Sharing Volleyball in Vanuatu

John Kessel has been an FIVB Level IV Coaching instructor for over 20 years. When time permits, he travels to other volleyball federations on Olympic Solidarity grants or FIVB grants to teach the coaches, administrators, officials and players ideas in growing the sport from the national to the grassroots levels, while returning with new ideas they share, to use in America. Unlike USAV CAP courses, and FIVB Level I or II course lasts 10-14 days, while Sports Aid Programme courses last eight days. To quote the FIVB Manual being used for this beach volleyball course "The broadest development aim of the FIVB is to introduce Volleyball to as many people as possible all over the world. More specifically, to create the conditions under which each country, given its resources, can give instruction to children and youngsters beginning volleyball." For this trip, John has taken a week of his vacation days to journey on four flights and over 36 hours across the dateline to Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, where it is winter now, and a bit on the rainy side, to work with the leaders on the two largest islands of their 183 islands, where volleyball is the #1 women's sport and #2 sport after football. More on the trip is seen in his blog at www.usavolleyball.org/blog/blog/220.