This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log.
Coming off the Cup weekend, I started training with a team talk to give the players a chance to express their thoughts on how things went and to share my own about where we need to get better to be competitive down the line. At this point I feel like the team largely knows what it needs to do to win league matches. The group still needs to keep developing that winning mentality and go into things each time out expecting to win and playing to win, but it’s coming along. The confidence at all levels is progressively building. I’m looking to keep that coming along while working on the aspects of the game we’ll need to be better at to compete with the teams we could see in the post-season.
Hitting with power and confidence remains the big developmental need at this stage, so I spent most of the first hour of training working on that. It started with having all the players doing wall hits from about 7-8 meters from the wall where they could work on proper body mechanics and armswing to generate power and I could coach them individually. That progressed to hitting lines, starting with back row attacks to keep them working on high reach and deep swings. They then moved on to hitting through 4, working to go down the line, and finished working hard cross-court angles.
After some target serving, I had them do some positional digging to work on being able to control harder driven balls as we continue to have issues with overpasses, swinging at the ball, rising up, etc.
I finished things up with 22 v. 22 in hopes to foster the “terminate the first ball” mentality, but there were only a couple successful first-ball kills. There were some good attacks, but I’d have liked to see more. That needs to get better, but we were missing a few of the better players due to minor injuries or illness. Had to punish a handful of no-effort balls to the floor.
Wednesday the first team plays another league match. The second team gets its first league play on Saturday.
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