The coach I want to describe is Mr Silva, who trained our volleyball team at secondary school in Belo Horizonte, in Brazil. I played for him from the age of thirteen until I left school, so about five years.
He coached us twice a week after school and on Saturday mornings, which nobody enjoyed at first because Saturday sessions started at seven. His training was quite unusual. We barely played full matches in practice. Instead, he broke everything into tiny pieces. We might spend forty minutes on nothing but receiving a serve, and he'd film us on an old phone and then pause the video to show where our feet were wrong. He also made us rotate positions all the time, so the tallest boys had to set and the smallest ones had to block. We thought it was strange, but by the end we all understood the whole game, not just our own job.
What I learned from him goes well beyond volleyball. The first thing was patience with small improvements. He used to say that nobody notices a one per cent change in a week, but everybody notices it after a year, and that's stuck with me in my studies and now at work. The second was how to lose properly. When we were knocked out of the state championship, he didn't let us blame the referee; he sat us down and asked each of us to name one thing we personally could've done better. It felt uncomfortable, but it taught me to take responsibility rather than make excuses, which I think is one of the most useful habits anyone can have.