This is an entry in my Midwestern State volleyball coaching log for 2015-16.
Monday
This week’s Monday morning was a bit better than last week’s. At least the player didn’t seem to be a leg-weary as they were. The head coach did need to “remind them” that we don’t let balls drop uncontested in our gym early on when we had them playing some 2 v 2 2-touch games.
From there we split them up between serve reception on one court and more blocking work on the other. In the latter case the focus was block penetration, with use of an elastic.
Some target serving followed, working on deep corners. We then did the Hard Drill on each court to work on multiple elements – defense against back attacks, being intelligent in bad-ball situations, staying aggressive under pressure, etc.
The remainder of practice was 6 rotations worth of a 6-v-6 drill where the serving team had to register three straight points. We called serves missed long or wide as washes, but a serve in the net sent the team back to 0. Each team had a turn passing and serving. Afterwards we talked about amping the drill up a bit by may be making it first-to-3 so either team could “win”.
Tuesday
No practice sessions today. Instead we had two groups of player in to watch video from the weekend for about an hour. A lot of the focus ended up being on defensive positioning and movement. We also briefly met with the team at the end of the day before they did a group activity together. At that point we basically progressed the team chemistry development process in the direction of accountability.
Wednesday
Illness and injury had us down a couple of bodies in this session, then we lost another one as part of a collision during the first half to bring us down to only eight. It ended up being a challenging session from a frustration perspective. This was largely driven by a couple of cooperative drills where the team (or groups) had consecutive sequence targets.
The first was a simple 3-person over the net pepper. We gave them a target of 10 straight dig-set-hit sequences, allowing them to hold their count level if they couldn’t get a good sequence, but kept the ball in play. This was in 3 groups on one court. That obviously creates issues due to the small space, but the bigger issue was simple lack of clean execution. By the point when we called time, one group had managed 5 and the other two 4.
After doing some serving and passing, we did the other cooperative drill, which was basically an out-of-system focused activity. This one was a 4-corner set-up with players in 1, 2, 4, and 5 on each side. Balls had to be attacked cross-court. If the ball was dug by the back row player, the other back row player had to set the ball (to either pin hitter). If the front row player dug the ball, either back row player could set.
The goal was 8 consecutive good sequences. It took probably close to half and hour. At one point relatively early on when it was clear they were struggling I brought them in to get them thinking about how communication could make it better. Later on we had them take a team timeout.
At noon we had two players who couldn’t make the video sessions on Tuesday in for their own session.
Thursday
We gave the team the morning off from lifting as a break from the early wake-ups and because there are a few banged-up bodies. For afternoon team practice we took them out on the sand court at a local school. Basically, they just played games. It was rough going at the start as some of them clearly had little to no sand experience. By the end, though, they were starting to have some pretty good rallies.
Friday
We tried a variation on volley tennis to start this practice. Basically, it was 2 people on court on each side, with one ball in play as opposed to the two balls from the Brazilian variation we did before. Instead we had one player on each side holding a ball which they had to pass to their partner if they were going to play the ball coming over from the other side. Some refer to this as “don’t drop the baby”. We found, though, that by the end both sides had adopted a strategy of one person holding the “baby” while the other ran around the court playing the ball. So it became pretty much 1 v 1. We decided that the next time we tried it we’d make it a 2-touch game rather than just 1-touch.
After that we had them to serving and passing triples as warm-up for then moving on to the servers vs passers game we’ve been playing.
We then had them do the hitters vs defense where the antenna is set up so the attacker can only go through a narrow channel dominated by a double block. Last time we had them hitting through 4. This time it was through 2.
Next up was Pin Magic, which is a 5 v 5 game. You have pin hitters in the front row and three back court players. Each rally is started with a bounced ball which acts as the first contact. That side’s player in 5 must set the ball, and the ally goes from there. Points are only scored on kills which are set by the player in 5 (on either side).
We finished up with a couple of rotations of 22 vs. 22. We used the variation where a first-ball kill in the initial rally earned that side a big point (no second ball).
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