Once, in training, I had my Svedala team doing a defensive drill. It was a very repetitive digging exercise. I’m not a big fan of that blocked type training, but sometimes I use drills like that to examine things. Or maybe I want to work on some of the mental aspects of being a volleyball player.
This drill featured defenders in positions 1 and 5. They dug first a line attack and then a cross-court hit (or maybe it was the other way around). They had to individually reach a score of 15. For each good dig they earned a point. For an overpass they lost one.
My main motivation for running this particular exercise was to see where the players were at in terms of platform control while digging the ball. In other words, were they able to keep their platform pointed toward the central part of the court when they had to move/reach for a ball or when digging a line hit?
Answer: Not as well as I’d like.
The other thing I observed during this drill was just how much perfectionism there was in the team. I heard players yell and curse at themselves. They made faces. I even saw one slap the floor in frustration. It was quite the spectacle!
This sort of behavior is actually one of the reasons I like to use a lot of up-tempo, quick ball initiation activities. Players who are prone to be hard on themselves for mistakes have that process short-circuited when they immediately have to do something else. It encourages focusing on your next responsibility and on letting go of mistakes.
This, however, must go hand-in-hand with having a training atmosphere which is accepting of errors as part of the developmental process.
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