARE ALWAYS OPEN
All of our practices are open for parents to watch. We don’t believe in keeping parents, who are paying thousands of dollars to the club and enjoy watching their kids, away from practices. Parents need to know what the team is doing and how their daughter is practicing. Parents don’t have to attend practice, but they are always welcome to.