John Mayer had just won LMU's first conference championship when he started questioning everything about how he coached. He had a system that worked. He changed it anyway.

JP Nerbun sits down with John Mayer, head beach volleyball coach at Loyola Marymount and the 2025 AVCA National Coach of the Year, to unpack the research that pulled him away from being the coach with all the answers. You will hear why a strong learning environment starts with the individual, why his practices open with cartwheels and one-eyed sets, and how handing players problems instead of solutions made them more creative, more independent, and less dependent on him under pressure.

If your athletes execute beautifully in practice but look to the sideline the moment things get hard, this conversation will change how you think about your next practice plan.

3 Quotes | 2 Questions | 1 Resource
Your fast-track to the episode's most actionable ideas.

"I flipped from before I was the provider of solutions, and then I became the provider of problems."
John Mayer

"I'm not as worried about what they like. My daughter likes ice cream. That doesn't mean it's gonna help her perform at a high level. I'm concerned in what's effective."
John Mayer

"These are the sort of people I want to put into the world, not people who follow orders."
John Mayer

Q1: What part of practice feels good but does not actually make you better, and where do you feel the kind of struggle that does?

Q2: When something in practice confuses you or is not working, how comfortable are you telling us, and what would make it easier?

The Nonlinear Nature of Learning: A Differential Learning Approach by Wolfgang Schöllhorn and colleagues
John credits Schöllhorn's differential learning research out of Germany with turning his coaching upside down. This open-access paper explains why adding variation, or noise, to practice can help athletes find their own movement solutions instead of copying one prescribed technique.
Read the paper here

• Great players don't automatically make great coaches.
• Design for the sweet spot between success and failure.
• Differential learning turns off the fear of judgment.
• A coaching crisis can be the doorway to real growth.
• Being the provider of problems beats being the provider of solutions.
• Feedback should flow in both directions.

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