This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log for the 2017-18 season.
It’s Spring Break as this post goes up. A little bit of a pause to refresh before things get serious during the last phase of the academic year. Nothing new on the the head coach position. At this point we’re still waiting for the official post to go up.
Recruiting
I mentioned in the last update that we had some pressure come up to make a move on offering a 2018 recruit. Shortly after, the same happening with regards to another. As a result, we had to move forward more quickly on things than desired. Nothing we could do about that, though. We had to make the decisions and line the commitments up.
The middle we offered accepted over the first weekend of the month.
Scheduling
One of the more fun aspects of Spring for college coaches is trying to figure out a schedule for team and small group practices. Player schedules are all over the place. It’s like a puzzle. In this case it was about looking at the post-Spring Break calendar and working out team practice times. We could have scheduled things for early mornings (I’m talking like 6am starts), but we decided not to go that route.
Monday is completely unworkable from a team perspective, so we made that a small group day. The rest of the week we shoehorned practices between class times. In some cases players will have to arrive late or leave early. Looks like Fridays we’ll get out on the sand.
We also had to plan out our Spring tournament the first Saturday of April. That was mainly about trying to line up the various requests of the five other teams that will play.
In terms of the 2018 season, we got the schedule for our second weekend tournament. We’re going to Nebraska-Kearney, who we played in 2017 (#9 in the final poll). I reached out to a couple of non-conference schools about filling our two unfilled dates, but they were already booked up. I’m not too worried about it. We’re going to play 4 out of 5 Tuesdays in October just for conference matches. Even trying to fit them in during September isn’t straightforward as we have to think about our weekend schedules and travel considerations.
Training
The final week of February/first week of March we had gym restrictions. As a result, we did one day of team practice and one day of overlapping group work. The latter was mainly about working on technical elements. Attack was the main focus as neither of our liberos was available.
During the full team session the main focus was a series of games with a certain scoring system. One of the things I’m trying to do when having the team all together playing is to create different types of challenges. This time I wanted the hitters attacking from non-traditional locations. For example, the middles might hit on the pin while the outside hit in the middle. The base scoring of the game was oriented toward first ball side out (FBSO). A team could only score on a kill from the first ball in serve reception. They received a bonus point if that kill came from a hitter hitting “out of position”. If there was no FBSO, then whoever won the rally earned the right to receive the next serve.
The first full week of the month we did hour-long full-team sessions on Tuesday and Thursday. On for Tuesday, expecting eight healthy bodies, I planned a doubles version of Speedball, then the high ball game we’ve played before. In the latter case with bonus points for kills from hand sets as well as for blocks. We ended up with nine, though, so I had to change things up a bit. Basically, I just had one more player on on side and used a rotation. There was a bit of time left over after the high ball games, so I filled in with Winners 3s where the off team came in from the side rather than serving in.
On Thursday I started them off with a competitive serving and passing drill for about the first 10 minutes. They were in teams by position – 2 middles, 2 outsides, 2 right sides, then our setter and a libero. From there we moved on to Winners 2s with a twist. The winners side had a setter, but the challenge side did not. So it was 3 v 2. And to further the twist, we rotated who that fixed setter was. Each player took a turn.
The last part of the session was a narrow court (about 2/3rds) 4 v 4 game. There were a couple of bonus point opportunities. A team got a point for any decent double block, regardless of the outcome (so in theory you could get multiple points in a rally). A team got two bonus points for a block-out kill, meaning 3 overall. Rallies were begun via alternating down balls from coaches, so the tempo was high. We got two games to 25 completed in I think about 25 minutes.
Meanwhile, our strength coach had the players going strong in the weight room, along with a mixture of speed/agility and conditioning work in the gym.
Office clean-up
The Volleyball assistant coaches’ office was in desperate need of a clean-up. Over the course of a week or two we got everything organized (the office doubles as storage for things like uniforms and player gear). We also got rid of some junk and other stuff that wasn’t serving any purpose. All that was left was to have facilities come in and haul away some worthless old furniture type stuff. When they did so it really opened up the space!
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