“Make it play.”

Those were the three words that defined much of my 2025 working year, and the first nine months and counting of 2026.

Those three words were the backbone of Volleyball for Dummies. 

They were a gift sent by Gabby Reece.

***

In June of 2025, a peculiar email hit my Inbox. It was from Reece, with the subject reading: “Book Opportunity.”

She included details and timelines and all the important stuff one might typically need to know before taking on a project as massive as a 350-plus-page book. All she really needed to write, however, was her one-line second paragraph:

“Would you be interested in collaborating with me to write a Volleyball for Dummies book?”

The next time I turn down collaborating with Reece on anything will be the first. Reece is the rare high performer with a happy marriage, an individual with an astonishingly vast and impressive social circle who also has, so far as I can tell, a tremendous relationship with her kids, a woman who has built a towering career and life for herself who has also remained refreshingly grounded.

The project could have had nothing to do with volleyball. I’d have been in.

But the question of how we’d write the book still remained.

Creative projects are in no way simple ones on which to collaborate. One individual’s vision will often clash with the other’s, and the result can sometimes become a messy, clunky armistice in which no one is happy with the final product. Whose vision would win out?

Gabby nixed any potential of that in three words: “Make it play.”

I’d never written an instructional or educational book – or even a story or article of any kind – before, so when I began drafting thoughts and outlines and thinking about the tone of the book, it felt dry as cardboard. My first few attempts at it were awful, unpalatable even to me, the writer.

When Gabby wrote those magical words — make it play — it changed everything.

Suddenly, the words began flying off my fingertips, and paragraphs simply appeared on page after page after page.

In my hands, too, was the perfect book, arriving on my doorstep at the perfect time: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. The Los Angeles Times describes it as “a warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps.”

The Christian Science Monitor took it a step further, labeling it as “one of the funniest books on writing ever published.”

Somehow, Lamott had taken the subject of teaching individuals how to write and turned it into 220 pages of incredibly helpful advice that was somehow, as the New York Times described it, “hilarious, helpful, and provocative.”

It was, in a word, play.

That’s exactly how Gabby and I wanted Volleyball for Dummies to read.

And so it was that, every morning during the summer and fall of 2025, I’d wake up and read 30 minutes of Lamott’s Bird by Bird, priming my brain, setting the tone for how I’d want Volleyball for Dummies to read.

Then I’d let the words pour out, unbidden, unrestricted, unfiltered by an editing mind. I simply wrote, with the sole goal being to have as much fun as possible, to make myself laugh, to enjoy the process – the thought being that if I were having a blast writing, the reader would have a blast reading.

We’d collaborate, of course. Gabby has spent more time around the sport of volleyball than I have been alive on this Earth. We’d discuss ideas, concepts we wanted to ensure were included. I’d fly through a rough draft of a chapter and then, together, alongside the helpful-beyond-words assistance of Jenn Meredith, Gabby’s irreplicable right hand woman, we’d map out concepts and ideas for the next.

Over the previous nine years of hosting SANDCAST, and nearly a decade of playing at a professional level, there was little shortage of tips, advice, and cues I could call upon when writing these chapters. Frequently, though, I’d find holes and gaps and, nearly as frequently, entire chapters where I not only didn’t know where to begin, but had no clue really where to go at all.

Enter YouTube.

As each rough draft lived up to its name – they were rough indeed – I set out on the deepest of dives into YouTube’s world of volleyball tutorials. Every Monday and Tuesday, I busied myself hunting down every tutorial I could find on whatever topic it was that was being covered, transcribed them, and organized the notes. I watched every single McKibbin Brother tutorial – literally every single one – and dug through the vast library of Better at Beach. I discovered and the wisdom of Coach Donny at Elevate Yourself and laughed alongside the Worsleys and the Out of System crew. I found videos in languages I do not speak, relying on YouTube’s translated captions and the common language of volleyball to fill the gaps.

Piles and piles of notes stacked up as hours upon hours of YouTube were watched.

And then I wrote more.

I wrote from an astonishing number of Starbucks in California. I flew through pages while jetlagged at a small AirBnB in Latvia. I wrote from a stunning balcony in Germany. I tap-tap-tapped well before dawn in my office at home, and then again to the whirring sound of my kids’ monitors as my household slept upstairs. I covered chapter after chapter at a lobby in Australia in between matches at the World Championships.

The book came fast.

As fast as anything I have ever written.

Because it was play.

As I wrote, I learned, calling to mind that wonderfully ironic maxim: The best way to learn is to teach.

Learning is the drumbeat of my life. Learning is fun.

Learning is play.

I learned new cues I have since brought to Florida State. I learned new prisms through which to see the game, which I brought to the broadcast on VBTV. I followed up on interviews we had done on SANDCAST and asked them to go deeper into the topic, discovering such nuggets as this from Paul Lotman in our serving chapter: “Good jump serves with the right amount of pace and movement should feel smooth and fluid; 75-85% of whatever your max power is, no more and no less. If you don’t hit that range, you’re probably serving too easy or making an error.”

It was a pearl backed up by Phil Dalhausser, one of the most formidable jump servers of our time, who added: “I would never try to hit it my hardest unless I had a stiff wind in my face.”

Was it all fun? Every minute?

Of course not. Nothing ever is.

Editing became the bane of my existence, the equivalent of conditioning on a Friday after your final practice of the week, when your legs are tired, your lungs spent, your mind already checked out and pondering what the ocean might feel like. But, like that Friday conditioning, when the editing was finished, and a book was soon in my hand – a feeling as satisfying as dipping into the ocean on a hot summer day – I could smile, knowing that, like sports, while the process was often tiring and the end most difficult, I viewed the previous year with a warm nostalgia, knowing that I’ll look upon that phase as one of pure play.