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 write this, I’m just coming off completing the U17 and U19 NEVZA tournament teams selection camp I mentioned in the last edition. I also ran two of our Futures camps for younger kids and attended Senior Women’s training one day. So 7 straight days at our National Volleyball Center. I’m pretty shattered!
Mostly my Summer has been one of planning. Many of our Indoor athletes also compete on the Beach, so we don’t do much with the age group players from May to August. Different story for the Seniors, of course.
NEVZA Selection Camp
This ran over 5 days – midday Monday to midday Friday. We had between 70 and 80 players there. On the women’s side there was a fairly clean split between U17 and U19 players, with only one of those eligible for U17 being considered to play up.
Things were more muddled on the men’s side. We had a bunch of 2008s that could potentially have gone in either direction. As such, they started the camp doing a lot of things jointly. Progressively, though, they moved to being more separated as it became clearer which players needed to go which direction.
Unfortunately, this camp ran entirely on weekdays. This limited us to about 7 hours of court time. I would have liked to have done 90 minute morning sessions and 2 hour ones in the afternoon. The meal timings wouldn’t have worked, though, so we had to do it the other way. Definitely would have been better to have weekend days in the mix. That’s something we plan to always do moving forward. And there are a couple other things we’re looking at doing in the future to make these shorter days more manageable.
Seniors Activity
As I noted above, our Senior/U22 Women got some training in recently. This was their first time in quite a while, Expectations, though, are that this becomes much more regular. They do, after all, have some competitions to prepare for.
The men also ran some training camps. Their big activity, though, was competing in the Nordic Cup in Denmark. There they played the hosts, as well as Norway and Sweden. This was a great opportunity for the guys to benchmark themselves against the tier of teams that should be our target right now.
Athlete Management System
Perfbook were due to roll out a major version update in early July. Rather than train people up on the old version, then have to train them again on the new one, we decided to hold out until the update to really ramp up our use of the platform. Unfortunately, there were delays in rolling out that update. It didn’t ultimately happen for us until the end of August.
So top of my list now is getting people trained up – both athletes and coaches. Then we can really dig in on making the most of the system and it’s potential to drive some big improvements in what we’re doing with the England programs.
Coming up in the next quarter…
There are a couple of keys things we have to do between now and year-end:
- Announce the NEVZA selections
- NEVZA teams will have training/scrimmage sessions
- The U17s will play at NEVZA in Denmark in mid-October
- The U19s will play at NEVZA in the Faroe Islands in late October.
- Plan and run our late December U18/U20 national team camp
- Get all of our current national team pathway players up on Perfbook
- Recruit additions to the Pathway – particularly in the younger age groups
- Develop within Perfbook a set of informational tools for us in admin, the coaches, and the players.
- Use performance tracking tools in Perfbook around all our trainings and competitions
We also have to enroll or put forward players for a number of different supporting programs that have their annual registration/submission periods in the next couple of months.
In other words, we’ll be busy!
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