Nobody remembers the first pass. It's the reason the kill shot was even possible.
My team won our sand volleyball club's season championship this week. It's a family thing at this point. My wife and I picked up the sport after we moved to North Carolina, neither of us having played a day in our lives before we found this club. Our daughter started picking it up in the backyard, bumping the ball with us just to be included, and has since turned into a genuine travel-team volleyball player, better than either of us will ever be. Our son got voluntold onto the team a year later, mostly because he's athletic and needed something to do. He met a girl at that club who's a serious player herself. The two of them are now dominant on the court together, playing at a level my wife and I have been happily lapped by.
Watching all of that happen taught me something about how a point actually gets won, and it isn't what it looks like from the sideline.
Volleyball has a rhythm. The other team sends something over the net hoping you'll drop it. Whoever's closest has to field it, and that first touch, the pass, decides almost everything that happens after it. A clean, high pass to the setter sets up an easy set. An easy set sets up a hitter who can actually choose where to put the ball. A bad first pass means the setter is scrambling, which means the hitter is scrambling, which means you're playing defense on your own offensive possession.
The kill shot is what gets remembered. The first touch is what actually won the point, three moves earlier, when almost nobody was paying attention to it.
“The kill shot is what gets remembered. The first touch is what actually won the point.
I've spent my whole career doing some version of the same thing, just without a net in front of me. The account that's already falling apart, the relationship that's already gone cold, the room that's already tense before you walk in: none of that gets fixed by the big, visible move. It gets fixed, or it doesn't, by how cleanly you handle the very first thing that comes at you. Ask the right question first. Actually listen to the answer instead of already building your response. Get that part right, and everything downstream gets easier. Get it wrong, and you spend the rest of the possession compensating for it.
Where else have you seen the real turning point happen quietly, a few steps before the moment everyone actually noticed?
This is Part 1 of a two-part series, Lessons From the Court. Part 2, on the three seconds after a mistake, is next.