Video Review: Wall “reaction” drill

Here’s one in a long line of drills that say they are to work on “reaction”. While I think it can be quite useful for platform control and manipulation, that’s as far as I’ll go.

As you can see from the post text above, they say this is all about reacting rather than reading. I’m going to strongly disagree with that. And this comes from someone who once upon a time tried to do things where players had to only react, not read. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work here.

Why?

Because as soon as the ball enters the player’s field of vision, they are reading its flight and judging the angle its going to come off the wall. It’s 100% anticipation. Reaction with out reading implies having no visual cues to allow anticipation. That is not the case here.

So basically this drill features players picking up information from entirely different cues than they would in a game. Same with this drill.

Yes, there are drills where players are “blind” to any potential cues. But as I’ve written before, the idea that they improve reactions is misguided. We want to develop reactions from the start, not the finish.

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John Forman

John is currently the Indoor Performance Director for Volleyball England, overseeing all national teams. His 20+ years of volleyball coaching experience includes all three NCAA divisions, plus Junior College, in the US; university and club teams in the UK; professional coaching in Sweden; and both coaching and club management at the Juniors level. He's also been a visiting coach at national team, professional club, and juniors programs in several countries.

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