This is a periodic update in my role as Indoor Performance Director for Volleyball England. I laid out the high level priorities under which I’m operating in my initial post.
As I wrote in the last update, we had quite a bit happening in the last three months – especially around the Juniors.
UK Volleyball Coaching Symposium
I’ve written about this before separately, so I won’t go into detail here. Suffice to say we had Jim Stone come over from the States to be our lead presenter for a coaching conference in September. The overarching theme was juniors performance development. At least a dozen of our Junior national team coaches attended, and all of them have access to the recordings.
Juniors teams preparation for NEVZA
We announced the U17 and U19 teams (12 plus reserves) for NEVZA in early September. The U17s did a weekend prep camp about two weeks before the tournament. The U19s had two separate scrimmage days against top UK university teams as part of their preparation.
This is a definite area of disadvantage for us in England compared to our NEVZA peers. Many of them have residential academies where their top players are together all the time. We don’t have that, so we’re always comparatively behind. That’s something we are looking to change, but it’s going to take some work to implement.
NEVZA Performance
The U17s played in Denmark in mid-October. The boys finished 5th overall. They lost to Iceland in the quarterfinals, but beat the two Danish squads in a 5-7th round-robin. While there’s obviously room for improvement in a number of areas, their overall performance was helped by having a solid setter leading the offense. They also matched up well with the other teams in terms of size, if perhaps not as much in physicality.
The U17 girls did not match up as well physically and I think were the least relatively experienced set of players for us out of the four England teams. That combination was telling in that they finished last. That isn’t to say there weren’t good performances, though.
The U19s played in the Faroe Island in late October. The women’s team was the most experienced of our squads, with several players in their 4th NEVZA and several others having played in the second round of U18 Euro qualification back in April. There were some definite bright spots in our middle play (one of the coaches told me during the event ours were the best), but we struggled to score on the pins and were out-of-system more than in-system. The result was a 5th place.
The U19 Men fared better. Despite being a relatively young group (no one over 17) they won Bronze. This is despite losing two players to injury before the event – at least one of whom was a definite main starter.
NEVZA Analysis
Aside from some things we can’t immediately do much about – other teams are bigger and other countries have national academies – there were a couple things that stood out to me as areas we need to get better to be more competitive.
The most obvious is serving. We’re poor in that area – including a shocking number of float serves into the center of the net. That has a knock-on effect of failing to prepare our passers for international serving.
The other big thing for me is what we could consider volleyball IQ, but I think also factors in other issues. That is our structure of play isn’t where it needs to be. Part of that is understanding situations and making decisions – the IQ part. Part of it is also a lack of a consistent structure of play. I’m going to address that latter bit more later in this post. Broadly speaking, though, I think these elements are things we should be able to relatively easily address.
I’m not the only external eye we’ve had looking at the teams. Part of our arrangement with Jim Stone, alongside him presenting at the Symposium, was to assess our NEVZA performance and feedback to the coaches. We’re in the middle of that process right now.
Perfbook
We’ve now got all of our indoor athletes and coaches on Perfbook, our new athlete management system, as well as most of our Beach folks as well. Over the last month or so we’ve really be ramping up our understanding of how we can use the system. Lots to still get our heads around, but I like where things are going.
December Juniors camp
Our next big event is camp at the end of December for our U18 and U20 players (2007 and younger). We’re using it as an opportunity to see some kids we haven’t seen in a camp context since April, as well as ones referred to the Talent Pathway since then that we think have good potential. It’ll be four days with a mixture of on-court training and off-court education. Lots of planning going on for that.
Upcoming Seniors activity
The first weekend of January will be a busy one for our Senior teams. They will be fielding teams for both the Novotel Cup in Luxembourg and a domestic tournament we’re hosting that will include Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. The combination is provides a good opportunity to not just giver our Senior players some competition, but also to help prepare our U22s for Euro qualification in the July.
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