Creating Competition Without Hierarchy: The Cal Coaches and Spikeball

Creating competition is something Justin Wilcox has tried to do with every level of the football things. It comes in more noticeable areas, like the quarterback competition the Bears will continue with into fall camp. It comes in smaller areas, like having linemen catch punts to determine which group runs an extra sprint at the end of practice. It even comes among the staff, with the game of Spikeball.

(Spikeball is basically a hybrid of volleyball and four square, which the video below can show. It came to more prominence through an episode of Shark Tank.)

Wilcox had played the game before, and in search of something quicker as a workout than heading down to the RSF to play basketball, and less monotonous than running, he brought the game down to the weight room for the coaches, grad assistants, and others in the football offices.

“A couple of us had played it before,” Wilcox noted, “and then we’re looking for a workout, because it’s either you come out here and run the stadium or the fire trails, it gets kinda boring, so we got it going.”

“I don’t know where he found it, I think he found it maybe last summer,” inside linebackers coach Peter Sirmon added, “but it’s kinda caught on. You can play it without really stretching, you know, it’s kind of an old man game where I can go down there and in twenty seconds I can be ready to go and not pull any muscles yet.”

With it being something relatively quick and simple to get into, it’s caught on with the coaches.

“As a coach, you never try to get into the habit of not working out, which is easy to do because we’re watching film, we’re having meetings,” running backs coach Burl Toler said. “So we all try to keep each other motivated to work out together. Coach Wilcox introduced Spikeball and everybody fell in love with it. It takes 5-10 minutes per game, takes agility, everybody is sweating their t-shirts out.”

The game has brought a number of coaches, quality control guys, and support staff together down in the weight room, where there's an open area for the games to take place, and teams have formed among the staff.

"Burl and I are teammates," Wilcox said, "coach Tui and Pete Sirmon are a team (Sirmon notes that they call their team 'the Cascades'), Hayden Schuh (a defensive grad assistant who works with DBs) and Eric Meyer (an offensive quality control coach), they’re probably the number one seed right now, Nick (Edwards) and (Brad) Northagel, a real solid squad, Cory Nicol, who works in recruiting, Matt McFadden (an offensive GA), Casey Petree, so a lot of the support staff (plays)."

Toler noted that Wilcox may be the most competitive of those that play, and that's part of why they partnered up.

"It was an easy sell," Toler said, "pairing up, when you become partners, you kinda look for the most fierce competitors, the most athletic, so naturally coach Wilcox and I matched up together."

With the staff holding their own tournaments, playing a couple times a week, it’s "a little camaraderie, little bit of exercise, and we’re all pretty competitive, so it’s a good reason to talk a little smack around the office," according to Sirmon. More importantly, it can remove some of the built in power structure of the program, for a little while at least.

"There’s no hierarchy down there," Wilcox said, "there’s no head coach, there’s no coordinator. It’s just teams."

That's an attitude that Wilcox has tried to create around the team, that no one is sacred, that there's something to learn from every, and that competition at every level is what's going to make them better.

"I think that’s what makes coach Wilcox such a great head coach," Toler said, "it’s because he kinda breeds that same feeling between the coaches and the team, just that there is no hierarchy, everybody asks questions of each other and everybody learns from each other, erasing egos from the top down to the bottom."