Like Bernardo: The Way of Bernardo de Rezende

Books that develop great coaches

Inspirational Insights for the Modern Volleyball Coach

A gold medal is warm. It holds the light of a thousand unseen hours and gives it back to you, a small sun in the palm of your hand. We have all chased that warmth. A silver medal, however, is cold. It carries no light of its own; it only reflects what it is not. To truly comprehend the work of an architect like Bernardo de Rezende, better known as Bernardinho, we must first understand the wound that shaped his hands—a wound forged in the southern California heat of 1984, the chilling weight of a silver medal that felt not like an achievement, but like a judgment. For us, as coaches, this is a foundational truth: victory is a celebration, but defeat is an education. A win is a dangerous anesthetic, papering over the small cracks in our foundation. A devastating loss is a forced and brutal autopsy, giving us no choice but to lay every organ of our program on the table and ask the one question victory never requires: Why?

That question became the engine of Bernardinho’s life’s work. This journey of relentless inquiry forms the core of the new book, Like Bernardo: The Way of Bernardo de Rezende. It’s important to understand, this is not a biography. Instead, author Emily Ann Brooks, drawing on years of hands-on volleyball experience, performs an act of deep listening—distilling the principles that echo from Bernardinho’s public career, his interviews, and the enduring legacy of his teams into a blueprint for shaping culture. He made a quiet vow on that podium, not just to win, but to construct teams that deserved to win by leaving no stone unturned. This is where his obsession with the final inch was born. It transformed his view of the game from a sequence of athletic moments into a fractal pattern of interconnected details. The thunderous kill that ignites a crowd is not the real story. The real story is the passer’s platform angle held for a millisecond longer; the setter’s precise footwork that freezes the middle blocker; the hitter’s penultimate step that creates both height and vision. His genius, and the lesson for us, lies in this fundamental rewiring of perception. It is the understanding that the final score is a lie, merely the sum total of a thousand hidden battles won or lost long before the ball ever crosses the net. This realization must become the engine of our practice design, transforming our gyms from places of casual repetition into laboratories where every movement is placed under a microscope.

This perspective is often born not on the court, but on the sideline. The most gifted players, for whom the game is an effortless extension of their own body, rarely become the most influential coaches. They feel the flow; they do not need to analyze the current. Bernardinho’s ultimate advantage was his enrollment in the University of the Bench. From that vantage point, removed from the distorting adrenaline of direct conflict, the machinery of the game reveals itself. You stop watching the ball and start seeing the geometry. You learn that survival is a matter of intellect, of deconstructing the game because physical dominance is not enough. This is the role player’s hidden curriculum, and it is the forge where a coach’s mind is truly made. It builds an unshakeable conviction that a team’s strength is not measured by the talent of its starters, but by the collective commitment of its entire roster—a wisdom that breeds empathy for the twelfth player, because you carry the memory of that value in your own bones.

With this understanding, the very architecture of our practices must be rebuilt. We fall in love with the sterile repetition of the block drill, the predictable rhythm of a hitting line, meticulously separating the physical from the mental. This is a fatal error. The brain that passes a coach’s gentle toss is a completely different brain than the one that must pass a 70-mile-per-hour jump serve at 23-24. To separate technique from the chaos of the game is to train a muscle but not the mind. Our gym must become a high-fidelity flight simulator, a place where we are not just training movements but engineering decisions. We do this by imposing strategic constraints—designing a game where the only way to score is after a transition dig, or where a setter is forbidden from setting the same attacker twice in a row. We are not giving our players solutions; we are creating more interesting problems, forcing them to build the adaptive, resilient minds that thrive in the storm of a fifth set. The chaos of the match must feel like a repetition, not a revelation.

This same relentless pursuit of truth must extend to how we build our teams and prepare for war. We often fall into the trap of recruiting for pure physical talent, seduced by the highlight reel. Yet character is the software that runs the hardware of competence. We must become obsessive detectives of what a player reveals in the split second after an error. Do their shoulders slump? Do they cast a poisonous glance of blame? Or do they clap their hands and communicate one simple, powerful message: Next ball. Give it to me again. This is the glue that holds an enterprise together when the forces of chaos try to rip it apart. It is the foundation for the week-long autopsy we conduct before every match, a process where we build not just a scouting report, but a neuromuscular game plan. The findings of our film study do not go to the players in a dense report; they go directly into the design of practice, burned into the team’s collective nervous system until the solution to an opponent’s tendency becomes an unconscious instinct. By the time the match arrives, we distill this entire mountain of work into a One-Page Gospel—a creed of three simple priorities that provides absolute clarity in the storm.

After the 2016 Olympic final in Rio, the great libero Serginho Escadinha took off the jersey he had just worn to win the ultimate prize and handed it to Bernardinho. It was not a souvenir. It was a transfer of custody, a final report on a mission completed. He was embodying the sacred principle of the New Zealand All Blacks: to leave the jersey in a better place than you found it. Because in the end, the memory of that final point, once so vivid, becomes a soft-edged photograph in the mind. This is the work that transcends the cold binary of winning and losing. It is the ultimate purpose that must animate our every action, giving the same sacred mission to the superstar and the third-string practice player. Our truest measure as coaches will not be the wins and losses next to our name, but the health of the culture we leave behind and the leaders we have forged to become its next guardians. The gold was never the goal. The prize was the privilege of wearing the jersey, and the sacred opportunity to leave it, and the people who will wear it next, in a better place. It is this transcendent vision of coaching that Like Bernardo seeks to capture. Blending timeless leadership concepts with actionable frameworks, the book translates the echoes from his sideline into a map for coaches at every level. It doesn’t just offer abstract lessons; it delivers tools you can apply immediately, challenging all of us to see the game as more than points on a scoreboard and to build a legacy that lasts long after the final whistle.

Emily Ann Brooks continues her deep dive into the minds of the architects who shape our sport. With Like Bernardo, she builds upon the path forged in her celebrated previous work, Like Karch: The Way of Karch Kiraly. Her talent lies in translating the careers of these masters into inspiration-rich, actionable maps, offering coaches who are in a constant search for inspiration the very tools needed to elevate their own craft.

This book is an investment in your coaching journey

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serves as an excellent professional development resource for volleyball coaches