It’s been interesting for me to track the impact the pandemic is having on things. We’ve certainly talked a lot about it on the MasterCoaches Weekly Buzz. On a more specific level, though, I can see how it is playing out on this blog. I’m talking about traffic and topics, which are linked to a large degree.
Ever since I started this blog in 2013, the month of August has been by far the highest traffic month of the year. No other month comes close!
The reason? Volleyball tryouts. August is the big month for that among US high schools, and at the lower levels of the college game as well. Coaches search for ideas on how to run those tryouts and they come across some of the content here. July gets some too, as does September, but August is clearly the king.
Have a look.
So what about this year? Only a bit more than 22k.
Last year in August the post Volleyball Try-out Drill Ideas got nearly 2600 views. That’s better than 1000 more than the next highest page. This year it’s about 800, and the page ranks only third on the site for views on the month.
Looking at the 5 full months since seasons got shut down back in March (so April through August) I see the blog’s home page as the most visited, followed not too far behind by How to teach the overhand serve to volleyball beginners and Volleyball Set Diagram. The tryouts page ranks 5th, with only slightly more than half the views of the home page. By comparison, for the same period in 2019 it was #1, about 1000 views ahead of the next most visited post. The home page was only 5th, with less than half as many views.
As I noted, a lot of the tryout traffic comes from searches. The same April to August figures show 10,000 fewer visitors to the site from search in 2020 than was the case in 2019. Other sources (mainly social media) counterbalanced some of that, but the implication is pretty clear. Coaches were doing less searching over the Summer months than usual.
It will be interesting to see how the pattern develops as schools come back into action.
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