John Mayer is coaching his brains out, and winning big

SANTA MONICA, 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…