LMU’s John Mayer is coaching his brains out, and winning big

LOS ANGELES, California — It was a most peculiar sight that greeted any visitors or passerby at the new beach volleyball courts on Loyola Marymount University’s campus on the morning of February 17. A dozen or so high school girls were playing beach volleyball, or doing something that kind of, sort of, in some ways resembled it and in many ways did not. One approached her attack by doing a cartwheel. Another did a 360. One headed it over the net. John Mayer, head coach of the Lions and the man overseeing the clinic, enjoyed that one.

“I love it,” he said, smiling. “What else can we try?”

This whimsical “drill,” if one could call it that — and many old school types likely will not — could be passed off as aspiring college athletes having a bit of a fun warm-up, and in many ways, that is exactly what was happening. But then you look at the nets, and it seems that of all of John Mayer’s many skills, setting up nets is not one of them: one is men’s height, one about a foot lower than women’s, while still another is slanted from high to low.

“Who knows what’s going on over there,” Mayer told the players.

On the contrary, Mayer knows precisely what’s going on over there, and setting up nets in his own mischievous ways is, indeed, one of his many skills. What may seem to be a most peculiar sight to the uninitiated is, in fact, what LMU assistant coach Angela White, formerly Bensend, called “the next evolution of coaching.”

For two hours, Mayer will spend perhaps only 10 minutes talking, though make no mistake, he is coaching.

The players just might not know it. That’s entirely the point.

Mayer’s subtle and quiet demeanor is quite the contrast from the more bombastic and gregarious manner of traditional coaching, with consistent instruction and a small, finite number of correct, technical ways of performing a skill or task. Rather than preach to the impressionable athletes on how to do something, Mayer simply puts them in various situations in which they can experiment and figure it out for themselves.

“Practice is a search,” he wrote on the daily whiteboard and emphasized a number of times over the course of the first two hours.

And so, throughout the morning, he lets — no, encourages — them to search.

“They’re learning how to become anti-fragile.”

“You always had that freedom to experiment so it’s OK to fail,” Marine Kinna, a former player for Mayer, said. “You never know what John is thinking.”

He lets them search for different ways to score on the perimeter, and ways to score in the meat of the court. He lets them find ways to score when the net is high and the defense pulling, and when the net is low and new angles of attack are presented. He lets them search for ways to score when their only tool to do so is with a poke. He lets them search for ways to score when one ball is flat, another is too pumped, one is a Mikasa, another a Wilson. He lets them search for ways to score when a surprise mini ball is thrown into the mix.

“They’re learning,” Mayer said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “but they don’t even realize it.”

Strange? Goofy? Gimmicky? It’s easy to see how one could view it that way. Evidence of Mayer’s massive success at LMU, and decades of motor learning science to back it up, would suggest otherwise.

In August of 2015, Mayer, then still a full-time player on the AVP Tour and in the midst of a season in which he would be voted the AVP Defensive Player of the Year as well as the AVP MVP, was named the head coach of the LMU beach volleyball team. He inherited an underfunded program that had gone a combined 14-29 in three seasons, a mid-tier school in a West Coast Conference dominated by Pepperdine, a fully-funded National Championship winning power.

Within two years of Mayer taking over, the Lions posted a winning record and made the finals of the WCC tournament. Two years after that, in 2019, they won their first WCC title, beating Pepperdine for the first time in school history.

They have won every WCC title since.

And Mayer has been named the WCC coach of the year every year since.

“It’s been fun, and it’s been fun to do it from kind of ground zero,” Mayer said. “Almost building a house where you see it as rubble. Our first year, the budget was $4,000. It was no staff, I shared an office with five people, no scholarship money. Because we had no budget, we’d play USC like 15 times. Now to see how far we’ve come, I have a full staff, two full-time staff members, three student managers, six scholarships, four-court facility on campus, we’ll travel to Hawaii, travel to Florida State. We have a team that could win a national championship.

“It’s also cool, you look around, it’s football schools, it’s USC, UCLA, Florida State, LSU, and little LMU, who has never won a national championship in any sport, which is unbelievable. It’s kind of exciting to think that we could be the first ones to ever do it. It would be a big deal to the legacy of LMU and hopefully open up some doors to what LMU can do.”

The fact that “little LMU” is annually in contention to win an NCAA title is a testament to what Mayer brings as a coach, a role he takes as seriously as parenting his own daughter.

“I think coaching is about as important a job as there is in the world, the influence you can have on lives, on young people’s lives, the mentors you can be for adults,” Mayer said. “I think it’s an impactful position. The issue is, we don’t treat it that way. My daughter’s fifth grade teacher has an advanced degree in education, in mathematics. My daughter’s fifth grade coach has no education. The requirement is she played when she was in high school. There’s decades of research on how to run a good practice. There’s psychology, there’s so many fields to dive in and learn about. But we don’t treat it as a profession. We go ‘You coached once!’ But this person could positively, negatively change their lives and this kid or this adult might have a negative relationship with activity, with exercise and sport. They might make lifelong friends, they might develop a love for the sport because of the way the coach goes about it, and we don’t respect it the way it should be.”

For a decade, he has co-hosted the podcast, Coach Your Brains Out, alongside Billy Allen, now the assistant coach at Stanford, picking the brains of coaches in every industry and sport, from professional golf coaches on the PGA Tour to pitching coaches with the Los Angeles Dodgers to the tight ends coach of the Miami Dolphins. During COVID, when schedules were cleared and Mayer had additional time on his hands, he scheduled a weekly zoom meeting with a group of individuals with PhDs in fields related to coaching and motor learing. That year became something of a hinge point in Mayer’s style as a coach.

“It’s non-linear. I talked about the coach being the provider of a solution, but when you approach things from an ecological perspective, the coach is the provider of problems,” Mayer said. “I’m not here to say ‘This is the way, this is how you have to do it. Here’s a unique movement problem, now go and try to solve it. Now, this is a hard problem, I’m here to help, but what else can you try?’ I’m nudging them to explore, nudging them to experiment. They’re having to self-organize, adapt, experiment, explore. They’re learning how to be anti-fragile, problem-solvers, all these skills that are game-changers.”

Never the same coaching experience

It is that very style that brought Kinna to LMU. A native of Guethary, France, Kinna starred at Lynn University as an outside hitter. When she decided to use her final year of eligibility on the beach, she had no shortage of offers, with a traditional power in UCLA calling, as well as “little LMU.”

Her boyfriend, DJ Klasnic, a professional player and regular listener of Coach Your Brains Out, recommended Mayer, both because of his coaching acumen and his resume as one of the best defenders of his generation on the AVP Tour.

“He already had an idea of how John views beach volleyball and how he could help me as a player,” Kinna said. Even Klasnic, however, couldn’t have foreseen the exponential growth Kinna would experience under Mayer.

Prior to transferring to LMU, Kinna had played limited beach volleyball. She was initially recruited as a left-side blocker…and wound up competing as a right-side defender … on court two … on a top-five team in the country. And finished 29-10.

“I never had a coach, so I was really raw. When I came to LMU, I know a lot of people have a hard time adjusting if they come from another coach, but because I had no background, it was super easy for me to understand it because I had nothing to compare it to,” Kinna said. “We had to figure it out as a player. Sometimes it takes more time to figure it out, but when we do figure it out, you’re more fulfilled. He’ll give you hints, little key points, he’s going to give you a result to achieve but you have to figure out how to do it. Throughout that period of learning about yourself, that’s how you’re going to figure out how to do it. It’s great to have a bigger toolbox. You’ll try things you think will never work and then all of a sudden it works really, really well.”

Was this new style strange at first? Of course. When coaches get into the field of coaching, the tendency is to fall back on a style of coaching that resembles how they were coached, perpetuating a string of top-down, one-way-is-the-correct-way style of teaching that is slow to evolve. Mayer admits that’s how he began, too, though it’s certainly not how he currently shapes his practices.

“This ecological view is this relationship with the environment and we’re going to let the body self-organize and we want to be as adaptable as possible. It’s more about how many tools can I add? Even if they never use it, we’re opening up more athleticism,” Mayer said. “It’s a way more fun way to coach our sport. That’s why it’s so fun. It’s never the same coaching experiences.”

It can make for quite a shock sometimes when athletes transfer into the program. Take Macy Gordon, a defender who won 79 matches at Cal Poly prior to transferring to LMU. Given her success, it isn’t surprising that the shift from Poly coach Todd Rogers’ style to Mayer’s took a bit longer than it did Kinna.

“She came to LMU and poor girl, she was so not used to this stuff,” Kinna said, laughing. “She took so long adjusting to it because she was so used to another type of coaching. I’m 100 percent sure it’s different and some of them ask why are we doing this?”

Why are they doing this? Allow the results to speak for themselves: In Gordon’s lone year at LMU, she finished 30-6, the best record of her career, surpassing her previous season-high win total by four.

Mayer is the first to admit that his style of coaching is breaking conventional norms, that even he isn’t sure it’ll land, that he’s learning right alongside the very athletes he’s teaching.

“John told us that we were kind of an experiment, that I don’t know if this style of coaching works,” Kinna said. “I think that’s the thing about John, he is always learning. It’s rare. Coaches can be closed-minded and have one vision. John is always learning something new. Now I’m sure he’s doing something different. I think it’s great.”

True enough, Mayer said that when he and Allen co-wrote a book, Coach Your Brains Out, in June of 2019, he’d revise much, if not all, of the material.

“I’m still young as a coach, 2018 was my last season [as a player],” he said. “I’m still trying to find that voice.”

He is still practicing what he preaches, and writes on his own whiteboards: That practice is a search, even for the man who has already found so much.

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