A coach once asked the following question:
How much 6v6 should you have during practice? As in start with serve, winning team gets serve, normal rotations, and just play? Nothing gives more game-like reps than a 6v6 game itself.
That last statement is certainly true – to a point. Nothing is more representative of playing volleyball than actually playing volleyball. That doesn’t necessarily mean straight 6v6 is always the best way to train, though.
The question isn’t really how much 6v6 you should use. It’s what you’re trying to accomplish and whether straight 6v6 gives you enough opportunities to work on it.
Straight 6v6 and game-like training are not the same thing
There is a tendency to hear “game-like training” and assume that means everything needs to be 6v6. It doesn’t.
As I discussed in Being game-like without being 6v6, the important thing is preserving the information and decisions players need to deal with in competition.
- A passer needs to read a server.
- A defender needs to read the set, hitter, and block.
- A hitter needs to see the set, block, and defense.
- A setter needs to respond to the pass, available attackers, and opposition.
You can create those situations without having twelve players on the court. In fact, sometimes reducing the number of players actually gives athletes more opportunities to deal with the problem you want them to solve.
More players can mean fewer opportunities
The obvious limitation of 6v6 is that one ball is being shared among twelve players. That isn’t automatically a problem, however. It depends on what you’re counting.
If you’re trying to get one outside hitter a lot of swings, standard 6v6 may be inefficient. The ball might not come to them very often.
If you’re trying to train six players to organize their block and defense together, though, every rally can provide a repetition whether each individual player touches the ball or not. That distinction matters.
Coaches often think about repetitions in terms of ball contacts. Sometimes the better question is how frequently players experience the situation you want them to learn.
Start with the objective
Before deciding to play 6v6, ask what you want the players to improve.
Suppose your priority is middle attack. You could simply play a game and hope the passing is good enough, the setter chooses the middle frequently enough, and the rallies provide enough opportunities. Or you could structure the activity so the team repeatedly gets situations where the middle is a realistic option.
The same applies if you want setters making out-of-system decisions, passers dealing with seam balls, hitters attacking against a formed block, or defenders working on specific responsibilities.
That doesn’t mean you have to leave 6v6. It means you may need to manipulate it.
Straight 6v6 has some important strengths
There are things full 6v6 does particularly well. Team organization is an obvious one.
Players have to deal with rotations, serve-receive formations, transition responsibilities, hitter coverage, blocking relationships, defensive positioning, and all the communication that connects those things. Those interactions are difficult to reproduce completely in smaller games.
If you’re working on teaching rotations and court positioning, for example, eventually the players need to experience the full structure. The same is true when you’re preparing for a match and want to evaluate how the team functions as a unit.
Straight 6v6 also has another useful feature: you can take the constraints away and see what the players actually do. That can be very informative.
Sometimes you need to see what emerges
Imagine you’ve spent part of practice emphasizing a particular tactical idea. At some point, you probably want to know whether the players will use it without being told. Straight 6v6 can provide that test.
Remove the bonus points. Stop initiating the ball in a particular way. Let normal play create the problems. Then watch.
Do they continue doing what you’ve been working on, or does it disappear as soon as the structure comes off? That tells you something important about the learning that has actually taken place – or hasn’t.
The randomness of the game can also work against you
Of course, the same randomness that makes straight 6v6 useful can make it inefficient.
Suppose your focus is defending quick attacks. You might play ten rallies and barely see one. If your priority is handling out-of-system situations, you might get a bunch of perfect passes instead.
You don’t control what the game produces. That is why coaches who spend a lot of time in 6v6 usually don’t spend all of it simply playing sets. They manipulate the game to create more of what they want.
Change how the rally starts
One of the easiest ways to do that is to change the initiation.
A serve is the natural starting point because that’s how rallies begin in competition. There’s a lot of value in that, particularly if serving and serve receive are part of your training focus. I’ve discussed the importance of preserving those real serve-receive demands in Serve Receive Drills That Transfer to Matches.
But you don’t have to start every rally with a serve.
- You can initiate with a free ball.
- You can toss a setter off the net.
- You can attack at a defender.
- You can create a transition ball.
- You can deliberately put one side out of system.
Once that initial condition has been created, the rest of the rally can be completely live. You’ve simply increased the likelihood of training the situation you care about.
Use multiple balls when it makes sense
Another option is to use a wash format or some other multi-ball structure. For example, the teams might play a served rally followed immediately by a coach-initiated transition ball.
Now one sequence gives you two different situations. That raises the tempo and gives you more opportunities to work on your priorities without removing the six-person structure.
Wash drills are one way to do this, but the underlying concept matters more than the format. You are using additional balls to increase the frequency of the situations you want.
Manipulate the scoring
Scoring can change behavior without changing the basic game.
If your priority is blocking, you might reward block touches or points scored following a block touch. If you want more transition attacking, perhaps teams only earn certain points after defending first. If you are working on aggressive serving, you can build that into the scoring.
There are lots of possibilities. The important thing is that the scoring encourages the behavior you want without completely distorting the game.
I’ve written separately about using bonus points effectively. They can be useful, but you should always ask whether players are still solving the same basic problem they face in competition.
Change the rotation or personnel
You can also manipulate which players experience a situation.
Maybe you want your starting lineup working through one difficult serve-receive rotation. Stay there for a while.
Maybe you want both setters getting repeated back-row transition opportunities. Structure the personnel accordingly.
Maybe you have more than twelve players and want to keep everyone involved. The substitution pattern in 6 v 6s is one way to rotate players through the game without constantly stopping the activity.
You don’t have to rotate normally simply because you are playing 6v6. Again, the question is what you want to train.
Smaller-sided games can still be highly representative
At other times, the answer is to use fewer players. A 3v3 or 4v4 game can dramatically increase individual involvement while still requiring reading, movement, communication, and decision-making.
That does not make it automatically game-like, of course.
A small-sided activity can be structured badly just as easily as a six-person activity. The important question is whether the information players use to make decisions is still there.
This is why I prefer the term game context. I explored that distinction more directly in Is this drill game-like?.
If players know exactly where the ball is coming from, know exactly what they have to do with it, and know exactly what happens next, the activity may look like volleyball without requiring much of the thinking that volleyball demands.
You don’t need all six players to preserve the important part
Consider working on one half of your defensive system. You may not need six defenders. You might need a blocker, a back-row defender, perhaps another player covering part of the court, and live attackers on the other side. If those players are reading the same cues and making the same decisions they would make in 6v6, you have preserved the important part of the game.
The reduced numbers can then increase how often each player experiences that situation. That is the main point I made in Being game-like without being 6v6.
Small-sided games are not substitutes for volleyball simply because you want more touches. They are useful when they let you increase opportunities while maintaining the information that matters.
Don’t chase contacts for their own sake
This is another place where practice design can go wrong.
A coach sees that a player only contacted the ball five times during a period of 6v6 and concludes the activity wasn’t productive. Maybe it wasn’t.
But perhaps that player was a middle blocker who read twenty sets, made twenty blocking decisions, transitioned off the net twenty times, and was available to attack fifteen times. Those are repetitions too.
Conversely, a player could make fifty contacts in an isolated drill and get very little practice reading or deciding anything.
Contact count can be useful. It just isn’t the same thing as learning opportunities.
Straight 6v6 can be useful for lowering the load too
One reason I sometimes use normal 6v6 is actually to bring the intensity down a little. That may sound strange because playing volleyball can certainly be competitive and demanding. But structured wash games, repeated transition sequences, and high-tempo multi-ball activities can create a much heavier workload.
Straight play naturally includes pauses and rallies of different lengths. That can make it useful within an otherwise demanding practice.
This is especially relevant once the season begins and practice load needs to reflect what players are already experiencing in competition. That’s part of the broader issue I addressed in How to Adjust Your Volleyball Practice Plan Once Matches Begin.
Should you play more 6v6 as matches approach?
There is a common idea that practices should become progressively more 6v6 as competition gets closer. There can certainly be good reasons for that.
- You may want more work with the starting lineup.
- You may need to rehearse rotations.
- You may want to prepare specific tactical plans.
- You may simply want the players experiencing the rhythm of normal play.
But I wouldn’t make increasing 6v6 an automatic function of the calendar. If your team still needs more work solving a particular problem, train that problem. The match being two days away doesn’t suddenly make straight 6v6 the most efficient way to do it.
The real question is opportunity
I’ve previously described the two purposes of drills and games as providing players opportunities to execute what you want them to learn and providing useful feedback. That remains a good way to think about 6v6.
Does straight play give players enough opportunities to work on your priority? If yes, use it. If not, change something.
Maybe change the initiation.
Maybe change the scoring.
Maybe fix the rotation.
Maybe use multiple balls.
Maybe reduce the number of players.
The goal is not to make practice look as much like a match as possible at every moment. The goal is to create enough representative opportunities for players to perceive, decide, and execute the things they need to do better.
So how much straight 6v6 should you use?
For most teams, I suspect the percentage of truly straight 6v6 should be relatively small. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t train six against six. You probably should do quite a lot of it, particularly when your priorities involve team structure and coordination.
But much of that 6v6 can be manipulated to increase the frequency of the problems you want players solving. Then use straight play when you have a reason for taking those manipulations away.
Use it to evaluate. Use it to integrate. Use it to prepare for competition. Use it simply because sometimes players should play volleyball.
Just don’t assume that because straight 6v6 is the most game-like activity available, it is automatically the best activity for what you need to accomplish that day.
