Coach Your Brains Out

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.