I once wrote about an early coaching experience when I had to use one of my middles as a setter. It worked very well, helping the team I coached win a gold medal. Less than a year later I had another situation which required a bit of fancy line-up footwork.
This time I was coaching a girls’ 16-and-under Juniors team. I had three players who could legitimately play middle at the team’s competitive level of play. I wanted (needed) all three players in there for their net play. A couple, though, weren’t all that keen on playing the position. Can’t say I blamed them as I always hated playing it myself. What I did was come up with a compromise that let me get them all on the court.
I forget at this stage which player I put where, but the basics of it were this. I put the three girls in a triangle in the line-up. One of them was the OPP. The other two were in the spots generally dubbed O1 and M1. In a 5-1 offense one usually puts their strongest OH and MB next to the setter. Those are the O1 and M1 respectively. I then put a couple of smaller OH type players in the two remaining spots either side of the OPP.
This line-up, of course, meant I had two of my quasi-MB players in the front row half the time and only one of them the other half. Obviously in the latter case that one girl played MB. In the other rotations, though, one would play MB and the other would play OH or RS, depending on whether the setter was up or back. Which one took the MB spot I often left to the players to decide, though sometimes I made the call if I saw something specific I wanted addressed.
The result was a pretty potent offense. It would have been a bit better with more experience in the setter position. It was sufficient for the team to finish 3rd in our regional championships, though.
The point is sometimes to get the most out of your team you have to do things in a non-standard fashion.
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