Giving Feedback
As a coach, giving feedback to your players is one of the most important steps you can take to facilitate proper learning. Without adequate feedback, the learning process can become stunted, and improvements will be minimal - even for highly motivated athletes. In order to prevent this from happening, you must ensure that you have established your key principles in a manner that allows you to give feedback to your players in a short, concise manner.
The Butterfly
One of the most commonly used drills by any volleyball team would be the butterfly. This drill can be modified in so many variations, that it can suit any team's goals for practicing a technique. As a coach, you can uses this drill to focus on passing, setting, hitting, blocking, defense, footwork, technique, reading hitters/passers/blockers/servers. It's really exponential.
During the "early development" phase of coaching beginning volleyball players, this drill is extremely useful in progressing from a static toss and pass, toss and set, toss and hit "blocked practice" drill into more random practice - where your players need to learn to read and react to touches on the ball that might not be perfect.
Relevance of Physical Benchmarks
Often times as a coach, player, or fan of a sport you will be bombarded with physical benchmarks and athletic performance metrics. At the professional levels of sport you will hear about so-and-so player's vertical leap, 40-yard dash time, or bench press. Think of the NFL Combine where they have potential NFL draftees go through a series of physical tasks in order to rank their athletic potential and performance.
But that is at the professional level, where the athletes would have already developed the necessary skills and knowledge to perform at the highest level. At that level, physical traits can differentiate between a good player, and a great player.
How is this relevant to the high-school juniors level of volleyball?
Functional Warm-ups
One of the major draws to the boys' and girls' volleyball programs at my old high school was the fact that the coaches rarely made the players run. In fact, it was one of the defining characteristics of the program which drew me into the sport to begin with. It wasn't a matter of being lazy, more a fact that running was boring, repetitive, and had no immediate "fun" factor to it.
But this wasn't the reason why we rarely ran before or during practices. No, the reasoning was much more logical, and wouldn't be revealed to me until I began to coach under them a few years later.
The fact of the matter is, especially at the high school/juniors level of competition, that running provides very little benefit. You can even consider it a complete waste of time. If I haven't already blown your mind or completely offended you, please hear me out...
Coaching with conflicting philosophies
The situation: You're assisting with a struggling high school volleyball program. The head coach has been there for 30 years with varying levels of success over the years. The full-time JV/Freshman coaches have minimal coaching or volleyball experience and follow the head coach's philosophy and teaching methodology verbatim.
Your background: You've been coaching for under 10 years, but have been working with perennial state championship contending high school programs, top ranked collegiate programs, and international coaching staffs. Your philosophies on how to teach the game from the ground up, as well as general theory, have been built upon a foundation of winning.
The question: How does one go about subtly changing the way things are run for the betterment of the struggling program?
Virtues of Consistent Setting
Perhaps one of the most under-rated characteristics of a good team (or maybe I am biased because I'm a setter) is consistency of setting.
You see a lot of setter changes with competitive teams at the juniors level as well as in adult recreational open-gyms/leagues. Sometimes a coach decides to run a 6-2 simply to get more players involved in the game (rather than for proper strategic reasoning.) Other times at a recreational (however competitive) league, teams may decide to run a 6-2 or just rotate "middle setter" to keep more players involved or to "keep it simple."
I need to whole-heartedly disagree with the notion that having two drastically different setters splitting the touches, or changing setters upon every rotation, simplifies the game. I'll touch upon both points (6-2 and "middle-set") in today's post as well as the general concept of how having a good setter can clean up the game.
Coach the Player, Not Yourself
Take a random sample of volleyball players and ask them for a list of what they think makes a good coach. Some will say experience, others will say intellect, and everybody else will list something different. And yet, they will inevitably list many overlapping characteristics.
Depending on their strengths, coaches can be specialized as good team builders, good tacticians, or good technical coaches. It is the latter that I want to touch upon today.
I firmly believe that regardless of what sport you are coaching, there is one defining feature of a good technical coach - The ability to coach for a player's specific style, not to change the player's style to conform to the coach's own playing form.
Polarity of Words
One of the earliest lessons I was given as an aspiring coach came from my high school coach. Not only was he a great example to follow as a player, but also as a coach, and he helped serve to mentor me in my pursuits to better understand the game. As a person who coaches youth, it is important to remember that there are subtle differences in the ways you get a point across to your players, and that some ways are better than others.
Inspiring a Passion
Stop by any team practice at the high school/juniors level. You will inevitably see a variety of personalities on the team from the super outgoing individuals to those who keep more to themselves and tend to be a bit more tentative. These personality differences can be a predictor of the type of player you may end up with. However, rather than the social tendencies of your players, look at the work ethic and focus on the court, and the desire they have to be playing. That passion for the game is what keeps them coming back for more.
The big question remains: How do we inspire this passion in our players?
Natural Flow of Practice
Regardless of whether you are a coach, player or fan, you have to agree that there is a distinct flow to the game of volleyball. There is a rhythm to the game as each team transitions from offense to defense, and vice versa. There is fluidity in the players' movements on the court as they get in proper court position for what is coming next.
There is a rhythm and flow to the game, and as such, there should be a rhythm and flow to the practices you run as a coach. I am going to discuss two different kinds of practices: team practices and individual skills sessions. It doesn't matter which kind of practice you are running, as there should be a natural progression from start to finish of basic techniques to combined movements and in-game reactions. During my tenure as both a coach and a player I have taken part in many practices which run the gamut between good and bad. Hopefully this discussion will help you along your way to running a more efficient and effective practice session.