N-R Archives - Coaching Volleyball

NCAA Second-Contact Rule Change paper now published

John Forman — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 13:00:00 +0000

As many readers know, ahead of the 2024-25 seasons the NCAA changed the rules around 2nd contact. They basically got rid of doubles unless the ball went over the net. I did a quick analysis of the impact of this rule change in the women’s game following their season.

The NCAA men made the same rule change, and then FIVB experimented with it over the Summer at VNL and in Beach events. They liked it, so now basically everything is going in that direction.

Back in May I started work on a proper academic analysis of the impact of the rule change. That peer-reviewed paper has now been published in the Journal of Sports Sciences, one of the leading academic journals in the field. You can read the full article here:
👉 Impact of the Second-Contact Rule Change on Setter Performance, Referee Home Advantage, and Rally Dynamics in NCAA Volleyball

What I found

Setters benefited most. Before the change, setters were by far the most vulnerable to ball-handling errors. Afterward, their call rate dropped by more than 80%. That makes setters now less likely than other positions to get a call – as shown in the bar chart.
Referee home bias shrank. Away teams used to get called, on average, for more ball-handling errors than home teams – a sign of referee discretion influenced by crowd or context. That gap virtually disappeared.
Rallies got a little longer. With fewer stoppages, the ball stayed in play longer, which adds continuity to the match.
Competitive balance didn’t change. Matches didn’t tilt toward one side or another. The game flowed better without affecting outcomes.

Why it matters for coaches

This is one of the first large-scale, data-driven evaluations of a volleyball rule change. For coaches, it confirms what many suspected: reducing referee discretion on second contacts helps setters and makes the game smoother without upsetting balance. That means more chances to run offense, fewer frustrating whistles, and a fairer contest overall.

A note on the bigger picture

This is my first publication in sports science (my earlier academic work was in finance), and I hope it’s the start of a series of studies looking at our sport. I’ve got a few ideas for future papers in mind already, but if you have any thoughts on the subject, I’m happy to hear them.

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Most interesting content from 2024

John Forman — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

I posted in my 20 24 review the most-read posts from the blog last year. Here I want to share with you the most-read pieces of content I shared with subscribers to my weekly newsletter.

The 5 Ws of a Perfect Practice – Alexis Lebedew
Weird drills volleyball coaches use – one of mine
Should You Teach The ‘Split Step’ to Juniors? – Alexis again
The outline of the sessions Jim Stone presented at the UK Volleyball Coaching Symposium
Match point of the first ever USAV 10U national championship (which I don’t think should be a thing)
A Good Coach vs. A Great Coach – Mindsets on FB
Five unscientific methods some sports coaches use – The Conversation
How Can We Measure Setters? – Mark Lebedew
The ‘Rachel Rule’ – for Coaches – yet another from Alexis
Stress Is Not the Enemy. Teaching Your Athletes to Embrace Stressful Situations – Jim Stone

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Looking back on 2024 and ahead to 2025

John Forman — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year once again!

Here’s my annual review of the year gone by and look forward to the year ahead.

Job

I’m now about 19 months into my role with Volleyball England as Strategic Manager for Talent. In other words, overseer of all things related to the England national teams – Indoor and Beach. After spending most of 2023 developing the overarching vision and 5-year plan, 2024 was much more about implementation. The three main areas of focus are improved coaching, more/better competition, and an upgraded athlete experience.

There isn’t the space here to talk about everything that’s gone on in those areas over the last 12 months. What I can say is that much of the work has been aimed at building foundations and transitioning to new ways of working. Some areas have seen significant changes already. Others not as much yet, but with plans developing.

The other part of what I do at VE is act as Indoor Performance Director (we also have someone who covers Beach). If you’ve followed my log entries, you’ll have a sense of what I’ve done at Volleyball England in that role. Lots of running of planning and running camps!

Travel & Education

My one real travel event of 2023 was going to Lisbon to spend about a week with the club Benfica. My contact with the staff there goes back to 2020 (further back for at least one coach). It was my first trip to Portugal. Aside from nearly going blind on a sunny day near the seaside (stupidly forgot my sunglasses that day), it was thoroughly enjoyable.

I did have it in mind to attend the AVCA Convention. They didn’t select the session I proposed to deliver with the VE Beach Performance Director, though, so it never happened.

A big developmental piece for me in 2023 was starting to use AI in a meaningful way. That’s something I further progressed in 2024. I’m not going to claim to have it mastered, or anything like that. It has become a very useful tool for me, however.

On the book front, there were a few quite good titles on my list last year. One was The Culture System by JP Nerbun. Another was Learning To Be an “Ecological” Coach by Rob Gray. And while I mainly consumed Developmental To Division I: Strength And Conditioning For The Volleyball Athlete by Missy Mitchell-McBeth for purposes other than my own education, I definitely picked up some new knowledge doing so.

I also listened to The Score Takes Care of Itself and The Leadership Secrets of Nick Sabin. While I didn’t get around to posting reviews about them, both were good coaching perspectives – especially, I think, in terms of a coach’s personal development and progression.

Content

There were 57 new posts to the blog last year. That’s down a bit from 2023, but I made up for the reduced blog output elsewhere.

My new college volleyball recruiting book is one major source of separate content. I published that in the Summer. It also represents my first foray into audiobooks. Admittedly, I mean AI narrated rather than me doing it or having someone else do so. Still, it’s another way to get content to people in a way they want to consume it.

I also took on two new courses last hear. One was a redevelopment of a prior course on practice planning. The other was a new one on managing things around matches. That came out of survey results indicating it was something people wanted to get better at.

Finally, I dipped back into the NCAA data for a new report. This one looks at the change in ball-handling errors after the rule change to mostly eliminate double calls on 2nd contact.

Site traffic

The site hit 3 million lifetime page views in early December. Overall, though, it was a down year for traffic. By quite a bit.

For the year as a whole, 2024 page views were down about 20% from 2023. Every month saw less traffic than it did the year before, with March being the only one where the drop was less than 10%.

Dig in to the numbers and you’ll find that it’s a fall off in traffic from social media that’s the difference. Visitors coming from search (Google, etc.) – which has always been the single largest part of traffic to the site – were basically flat. Visitors from social media – the #2 source – were down better than 40% in 2024 compared to 2023, though the engagement levels of those who did come to the site were up by about 70%.

This is very interesting because the Coaching Volleyball group on Facebook, grew by something like 50% last year, hitting over 108,000 members. You’d think that would help lift traffic to the blog, especially since I share content there. Not so much apparently. I’ll speak to this more below.

Anyway, here are last year’s most viewed posts.

And here is where readers come from.

The top 5 countries remained the same from 2023, though visitors from Canada were up about 13% and Australians up about 8%, while the others were down.

What’s notable is Poland at #6 when it wasn’t even on the list in 2023. Germany and India are both carryovers, but dropped down a notch and swapped places. Sweden is the other new arrival for 2024, with France and Italy the two countries bumped out.

Looking ahead to the new year

The big thing on my list for 2025 is to get a new membership community launched and running. The framework is in place. Just need to put some finishing touches on things before it’s ready to go.

This community idea has been on my mind for a while. Seeing just how much of a stranglehold the Facebook algorithm has on what the Coaching Volleyball group sees, though, really pushed it from a potentially interesting concept to something I need to do.

As I write this, I’m looking at the last 28 days of posts to the group. There are 117. Of that 117, only 7 got views in excess of 10% of the group’s members. A post with 114 comments and 129 reactions was seen by fewer than 5% of members! That’s just not right.

So I want to build something where there’s no system deciding who gets to see what. One that organizes content and discussions better. And also one where members can have more of a say in how things work.

Look for more on this in the weeks to come.

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Research on NCAA 2nd contact rule change

John Forman — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 14:00:00 +0000

After the 2023 season, the NCAA implemented a rule change around 2nd contact in Women’s Volleyball. Basically, it eliminated double calls, unless the ball goes over the net. So if you set a teammate, you can’t be called for a double. They talked this about for a while, and experimented with it in Spring play previously, so it wasn’t a surprise.

Following the conclusion of the 2024 season, I completed an analysis of ball-handling errors (BHE) called over the last two seasons. I turned that into a short report titled The Impact of the 2nd Contact Rule Change on Ball-Handling Errors Called in NCAA Women’s Volleyball. Follow the link to either read online or download the PDF.

Don’t worry. It’s not long (only 7 pages with a large font and good spacing). And there are visuals. 🙂

The quick and dirty is that BHE dropped massively in the 2024 season. Shocker, right?

Edit: After the Men’s season I did a full-on academic study of the impact of the rules change. You can read that here.

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BIG milestone for the Facebook group

John Forman — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The other day the Coaching Volleyball group on Facebook hit 100,000 members. That’s a figure I have a hard time wrapping my head around, to be honest. I started the group 10 years or so ago. Definitely never imaged it would ever get this big!

Honestly, for the first few years the group was pretty much dormant. There were some technical issues with it, so most of my focus was on the Facebook page instead. I can’t remember when it happened, but at some point the Group really took off, way surpassing the Page. Maybe changes in how FB does things has something to do with it. I don’t know.

The really wild part of all this is that it was only about 15 months ago – on the 10th anniversary of the blog’s first post – that I noted the Group had just under 50,000 members. That means it’s added over 50,000 new members since then!

The English have a good term for how I feel seeing that – gobsmacked. It means dumbfounded. That’s definitely me.

Now, to be fair, the group doesn’t have 100k active members. I pulled up some stats. From July 1st to September 27th – so nearly 3 months – there were about 10,000 people who posted and/or commented. It was likely a bit higher than that because apparently there was a glitch and I’m not seeing anything for about 2 weeks in that period, but close enough.

Let me tell you, even 10k active members keeps me quite busy as a moderator.

And get this. In that same time frame, FB says over 1 million people viewed the group. How crazy is that!?

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Report from a cross-sport coaching conference

John Forman — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Last week I attended a coaching conference put on by Sport England. Representatives from a number of different sports – from large (like track & field/athletics) to comparatively small (like volleyball) attended. Between the presentations themselves and the discussions we had at our tables, we talked a lot about coach education programs and the concept of coach development. They were interesting conversations.

The structure of coach education

A big topic from the beginning was required formal education (coaching certifications/qualifications) vs. continuous professional development (CPD). The sports are in different places with regards to required certification. Many are like we are at Volleyball England with just two levels. Gymnastics is an example of one with a different approach because of safety considerations.

I think there was general agreement, though, that formal requirements present challenges. Probably the most obvious is the cost in both time and money. Given the majority of coaches are volunteers, you can see how this might create friction in the process.

This brought up the question of whether we could drop certifications. This honestly doesn’t seem likely (insurance reasons, for one), so the next question is how to make the system better. For example, can we integrate CPD to lead people into the Level 1 and then act as a bridge to Level 2.

And, of course, what does CPD look like for those who’ve completed the Level 2 requirements. Those folks can’t just sit back on that for the next 20 years (which definitely happens).

Coach Developers

The other key topic – at least to my mind – was what coach development looks like beyond simply running courses, and what those in the role of Coach Developer actually do. The feeling is that too often they default to simply offering up education rather than the sort of individualized guidance and mentorship really required.

There was an interesting proposal for the training of CDs. That was to have them work with mentee coaches while those coaches go through some kind of education program. In other words, the CDs develop their skills actually working with coaches the way coaches develop their skills actually working with players.

Putting it all in context

Obviously, I was at this conference in my capacity as the head of the national team programs for Volleyball England. As such, I was thinking about things on two levels. Narrowly, I was considering our national team coaches. This is very much like you would do from a club perspective. Granted, I’m not dealing with brand new coaches at that level, but I do need to look at how we help each of them grow and develop. Even experienced coaches have room to keep doing that.

The other perspective for me was broader coach development across England. This is a major focus because if we want better players in our national team pipeline we need stronger player development at the club level. We could have the best coaches in the world, but we simply can’t see the players as much as their club coaches do.

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UK Volleyball Coaching Symposium 2024 report

John Forman — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The weekend of September 14-15, 2024 Volleyball England hosted the UK Volleyball Coaching Symposium at its National Volleyball Centre. In attendance were coaches from England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. The theme of the event was juniors performance coaching. Thanks to funding from the FIVB, we had Jim Stone as our lead presenter. Jim won a U19 World Championships gold medal coaching the USA women, so he suited well the event’s focus.

There were four off-court sessions:

An examination of sport and exercise medicine in volleyball and the prevalence of different injuries in volleyball based on recent research run by the V.E. Chief Medical Officer.
A discussion of developing and sustaining confidence in players led by Alex Porter, the head coach of the University of Essex, which is one of the UK university performance programs (with a bit of contribution from myself).
A look at performance metrics and how they relate to winning from the England Men’s National Team analyst (he actually did his own “takeaways” post here).
A State of the Game session run by Jim looking at how the game is being played now, and where it seems to be going.

All the sessions generated good conversations with insightful questions. The session on confidence, though, could easily have carried on for quite a bit longer than it did. The main thrust was that there is are two types of confidence. The first is self-confidence, which is general. As such, it is subject to the influence of day-to-day events in a player’s life.

The second is self-efficacy. This is domain specific. In other words, it will be different for receiving serve vs. hitting vs. serving. This is heavily influenced by the player’s sense of competence and their prior experience. What we see is a feedback loop where self-efficacy (confidence) allows the player to take risks to try to improve, that improvement leads to increased competency, which lifts self-efficacy, and so on.

Of course, we also had a bunch of on-court sessions.

The first of those was connected to the look at volleyball injuries. An S&C coach from TASS with experience working in the volleyball space (not an easy thing to find in the UK) ran a session that featured activities to warm-up athletes up, help them avoid injuries, and generally improve their physical capabilities. This was all court stuff. No discussion of weight lifting or anything like that.

The remaining sessions were all run by Jim. They went over:

Early-Practice Activities (ball-handling and other warm-up type exercises)
Serve & Pass
Developing Tempo in Attack
Integrating Front and Back Row Attack
Out of System Offense
Block & Defense

We had juniors players on-hand to be demonstrators for the on-court stuff. On Saturday it was a group of girls, while on Sunday we had boys. I invited players that I thought would probably be fairly representative of the level of players the coaches in attendance would be working with. In other words, I didn’t want to just bring in a bunch of college players so it would all be nice and neat.

This approach ultimately had pluses and minuses. I think it went according to plan on Day 2 with the boys as we had a decent level of capability throughout. With the girls, though, we were lacking in the setting position. We had a couple, but they were inexperienced. That made Jim’s “tempo” session a challenge. On the one hand, it was frustrating that Jim couldn’t do what he probably would have otherwise. On the other hand, however, attendees saw Jim adapt to the circumstances in a situation probably quite like what they’d face in their own gyms.

One of the funnier elements of that whole scenario was that one of our England U19 players – a Middle – actually demonstrated some interesting setting skills. This had our national team coaches looking on with mouths open (we could REALLY use more height at setter) and asking her club coach, who was there, why this is the first we’ve ever seen that. His argument was that if he didn’t have her hit he wouldn’t have any offense. That does, though, beg the question of running a 6-2.

The other thing that stood out was Jim’s concentration on players’ focus of attention.

Of course there were a lot of other takeaways. Based on the comments we collected at the end, different people took a variety of things away from basically every session. Exactly the sort of thing you hope for.

Overall, the event went very well. All the feedback we got during and after the Symposium was extremely positive. One of the coaches from Ireland in attendance shared his thoughts and takeaways in a post on the Volleyball Ireland Facebook page.

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Proposed FIVB rules changes

John Forman — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 13:00:00 +0000

FIVB has proposed a couple of rules changes for the next quadrennial. They were all approved by the Board of Administration at the end of May. Here they are.

No positional faults for the serving team

They will change rule Rule 7.4 to allow members of the serving team to occupy any position they like at the time of service contact (i.e. no overlap fault). The receiving team, however, will continue to have to be in rotational order.

The rationale is to strengthen the defense and provide for longer rallies. From a purely switching perspective, I don’t see it. If teams use this in certain ways…

Updated screening rule

Players on the serving team will no longer be able to raise their hands above their head during service until after the ball has crossed the net.

The argument for this one is “… to enhance fair play and as a safety precaution…”

Crossing space rule (aka pursuit)

They will adjust Rule 10.1.2 such that a player can only play a ball that’s crossed the net plane outside the antenna (into the opponent’s free zone) if that was the result of first contact (dig, reception). If it the ball crosses the plane outside the antenna on second contact it will automatically be out of bounds. Point over.

I don’t see anything here likely to significantly impact play. We’ll see about serving team positioning, though.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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The Perfect Drill ranking challenge is on!

John Forman — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I mentioned that I’m running a 24-hour challenge to see if we in the volleyball community can put my new book, The Perfect Drill, on top of the Amazon.com Sports & Outdoors category. That challenge is now underway! It will run until 6:00AM US Eastern time on Thursday.

Buy The Perfect Drill here.

Note that this is for the main Amazon.com store. If at all possible, please buy from there. Rankings are by store, so we want to put as many sales as possible through one store. If you can’t buy through the main one, though, go ahead and use your own store. We can drive rankings there as well.

I’ll provide ranking updates throughout the day on the Coaching Volleyball group on Facebook.

Special Bonus Q&A: In the book you’ll find a link to access the Additional Resources. Sign-up for that and you’ll automatically be registered for the reader Q&A.

Post a review: If you do buy the book today, and have a chance to give it a read, go ahead and put up a review on the Amazon page if you have the opportunity. It’ll help other readers and support the challenge.

Share the challenge: Of course it would be great if you could share what we’re trying to do with your friends and connections in the volleyball community in whatever way works best for you (email, social media, etc.). The more people we can tell, the better our chances of topping the Amazon rankings!

Some folks either jumped on the challenge a bit early or they came across the book organically. When I woke up this morning this is what I saw:

Nice start, but a long way to go to make the goal.

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Most interesting content from 2023

John Forman — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0000

I posted in my 2023 review the most-read posts from the blog last year. Here I want to share with you the most-read pieces of content I shared with subscribers to my weekly newsletter. To be honest, though, I’m a bit dubious about the results. There were a couple of editions that seemed to receive an unusually high amount of click-through compared to others. That’s skewed the tallies, but I don’t know exactly by how much. What I’ve decided to do is to share the top clicks by source. That way even if the figures are misleading, at least the sources will be correct.

Youth teams trying to play like Olympic teams – one of my blog posts
10 Ways to be a More Positive Coach – JVA blog
Passing Techniques and Systems- One Size Does Not Fit All – Jim Stone
2022 transfer trends released for Divisions I and II – NCAA
In-System vs. Out of System Attacking – NCAA Volleyball (2023) – Chad Gordan’s Twitter
A PowerPoint PDF from Volleyball New Zealand looking at FIVB rules changes. The bit about overlap is what folks were most interested in.
Thinking About… Extra Balls / Wash Balls – Mark Lebedew via World of Volley
Seven thoughts that may not be readily obvious for coaches – Dan Abrahams (Facebook)
Is this drill teaching setting? – Alexis Lebedew
Three books that every coach needs for ready reference – Vern Gambetta (Facebook)

If I were to guess the real numbers, I’d say Chad Gordon’s infographic was probably the most clicked link for 2023. Not that the stuff that sits above there by the numbers isn’t interesting. I just have my suspicions.

Anyway, subscribe to the weekly newsletter and you’ll see the stuff I share each edition.

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