Simon Hallberg

I'm Simon. I'm a volleyball coach from Sweden, currently coaching in the Faroe Islands, and I built VBPractice because I spend a frankly unreasonable amount of my life thinking about volleyball.

I started playing volleyball at Sollentuna VK, and eventually got into coaching. When I couldn't continue playing, I found that I didn't really want to leave the sport. If anything, I became even more interested in it.

I got really into the parts of volleyball that you don't necessarily notice when you're just playing. Why does a team defend this way? Why does a setter make that choice? Where is an opponent actually scoring their points? What happens if we change one little thing?

That turned into coaching, video scouting and, eventually, working in higher-level environments.

I've coached youth teams at Sollentuna, worked with national-team environments in Sweden and Norway, and had the opportunity to work with players who have gone on to RIG and national teams. Today, I'm the head coach of the women's team at KÍF in the Faroe Islands.

But I'm still very much learning.

I watch a ridiculous amount of volleyball. I steal ideas from other coaches. I try things with my teams, sometimes they work and sometimes they absolutely don't. I watch the video afterwards and try to figure out why.

That's probably the biggest thing about how I approach coaching:

I'm curious.

I don't think there's a point where you've "finished" learning how to coach volleyball.

So why VBPractice?

At some point, I got tired of having my coaching life spread across approximately 47 different places.

I had spreadsheets for one thing, notes somewhere else, videos somewhere else, drills in another document, and random ideas that I had written down at some ungodly hour because I thought they were brilliant.

And then, three weeks later:

"Where the fuck did I put that?"

So I started building VBPractice.

At first, it was basically a tool for myself. I wanted somewhere to keep my drills, build practices, take notes, plan sessions and keep track of what I was actually trying to develop with my teams.

Then it kept growing.

The more I coached, the more things I wanted it to do.

And that's still how I build it.

If I run into a problem while coaching, I think:

"Could VBPractice solve this?"

Sometimes the answer is no.

Sometimes I end up spending an absurd amount of time building the answer.

That's kind of the point.

What I want VBPractice to be

I don't want VBPractice to be another piece of software that coaches have to spend hours learning before they can use it.

I want it to feel like your coaching workspace.

Your drills. Your practices. Your notes. Your teams. Your ideas. Your way of doing things.

The software should make coaching easier, not become another thing you have to manage.

And I'm building it from the perspective of someone who actually uses it.

I'm still in the gym every week. I'm still coaching. I'm still watching matches, writing practice plans, scouting opponents and discovering things I want to do better.

So VBPractice is going to keep changing with me.

That's probably the best way I can describe it: I built the tool I wanted as a coach, and I'm still building the tool I wish I had.