This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log for the 2017-18 season.
The weekend results could probably be said to be in our favor. Eastern NM and Western NM both lost two – each to Commerce and Texas Woman’s. That put them on 4 losses each with Angelo and Tarleton upcoming this week. Not matches they’d be expected to win. Cameron and UTPB also lost their weekend fixtures, to keep both at the bottom of the standings. Interestingly, Kingsville was pushed to 5 sets by UTPB, then lost in 4 at West Texas. That sees both Kingsville and WT also sitting on 4 losses.
Here’s the league standings as we head into the final week of the first half of the season.
Monday
We started with the usual stats talk that we normally do on Mondays. On the plus side, our defenses is performing well. We’re among the top teams in the league in terms of opponent hitting efficiency. Our block is a definite factor there, as we entered the week 3rd place in the LSC rankings in blocks/set. Unfortunately, we have struggled mightily in attack. Over the weekend we managed a measly 21% kill rate, and for the conference season so far we stand 10th of the 11 teams in hitting efficiency. That’s not the sort of thing that earns a team many wins.
We reviewed video of our weekend attacks with the players. In particular, we identified a few key places where we feel we can make improvements. Overall, though, it was mainly about taking more aggressive swings. Our hitters seem to have been more tentative in recent weeks. Need to get back to the high and hard swings that featured in our attack earlier in the season.
Practice focused on these things, though it was a fairly short and low intensity affair. Our medical issues continue to mount. Our 2nd setter still has her broken finger in a cast for a couple more weeks. Setter #3 was waiting for clearance to play after her concussion. Of course, our freshman OH remains out long-term due to her knee injury. For this particular session we added our senior MB with shoulder issues. On top of that, our junior was out sick.
We began with some servers vs. passers, then shifted to a more attacking focus. The rest of the session featured a variety of games aimed at stimulating aggressive attacks. We made some good progress in certain areas.
Tuesday
We took a break from conference play with a home match against Lubbock Christian. They finished 2nd in the Heartland Conference last year and came in to the match 4th in that league. We played them at their place in 2016, losing a close 5-setter. This was one of the non-conference matches we play to help influence our NCAA South Central Region ranking, since Heartland is part of that Region with ours.
This definitely wasn’t a pretty match. Both sides made their fair share of errors and gave up runs of points at times. That led to a split during the first two sets, both of which were only decided by two points. In the first we allowed them to come back after getting a large lead. In the second it was us who came back, but could not finish it off. From there, though, we coasted to relatively easy wins.
Our defense was again solid, holding LCU to just an .076 hitting efficiency. They only scored on 23% of their swings and we tallied a dozen blocks. Our service game was solid generally, though we could have made fewer errors. We had three players rate 2.0 or better and we scored better than 60% of the time when each served.
Offensively, we were better than in recent matches. We got kills on around 35% of our swings. Our freshman MB had a really good match, hitting .643, while our senior OH lead all hitters with 19 kills. We could have done with a few less errors as our efficiency was a bit below .200, but you could see we were trying to make the improvements we talked about on Monday.
Wednesday
After the match the night before, we didn’t want to go to hard in practice. We started with video review. Each of the coaches took a position group – MBs, OHs & RS, DSs – and went over clips from the LCU match. I was with the MBs. We focused on timing. It made timing issues very clear for them. They could easily see the difference between their good swings and their less powerful ones. The pin hitters also focused on timing with respect to their sets, keeping to the theme of the week.
Practice itself focused on those pin hitting timing elements. Basically, we just did serve receive to attack vs. a block and defense. As a second phase, we added an attack to also work on things from the transition side of things. All together we were on the court not much more than an hour.
Thursday
We carried on in this practice the themes for the week. That means working on offensive timing and getting back to aggressive attacking. We started off with Brazilian tennis as our warm-up. From there we shifted into an out-of-system game to work on high, hard swings. We shifted from there to more in-system work using the same type of pass-to-attack drill we did Wednesday. That rolled into 6 v 6 action.
We started with a variation on 22 v 22. In this version we gave a team a win big point if they scored on a right side attack during the initial rally. We also whistled any rally dead and awarded a point to the other team if there was a failure to cover. Otherwise, it was normal rules. After a couple of games of that, it was on to a standard game with a bonus. If a team turned a cover ball into a successful attack, they got a bonus point.
All in all we were quite pleased with the attacking play. Definitely more aggressive than we’ve seen in recent times.
Friday
We did an early practice before hopping on the bus. Most of it was carry over from the work we did earlier in the week – namely focusing on attack timing and aggressiveness. We started with Speedball back row 4s as a kind of warm-up. After that we did a hitting drill initiated by a serve where our OHs and RSs had to attack areas of the court successfully with netting. Basically, that was about reaching high and staying away from hitting to Zone 6.
Next up we did rotation-based receive to attack. We made it competitive by splitting the team into 3 groups of passers and hitters and giving them four serves in each rotation. Group with the most kills (not playing the ball out) won. This was followed by full 6 v 6 play in a repeat of Thursday’s 22 v 22 variation. We wrapped up with some servers vs. passers.
We left campus at about 10:00am for the long trip south. All together it was about 11 hours. That, though, included a stop for an early dinner at the home of one of our seniors who lives along the way. Always nice to get a home cooked meal during your travels!
Saturday
The last match of our first time through the conference was at Kingsville. They finished 3rd in 2016 and were picked to repeat that in the preseason voting. After defeating Cameron on Friday, they entered our match at 5-4 in LSC play.
All in all, while we lost 3-0, I was not overly dissatisfied with our performance. The first set wasn’t great. In particular, we just could not stop their offense. After that, though, we definitely stepped things up. Sets two and three were both quite tight. Our serving gave them problems and we were attacking more aggressively than we’ve done. We got our kill % back above 30%, though still need to push that even higher to have real success.
That said, the annoying thing is that we continue to have stupid “Who’s ball?” type of moment. We’re more than 20 matches into the season if you count the ones we played in Argentina, and there are still times when dumb stuff happens because of confusion about responsibility or players simply failing to do their jobs correctly.
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