Coach-to-coach volleyball talk that stays specific
John Mayer and Billy Allen host a weekly conversation about learning and leadership in volleyball, pulling ideas from coaches in college programs. The talk stays practical: how a setter builds decision-making, how practice shifts heading into the postseason, how a team recovers from a loss that stings.
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Coach Your Brains Out is a volleyball coaching show that behaves more like a long conversation between colleagues than an interview program. John Mayer and Billy Allen host. The stated frame is learning and leadership from the top minds in volleyball and beyond, and the show takes the 'and beyond' part seriously. Guests are working coaches, and the questions come from inside the job. Jamie Morrison, head coach at Texas A&M University, appears across a two-part run. The first half covers building a vision, including what changes when a program starts drawing crowds and people begin asking for your time. The second half stays with the postseason: an SEC tournament semifinal loss, the grief in the locker room afterward, and the seven days that followed. The answer is not motivational filler. It is a list of three or four things to upgrade before facing Texas again. Jeff Grove, associate head coach at Emporia State, brings roughly thirty years of college coaching to two episodes on setters. That conversation gets technical in a useful way. How much variability belongs in a rep. When blocked repetition is fine and when it stops teaching. How late a coach can make the call and still have the setter take the ball in the same position. There is also a recurring Motor Learning For Coaches thread, including an episode on errorless learning, where the discussion wanders into off-season reading before circling back. Patrick Murphy turns up for a two-part episode on mudita, built around affirming the behavior a coach wants to see and around the idea of giving people their flowers while they are still alive. Across all of it the show keeps translating concepts into things a staff can actually do. Practice design. Feedback habits. The vocabulary a program repeats until it becomes shorthand. The hosts are generous listeners and let guests run, which means a single answer can stretch for several minutes before someone pulls it back to a takeaway. Sentence by sentence it is casual. Structurally it is disciplined. Coaches who have sat through polished, surface-level clinic content will notice the difference here: the specificity, the willingness to sit inside a loss, the way an idea gets tested against a real team before anyone agrees it is true. The catalogue has grown past four hundred episodes, with new ones on Thursdays.
Made for: Volleyball coaches at the college and junior levels who want practical ideas about practice design, setter development, and team culture. Also useful to coaches in other sports curious about motor learning and how programs handle a season-defining loss.
What sets it apart: Rather than recapping matches, it stays inside the coaching decision, following a single question from a guest's principle down to the drill, the cue, and the timing of the call. The two-part format gives technical topics like setter training room to go past the clinic-talk version.
Coach Your Brains Out is founded by professional beach volleyball players and college coaches John Mayer and Billy Allen. The primary goal is practical, useful education that will help you become a better coach. Our podcasts are released every Thursday, so set your notifications accordingly!
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
John Mayer and Billy Allen make team culture practical by tracing leadership ideas into goals, feedback, accountability, and everyday coaching decisions.
Coach Your Brains Out treats coaching as practical management, with John Mayer and Billy Allen asking how leaders turn ambition into daily behavior.
Team culture gets practical when John Mayer and Billy Allen ask what your players will do tomorrow.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded case for specific affirmation as a practical tool for stronger team culture and shared accountability.
Coach Your Brains Out frames team culture as a daily leadership practice: how can affirmation become specific enough to shape behavior? Murphy ties mudita to the habits coaches can actually use, from naming the standard out loud to recognizing a teammate's contribution with…
A coaching story about genuine buy-in, peer accountability, and why athletes notice fake conviction.
Patrick Murphy, head softball coach at the University of Alabama, treats team culture as something more demanding than a slogan. His story about 25 softball players getting U tattoos, and his own decision to join them with a mudita tattoo, gives the idea a concrete start.
A grounded coaching conversation about keeping young athletes engaged and building culture through everyday leadership.
The episode treats youth coaching as a serious craft, pressing on a reflex many coaches know well: a seasoned eye can spot a clunky drill fast, but the more meaningful test may be whether a young athlete leaves smiling, stays involved, and wants another session.
John on coaching becoming an identity while helping build LMU's next chapter.
John's shift from chasing a beach volleyball career into coaching gives the episode its clearest thread. Coaching had been there for years, from club work in college to Santa Monica College while he was still playing, but it began as a second thought before becoming more of an…
A practical episode on turning shared ambition into behaviors a team can actually practice.
Jamie Morrison frames team ambition as something that has to be made usable. Rather than treating a big tournament goal as a slogan, he shows how a coach can help players turn it into behaviors they choose, share, and hold each other to.
John Mayer, co-founder of Coach Your Brains Out and head coach of LMU beach volleyball, discusses his coaching journey and philosophy.
Rob Nelson discusses integrating principles into warm-ups and making them efficient for volleyball practice.
Texas A&M head coach Jamie Morrison joins Coach Your Brains Out to discuss his team's national championship run.
Jamie Morrison discusses how his team used a loss in the SEC tournament as fuel to improve for the NCAA tournament, emphasizing the importance of learning from failure and adjusting practice routines.
Jamie Morrison discusses creating a vision and the rewards and challenges of leading a successful volleyball program at Texas A&M.
Coaches discuss off-season reading habits and briefly touch on errorless learning in motor learning for coaching.
Jeff Grove discusses how to incorporate variability and decision-making into setter training drills.
Jeff Grove discusses the evolution of college volleyball over 30 years, highlighting increased parity and the growth of junior volleyball.
Mudita turns into coachable behavior.
Patrick Murphy brings mudita into coaching without making it feel like a slogan.
John Mayer and Billy Allen argue that youth coaching should prioritize respect, fun, and clear intention over "machine gun feedback" and endless corrections.
Coaches discuss how to guide athletes to provide effective feedback and the value of allowing athletes to explore their own solutions.
John Mayer and Billy Allen welcome back Javi Miller-Estrada to discuss his coaching journey, the evolution of his podcast, and reflections on a debate about promoting ecological coaching methods.
John Kessel discusses the metaphor of being a river versus a reservoir in coaching, emphasizing the importance of continuous learning and sharing knowledge.
John Kessel discusses his post-retirement work running a healing retreat for veterans and first responders.