This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log for 2015-16.
After a full set of fixtures last week – and then some – here’s how things stood in the Elitserie coming into the new week.
As of this point, we were the only team on the women’s side to have secured a spot in January’s Gran Prix. Our 22 points is enough to ensure at least a 3rd seed. Neither Örebro nor Engelholm could catch us. Lindesberg could pull level, which would see it come down to a tie break for position. Hylte is the only one that could finish with more points.
In terms of the Oresund Liga, our win over Gislaved last Thursday counted toward the standings. Also on Thursday, Holte defeated Engelholm 3-1 at home. The other match on the week was Amager hosting Holte on Sunday in a Danish league match that counted toward the cross-border league as well. The away side got the win there. Leaders Brøndby were inactive, so here’s that table.
Our upcoming match at Brøndby on the 15th is the only one left before the holiday break and will decide who leads the league to start the second half come January.
Monday
I was in England fulfilling a requirement of my PhD work, so there was no training. Given that we’d played two matches in three days, the timing for this was pretty good.
Tuesday
I got back to Svedala in the early afternoon and one of the club’s board members picked me up at the train station to take me to my new place. On the plus side, it’s an interesting place (old property that was formerly a cloister) that seem comfortable and has wifi. On the down side, it’s 6k outside town with no real transit options. People are going to have to shuttle me back and forth. I believe the club is look at this as a temporary situation and that they are looking for something more convenient to eventually put me in “permanently”.
At the start of training, we started talking a bit about the last match – which seemed a long time ago for everyone – and the one coming on Sunday. For my own part, I focused on our improvement in recent matches when having a lead and being in position to win and creating problems for the other team from a tactical perspective.
After pre-hab and some partner pepper, I split the team. On center court I had the MBs and Setters working on attacking after block-transition, which they told me they felt was very useful. On the side court I had the rest initially doing some cooperative 3 v 3 play which required each player on a side to get a contact, which I then shifted to an 11 point back row attack only game.
After doing some target serving, I had them play a bit of Winners with fixed setters and MBs..The rest of training was a 6 v 5 version of 22 v 22. I had the starting setter on the 6 side for her three back row rotations, then moved her to the 5 side for two front row rotations. I normally would probably have included some serve and pass, but in this case I wanted to maximize our time in game play and since 22 v 22 is serve reception focused we got plenty of passing in.
In the first part of training I had some concerns about focus. Things were a bit sloppy, which made me think there might be a bit of complacency about things given that qualification for Gran Prix was already assured. I told them heading into the game play that I wanted high intensity during that work since it was probably the only time this week we’d be able to do near full team play. There was some good play in that final phase.
Wednesday
After skipping the last two weeks – one for a match and one because I had them on “active rest” rather than doing a program – the team was back together for their weekly join weight training. At the end of last week I gave them a new lifting program running through to the end of the regular season. That’s 13 weeks. It starts of low intensity, higher reps through the holiday period, then picks up once we get back rolling again in January.
Following the usual Wednesday warm-up routine, I had the players do a 5-person version of over-the-net 2-touch shuttle. I then had them play a series of 10 point games of 5 v 5 back court. There was a setter and middle at the net, with three in the back court with all attacks going through 1 and 6. I wanted to do this to work both on defense against something we’ll see in Sunday’s match (at least in terms of the pipe), but also to work on improving our own attack. Unfortunately, one of my changes meant my OH1 ended up being the only attacker on her team, so she got every ball. Good for working on that attack and for the defense training on the other side, but not optimal in general terms.
From there we did some serve & pass, with a bit of hitting mixed in. That was followed by target serving.
The last part of training was some 5 v 5. I wanted to keep working on our blocking, particularly in terms of dealing with attackers who like to go block-out. We struggled with that last time we played Hylte. The game had play start with a serve and the first set was required to go to the OH. After that the setter could go where ever she wanted. If the serve did not produce a rally (ace, hitting error, block) then I initiated a ball to the serving side – though I only counted the first ball toward the score. We played several games, rotating players around.
After I finished some players did a bit of work on specific things of their own. Our OPP worked with our OH1 on digging line attacks. The two MBs worked on blocking balls when they have to close fast to the pin.
Friday
Last real training before the Christmas break. I had to have a few words with the team at the start about being on time. There’s been a slow drift toward tardiness as the season’s progressed. It’s not that players are turning up late – at least not without a good reason – but we’ve been pushing things in terms of getting started on time and I’ve been on the verge of saying something about it. In this case, the net didn’t get fully up until 5 minutes or more after our start time, which gave me a very clear thing to point to as representing a problem.
After pre-hab I had the team do 21 to see where they were at in terms of focus. From there it was a bit of target serving focused on deep and short serves, which is the sort of thing that could come in handy against Hylte.
Along the same vein, the next exercise was back row attack Winners 3s. I saw some really good stuff both in terms of our attacking and our defending. Hopefully that translates to our play. I’d really like to see us get our OPP more involved in the offense when she’s back row.
The last two exercises were also game play. The first was a 5 v 5 game where I initiated an attacked ball to each side in turn and let them play out the rally. The idea there was to get some work in on our transition game, which has been up and down of late. The last thing we did was to run through the rotations in 6 vs 4 fashion, with the 4 serving and also getting a free ball if there was no subsequent rally. I tried to have the rotations go quickly, but wanted to make sure there were at least 3 good attacks from serve receive in each one.
For the last 2 rotations I specifically set my O1 up to be hitting when my OPP was playing defense to keep the latter working on her defensive game. She’s come a long way, and has become really adapt at picking up tips, but she continues to have her struggles handling harder driven balls well.
Sunday
Our second away match against Hylte was played at their other gym.
In what was generally a back and forth affair, we won 3-2. Set scores were 25-23, 18-25, 25-22, 21-25, 15-12. Once again, our inability to put up a solid block at the pins gave us issues – both at the net and in defense. Looked like we just wanted it more when it counted in the last set as we just outscrapped them.
Our sideout game was very strong – near men’s levels of efficiency around 66%. Unfortunately, so was the other team’s. We also dramatically improved our ace/error ratio and I think generally did a better job of putting them under pressure despite our inability to stop them from siding out.
Other stuff
My OH2 twisted her ankle late in the 5th. She fought through it to finish out the last few points, but there’s a good chance she’ll miss Tuesday’s match.
The two points we got assured us of a top 2 seed for Gran Prix. Hylte, though, can match our point total if they win their remaining match before the break 3-0 or 3-1 they’ll. If so, they would take first on the basis of a better set differential.
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