Men’s National Excellence Program, An Interview with Dan Lewis

After a 15-year playing career with Team Canada, Dan Lewis quickly transitioned into key coaching roles within the Canadian national team system. Dan is the head coach of the Men’s National Excellence Program (NEP), which brings together nationally identified high school athletes across Canada into a daily high performance environment. The NEP runs every year during the fall months, helping these young athletes manage high performance training loads while also balancing academic excellence and healthy living.

Wes Chen and Momentum Volleyball sat down with Dan Lewis to get his thoughts on the evolution of the NEP, the Canadian volleyball pathway, and some of the key values that he shares with his athletes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you give us a brief overview of what the National Excellence Program is and how it works?

The NEP is meant to help close the gaps between Canadian volleyball players and top level international players. We used to have the full-time training centre here which was more of a post-university program helping athletes prepare for becoming a professional volleyball player. The NEP is a shorter version of it, with a focus on athletes between grades 10 and 12 which allows them to train and compete against the top versions of themselves at that age.

A huge part of the NEP is to prepare our athletes’ body and mind for training at the highest level. They train up to eight times a week, lift three times a week, and gain knowledge of international volleyball from a player and coach standpoint. Not many people understand what it means to commit to a program that is going to help you become an international-calibre volleyball player. It really is a lot of responsibility for an athlete to become a professional, so we guide them through that process and hold them to those standards.

What does the NEP bring to the Canadian volleyball system and our national team program?

The NEP is what we call an ‘upstream program’, where the athletes are younger and much earlier in their careers. Compared to a ‘downstream program’ like the old full-time training centre where athletes were, more or less, already national team or international-calibre players. In the past 15 years, Canada has done a really good job with our downstream programs but we have to recognize the need to navigate the entire river.

Most of the top volleyball countries start training full-time players with professional clubs by the time they are 14-16 years old. By 16 or 17, athletes are already involved with some of the better pro programs in their country. Our Canadian university/college system is quite different with their student-athlete oriented approach. Our players are still in an excellent training environment here but it isn’t a professional one, so their total training load is not the same as someone who is.

From a young age, these international athletes have been learning to compete professionally in daily training environments that include seasoned pros, national team members, and Olympians. We know we can’t compete with this volleyball-only environment, so we must figure out how to maximize every single opportunity that we do get within our system. It requires an incredible amount of enthusiasm, discipline, and commitment from the athletes. That’s what the NEP really brings, an earlier exposure to an incredibly focused and accountable training environment.

How did you identify gaps in our national team pathway and how did the NEP evolve to address that?

It started for me when I was a player and Glenn Hoag took over the national team. After a year or two, I was already thinking about volleyball in a completely different manner. Many athletes, including myself, would come to the national team and have problems with basic fundamental skills. We’d have big gaps in simple skill execution, for example with precise high ball setting or free ball manipulation. Canada is good at offense and serving from a skill development standpoint, and a lot of our athletes tick these two boxes. But we falter more at the other key skills: reception, blocking, defense, and setting.

Over time we realized that we have a lack of fundamental skill development. There’s also a lack of opportunity, just from a sheer amount of time available that athletes spend in a concentrated volleyball environment competing against the very best for their age. We were finding gaps and disconnects in the pathway where sometimes our athletes weren’t training in the summers for years at a time.

So coaching the NextGen program first gave me the chance to start working within the pathway earlier. I was able teach some of those skills and adaptations we were otherwise having to start downstream. The opportunity for the NEP came soon after, and long-term it made the most sense to continue sharing the knowledge and needs of the international game with our top athletes at an earlier age.

What are some of the important values you teach NEP athletes to help them succeed as they progress through their careers?

I try to keep it as simple as possible. As a team we understand that we made the decision to be here and that we all have responsibilities that come with that. A key principle that I use is that we are going to co-create something here together and everyone has a crucial role to play in creating our environment. It’s a team-first mentality and you must make decisions that are best for the team.

It’s essential to have those classic values that you find in a high performance environment – discipline, hard work, enthusiasm. But most importantly, I tell the athletes that they need to assume the responsibility of the decision to be here. Be enthusiastic and curious about your own development. We focus a lot on ‘to-dos’ here so that these values aren’t abstract. What are you going to do every single day that’s going to help you execute on your decision to be here?

I’m grateful that these athletes want to come and train in this environment because it’s not easy. One of the purposes of NEP is to address weaknesses in their game when compared to their international peers. It’s one thing to be among the best in Canada and another to be among the best in the world. This program is designed to help them realize who they’re competing against on the international stage. These players have great potential but they have to prepare the groundwork properly.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about the program?

I think the most important thing is that if we introduce these adaptations as a youth, we have to continue applying them over a long enough period of time to consolidate it. NEP is a very productive three months, but if you’re not continually stressing the adaptations they will fade away.  Learning the fundamental principles and behaviours of someone that executes a high performance life is extremely difficult. It’s tough to get through this program and build up the resiliency needed to compete at this level. But the athletes made the choice to be here and they assume the responsibility of that choice. By the end, hopefully they are able to reflect and apply this to the other aspects of their life. It prepares them for the future and if they decide that they want to pursue this road, then they’ll have learned the foundation to do so.