Priorities: Start to identify best passers, work on mental and physical toughness and conditioning, court positional work
Training time: 2 hours
Space: 1 court
Players: 14
Notes: This session followed a hard one two nights prior, and a slower one the prior evening where the team worked on rotations positioning, and coverage.
– – – The Plan – – –
Warm-up: Started with a dynamic warm-up because of lingering stiffness and fatigue from the sessions the prior two nights.
Light Positioning Work: Used the Newcomb game to have players run through rotations, coverage, and base/defense positioning work as a light on-court warm-up continuation featuring court movement.
Serving warm-up: I had them partner up across the net. They started at about half-court just serving the ball back and forth with a focus on good mechanics. As they felt warm they backed up until they got to the point of doing full court serving.
Serving Game: Ran the Amoeba serving game two times through to work on directional serving.
Target serving: I had them do 5 good serves each to Zones 1 and 5 where they had to put the ball in the last 3 meters of the court, as well as 5 good serves in front of the 3-meter line. I gave them 5 minutes to complete the drill.
Serving and passing: Ran the Get-2 passing drill and recorded passing stats. Kept the drill going until there were 30 total 3-passes. About 6 balls hit the floor with no or insufficient player effort, resulting in 6 punishment runs (rather than going back to 0 as I wasn’t doing an out-loud count).
Hitting: Had the whole team run quick attacks to help reinforce the need for good passing.
Passing: Put the team through the Run Serve Receive drill with each player having to get 7 good passes to get out.
Serving: Ran the Run & Serve drill to put the players under physical and mental pressure (especially after all the running they’d had to do prior).
Game-play: To get them playing and to continue the process of mixing players up and giving them a chance to get to know each other on the court, I had them play Winners 3s.
Team play: I finished up with 6 v 6 play to reinforce the positional work from the prior day and the beginning of training, and to start evaluating players by position.
– – – Observations – – –
I actually tried doing a winners variation drill after the second bit of passing, but the players were missing too many serves so I had to drop it quickly and move on. The serving bit which followed was scheduled, but just moved up.
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