Coaching Volleyball

Coaching Log – Mar 9, 2014

March 10, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Coaching Log No comments

This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log.

The team played it’s last round of South West league fixtures on Sunday. There is yet another round to be played this Sunday to come, but since the team will be in Edinburgh for Final 8s, the club will bring up some of the Intermediates to fill out a squad. Two relatively straightforward wins puts the team atop the table on points, though they won’t stay their when the presumptive champs catch up in terms of matches played. Odds are we’ll finish the season in 3rd place.

It’s been an impressive run, especially considering the chopping and changing of line-ups we’ve had through the campaign. I don’t think we’ve had the same group of players two fixture dates in a row and I’ve often juggled line-ups around match-to-match and even set-to-set during any given triangular round of play. For example, yesterday I had our two squad setters each set one match and play OPP the other. The team is 14-2 in the league and has won 10 straight without dropping a single set. Since losing our last BUCS match of first term, we’re 11-0 overall in all competitions, with a 30 set win streak. Not a bad way to enter Final 8s from a confidence perspective.

My one concern is that we haven’t played any really challenging teams in quite a while now. Yes, they get at each other pretty well in training, which is a big reason they’ve had things relatively easy this term, but that’s not quite the same as facing tough external competition. Had we not got a bye in the Round of 16 it would be a different situation. As it stands, I’m pondering maybe getting some of the guys to come in to bolster the B team a bit for 6-v-6 action this week.

In terms of what came out of yesterday’s matches, there again was some very good serving. I have to give very serious thought to using the second team setter as a serving specialist at Final 8s. A couple of the hitters took the opportunity to work on a few things, which of course produced mixed results. Defense was generally solid, but passing could have been better. My plan for this week will be to have serve receive incorporated heavily into the games and drills.

Between matches yesterday I continued to give some thought to how I might be able to maximize the amount of talent – both mental and physical – we had on the court. I played around with line-up ideas and came up with one that could work. It’s definitely non-traditional, but I think it could be quite useful. The problem is one of the players motivating a look at the change hasn’t been playing quite up to the level I’ve seen her at for some reason. Makes me wonder if it’s worth giving this line-up a shot in training this week because I certainly don’t want to spring it on the team at Final 8s.

Setter Training: Pushing the ball out

March 7, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Coaching No comments

My book project partner, Matt, had a question come in to his blog asking about helping players get more distance on their sets.This ties in with two of my prior setter training posts on hand position and weight transfer. Matt makes the following comment:

“The key for distance setting with control, is quick hands. The faster your hand motion, the truer your target line and the further the ball will fly. Slow hands which rely on a leg push for distance are very inconsistent in length and line. You don’t want the setter to punch the ball, but rather get it out of her hands as quickly as possible.”

If you’ve read Oliver’s comment on my hand position post you’ll know he made the observation that minimizing the movement of big joints helps with consistency as the large joints have the potential for asynchronous movement (read uneven extension of the limbs). This is right in line with Matt’s observation that relying on leg push makes for inconsistent sets. That’s part of why I train weight transfer rather than leg push.

Of course not all players can set effectively just using fast hands. They lack the physical tools. For some, it’s a question of growth. For others it’s a question of training.

When dealing with a physically weak setter, it makes sense to back down the joint sequence to the point where the strength is sufficient. So if wrists alone can’t do the job, then bring in elbows. Have the setter bend their arms as much as is required to get sufficient set distance, and then focus on good follow-through for the sake of consistency (superman). As the player gets stronger in the wrists, have them use a progressively higher contact point, meaning less elbow involvement.

If the player still cannot push the ball outside using elbow extension, then we have to start bringing the body into play. Again, this should be done in as limited a fashion as possible, otherwise you end up with things like players jumping through the ball or piking their butts backwards when trying to push the ball across the court.

Ideally, the body of a setter is just the vehicle which gets them into position to execute the setting skill. We’d rather not have it involved in the actual set execution if possible. As with wrists/elbows, you should be thinking in terms of getting the player away from using the body as quickly as possible as their strength develops higher up.

As we’ve no doubt all seen, it’s really hard to break players of bad habits and bad techniques. To the extent that you can limit the amount of time your setters spend using lower body elements we’d rather they not use in the long run to get more distance in their sets you make life easier for yourself (or their next coach) in the future.

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Coaching Log – Mar 5, 2014

March 6, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Coaching Log No comments

This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log.

Not my best training session in the context of where we are in the training. I was down a few players for various reason, so wasn’t able to quite do the team training stuff I’d have normally done. Instead I had the team working on a few other things.

After dynamic warm-up they did the Touch & Go game. I followed that up with 3 and 4-person over-the-net pepper and then had them do some serving. From there I moved them to the hard drill. I set the target at 5, but they weren’t able to achieve that. There were some good rallies and some nice hits, but the mix of players didn’t make for a group who was going to handle things as well as if we’d had a couple others. I eventually shifted things on the net in the form of cooperative cross-court hitting. The result was similar. After a bit more serving, I finished training with a round of 3-serve mini games.

Those two cooperative drills are ones I decided to do based on the number of players I had and how they can work on multiple aspects of play – hitting, defense, playing intelligently, etc. They are good drills from that perspective, but in this situation where I want to be building the players up for Final 8s and I didn’t have the group which was going to have the best chance of success they were probably not the best choice. That puts a premium on doing trainings next week that have a much more positive vibe to them.

Building tournament expectations

March 5, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Coaching No comments

BUCS announced the draw for volleyball Final 8s on Monday. Actually, they posted two different draws – first putting up one that was as expected, then a couple hours later changing to a surprising one.

Final 8s is played in pool fashion, with two groups of 4. The top two in each pool do a crossover set of semifinals as the progression toward the ultimate championship match. The 3rd place teams match up to decide 5th and 6th and the 4th place teams battle it out for 7th and 8th.

The initial Final 8s draw I saw looked very much like what I anticipated seeing. Teams from the same conference were separated and generally speaking the pools looked to have represented a pretty good split in terms of a reasonable seeding of the teams involved.

The new – apparently final – draw replaced the seed-based pools with ones based on a north/south split. That means no separation of conference foes. Since the Northern conference put 3 teams in Finals 8s in both the men’s and women’s field, it means they are practically playing a league round-robin to determine who advances to the semifinals. Why BUCS would do this I don’t know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of trying to identify the best university teams.

The one positive about these pools is that they likely are more competitive this way. My impression is that the Northern conference teams are the strongest, so having them together and the relatively weaker teams from the other conferences together in the other pool likely makes for tighter group-play matches in the pool stages. Also, these pools kind of represent next year’s premier league groupings.

On the men’s side, we have Bournemouth in our pool. They won our conference (we came second). We lost both matches against them, though there was some good battling. The other two teams in the group are from the South East conference – UEL who came first, and UCL who finished second. UEL is a scholarship program, and they were semifinalists in the Student Cup, so they’re likely to be pretty good. UCL finished 10th in the Student Cup, which was actually behind teams from our Conference who finished lower than we did, so that’s clearly a match we need to think of in terms of being winnable if we play to our abilities.

On the women’s side, we again have Bournemouth in our pool. We actually finished level with them in the conference table on points, but they took first on a tiebreak. We split our two matches this season. Cambridge and KCL are the other two teams. Cambridge finished 2nd in Midlands, though might have been first if they didn’t have an administrative points deduction. They also took 4th in the Student Cup, so they likely will be a solid team, which fits with what I saw of them in Final 8s last year. KCL went undefeated in South East, but beyond that I don’t know anything about them. They didn’t play in Student Cup this year.

Interestingly, the schedule as it currently stands sees both men and women playing Bournemouth in the final group-round fixture. The teams will be battling for position at that point, so those matches could be very interesting and very intense.

The question I will have to address from a coaching perspective with the two teams is how to manage expectations and playing time. The considerations are different for the men and the women.

In the case of the guys we have a situation where the team has a quite young core group we expect back next season. That makes it easier to share playing time around without having to be too focused on results. As I noted above, the teams we face in our pool will be part of the premier league we’ll play in next season and we could face a fourth one in the crossover match, so we get a nice initial view of what that’s going to be like. Having UCL in our group perhaps gives us a chance to go for a better finish than might have otherwise been the case.

On the women’s side the story is different. There are only a couple who will be back with the team next year. That puts a premium on trying to get the most out of this campaign. Also, whereas the guys may simply be physically over-matched in cases, I don’t see that being the case with the women. Could other teams be better? Certainly! But I think the women are likely to be very competitive, especially since they serve and defend quite well, which goes a long way in creating tight matches.

In both cases, though, how I think things will play out based on an honest assessment of where the teams are at and how things actually unfold could be quite different. I need to have contingency plans to deal with potential developments. This isn’t just in terms of line-ups. It’s also in terms of dealing with team and player psychology. It can be a real challenge managing a team (or player) that goes into an event like this with a certain expectation, then has to face the realization that isn’t going to happen. Motivation is a major issue when the goal a team was aiming for is no longer in reach.

Of course as a coach I have to make sure I’m clear with the team and players about expectations and the plan. Things can change on the fly, of course, but there tends to be less trouble with upset players when they know how things are probably going to go. It also helps in managing performance expectations and dealing with negative developments.

Coaching Log – Mar 3, 2014

March 4, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Coaching Log No comments

This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log.

I started this training with a talk about expectations for Final 8s – namely that I go into it not fearing any of our prospective competitors. Will there be some good teams? Absolutely. Do I expect us to win all our matches? No. But I do think we can be competitive in all of them and make the other team work for it. I explained that starters are likely to get the majority of the playing time, but that non-starters could get time as well, depending on how things go.

After the meeting, the players did their dynamic warm-up. There was some tardiness which required several minutes of punishment before we got into the volleyball. That commenced with the serving warm-up, finishing with target serves. A positive was that everyone completed the assigned serves in the allotted time. I think that was the first time all season!

From serving I moved into a split court situation. I divided the court lengthwise and had the OHs and OPPs on one half and the MBs, Setters, and Libero on the other. The hitter group did some serve receive and passing and hitting with my assistant. The MB group worked on quick attacks off a free ball pass. The latter showed a bit of success, but still needs a lot of work – particular in a game-play situation.

Because of the tardiness punishment, time got crunched, so I couldn’t do quite all the stuff I wanted to do. My plan had been to first do Bingo-Bango-Bongo and finish with a 3-serve wash game to get some work on both transition and serve receive. Instead, I did a few rotations of Scramble, then B-B-B.

I wasn’t happy with the focus in play, generally speaking. The players looked at least mentally tired, if not physically tired. The calisthenics they had to do for punishment may have been contributory, but I made a point after training to tell them I expect better next time.

Peaking at the right time

March 3, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Coaching No comments

In any given season there is a time, or perhaps a couple of times, when you want your team playing at its absolute best. For many this is at the end of the year during post-season play, but in other cases there may be a desire to see a team peak for intermediate competitions – a certain tournament, a big rivalry match, the start of conference play, etc. When I coached at Brown, the head coach talked about how different it was having gone from a situation where the Ivy League champion was determined in a season-end tournament as compared to the newer system where the champ was determined strictly by league performance (no tournament). It changed the season dynamic in that no longer could you just build things up to have the team playing its best volleyball at the end.

This all comes to mind because the university teams I coach are in the stretch run now. In less than two weeks they will both play in Final 8s, with the men’s second team also having a Cup semifinal, and potentially a final as well. With the women in particular, things have progressed very well in terms of peaking them at the right time. I have all season long had my focus on getting them here and having them prepared to face this level of competition and it’s paid off.

You really could say that I was training this team for Final 8s. If you were to ask the players, they would tell you I constantly talked about where we needed to be to go toe-to-toe with the top teams in the country. Obviously, we played lots of matches along the way – 34 by my count – some against good teams, some against poor ones. Frequently along the way I made coaching points based on our performance in them to help the players see where we wanted to be in terms of all facets of the game.

Much of my work with the ladies has been on the mental side of things. This is in terms of building their confidence and having a good playing mentality as well as making good decisions on the court and making sure they are always focused and doing their job at any given time.

Of course there’s also the technical and tactical development side of things. It’s hard to do a lot of individual skill training when you only have 3.5 hours of court time per week, and the multi-week holiday break doesn’t help in that regard. I have focused my efforts on more team oriented stuff as the bigger priority because of the larger gains to be had from improvements there. That said, the areas of serving and hitting are both places where notable improvement has been seen through the year. Both were points of focus for me from the start. Now blocking is coming along as well (though still needs work).

Then there’s the physical aspect of peaking – having your players in the best possible condition when it matters most. This is probably the trickiest part. After all, volleyball training is about develop team and individual abilities and tactics, which hopefully is a path of continuous improvement. Trying to peak a team physically – and mentally, for that matter – is about knowing when to push and when to give them a break. And this isn’t just about what’s happening in the gym, because quiet often what’s happening outside it plays a part (like exams and heavy course-load periods for students).

So what have I done to get the women to peak at the right time?

With this team I’ve had the advantage of having a pretty good idea of where they would be in the league – namely high enough to earn a spot in Championships – and what were the team’s priorities. I didn’t have to worry too much about results along the way (though the team is 25-9 overall across all competitions). That gave me some leeway in terms of working different line-ups, focusing on certain aspects of play, etc.to keep the team moving in the direction I wanted. Things aren’t always quite so easy.

Basically, for this team it’s been a question of building progressively through the season. I’m talking about training intensity here – both mental and physical. Every week I’ve expected a little more of them. Sometimes it’s been subtle. Sometimes it’s been overt. Along the way I’ve introduced physical and mental challenges intended to prepare them to take things up a notch and to be able to fight through in the face of adversity. It hasn’t been a straight path, but then it never is!

With two weeks of training left (4 sessions) I will continue that process in terms of looking for a little more out of them each time on the court. My only shift will be in getting more specific with line-ups and tactics to prepare for Final 8s.

Game: 7-point Rotations

February 28, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Games No comments

Synopsis: This game focuses on serve reception and gives considerable attention to weaker rotations.

Age/Skill Level: This game is for all levels.

Requirements: 2 teams, full court, one ball

Execution: This game is actually played as a series of mini-games. In each game one team serves every ball and both teams stay in one rotation for the whole time. The first team to score 7 points wins the mini game and gets to rotate. They serve the next mini game. The losing team stays in their rotation and is the receiving team for the next mini game.

Variations:

You can play for more or less than 7 points, depending on whether you want to lengthen or shorten the rotations.
Bonus points can be employed to focus on certain things. For example, 2 points can be given in the case of a stuff block, an ace, a successful quick attack, or a first-ball kill.
You can play until one team gets through 6 rotations, until both team get through 6 rotations, for time, or for some other objective.

Additional Comments:

Because this is a serve-initiated game it will tend to be played at a slower general tempo than games such as Bingo-Bango-Bongo where a new ball is initiated as soon as a rally ends. That could result in lower intensity levels, depending on the team. This is something which must be considered and accounted for in practice planning.
Since a team cannot rotate until it wins a mini game to 7, you can easily see situations where one side has to play multiple mini games in the same rotation in a row. This has the plus of concentrating reps on weaker rotations, but has the risk of frustrated players struggling mentally.
Also, because a team can win mini games as the serving side without ever having to do serve receive in that rotation, you may want to have a plan for making sure those “missed” rotations get at least some reps.

Sometimes you just do what you can

February 27, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Coaching No comments

In my last post I talked about the luck of the men’s team I coach getting a walk-over in the BUCS round of 16 match to get easy passage on through to Final 8s. Yesterday we had a bit of a reversal of fortunes.

Yesterday both the men’s and women’s second teams had conference cup quarterfinal matches. The draw actually worked out such that the same university was the opposition, and the host, for both matches. For the guys we were able to field a nearly full-strength team. We lacked a libero, which did hurt, but otherwise we had a full compliment. It was an ugly match – especially since the refs made no ball-handling calls at all – and we had a bad start, but with a few on the fly adjustments we were able to claw back from 0-2 down to win. That sees the guys on to the semifinals in two weeks, where they will be host.

The tough luck came on the women’s side. Because of exams we only had 2 of our regular players available, along with the young lady who started training with us just last week. We had to bring in 3 players from the club’s Intermediates group. One of them had done some fill-in duty last term for South West league play when we were thin, but the other two were completely new to the group. They had literally been asked to fill out the team the night before!

Needless to say, you don’t go into a match in a situation like that with very high expectations – particularly against a team that had been playing together all season long, on their home court, and after they had won their first round match 3-0. On top of that, we had no middles!

So what to do?

I ended up putting the two regular BUCS players and the one who started training with us last week in a triangle to balance out the skill and experience. I put our tall BUCS outside hitter opposite the setter and had them both operate out of the middle when front row. The OH played in 6 when she was back row, but the setter played her normal 1 position. The rest of the players just filled in around them based on whatever shift was needed to allow the other two to get into position.

That’s about the best I could do having never seen half the team play before. Whether it was the system or the players or what, we ended up doing surprisingly well. I’d expected a quick 0-3, and I get the impression the ladies were kind of expecting that as well. Instead it was a tight affair throughout. I think we never scored less than 21 and we actually won the 3rd set! Under the circumstances, a 3-1 loss of that nature was practically a victory.

The thing that made me laugh was a comment made to me after the match by the guy who reffed (one of the men who played in the match against our guys). He complimented the team on being really well coached. Hah!

Better lucky?

February 26, 2014 John Forman Volleyball Coaching News & Info No comments

This falls into the category of “better lucky than good”.

Please don’t hate or envy me too much for what I’m about to tell you.

As I’ve documented in my coaching log, the university women’s team I coach was granted a first round Championship playoff bye. That means they go straight through to the BUCS Final 8s while everyone else has to battle it out this week for the 7 other spots. You may be aware that I also coach the university men. They too qualified for Championships this season by placing 2nd in their league. They were drawn in the round of 16 against a team from Northern Ireland.

Get this…

The men aren’t going to have to play their way into Final 8s either. The opposition has forfeit (apparently their setter couldn’t go for the match). This means a second year in a row finishing in the top 8 for the guys – and as with the ladies, qualification for next season’s new premier league.

I asked one of the club captains if they’d made a deal with the devil to have this kind of luck.