I’m in the thick of my camp and clinic season. We ran two day camps locally, mostly for kids interested in playing club volleyball for us this upcoming season. One week was U12/13s and one week was U13/14s. In addition to that, I’m traveling this summer to run some events, mostly for different club programs around the country.

In Part 1, I outlined some overall structures and philosophy of how I run camp, which is a lot like how I run practice. I wrote this in the previous article, but here’s the daily outline I prefer:

Daily Outline

• 9:00 - 10:30 Session 1

• 10:30 - 10:45 Snack/Water Break

• 10:45 - 12:15 Session 2

• 12:15 - 1:30 Lunch Break

• 1:30 - 3:00 Session 3

I sometimes modify off that depending on logistics. Some programs I want with want to go to a double-wave schedule in order for me to work with more of their total kids. In that case, it’s more of a 9:00 - 5:00 or 5:30 schedule with one wave of kids (often younger) doing Session 1 and Session 2 and then a Session 4 added for an older group of kids who has two practices to do.

But, in general, I prefer to keep sessions a bit shorter and move them along faster. What I don’t like is when sessions drag. I’d rather end the day with kids wanting to stay and free play at the end or during lunch break than the kids asking when camp is going to be over.

In the previous article I talked a bunch about Power - Ball Control - Teamwork as an overall framework for, “this is what it takes to be a good team.” I want to dive a little more into practical applications and how you go about training this stuff.

The Challenge of Developing Power

Tony Holler says that, “speed grows like a tree,” and I think he’s right. Speed and power is improvable in almost all athletes, especially almost all teenage athletes. The problem is that it doesn’t improve quickly and the rate of improvement is lower than the variance. Here’s what I mean by that:

A teenage volleyball player improving their jump by 4” in a calendar year is fantastic. Going from 9’2” as a freshman to 9’6” as a sophomore is great growth for a kid. Achievable, but really nice progress. 4” in a calendar year means 1” every 3 months. With 8 practices a month, that’s 1/24” of improvement per practice. To put that in context, that’s just a bit more than the thickness of a credit card. So even a player making significant progress in their power development is making, on average, imperceptible improvement on a practice-to-practice basis.

Furthermore, when you train speed and power, you don’t get better within the session, especially beyond the beginner level or when a kid has never done the particular exercise or test before and they get a little better after a few repetitions of the exercise. But generally speaking, if you’re going to run timed sprints, you’ll warm up and run one. The second one might be faster than the first and maybe even the third. But generally after a couple sprints there is a level of fatigue that sets in and performance starts to decrease. (This is also why power work is performed with plenty of rest and low repetition, because otherwise you are just teaching the nervous system to get good at outputting sub-maximal power.)

So coaches cannot see progress within a session and they can’t see progress from session-to-session. We know that feedback is required to learn, so what coaches generally learn is, “speed (jump, quickness, etc) is genetic, there’s no point working on it.” And honestly, that’s totally fine, because players will get more athletic, to a point, by simply playing volleyball. The worse lesson to learn is to crush kids with conditioning, because it’s easy to see the effect within a session. These coaches usually understand the concept of supercompensation: when we fatigue our body it compensates by building back up, “and a little more,” in order to adapt to physical stimulus. But that has to be prepared with understanding the concept of SAID (specific adaptations to imposed demand), which means that doing a lot of slow running (even if you are trying to sprint your fastest, you’ll still be slow when you are fatigued) teaches your body to get better at running that speed.

When I instruct at GMS clinics, we just don’t have the time to dive deeply into power development. Thus, I usually say, “don’t worry about doing any of that at practice, just train volleyball at a high intensity, and your players will adapt to that.” And overall, that’s better than misapplying speed/strength/power training, which can end up giving your players dead legs, shin splints, sore shoulders, etc. And remember that Conditioning Doesn’t Matter.

But yet, I do power training with my teams, so with some space to explain that I don’t always have at GMS clinics, allow me to share what I like to do.

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1. When it comes to arm development, there’s a tortoise and the hare opportunity if you help your players develop over the course of the season. I’m going to update some new speed results over the course of this season, but something to remember is that, by the time you get to 16s Nationals, for example… the teams are basically 17s teams. So there’s some X% of attacks that might score earlier in the season but won’t score now because the defenders are X% better at digging hard-driven balls now after 8 months. I’ve talked about the competitive treadmill before: if you aren’t getting better, you’re getting worse because others are getting better. If you don’t add 2-3mph to your swing over the course of the year, you’re going to get dug more by defenders who are now a little better.

2. When a lot of 16 year-old players see the block is really up on them and the set is not perfect, the instinctively take some off the swing, but that’s when they need to be more aggressive. Sure, there’s some good blockers out there and they might clamp a hitter every now and then, but hitters who are willing to take a big rip at the hands usually get rewarded. Counter-intuitively, the hitters who get less aggressive often end up getting blocked more because they don’t power it through.

3. Being clear about roles, playing time, and expectations is super-important. As we are getting to the end of the year, I’ve been getting feedback from current players and starting to look forward to the next year. I’ve heard consistent feedback that they appreciate getting some knowledge before a tournament about what their expected role and playing time range is. My dad always used to say, “people can stand to be disappointed, but they hate to be surprised.” I think some coaches try to sugar-coat things a little bit going into a weekend (“if you do well, maybe you’ll get some more playing time,”) but I always think it’s better to almost be a little pessimistic (“we’ll see, you’ve been doing well but so is [your teammate] so I can’t promise that you’ll play more than last tournament.”) and let a player be pleasantly surprised.

4. For whatever reason, teams from the midwest have killed us on the Gap/31s this year. What are they feeding these middles out there?

5. I used to resist talking about defenders crossing. And I don’t love defenses getting too scripted about who goes in front and who goes behind, because things are not as controlled as they are in serve receive. BUT… it’s now two straight club seasons where our crosscourt defense has significantly improved once I started coordinating the middle-middle defender to cut in front and the cross-court defender to slide behind on the long angle. And there’s been a couple other club teams that I know have been helped by this. Next season I’m just going to start there.

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Overall Outline

• 2-day Camp (Monday and Tuesday)

• 9:00am - 3:00pm

• ~14 kids for a court

Daily Outline

• 9:00 - 10:30 Session 1

• 10:30 - 10:45 Snack/Water Break

• 10:45 - 12:15 Session 2

• 12:15 - 1:30 Lunch Break

• 1:30 - 3:00 Session 3

The goal of this camp was to introduce players to our system of teaching volleyball and, in particular, introduce them to competitive volleyball. What I mean by that is this was not designed as an introductory “all skills” camp where you spend X amount of time showing how to underhand pass a ball, and then Y amount of time showing how to set a ball, and then Z amount of time showing how to take an approach to hit, etc. Instead we wanted to maximize the time the kids spent playing and competing in various game, mini-game, and other volleyball-related stuff.

Why?

1. I think all-skills type camps are boring. While I’m not entirely opposed to them (I’m sending my young daughter to the little kid’s week of camp at nearby UNCW, and I’m sure that will be the format), I generally think they are not as fun and engaging for kids as a format where there is both more play and more competition.

2. The all-skills format tends to strip context. You teach kids to pass and then when they eventually play they don’t do anything related to how you taught them to pass. This is a problem with all practice, since Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything, but let’s at least not design practice to ensure that it won’t even transfer from morning to afternoon.

3. Young players need less technical training, not more, Part 1. The more advanced you are, the more you benefit from training where a specific piece of movement is isolated in focus and concentrated on to change. Young players are already exploring solutions and have lots of variability baked-in. “Technical training” (broadly categorized as less-gamelike training where the athlete attempts to modify the way they perform a movement or skill) has value when an athlete has developed a sub-optimal habit or relies on a particular movement solution that is sub-optimal for certain game situations. Most young players haven’t even built any habits. There is some technical training that is valuable for young players, such as teaching them how to stand, toss, and step into a serve or how to take an approach and jump off 2 feet. But by and large, young players need to build game context, not tweak movement patterns.

4. Young players need less technical training, not more, Part 2. Also, keep in mind that prepubescent players have bodies that are rapidly growing and changing. I don’t bother teaching my 6 year-old daughter the proper hand shape for setting a ball, because her hands are so small and the proportions of hand size, arm length, head size, etc are far enough away from where they will eventually be that any technical training on that skill will have little to no transfer to “good habits” for setting as a teenager. Again, this doesn’t mean to never teach a still-growing player better ways to perform a skill, but the notion that a 4’10” kid is going to build some good habit that will ensure a technically perfect platform when she is 5’10” does not really correspond to how the body works.

5. It’s simply not all that difficult to teach technique to players that are engaged, motivated, athletic, and responsive to the game. It is very difficult to work with players that are unengaged and unmotivated. Athleticism or the favored volleyball term of “physicality” is often what determines the level of play a team can participate in. My broad paradigm is that, in club volleyball, the level of play you should enter (Open, USA, Club, etc) is determined by physicality and your success within that level is determined by skill, but there’s obviously lots of overlap.

Applied Athleticism

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An athlete’s intent is the most important influence on the outcome of a play/movement/action. Intent is what they want their movement to accomplish and their internal visualization of what that looks and feels like. Coaches should prioritize influencing an athlete’s intent and constantly check for understanding. Attention is how athletes change their intent or modify movements as intents change. Attention is the currency of coaching and influencing what athletes “pay attention” to is a critical job of coaches.

In a previous article, I talked about this idea of Goal - Intention - Cue. A lot of players don’t really play to win. They play to… perform the actions that resemble the game in a way that’s been taught to them. Meaning, their goal is not necessarily to kill the ball, it’s to hit the ball in accordance with the norms of the way they’ve seen volleyball played. They wouldn’t say it that way, but that’s how I interpret the way many volleyball players perform.

This really matters because Intention is the single most important determinant of how your body moves. In the triad of books I recommend for our Summer School study, Rob Gray’s material offers this insight: that human beings are problem solving machines. As a person plays volleyball, their brain/body is attempting to solve problems at a mostly sub-conscious level. They are not running a “motor program” the way that Schmidt would teach (and that I was taught when I first started going to Gold Medal Squared clinics), but are instead adapting to solve the constantly-novel problems.

Therefore, your Intention is basically the conscious brain expressing to the rest of your self what you want to accomplish with the action. That does seem to guide behaviors.

However, (and here’s where I think that the “muscle memory” analogy does actually provide some insight, even if it’s not necessarily literally what happens) the way I see a lot of players play is that their Intention starts to become, “play the way I’m supposed to play,” instead of, “play to win the point.” Or should I say…

Setting Intention

One of the reasons you need to buy Nick Winkleman’s book, is that he shows how words affect intention. Try it right now. Find a nearby wall and stand a couple feet away. I want you to push the wall…

1. In a way that would make as little noise as possible.

2. In a way that would make a lot of noise.

3. Like the wall is brittle and you want to chop it in half.

4. Like the wall is solid and heavy and you want to topple it over.

5. Like you want to push yourself away from the wall.

If you visualize all 5 of those scenarios to set an intention before you act, your body will do different things. Your acceleration into the wall will be different if you’re trying to make as little noise vs as much noise as possible. You would probably contact with a different part of your hand. If you’re trying to topple the wall over you wouldn’t strike the wall suddenly (like you would in scenario 3), but instead you would make gentle contact and then gradually build force. You’d likely have one foot back so you could drive from your legs into the wall. In scenario 5, you’d probably make gentle contact and then build some force, but you’d have your legs in close to the wall so you can push yourself backward.

The point is, your brain works by imagining a task and then aligning to complete that task.

When we coach volleyball players, helping them understand the task is really important.

Check For Understanding Intention

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All of those articles tend to draw from my holy trinity of coaching books:

The Language Of Coaching - Nick Winkleman
How We Learn To Move - Rob Gray
Coaching Athletes To Be Their Best - Rollnick and Fader

This summer, I want to organize a lot of my coaching writing around three jobs every coach has to do: design better drills, teach players more clearly, and guide athletes toward better behavior. These are the three books that most shaped how I think about those jobs.

First: Throat-Clearing

I don’t think any one source in coaching has all of the answers, and I think coaching has an interesting combination of solutions that are both progressive and cyclical. What I mean by that is improvement or innovations in sport often come from two camps:

1. Building upon what a previous coach/player/team did. An example is the rise of jump-setting in beach volleyball. It seems like each season more players are putting this into their game and branching off into whole new offensive systems.

2. Rediscovering something that was dormant for a while and often implementing it in a slightly different way. I can’t dig it up, but I read an interview with Urban Meyer talking about his spread option offense where he basically said, “yeah what we’re doing is basically digging up old single-wing football from the 50s but with X, Y, Z new pieces added to it.1

So when I say a bunch of this stuff, I’m talking more about my personal journey and where I pull sources from. The single-most influential book that I ever read was The 4-Hour Workweek. When I scan through that book now, as an almost-40-year-old in 2026, it doesn’t seem mind-blowing. Efficient business practices, remote work, solopreneurship, geo/currency-arbitrage. All of this stuff is pretty common practice by now. And there’s plenty of ways to learn about that stuff. But I read that book when I was 22 years old in 2009 and it’s what helped me make the jump to drop out of grad school and pursue coaching full-time.

All this to say: I love these 3 sources for what they represent to me (which I’m about to explain) and how they’ve clarified pieces of the coaching puzzle for me. I don’t claim that Nick Winkleman invented external cueing, but I like his process the best and therefore, as a SmarterVolley subscriber, it’s the textbook you’re going to have for SmarterVolley Summer School.

3 Pieces Of The Puzzle

I’ve written extensively about these books previously, but there are new subscribers and I want to use this article as a reference point, so let me state why I choose these three books.

Coaches have lots of roles. The job of “Coach” is a bunch of different jobs; several of which (such as Tactician/Strategist or Travel Coordinator) I’m not going to get into now. But I will talk about 3 sub-roles of coaching:

1. Drill Designer

2. Tutor

3. Mentor

Each of these three sub-roles roughly corresponds to one of the above books and I believe that these three sub jobs correspond to the main skills that coaches need to have to help players get better at volleyball. Your Systems are the “What” and your understanding of the statistical realities of the game is the “Why” behind what you’ll coach. The three sub-roles are the nuts and bolts of the “How” you’ll accomplish things on a day-to-day basis.

Drill Designer

I differentiate Drill Design from Practice Planning. Practice Planning is important, but I don’t think it’s a lifelong skill for most coaches. You can do just fine running the same Template over and over again. Most seasons require quite a bit of planning right in the beginning to get your Template and Season Blocks laid out. But once you have that down, you’re on easy street.

Drill Design, on the other hand, is a different skill. The way I think about Drill Design is that it’s totally unimportant until it is. What I mean by that is that, in a given day, whether you play 3v3 or 4v4 doesn’t really matter all that much. Over the lifetime of a player’s career, that one decision probably doesn’t even matter either. I happen to love 4-Ball Passing for club volleyball teams who can’t break out into separate courts for serve/pass activities. However, there’s plenty of players who get really good at passing and never do 4-Ball Passing. The drill itself is completely uncorrelated to getting good at passing.

One of the tricky parts about coaching is that there’s a randomness to it. There is no guarantee that any given practice will help a player improve their skill. You might even say that Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything. But there’s degrees of randomness. Poker is random; there is luck involved. Yet poker is unquestionably a game of skill. How do you determine a game of skill v a game of luck? It’s not so much whether you can win… the best test of a game of skill v luck is whether you can intentionally lose. To continue the poker example, there’s no guarantee that a given player will come out a winner in a session of play, much less a given hand. But it’s very possible to dramatically increase your odds of losing a given hand and you can guarantee a loss on a given session by playing poorly. In contrast, a game like roulette is impossible to affect either way; there’s no way (given the same overall betting amounts) that I can try to lose faster or slower than you. Thus, there’s no skill component.

Yes, this is related to Drill Design. What I mean by this is that the main thing about Drill Design is less about designing the perfect drill and more about not doing unhelpful things at practice. The tough thing about Drill Design is that it’s very midwit.

You have to assume the base level of a practice is just scrimmaging the whole time. Scrimmaging is a productive activity! It’s not maximally productive, but if you coach a team, and the only drill you ever do is scrimmage, you could absolutely be above-average in your rate of improvement.

But we don’t coach to be above-average! We coach to be great! So then we design lots of additional drills… and then we risk doing stuff at practice that is less productive than just scrimmaging.

So Drill Design doesn’t matter until it does.

How We Learn To Move is the first book written by Rob Gray. He’s written more books and he has a podcast of his own and sometimes appears on other podcasts. He’s a pretty prolific guy. I consume as much of his stuff as possible, and you could argue that Learning To Be An Ecological Coach might get you there faster if you started with that one. But I didn’t start with that one, so How We Learn To Move tends to be the book I reference.

I feel like I sometimes spend more time criticizing the ecological approach to coaching than writing about it or describing it. I think that direct instruction has a lot of value and “muscle memory,” while probably not being a thing, is a useful description of how some things are learned for some people at some time. That said, I want to spend a little more time this summer talking about how the ecological paradigm (and more specifically, some of the ways that Rob Gray describes this paradigm) influences how I coach.

Here’s my best short summary of it:

When volleyball players move to accomplish an action, there’s a 3-way interaction between themselves, the task, and the environment. The player’s self-perception both influences how they will try to accomplish a task in a given environment and is influenced by the task and the environment. The tasks a player is asked to do influences the player’s perception of the environment and the environment influences the perception of a task.

That paragraph is pretty jargony, and I’ll unpack it more this summer. But just to give a few very simple translations:

• Give two players the same set and the big player might swing at the ball one way while the small player might swing at the ball another way.

• Give the same player the same instruction and he will respond differently when he is feeling confident/nervous/angry/calm/etc.

• Give the same player the same set and she will swing differently depending on whether the block/defense seems bigger/smaller/faster/slower/etc.

• Two swings off the exact same set with the exact same approach against the exact same block/defense might seem different (and thus the player might swing differently) when the game is 0-0, 15-15, or 24-24.

This is why I say that 3v3 or 4v4 doesn’t really matter. They mostly just matter such that you understand what kind of situations they are going to create. This is also why I do the same practice templates and therefore the “same” drills over and over again. When you play Jamball a lot, you get a feel for how certain players will interact with that game, because the game looks pretty different depending on the size of players, their confidence level, their trust in their teammates, who they are intimidated by, etc.

Tutor

The favorite sub-job of many coaches is what I call Tutor. This is basically the small-scale teaching process between player (or small group) and coach. “Hey, here’s how you make this set,” or, “try creating an angle this way,” are things that get said when coaches are in Tutor mode.

Tutoring can occur within a large-scale practice. I’ve written about Tutoring specifically before, and it’s probably one of the most reliable ways to get your practice to actually do something. In many ways, I visualize player improvement as mostly being individual tutoring + 6v6 systems work and try to avoid a lot of stuff in the middle.

There’s obviously overlap between Practice Planning/Drill Design and Tutoring, because you only have so much gym time and so many courts and a certain number of players, so if you want to be able to Tutor them, you have some logistics to figure out, assuming you don’t want everybody else standing on the sidelines watching you tutor 2 kids at a time.

Let’s set that aside. What I want to focus on here is the specific teaching connection and how things get explained. Coaches have tremendous power to clarify things for athletes and help them make connections faster. They also have tremendous power to put an athlete into cognitive overload and slow down the learning process. One reason that Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything is that when learners get overloaded, they don’t retain anything and thus no improvement happens. The tricky part here is that, since There Are No Blank Slates, athletes will very often overload themselves! There’s definitely plenty of players who lack focus and will essentially concentrate on nothing while they play. But there’s probably an equal number (maybe even a greater number) of players who will focus on too much/the wrong thing and mess up in the other direction. Good teaching helps get athletes to the golden mean in the middle.

Nick Winkleman’s book is the most practical book I’ve ever encountered for how to adjust how you speak to athletes, in order to better assist the learning process. My best short summary of how I use this information in a volleyball practice:

An athlete’s intent is the most important influence on the outcome of a play/movement/action. Intent is what they want their movement to accomplish and their internal visualization of what that looks and feels like. Coaches should prioritize influencing an athlete’s intent and constantly check for understanding. Attention is how athletes change their intent or modify movements as intents change. Attention is the currency of coaching and influencing what athletes “pay attention” to is a critical job of coaches.

There’s a lot of value in just gaining some new ways to say things. Check out the 99 External Cues series for some ideas. But the even deeper idea here is this interaction between movement, attention, and intention. My model for it is:

Intention → Attention → Power → Energy

Intention is literally what the player wants to do. “Serve the ball in,” or “Hit the ball hard,” are valid, if unrefined, intentions. Most players lack intention or have scrambled intentions. The tail often wags the dog. Again, there’s often a midwit effect in play here as many elite players think about the game in a much simpler way than mediocre players. Many coaches compound this by overcomplicating things; in a desire to teach faster, they slow down the learning process.

There’s lots of overlap between Attention and Intention and very often, players need to put their Attention on just having the basic Intention of executing the play. Again, “hit the ball hard,” is not only a perfectly valid Intention but it is a perfectly useful thought to occupy an athlete’s Attention. It’s not always ideal, but it’s better than what many athletes think. As athletes become more clear in their Intentions, they start to understand how changes to their Attention affect the outcome. “Finish fast,” “finish strong,” and, “finish high,” might influence the outcome in different ways.

Power is the physical execution of Attention. Smaller/younger athletes can often move in a way that’s very similar to bigger/older athletes, just with less power. The fundamental mechanics in these two plays are basically identical:

But there’s a big difference in power/execution!

To paraphrase Tony Holler, “power grows like a tree,” meaning: slowly and over time. However, Attention also influences power! There are attentional cues that nudge an athlete more toward increasing accuracy/touch and attentional cues that nudge an athlete more toward power. Winkleman’s book, and his general process, help coaches understand this.

And finally, Energy is the ability to apply power over time. There’s a physical definition, but there’s also a psychological and team application. “If you can do it once, you can learn to do it every time,” applies to the skill execution by one player on a given play. Individuals learn to execute with Power over time by building and sustaining Energy. Teams gain the Power to finish close sets by building and sustaining Energy. That’s a tricky one and more of a topic for another day as Winkleman doesn’t get much into that.

Mentor

Coaches are influential figures in the lives of young people. Big concepts like “inspiration” and “motivation” and “influence” and “guidance” are hard to pin down. What do they mean? Fundamentally, it’s about turning words into works aka changing behavior. As Rachel Dawes might say, it doesn’t really matter what you aspire to be to your athletes (as a mentor, leader, etc), it matters what you help your athletes do.

Let me use a very simple example. Many players let balls drop on defense without diving for the ball. Those players don’t really care about winning. They don’t want it bad enough! But yet, after the game, some of those same players will be crying because they lost. They did want it after all?

Neither. For most of these players, they simply aren’t very good at diving. When they aren’t good at diving, it hurts to dive, plus it hurts even more to dive after a ball and mess it up and look like a big dummy when you mess it up. It’s usually not the little waterbug who is really good at diving who doesn’t dive, ya know?

The same goes for other behaviors that are less clearly skill-linked. Most players who come to practice late don’t want to let their teammates down. Most players who lose focus and start chatting during a drill don’t see themselves as lazy good-for-nothings. Yet players all over the country are doing these and other self-defeating behaviors all the time.

The Motivational Interviewing framework laid out by Fader and co. both (a) confuses me with its name, because it appears to have nothing to do with interviewing as I understand the word and only a little with motivation and (b) is the best framework I’ve learned to help steer athletes toward positive behavior change. It helps them connect being with doing.

My summary of the practical application of this book is:

Change is difficult when emotions are involved. When athletes are emotional, direct intervention is often counter-productive and can backfire to produce the exact opposite result intended. (This is in contrast to asking for a behavioral change an athlete has no emotional tie to in a situation where the athlete is not in an emotionally-charged state. In those situations, direct and clear instruction is often best.) Influence is difficult without rapport and a good way to build rapport with an athlete is to identify and reflect their feelings. When coaches understand the core values/aspirations of an athlete, they can help players connect behaviors to those values/aspirations. When athletes can see these connections, they will often express a desire for new behaviors, at which point the coach can engage in more direct instruction.

Whew, if you’re a numbers guy like me, it might have been draining just reading that last paragraph. But sometimes the hardest roads are the ones worth choosing.

Summer School Curriculum

I’ll write more about these three coaching roles and reference these books (or others by the same authors) quite a bit. I don’t do book reviews on here because I think you should usually just go right to the source. What I will do is highlight and share the applications of what you actually do with this knowledge. A few topics I have on hand are:

1. More cueing and teaching to improve your tutors.

2. An additional article on how to make practice more tutorlike, even when you have a bunch of kids on one court.

3. Drills within drills or how to keep templates consistent while teaching different things.

4. How to help athletes identify strengths without them becoming limiting labels.

Leave a comment or send me an email with some related topics you’d like me to hit and I’ll see if I can include them as well.

If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round.

When I read that quote, I felt a wonderful ah-ha! moment, like somebody just flicked a light on that made the room 30% brighter. I felt this way basically the whole time I attended my first GMS clinic a long time ago… I had been working hard as a coaching, trying to figure things out on my own and stumbling toward things, and then Carl would say something and I’d think, “yes, that’s what I mean to do/think/say!”

I love this quote because I think it hits on so many things that are important to coaching, and reflective of the way I coach — at least when I’m coaching at my best. Brian’s article is a bit more training-oriented, but I want to zoom one step out and be a little more philosophical.

Here’s a few thoughts on the interactions between work and play.

It Takes A Lot Of Work

Significantly improving in any endeavor is not easy. Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything, so you either need to practice a lot, in order to make up for inefficiency on sheer volume, or you need to practice really well. Deliberate Practice is not easy. Something that makes Deliberate Practice so difficult is, for many learners, practicing deliberately constantly knocks you out of flow.

Flow is an immersive state and it feels good to be in flow. When we’re doing activities that create flow, time flies and there’s a much lower perception of effort. It would be great to stay there a lot!

And yet… we also need Deliberate Practice. Maybe.

I don’t know know that you need much Deliberate Practice to get good at something, particularly if you have some talent for it. If you’re fairly tall and move fairly well, you can get pretty good at volleyball by just playing. However, in order to get great, or in order to significantly change your natural development arc, Deliberate Practice becomes important.

Learning To Play

Do kids naturally play? Yes and no. While there’s no question that all (or at least most) humans have an innate desire to play, not everyone naturally plays in a way that works well with others, or with the environment of which they are a part. The simplest way to illustrate this is to imagine somebody playing volleyball without knowing the rules. If you happened upon a casual game of volleyball and it was your first time ever having seen the sport, you might have a natural desire to join in, but you might frustrate yourself or others because you don’t realize your team is only allowed 3 contacts, or that you aren’t allowed to catch the ball or let it bounce, etc. This is a simple example, but I think it illustrates a general concept: play is more fun when you know the rules.

Rules don’t have to be strict boundaries of a game; they can be rules of thumb that, when mostly followed, allow for a better overall experience for everybody. For example, the Yes And… rule is suggested for improv theater or other games involving shared scenario creation. Anyone who has a child has probably experienced phases where that child’s definition of “play” means “ordering everyone else to do exactly what they say to create some scenario they imagine in their head which will ultimately never be fully realized leading to sadness and anger for everyone.”

Likewise, volleyball players don’t always know how to play well with others. I’ve written about the importance of Learn To Learn before, but many kids also have to Learn To Play. This is especially true for young teenagers, many of whom have their “play muscles” either deconditioned or intentionally trained out of them over the previous half-decade. In particular, adolescent girls often go through a phase of socialization where play shifts away from physical contests and toward social or emotional battles with peers. It sounds odd, but many kids need some help figuring out how to engage in physical play (aka sports) in a way that is fun for everybody involved.

Work Or Play?

One of the challenges of youth sport is that many of the adults bring their own baggage with them. There are parents and coaches who never quite reached their potential as athletes and desperately want to help their kids reach full potential. There are coaches who coach the way they were coached. There are also coaches who coach in a way where they are clearly trying to undo the offenses against them by previous coaches. Because I think most people are good, I think most coaches and parents involved with youth sports are trying to do right by the kids, but it’s hard to see things through an accurate lens. So this intention is not always realized.

Remember also that There Are No Blank Slates. Every player that comes into your program has a different history and background. They have different experiences and thus have had different interactions with both work and play. Playful coaches sometimes struggle with players who enter the program with a, “no pain, no gain,” attitude. When a player like that hears, “we have to loosen up and have fun out there,” that player might think, “my coach isn’t as serious as I am.” On the flip side, very serious coaches might lose a player who is naturally more improvisational or less technically-minded. This player might feel like they are playing poorly because they are being asked to overthink things they do naturally — or at least think they do naturally.

I’ve believed in this idea of turning work into play for a long time, but the quote that began this article presents it in more clear way than I’ve said it before.

I texted this quote to our team group chat earlier in the week:

I’m fortunate to coach lots of good kids who both love to play volleyball and are willing to “work” at it as well. I was curious what thoughts they would have. While there was some variety, a common theme emerged and it surprised me. I’ll roughly paraphrase it as:

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When I finished the previous article in this series, I didn’t have another one planned immediately. I’m writing this from the beautiful Redneck Riviera, Gulf Shores, Alabama, the host site for the NCAA Beach National Championships.

I’ve worked with John Mayer and the LMU beach team for a while now. Gulf Shores is particularly fun for me, because it’s about the only time I actually get to see them play live. I spend the rest of the season watching video and sending analysis and although I love my beautiful spreadsheets, I do sometimes like to actually go outside and see the sun.

Through his podcast and his success as a coach, John has probably done more to bring modern motor learning theory to the general volleyball coaching population than anybody else. My collaboration with him has been one of the most rewarding relationships of my coaching journey for a variety of reasons, but the aim of pairing statistical analysis with an ecological coaching framework in order to construct better problems for players to solve is the most enjoyable from an intellectual perspective.

Before we get there, I want to talk about how this applies to the Beginner v Advanced framework I’ve been exploring on here in previous articles. I’ve been talking about things like pace of practice and modifying rules, but I want to talk about a factor that falls more into the difficulty level of practice and that’s the idea of noise.

What Is Good Technique?

When we talk about “clean technique,” “good technique,” “fundamentally sound,” or being “repeatable,” what are we, as coaches, trying to say? I don’t think what most coaches are talking about is necessarily some desire for biomechanical perfection. I think most decent coaches recognize that there’s some variability in how good volleyball players get things done and that there’s a few ways to skin a cat. What I think these expressions are trying to get at is that a player is mostly taking action that is related to the action that they are trying to perform.

To use the idea of signal v noise, noise is stuff the player does that is not related to what they are trying to do. Unproductive stuff. You can imagine a player who has “noisy” technique has a lot of extra motion, a lot of limbs going everywhere, is generally spazzy and not smooth or simple in their movements. From that perspective, noisy is clearly not desirable, thus when many coaches say that a player is “fundamentally sound,” I generally hear that they have a set of movement solutions that are directed toward their goals and not a set of movement solutions that are noisy.

Differential Learning

I’ve discussed discussed the idea of Differential Learning before, particularly related to the Goldilocks Method. Differential Learning captures the idea that adding an appropriate amount of random noise to an existing signal actually strengthens the signal. In the diagram below, (a) represents the original, faint, signal, (b) represents the signal with a moderate amount of random noise added to it, boosting the signal, and (c) represents the signal with too much noise added to it, obscuring the signal.

Wolfgang Schollhorn seems to be the pioneer in transferring this idea from the information/signals world to the physical movement and coaching world. I’m not sure he would even sanction my Goldilocks method as “true” Differential Learning1 but I don’t know that I’m ready to go full-Wolfgang. The point is, players can actually benefit from trying to produce the same outcome in a variety of different ways. The (appropriate amount of) noise actually amplifies the signal.

In Practice - Advanced Players

A simple example of this took place at the LMU practice I watched a couple days ago leading into their opening round match here in Gulf Shores. The players broke out into different courts to serve and the setup was just a simple serve and “chase” (although since this is a well-supported D1 program, there were some managers and support staff available to help chase the balls, increasing the reps for the players) drill where they were serving one way into an empty court.

The learning aspect here was that the coach on each court had some scripted challenges to interject noise in the system. For example:

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Beginners v Advanced
Part 1
Part 2

Pace Of Practice

I touched on this in Part 2, but one of the counter-intuitive parts of coaching is that beginners generally need a faster-paced practice than advanced players. I kept Part 2 focused on the start of practice, and now I want to address the rest of practice through the lens of pace.

First, what is practice pace? The simplest definition here is a combination of these four factors:

1. In a given practice activity, how soon is the next ball entered after the last rally has finished?

2. In a given practice activity, how quickly do players switch in and out?

3. What’s the duration of rounds of the same drill/game/activity.

4. How frequently do you switch practice activities?

Let’s take these one at a time.

Pace Of Entry

The pace of entry needs to be quicker for beginners and a bit slower for more advanced players. The other way to think about that is, “when working with beginning players, enter the next ball as soon as possible. When working with advanced players, give a little more time between rallies.” Here’s why I think that way:

Advanced players are both bigger and more powerful. While elite professional athletes are in, “better shape,” for volleyball, they also expend much more energy within a given rally. It’s not common to see 13 year-olds huffing and puffing after a long rally, but a rally between professionals that lasts over 30 seconds will leave both teams fatigued — they just put out a lot more in each play. This is even the case within juniors volleyball. For example, compare the output of a high-level 17s team to beginner 12s.

Also, because advanced players are bigger and more powerful, there’s more potential for danger due to various factors. For example, a ball rolling through the back-row (or let’s be honest, even the front-row) might not present a safety hazard for 12 year-olds, it probably will for 17 year-olds and definitely will for pros. While we shouldn’t be in the habit of letting 12 year-olds jump with volleyballs rolling at their feet, it’s not quite the same hazard as a 200lb professional athlete coming down from 35” in the air and landing on a ball.

The distraction hazard is more dangerous with high-level players as well. I feel comfortable standing in certain parts of the gym (including on the court while a rally is going on) looking in certain directions while coaching 12s that I would not risk at a pro men’s practice. Therefore, if you accidentally enter a rally at a 12s practice where one kid isn’t paying attention, you’re not really risking an injury. In fact, entering the ball quickly when coaching beginners is actually an important way to train their attention. Keep the pace fast and you will build their reflex away from chasing butterflies and toward a habit of always looking toward the action. On the other hand, when coaching players who hit the ball hard enough to hurt people, and you should always check that a setter and hitter on one side are not still talking to each other about the last play or that a libero is not adjusting a shoe, etc. Collisions (player-to-player or ball-to-player’s-head) are more dangerous with high-level players.

A final factor is that the between-plays time is often valuable for advanced players and a distraction for beginning players. As players mature as athletes, they (a) start having more productive things to say to teammates between rallies and (b) they get a better sense for how long those conversations should last and/or how to keep a brief exchange brief.

This isn’t a binary though. It’s definitely good to have some more rapid-fire entry drills with advanced teams and some things that are slower-paced and allow more teammate-to-teammate communication between rallies for beginners. Just keep these factors in mind.

Player Switches

I’m a big fan of Speedball. The general speedball format involves some amount of players switching on and off every rally. It might just be a server or it might be a whole group. Sometimes people call these formats Queens/Kings formats or Waves formats. (Speedball has some slight specific differences, but it’s just logistical.)

Generally, I like these rapid-switching drills more for younger/more beginning players and less for older/more-advanced players. Speedball/Queens/Waves switches are nice for beginners because it keeps everybody a bit more engaged. The maximum time you can be off the court is a couple of points. In my Mini-Volley format, we rotate on every sideout and the maximum server run that we allow is 2 points. So every 2 points, players are rotating. This is good, it trains attention and engagement. If you keep a 12 year-old out of a drill for 6 consecutive minutes, they are 80% likely to get bored and start wandering or distracting teammates and 20% likely to start crying because coach hates them and they never get to play at practice.

On the other hand, a more advanced player (even a mature 15 year-old, for example), can, work hard enough to actually be tired and appreciate a little rest, understand the need for teammates to get reps too, and probably have a productive conversation with a teammate or coach while waiting for their turn to come in.

Extending this further, sometimes these rapid-switching drills can be a bit annoying for professionals, because they generally want to:

• Work their butt off for some period of time and win a round of a drill, then:

• Get a meaningful breather to get a drink and think about what they want to do in the next round.

That said, I do like three situations for rapid-switching with advanced players:

1. Warmup. Queens/Kings formats can be good warm-ups for advanced players because the jogging to switching in and out is movement that helps them warm up.

2. Cutthroat-style games where you have ~3 players trying to stay on and getting eliminated. The most common would be something where you have say 3 hitters (1 on the court, 2 waiting) who are playing an FBK format where that hitter gets set the first ball and, if they don’t kill it, they get cut and then next player switches in.

3. Training camp or first-practice after a break type stuff where you actually don’t want the competition to ramp up super-high and you want things to move quickly, get lots of player combinations going, without dragging into really mentally-intense battles just yet.

Round Duration

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Here’s what definitely happened and my thoughts on why it happened.

Or

Here’s an idea and here’s how I actually apply it.

This is more of a, “some thoughts are bouncing around in my head and I’m not quite changing how I practice, but maybe I will, but also maybe I actually do coach in a way that reflects these thoughts but I don’t have a systematic way that I could describe it,” sort of article. Maybe you’ll enjoy it, maybe not. I’ll leave this one unpaywalled and you can let me know in the comments if you want more of these half-baked sort of coaching thoughts or if I should just-stick-to-the-facts-nerd.

Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything

In the world of People Who Are Serious About Coaching, there’s a lot of thought given to words like Retention and Transfer. These words are important in education as well. Hey, it would sure be nice if little Johnny could retain what he learned in math class over the weekend and it sure would be nice if what he learned in math class transferred to anything… or at least the state testing exams! Same in volleyball. Sure would be nice if what we did in practice impacted at least in some way what happened in a match.

It’s a little easier to measure retention and transfer in education. Kids are in school for many more hours than they are at volleyball practice and education intervention come with papers that can be graded, saved, and compared. It’s REALLY HARD to even measure retention and transfer in volleyball, because it’s not always easy to measure performance. The NCAA is a difficult enough testing ground. When a player improves their hitting efficiency from one year to the next, they got better, right? Unless… the team passed better and the setting was better. Then, maybe they didn’t get any better, but the team around them got better. When a player fails to improve their hitting efficiency from one year to the next, they didn’t get better… unless they achieved the same performance under more difficult conditions. That’s before we even bring opponents into it.

Beyond that, improvement is really actually hard, especially as you get better. That’s why I say that Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything. Let’s take the fantastic University of Nebraska. One of the most successful NCAA volleyball programs in the country over the past few years. They have all the resources that they could ever want; they have a strong coaching staff; they have motivated players with lots of incentive to get better and improve, etc, etc. They also have 3 players who have gotten significant playing time for 3 years in a row: Bergen Reilly, Laney Choboy, Harper Murray. Here’s their service aces per set for those 3 years:

While serving more aces isn’t the only important thing about serving, it’s an indication. Generally speaking: better servers serve more aces and weaker serves serve fewer aces. And an individual server improving will tend to serve more aces.

Does anybody think these players didn’t practice serving over the course of 3 years? That coaches haven’t been working with them? That they haven’t been coming in to do extra work by themselves? Of course, they do all those things. But… Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything.

Anders Ericsson might say that Deliberate Practice is the key. Most people in a given field don’t improve much after a year or two of experience. I think this is true for volleyball players. Most volleyball players don’t improve much after a year or two of experience… at a given level of play.

Changing Context Stimulates Change

One of the things about volleyball players gaining expertise is that it changes the level that they play at. For example, a 12 or 13 year-old who has only played bump-it-over ball will get a lot better the first time they play on a team/at a level where 3 contacts are happening. The first season a kid in the 14, 15, or 16 year old range is on the court with players that are hitting really hard, they are going to have a changing context that might allow for a change in performance. I talked about this and how it relates to the idea that The Game Teaches The Game.

This means that some of what the game teaches you at U-13 is false at U-17! Some examples:

At U-13, if you have to send a freeball, you want to send it to deep zone 1, but at U-17, I’d rather send it to the short 2/3-seam.

At U-13, rather than send a freeball, you want to get a hand on the ball and hit a downball. At U-17, I’d rather set the ball over the net to a good spot than hit a downball.

At U-13, I’d rather not cover my hitter, because the ball will almost never be blocked, but it will be dug back over a lot and I’m often not big/fast enough to cover the court if it gets dug back over. At U-17, the ball will be blocked more than it will be dug over so I better get good at covering.

There’s a bunch more of these examples and you may not agree with every one. That’s okay, my system might look different in a few years. The game continues to evolve.

Circling back to those Nebraska players, we see some significant changes in hitting performance among several of them. For example, Harper Murray’s efficiency went from 0.237 to 0.257 to 0.295 over those 3 years. A significant portion of that improvement is almost certainly improvement among her teammates: better passing, better setting, change in systems, etc. But I think it’s also reasonable to say that her hitting context changed more than her serving context. For a women hitting a float serve, the constraints of the net and the court are more significant than the constraints of an opponent. There’s only so hard you can hit a float serve and there are 16 year-olds capable of hitting a 40mph floater. Servers can and do get more consistent. However, that’s not the same as the changing demands on the attacker, which might include learning to play in a faster offense, scoring against significantly bigger and better blockers, etc.

Ecologically-minded coaches tend to spend a lot of time trying to set up different contexts in order to stimulate change. I think most of the time they are beating their heads against the wall because they just don’t have the players in the gym to make it happen. Coaches from more of a blocked training school will get reps reps reps to try to make that change happen. But, at the end of the day, change might not happen because Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything.

It’s not these coaches fault, it’s just hard to improve at anything. Or should I say, it’s hard to change your trajectory of improvement. After a year or two, young people tend to get on a performance track in any given field and stay somewhere in that ballpark. Students learn stuff between 2nd and 6th grade, but their performance tends to be on a similar band relative to peers. Volleyball players improve from 13s to 16s, but their relative performance tends to stay similar. The phrase tends to is doing a lot of work here. Obviously there are players who are able to “jump up a level” and go from being a 2s-team player to a 1s-team (which also implies some players fall back a level) and so on.

In my experience that takes a lot of work. It’s also kind of a tautology. If you kind of do about what everyone else does, you’ll improve at about the same rate that everyone else does, thus your relative improvement will stay about the same.

The Treadmill

I talked to my U16s team this year about this concept. I used the analogy of a treadmill. If you run at the same speed as the treadmill, you stay in the same place. It’s a Red Queen sort of deal… you have to keep running faster just to stay where you are. Competitive success in sports is sort of like this.

A setter wants to get more playing time. They are working hard and improving. But so is the starting setter! So they have to not only improve but improve at a faster rate than the starter.

A team wants to win more games. They are working hard and improving! But… so are all the other teams that will be at the next tournament. So a team has to not only improve but improve faster than their competition.

This applies not just within a season but season-to-season. Talent in volleyball consolidates. The big-market clubs tend to pull in players from the surrounding areas over the years. X% of families are willing to drive their kid an hour to practice at U13s. Y% of families are willing to drive their kid an hour to practice at U16s. Y > X. So a small-market team (like us) needs to not just improve, but improve fast enough to compensate that the competition is going to pull in additional players each year.

So we have a situation where Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything but also the fact that we need to not only improve but improve faster than our opponents. Yeesh, no wonder Carl used to say that coaching is rocket science.

Rote v Flexible v Inflexible

I’ve had this general concept in mind, but this article rattled them a little looser than normal. Read the article, because the author explains these ideas better than me paraphrasing. But it got me thinking about the volleyball equivalents of Rote, Inflexible, and Flexible knowledge.

It’s important to remember that knowing and doing are not the same. Movement and solving abstract problems are not the same and expertise in one domain is not acquired in exactly the same way as expertise in another domain. (This highlights a problem I have with the field of motor learning in general. It’s often assumed that if experimental study shows Learning Condition A works better for golfers, then it will also work better for basketball players or whatever. It’s possible that certain types of practice might work better for golf and worse for gymnastics or whatever. I rarely see that explored in motor learning literature.)

That said, the author hits on this idea I have that I sometimes frame as 100% → 10% → 1%. You have to get a lot better at something in practice in order to get just a little better in competition. If your line shot gets “a little better” in practice, you won’t notice any effect in competition. For your team to get a reliable 1% performance change in Sideout, you can’t be 1% better — because of treadmill effects and noise and other factors, you need to be like 10% better to get a 1% change in sideout. But in order to get 10% better at actually siding out, you need to get like 100% better in whatever drill you’re doing. You need to go from winning Aceball 1-2 times out of 6 rounds to winning Aceball 4 or 5 times out of 6 in order to predict with confidence that you will prevent aces better in the next tournament.

I mentioned this in my 6 Months Of Speed Results article. After a month or two, I had players that were faster. Wait, let me correct myself. I had players who had better times in speed tests. Were they faster? Maybe, but maybe they were just better at a speed test. Were they better in competition as a result of that speed? Almost certainly not. After 6 months, some players had significantly faster times. Were they faster? Almost certainly. Was that speed transferring to competition. Maybe…

Like all things, it’s hard to tell. Anecdotally, I had several outside observers who weren’t in the gym make comments about a couple players. One college coach who ended up offering one of the girls said something along the lines of, “she’s just looking so springy right now.” That player, like several others, had improved more than 0.2 in her 20m fly. Another college coach commented that a different player seemed to have a lot more pop on the ball. That player had made an 8mph change in max spike velocity. A small change might indicate nothing other than fuzziness in the test or eating a better breakfast. A moderate, consistent change might indicate improvement in that underlying quality but is unlikely to significantly affect competition performance. A big change now might start to actually affect performance. Remember, we’re on the Red Queen’s treadmill. We need a big change in a “drill” in order to get a moderate change in the underlying quality in order to get just 1% better in competition relative to our peers who are also working hard at practice.

Or sometimes we talk about improvement being like an iceberg. When you practice, sometimes there’s a lot going on under the surface that you can’t quite see. You practice and practice but that practice doesn’t seem to pay off. I love the ecological guys because they are quick to question old practice methods. If practice isn’t leading to performance gains let’s get rid of it! Make sure players understand the context, make sure practice is representative of competition. I love that. But yet… I think there are things happening under the surface that we can’t quite see. This model of Inflexible v Flexible knowledge is valuable.

At the risk of both drawing a comparison between “book learning” and sports skill that I already warned about AND talking about education which is a field I’m both not an expert in… let me now do both.

We homeschool our daughter and she’s learning math. Not long ago she took an assessment test and I can review the answers to see what questions she answered correctly and which ones she got wrong. If we compare two questions, we can see the idea of Flexible v Inflexible knowledge.

Question 1:
There are 8 girls and 12 boys in the class. If the teacher needs 2 tables for the girls, how many tables are needed for the boys?

Question 2:
Adam buys 15 buns for $6. Tom buys 20 buns. How much did Tom spend?

Both of these questions utilize essentially the same math: basic multiplication and simple ratios. She got the first question correct and the second question incorrect. The mathematical concept is the same, but (a) the context is more concrete in the first example and (b) the ratio is more obvious in the first example.

First of all, in the 6+ years of her life, my kid has sat a table many, many times. 4 is arguably the most common configuration for tables and in fact is how we have our kitchen table set up except when company is over. She is familiar with sitting at tables. She has bought things before, but transacting with money is slightly more abstract. Next, the ratio is more obvious in Question 1. My daughter “knows” all of the multiplication facts in both questions about equally well when asked directly. If you asked her “what’s 2 x 4?” and “what’s 3 x 5?” she’ll get them both right. However, she has known that “half of 8 is four” for a couple years now, while 3 x 5 is only months old. It’s just in there more deeply.

This is where that idea of Inflexible v Flexible knowledge connected with me. She “knows” how to do these problems, but her knowledge isn’t very flexible yet. She needs more practice and feedback.

Flexible v Inflexible Volleyball Knowledge

When you do very basic, blocked drills with volleyball players, there is little to no reliable transfer to competition performance. But also… when you ask them to do things that are “too hard”, there is little to no reliable transfer to competition performance. Let’s use an example.

Many of you know I love the Scrape Tip:

Do I want middles tipping every time? No. Do I like them to try this little tip every time they see a help block, particularly early in a match? Yep. If you do it every time, teams will start peeling their left-front blocker. So you have to be able to hit. But I’m a big fan of having this tool in the toolbox.

Many middles are bad at this shot when they first get introduced to it. After all, they’ve just played some amount of years being told that hitting is better than tipping and you generally make teams based on how well you hit, not how well you tip. (I rarely include tip kills in a middle highlight that gets sent to a college coach.) Often, I assess this by showing some video and then seeing if the player can do this in a controlled setting like a hitting lines. Often, they can’t! What I mean by that is that they physically place the ball where it needs to be. Most of them tend to throw the ball too hard and either put the ball too deep (“umm… throwing the ball right at the libero is one solution but maybe there’s a better one?”) or right out of bounds. Getting a feel for this stinky little drop tip takes some practice.

But guess what, just because a kid can do it in hitting lines, doesn’t mean it will work well in the game. Or, they’ll do it at the wrong time.

So players need context! We don’t want them to have Inflexible Knowledge.

But… I think the Inflexible is a step. I don’t know that you can skip over it. Meaning, if a player cannot physically perform this action (in this case, tipping the ball over toward the sideline not-too-deep-but-not-too-short) then adding context is just going to make them worse. It’s not impossible that they could experiment and figure things out in some sort of live 6v6 setting where you give a bonus point for scrape tip kills. But let’s be honest, there’s lots of teams out there doing bonus point scoring for certain things and still Most Practice Doesn’t Do Anything. Give it a shot, pick Scrape Tip or Cross-Body or some other shot that your middles don’t do reliably right now. Run 6v6 with a bonus for that shot for 20 minutes at your next practice before competition and then count how many more times they score on that shot in competition. The answer might be more than 0, but it also might not be.

So we need more time, which is okay. Try it for 4 practices in a row and count how many times they score on that shot in practice. For some players, that answer might be significant. For others, it will still be close to zero, because it’s not that they have Inflexible Knowledge, they have basically no knowledge. They don’t know how to perform that action, they are doing it in a difficult context, and their brain doesn’t perceive that they have the action capacity to perform that skill. In other words, it’s “too hard.”

When I assess players players, I first would love to see them perform a skill in the game context. Show a video, give it a try, okay let’s see where we’re at. Many times, players are able to figure it out within that context. But not always. Sometimes, and I think this is where your coaching judgement comes in, the game context discourages a player from performing a certain action, even though it’s what you meant to encourage! In these cases, I use “easier” reps, which could even be as easy as something like coach toss. To use one of the most introductory teaching patterns in volleyball, if somebody cannot take a correct approach off a coach toss, they will rarely take the correct steps in a game context. For those players, I intervene until their approach can be somewhat in the ballpark off a coach toss. They’ll still get to play 6v6 in the meantime (if you wait to play 6v6 until all of your U12s take good approaches, you might not get to play all year), but I just wouldn’t expect or coach their hitting footwork in that drill. There’s lots of other stuff to coach!

When I get a player who can perform a skill “correctly” (and by this, I mean get the basic characteristics of the movement down, but not necessarily with high levels of speed, accuracy, or timing) in easy contexts (like coach toss or hitting lines) but not in more difficult ones, I assume their knowledge is Inflexible (well, I didn’t think of it in those terms, but I like that terminology now and I’m going to start to use it) and I want to try to find appropriate Challenge Point activities to bridge the gap.

Alright, abrupt ending because this post is getting long and I didn’t have a clearly articulated end point for this anyway. It’s a half-baked idea that I’m not sure I can fully express. Let me know what you think in the comments. More stats analysis is on the way soon.

A common conversation in coaching goes something like this:

Coach: “I have an athlete who does X, should I try to change it?”

Other Coach: “It depends, how effective is the player at doing X?”

Let’s take the classic example of a goofy-footed approach. Clearly Phil Dalhausser was “good enough” to be the best in the world with a goofy-footed1 approach. Clearly most 7th-graders are not Phil Dalhausser. If Phil Dalhausser is your standard, no kid has made a good play ever.

In Part 1 of this article series I talked about how many modern motor learning theorists tend to not view movement as motor patterns selected from a centralized database of memory and thus, rather than viewing things as a habit, they would tend to view every action as an independent interaction with the task and environment and that the brain selects the best movement solution for the task at hand. As coaches, rather than prescribe biomechanical solutions for players, we’re better off analyzing how their solutions interacted with the task and the environment to produce an effect. Or, as Loren Anderson put it in his article series that I think is a great lay introduction to the basics of EcoD coaching2:

In ecological coaching, movement emerges based on what the athlete perceives in the game—not from following a rigid technique model. There is no single “correct” way to pass or hit—only effective ways that fit the situation.

For example, think about how different players serve. Some have high tosses, some barely toss at all. Some jump float with a rigid arm, others have a more relaxed motion. What matters is the result, not whether it fits a textbook model.

…

Traditional coaching often prioritizes repeatable technique. But ecological coaching prioritizes repeatable outcomes—which means exposing players to varied situations so they develop a range of solutions.

Or, to circle back to the beginning of this article:

“It depends, how effective was the player?”

Habits And Effectiveness

Here’s where this can be a challenge for me and, I think, many other coaches:

Sometimes habits are “good enough” and sometimes they aren’t. If habits don’t exist and every play is the result of a unique and independent interaction with the task and environment, this doesn’t matter. But if habits do exist, then this matters, because when you change habits develop new habits3, you have a different solution all (or almost all) of the time, not just when it would be good enough.

That’s a little abstract, so let’s watch some video.

Note: When discussing specific plays by individual players, especially non pros, I try to be kind. Long-time readers of this newsletter notice I don’t often post mistakes or critiques and the ones I do post are usually of “my” players and are generally paired with videos showing an improvement or at least an improvement in process. That’s because it’s too easy for critiques to get taken out of context and this is a public forum and I don’t have any desire to put athletes on blast. The Man In The Arena and all that. I’m going to use some beach video here and these players are not “my” players (I have done video/statistical analysis for LMU for a long time but I am not on the official coaching staff and I am also not on the Cal staff) so I am just using these as a starting point for an extremely common passing habit in beach volleyball. Hopefully everyone reading can take all that and keep the discussion in context.

Here’s some passing clips from an early-season beach match between LMU and Cal 4s. I chose this match because all four passers in the match have a passing prep habit that looks something like this:

Meaning their arms are not in a more classic “down and relaxed” arms posture:

But are instead in some different variations of up/out:

The question that I want to examine is, “are these solutions good enough or not?”

Here’s some plays where they were:

And here’s some plays where the solution wasn’t ideal:

So how do we answer this question?

A valuable mental model is The Map Is Not The Territory. For a long time, at GMS clinics we presented motor learning through the lens of Information Processing. This had implications for how skills were taught to athletes. Now, we introduce both Information Processing and Ecological Dynamics. For someone who studies motor learning, this is likely quite unsatisfying: the two theories are not really compatible. But from my perspective, I don’t really have a huge problem with it because The Map Is Not The Territory.

What this means to me is that it doesn’t matter how good our map is, it matters how we use it to get where we want to go. I really hate knocking down strawmen, so I don’t want to imply that there’s coaches out there who only care about motor learning theory and don’t care whether their teams get better or not. But I do think it’s important to stay laser-focused on whether you are helping an athlete produce positive change or not.

This goes for people who are really into technique. Are your technical interventions helping your athletes or not? In the interest of admitting bias, I really don’t like this “up and out” passing prep. I think it smacks a bit of Fake Fundamentals. I also think it’s much more common in women’s volleyball because one of the best of all time passed like that. I’m not interested in arguing with anyone specifically, but you can find videos of coaches advocating for starting with arms wide because it helps you create angles outside your body. But almost every time, you still see passers that start wide bring their arms into their center and then move them back out. See it here in these video captures:

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This is also one of my favorite drills for coaching younger players, and it hits on some important differences between coaching beginning players and coaching advanced players. In the previous Beginners v Advanced article I discussed court size and net height. Now I want to discuss pace.

When I talk to volleyball coaches who have never been involved in professional or National Team volleyball, I tell them one of the things they might be surprised by is how slow the pace of practice is. You might naturally think the pace would be higher… after all, good high school teams often practice at a faster pace than bad/unorganized teams. Stronger young players are often capable of sustaining a faster practice pace than players who are new to the sport. It’s natural to extrapolate that trend to professional volleyball and assume the practice pace would be higher. It’s not.

I want to explain what I mean by that a little more and look at a few parts of practice. Then I’ll describe what this means for me and the practices that I run. (Note: I split this article into an additional part because this one ran long.)

Starting Practice

If we take, “how good are they,” out of the equation and just look at practice structure/flow/etc, the biggest difference between a professional practice and a typical club practice is at the start. Professional practices start. So. Slow. I can remember my early years on the NT staff feeling anxious at the start of practice. Come on… aren’t we supposed to be doing something??

But here’s the deal: professional teams generally have about all the practice time they could ever want or use. Club teams do not. Professional teams generally don’t have hard starts or hard outs. While every team is slightly different, it’s unusual, in my experience, to see a professional team where everybody is not on the court, and then everybody gets on the court and then practice just starts immediately.

What happens instead is that players trickle out to the court in 1s and 2s as they are ready to start practice. Some teams might have a full team lift before practice, which generally means that players finish at slightly different times. Other teams might divide their lifting into groups, which means that some players are on the court getting some extra warmup in while others are lifting. Other teams lift after practice, which means the full warmup is before practice, which means that your 31 year-old veteran player is already on the court going through a targeted activation routine while your 20 year-old kid bops out there 2 minutes before things get going, does 2 half-speed warmup block moves and is ready to go.

Professional teams might also have some positional tutoring before practice, especially setter tutoring. Many pro teams split into a 2-a-day format where the morning is light ball-control practice (with little or no jumping) while the afternoon is competitive/jumping practice. This means the start of practice looks different between the morning and afternoon.

Again, everybody does things differently, but in most cases professional teams will still have a formal “okay we’re like really starting now” start to practice. So if practice starts at 9:00am, everything I’ve described above takes place before 9:00am. And then at 9:00 the coach calls the player into the whiteboard, or the trainer calls them out onto the court for a guided warmup, or the captain leads them in something.

Hard v Soft Starts

Club teams, if they are any good, usually start practice differently. Most club teams have a hard start, meaning they are waiting for somebody to get off the court before they can start. I refer to a practice where you don’t all have an exact, firm start to practice (like above, where players can trickle in) as a soft start. More on that in a second. Let’s talk hard starts for a second.

When you have a hard start, I think it’s important to have a very clear way that practice starts. Coaching club volleyball is very much an exercise in maximizing practice time. Here’s why:

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And here’s how we come back to habits. I think it’s a fair statement, in the colloquial use of the term, to say that, “the first montage shows a habit of setting off the back foot, while the second montage shows a habit of setting off a lead leg.” So in that sense, yes, I think habits do exist. But in terms of coaching this kid, that statement is somewhere between unhelpful and counterproductive. It’s like yelling at a hitter to “get your elbow up” when they are late. If they reached high for the ball, they would whiff. That’s why they dropped their elbow.

Broadly speaking, I don’t find speaking about dynamic actions in terms of habits very helpful. Because perception and action are coupled, the dynamic actions of the sport are determined by what you perceive. Trying to consciously override what your body has perceived as the best course of action is just as likely to hinder an athlete as it is to help them.

Here’s where the ideas of habits gets tricky. I referenced The Power Of Habit in the previous post, and I’ll come back to another concept from that book and that is the idea of Keystone Habits. To quote the linked piece:

We have habits everywhere in our lives, but certain routines — keystone habits — lead to a cascade of other actions because of them.

Many habits that we see on the volleyball court are going to be very difficult to change at the point of contact, because the athlete is now in position where what they see in front of them is going to strongly influence their body to move a certain way. The habits that I’m interested in changing are these volleyball Keystone Habits that strongly influence what athletes perceive, which will then change how they move.

Example: Ball-Setter-Ball-Hitter

BSBH is a drill that explicitly teaches a specific eyework sequence. It’s quite easy to imagine how changing your eye sequence changes what you see, and therefore, how you move. Players trained with a traditional GMS BSBH eye sequence tend to have a “hold and read” stance at the net, with often a very deliberate head turn to look at the setter.

Players trained with a different eye sequence might shift or move in different ways.

Obligatory: these clips aren’t quite apples to apples and there’s also different blocking schemes, etc, etc… I just had these 2 clips handy that I knew showed different middle blocking postures. The point that I’m making is that what you look at determines how you move. Keystone Habits are habits that influence a lot of other habits. Therefore, eye sequences might be good Keystone Habits. BSBH is a Keystone Habit.

And also, even when you train physical movements that you hope to become Keystone Habits, tying them in to the visual information that an athlete will see when performing these movements makes them much stronger.

Back To Setting

This fall I shared some parts of team systems that I teach, including how I like to teach setter release footwork. Setter release footwork is an odd skill that actually gets less important as you get more advanced. And now, given that pros can release on toss, rather than contact, it’s basically an irrelevant skill. But it’s still very important for coaches of young players to teach, because their environment demands it.

If you look at the video clips from the Part 1, there’s a lot of different “habits” that improved from the December examples to the February examples.

• Clockwise or counter-clockwise turn.

• Distance of release

• “Strong release” (ex: getting to your spot before you start picking up visual information from the passer vs getting stuck halfway and changing your release based on information from the passer before you get to your spot)

• Setting off lead leg v setting back-footed

Any one of these could be habits that you find more or less important. I don’t want to get into too much of that just yet, because those are actually the secondary considerations. The point is that if you want some of that stuff to happen, you have to address stuff that happens earlier in the chain.

I shared this video of a Rotation 1 release of a player that I coached that I consider to be just right:

Here’s a clip from an early-season practice:

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Translation: please don’t unsubscribe!

Do habits exist?

Most coaches say: yes, of course they do. There’s the old cliches like, “practice makes permanent,” or, “grease the groove.”

Modern motor learning tends to question the habit narrative. When I first started learning about motor learning, the term used was motor program. As coaches, we help build these motor programs, these visual recordings of a skill stored in our brain, for our athletes. At the risk of putting words in somebody’s mouth, I think many in the ecological dynamics motor learning camp would reject that analogy. Our brain doesn’t store an “approach footwork” file in our brain like a computer and we don’t double-click and access that footwork motor program when we need to go hit a ball. Instead, we interact with the environment in a dynamic feedback loop where our body perceives an action capable of accomplishing the task in that environment at that particular moment.

Since the environment is constantly changing and even the individual organism is constantly changing (I’m a little more happy or sad than I was 10 seconds ago; I’m a little more tired or energetic, etc), the interaction of these 3 factors is never quite the same, thus ever situation is novel, we never step in the same river twice, and habits don’t exist.

Habits Do Exist

I don’t like knocking down strawmen, so let me not take things too far. Most people in the ecological dynamics sphere would say that yes, there are certain invariants that define a particular class of movement and athletes have these attractor wells and what we tend to call habits are not recalling one central motor program but instead activating these attractors that can create a consistency of output in a variety of environmental interactions.

Let me take a step back from movement and talk about what we commonly call habits, in a broader sense.

Charles Duhigg wrote a wonderful book called The Power Of Habit that was so good it only needed to be about 3 pages long. In it, he describes the habit loop:

Cue → Routine → Reward. I don’t like summarizing other people’s work, so read the book and get it straight from the source. I’ll just tell you the most impactful takeaway from the book for me, which I would state as:

You don’t change habits, you create new ones.

I’ve said that a bazillion times to athletes, or, sometimes when I respond to an athlete describing that they, “have a bad habit of doing X,” I phrase it as, “the good thing about habits is that you can always make a new one.”

Perception And Action

Perhaps the most valuable insight I’ve gained from Rob Gray is that perception and action are coupled. I imagine I’m not the only one who influenced in that way — he literally named his podcast Perception & Action. How does that impact my coaching? I try to be aware that how you move (action) is entwined with what you see (perception). When I teach players new or better ways to move around the court, I start with what they will see before and/or during the movement. Improving the quality of perception almost always leads to improved movement quality.

(To the extent that coaches see results from working with players on split-stepping, I suspect it’s more about getting players to attend more closely to server contact and less about the actual split step, which I tend to think is usually, but not always, better left to the body to determine when and how to do.)

What’s interesting to me is how often something that doesn’t even seem like a movement is influenced by visual perception and body orientation.

I taught my daughter to read at a very early age1 and, as many parents in that movement do, I relied heavily on the aptly-titled book, Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons. Before going further, let’s post a clip of Zig Engelmann teaching:

If you only have 25 minutes (if you want to see him in action, skip to 3 minutes in) today to get better as a coach, skip my article and just watch this entire video of him teaching. The moment starting at 11:00 that leads to kids literally jumping out of their seats with enthusiasm is a brilliant moment of affirmation. Also note the moment at 13:08 when there’s a wrong answer. “5 is wrong.” When children are generally successful (these kids are getting the answer right 90% of the time) and operating at an appropriate challenge point, they don’t need to be told, “owwhh yay sweetie what a great try but actually 5 is a different answer than I was thinking and could you maybe try to think of another answer that might be less not correct?”

Okay sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, embodied perception.

Something that strikes me about watching this demonstration is how physical it is. First of all, note how mental information is stored physically with the body. The clearest example is counting with the fingers. But also, there’s the sing-songy tone the kids adopt when recalling the different arithmetic algorithms. In many cases, Engelmann uses his body (the chalk hand is obvious, but he uses his whole body to teach) to direct attention. There’s a continual link from perception, to action, and back to perception again, even in something like arithmetic that would seem to exist entirely in the mind.

(Side Note: If you are teaching your own kids arithmetic, I highly suggest that you also start with mostly guided oral quizzing (as these kids are doing) as the cognitive load of physically writing the numbers often overwhelms the brain space needed to learn the computations. That’s related to what we’re talking about, but not quite, so I’m going to sidebar that for another article.)

When I used the TYCTR method to teach reading, I was struck by how physical the reading instruction was. The challenge (at least for my daughter) was less about understanding what sound certain letters made and more about keeping the eyes where they need to be to actually look and process the letters on the page. Perhaps others have different experiences, but that was really surprising to me. Changes in the body dramatically changed how effective the learning was for my daughter. For example, she clearly had a strong preference for having the book below her and being more on top of the book, in order to more easily drag her finger along the word. I went with it and I suppose even now, she generally still prefers that posture for writing and drawing:

I’ve never asked her to precisely articulate why she prefers writing in this way, and I’m not 100% sure she could. But I suspect it’s because writing is often very taxing for young kids because they have not yet learned to properly coordinate tension in their wrist and hands and therefore their hands cramp up quickly, especially if they are asked to write neatly. In that body posture, the elbow/forearm can rest on the ground and take some of the tension out of the hand/wrist area. With less brainpower spent resisting the annoyance of Uncomfortable Hand Syndrome, writing is done more quickly and accurately, which is pleasing, which allows a kid to get into flow state.

Are You Ever Going To Talk About Volleyball?

Yes, yes, I’m getting there!

The point that I’m taking 1000s of words to make is that perception and action are coupled aka the mind and body influence each other. Here’s the most basic applications of that concept:

1. When your players are physically uncomfortable, it is difficult for them to learn.

2. When they are cognitively overloaded, their physical movements will deteriorate.

3. By changing what they look at and how they look at it, their body will move differently.

4. Certain body postures and movements will change what they see and how they see it.

I want to dive more into each of these concepts, but let me circle back to habits, because this article series was supposed to be about habits, but, as usual, I took 1,500 words to set the table and I want to wrap up this up as a Part 1. So let’s come back to habits. To make things more practical, let’s look at a setter and see if she has any common movement responses that we might call habits.

First, let’s look at this video. It will be all the Setter-5 and Setter-4 releases from one of my setters in our very first 2 matches back in December, excluding missed serves and shanked passes. So all the Setter-5 and Setter-4 receptions where she could do something. Take a look and take a second to describe 3 or 4 things she does in most or all of these plays:

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One of my early posts here was about using the Triangle On The Beach. Check it out if you haven’t yet. I’ve also written a bunch of other beach-related posts. Here’s a compendium of some of them.

The Outrigger tournament pitted a bunch of the best NCAA beach teams in the country against each other to start the season. The beach girls at our club have been working on defensive eyework and coordinating blocker staying or pulling with the back-court defender. I’m a big fan of killing 2 birds with 1 stone, so, much like Office Hours posts I’ve been doing for indoor, I thought some of the clips I pulled would make for a good initial post. Later this week, I’ll share some match analysis and go over some Triangle stuff as well.

Here’s 10 clips with some good takeaways for block/defense eyework on the beach.

Stay And Block

This is an out-of-system pass, so the block clearly has a “ready to move” posture here. You can see her almost expecting to pull. However, she gets a good look at the set and sees it coming tight, and decides to stay and block.

I also like the extra adjustment she makes with her feet to get in front of the hitter and seal line. This would be an extremely difficult ball for this hitter to hit cross-court, so the big danger is getting tooled line. Nice eyework by this blocker.

Line Up The Angle

Here’s block/defense fundamentals executed so well it’s almost “nothing to see here.” Even ignoring wind effects, going behind is often valuable because most hitters are better at running their route and hitting behind than defenders are at adjusting their defensive lineups.

The blocker sees the hitter going behind early and shuffles to stay on her blocking lineup. (Although, to be honest, it looks like a 1-call to me and that doesn’t quite look like a line block to me, but I think things are also relative to scouting report and she certainly doesn’t get beat line, so I’m not going to nit-pick a blocker that’s making a huge move and getting way over like that.) I do like the extra call just confirm what she’s blocking as the hitter goes behind.

And then the defender takes a step to the cross-court, and then just another little micro adjustment to get between the hitter and the corner. This is exactly how you want to be lined up when a hitter is going to swing hard in this situation. Really nice and simple and balanced and it turns into a transition kill.

Classic 2-Block

Some more fundamentals that I really liked 2-calls are not as common as 1s. I think they are hard for a lot of teams to get lined up without giving it away a year early and giving up an easy crosscourt roller. This is done really well against one of the most terminal hitters in college volleyball.

See The Set

Blocker recognition of the set is so important. There’s a whole bunch of situations here that put pressure on the blocker eyework:

1. Blocker is serving and running up.

2. Offense is going behind

3. Offense keeps the set somewhat low. (Not super-low, but not a moonball)

If you notice, the setter is squared a bit off the net, which gives you a clue, and then the set flares off the net too. I don’t think good readers process any of that consciously, but when you watch it on video, you can see those micro-clues that give the indication of, “this set is flaring off, so pull.”

Shot Block

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I’ve always reserved some amount of time post-match for analysis and planning. When I was on college or professional staffs, I might spend some time the night of the …

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Here’s some additional comment threads from the Open threads:

Office Hours Jan 12
Office Hours Jan 20

Mike Shea asks:

When you look at the stats sheet following a match, what stats are the most important to you and why?

A little different team-to-team, but let’s say for a “normal good” team. This would be most club teams minus teams that are more beginnerish (like a 12s or a 15-4s) and the truly very elite (17s teams qualifying in Open) and it would also encompass quite a good amount of college teams.

#1 I’m looking at Terminal Serving as well as the 2-2-2 concept. Are we winning Terminal Serving or losing? If we are losing Terminal Serving, that means we are putting ourselves in a hole every set. So that’s the first thing I’m addressing. (Again, at certain levels of play, we know Terminal Serving starts to be a little less correlated to winning compared to attacking, so at certain levels, I don’t freak out about having a small TS deficit if that’s what it takes to get my most physical attackers on the court).

Terminal Serving is related to this idea of 2-2-2. Miss 2 or fewer serves per set. Serve 2 or more aces. Allow 2 or fewer aces. Example, my 16s team has played 11 matches and we are 6-5. We have missed 2.5 serves per set, served 2.8 aces per set, and allowed 3.4 aces per set.

So (a) we aren’t too far off these goals, which is why we have a solid record and are playing a pretty good level of play, but also (b) we are a bit short of these goals, which is what’s preventing us from being 8-3 or 9-2 and right now instead of 6-5.

So that’s my first priority. Now, say we’re good on that:

#2 I also want to see us be good on the MTP front. How often are we making a direct error or giving a freeball out of serve receive?

#3 Next... what’s our Kill %? And what Kill % are we allowing?

Again, at certain levels, I almost start with #3, but for most levels of play, I’m starting with #1 and working from there.

Braden Lanctot asks:

At the collegiate level, we have put Friday/Saturday matches. How do you balance/prioritize what we did well on the weekends match vs preparing for the opponent the upcoming week? How much time would you spend on recent video review vs the scouting next match?

Early in the season I'd be 80/20 biased in favor of looking at our side of the net. Once you get solidly into conference, I'd be 80/20 in favor of scouting. (This assumes a typical solid collegiate level, I could stay more looking at our side of the net with, for example, a very young and totally rebuilding team)

In a related vein Pablo Acuna asks:

I’m in a short tournament (4-5 days) where im competing both in men’s and women (2 games a day), I’m having trouble to find the right amount of time to watch full games of my next opponent. I have already watch games previous the tournament, however I would like to have your opinion and recommendation about my situation when don’t have the proper amount of time to set up a proper game plan, and how would you set up your team meeting before these games? What do you communicate to the players and what you like to have in your own to make adjustments and communicate them during the game?

This is a great question overall, so it’s a question of priorities:

(1) I would probably focus on either how you are going to sideout or how you are going to break point against the opponent. And then keep the other strategy more simple.

(2) Try to watch all opponent servers at least a little bit, to see if they do anything unusual. Jump spin, short serving, etc. Just to have your team prepared if they are a girl’s team and are only used to standard float servers. Or if they are boy’s/men’s and only used to standard topspin. Any hybrid servers? Variations? etc

(3) Watch at least one match of opponent rotations, not to chart tendencies (if you have datavolley files, you can get that, but you won’t have enough time to hand-chart if you don’t have datavolley access), but just to see their overall concept of offense. Do they run middle in center or in the gaps? Do they seem to overload or set away from their middle? Is the tempo fast or medium? In 2-hitter do they keep the middle in front or behind. At high levels, do they attack back-row?

(4) Watch the best opponent attacker at least 20-30 swings and develop a defensive plan. This can be a highlight of your meeting.

(5) Try to identify one opponent defensive weakness. Small blocker? Poor tip coverage? Over-rotate on defense and leaving a spot open? Blockers drawn to the middles? Give your team one piece of opponent defense they can exploit for 1-2 easykills per set.

A reader asks:

For the pull/push middle system, how do you like the middles to attack in transition? For example, when the middle is blocking a go and then transitioning, do you exclusively run a push or flash because of where their basecamp will be when they transition off the net? Or do you still run some pulls in these situations? Similarly, when they are blocking the quick or the red, what routes do you usually have them run and where should they be transitioning off the net to in order to effectively run those routes?

I always run Flash after they block against opposing outside. I always run Pull after blocking against opposing rightside. Check out this if you missed it, there’s some video examples:

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Some of these discussions are also pulled from comment threads from older posts, which you might not see if you only read the newsletter email.

Check previous mailbag posts here if you haven’t yet:

Spring 2024
Spring 2025
Summer 2025
Fall 2025

And now, this season’s questions and comments.

There’s been lots of good threads developing from the Office Hours posts:

Jan 12, 2026
Jan 20, 2026

One thread sparked some interest:

I wanted to get your opinion as we are having the same problem with multiple athletes. We have several athletes who are great leapers (over 10 feet), but their blocking technique with their hands is pretty bad. For example, we have a couple of very athletic players who seemingly try to swat the ball every time they block (their arms/hands go back behind their head and they swat at the ball as the attacker is attacking it). We've tried different cues to try to correct this but they always revert back to the same. Any tips/suggestions for how to get this habit out?

Yes, sometimes it’s almost the great jumpers who have *more* problems with it, because they are up in the air for so long. I’ve had lots of guys who got deep into that habit. I don’t know if I have any magic bullets, but a few things that have been part of helping athletes with this in the past:

1. I think some blocking against a coach is fine to work on this. If you’re a taller guy you can do this from the ground, or else a very low box, like 12”. What I’ve experienced sometimes if you take a 6’4” coach and stand on a 30” box, you are attacking at a height that’s going to encourage the athlete to really reach *up* instead of *across*. So toss and then trying to time your attack to get into that gap between their arms and the tape will encourage them to press across. Cues like “one move across, not up and over,” which I imagine you might already be saying.

2. Going along with this, a little Goldilocks (too cold, too hot, just right) can help bring some awareness. Have them intentionally make 2 moves. Then intentionally scrape their arms along the tape as they come up and over. Then try to do it *almost* scraping their arms but not quite touching the tape. Those kind of cycles.

3. Side-long camera. If you can stand on a ref stand, or, if you're taller, you can just hold your phone up so it looks along the net. Have the player block some balls and then come look. I'll upload a few examples (good and bad) I have lingering in my library so you can see what I'm talking about if you can't imagine it.

4. Pool noodle. If you can set up a ref stand or else this time you want a tall box. What you want to do is hold up a pool noodle about 18-24” above the net (halfway up the antenna or so), parallel to the net. Essentially creating a ceiling. The blocker has to block and end up under the pool noodle. You can do it with elastic too, but sometimes stringing elastic along the net is a little time consuming, whereas if you can just hop up there and hold a pool noodle, it’s pretty easy. You can even do it with a live attacker, if they hit the ball into the pool noodle, all it’s going to do is knock it out of your hand. (If they hit it hard enough, they can break the pool noodle, but that’s actually kinda cool and I’m just fired up for that.)

When I coached at Pepperdine guys we actually even had this little gadget that somebody made that we could slide over both antennas that actually put an elastic slightly on the opponent side of the net, so the guys had to really get way across in order to get under that. But I think you need to start being like 11’6” for that to really be relevant. Even an explosive girl who is at 10’3” will be fine with just an elastic band above the net or holding a pool noodle.

And here’s some of the side-looking video I posted as well:

You can really see there’s almost no space between blocker hands and the tape. Just pure press. Really nice example.

Here’s an example with a couple less physical blockers:

The right-side blocker there is in a pretty static move, but she does a decent job on her press. She’s not that high over the net, but there’s not a lot of space between her and the tape, so she’s in a solid place for a positive touch. The middle blocker is fading off the net and could likely lose the ball between her and the tape.

Here’s a couple more physical blockers who do a good job with a press. Not a lot of space between them and the tape. (They overrun the set buttttt, one thing at a time…)

And finally, here’s an example of a couple blockers working on this.

On the first clip, the middle blocker is a little “up and over” instead of a straight press. So on the second ball she adjust to try to press more across and… nets. This is common and this is why you do some of these blocked reps while you’re trying to make changes. No big deal!

I don’t think you want to overdo it with players watching their own technique. You can risk being a little too internal, over-focusing on the micro movements instead of the vision and feel of the whole play. But a little bit of having some cell phone video that they can do some reps and then come see can pay off in making this change.

A reader who attended a GMS clinic asks:

Hi Joe, I struggle with in-game coaching when it comes to 5-1 and 6-2 rotations. My background is in sand and rec/cyo volleyball with new players. This is my first year in club and I'm coaching a national level team (12u). My roster is heavy with libero/DS type players. Most of the girls started specializing last year. I'm not a big fan of specialization but I understand the pressure. I have 3-4 girls that are super skilled., then here's a fairly big gap in the current skill level between the top of the roster and the bottom, but we're going to close it. So my question: how do a manage a roster this big?

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Well… I’m about to tell you, because I worked up some Win Probability Charts, depending on whether the team was serving or receiving and how much they were winning or losing.

If you’re into these sorts of studies, here’s some others I’ve done:

What attack patterns are most effective?
How effective are the blockers at each position?
How do setting choices affect opponent transition efficiency?
How does Make Them Play correlate to winning?
Does serve location influence where passers pass?
Do setters influence where passers pass?
Should passers consider where the setter is?
MTP Part 2
Not-$7 Study: Coin Flips
Men’s Backrow Attacking

Conditioning Doesn’t Matter

Everything You Wanted To Know About Serve Zones Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 (Sanky Sanny Guest Post)

Alright, below are 5 sets of Win Probability Charts (WPC). The first one considers a sideout environment of 50%. That is: both teams have a 50% chance to win the rally when serving and both teams have a 50% chance to win the rally when receiving. This is a pretty good approximation for lower-level volleyball, up through most high school or club ball. Strong high school varsity teams and strong U16-and-up club ball will play a slightly higher sideout environment, but teams are still higher-error than NCAA teams and service runs are more common. Most club teams will find the 50% charts apply best to their level.

After I present the charts, I end with some potential applications for subbing or calling timeouts.

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You can check Part 1 for the full statistics read-out and my breakdown of the Terminal Serving and 2-2-2 statistics. Now, I want to turn my attention within the rally:

We’re winning 54% of Live Rallies, which is a nice edge, and it’s split evenly between First Ball and Transition (which I’ll show below), which we are both winning a 54/46 split of points. To put that in context, winning 54% of rallies equates to a 25-21. In fact, that’s how I tend to relate this to players. Here’s a feedback chart for an NCAA beach pair:

The point here is that, as coaches, we can dive into the statistics or get deep into things, but we want to try to keep things simple and relatable to players. We need them to be athletes, not mathematicians.

First Ball

We see here that this team is winning 54% of First Ball rallies. If you’ve seen some of my professional/collegiate analysis, which is done in Volleystation, there’s some more details in there. For club ball, I don’t separate out Good/Medium/Bad passing, I just draw a Good/Bad line. So medium generally gets pulled into Good for me in club.

You’ll also notice that I only have FBK and FBE in here, not full efficiency. That’s because I only use a Terminal Contact sheet, not a full statistics program that logs every contact. For this sheet, I only need to make one tally mark per rally, which tells you how the point was won and lost. This gives you the shape of the Triangle as well as many of the sub-details. But you don’t have continue stats such as digs, or attacks that we neither kills nor errors.

In a perfect world, would I have accurately logged individual stats? Sure. But for club ball, I feel like I can get 90% of what I need to actually influence practice just based off the Terminal Contact sheet.

Also, note that FBK here is (First Ball Kills) / (All Receptions). Since we were aced on about 15% of receptions (not outstanding, but not bad for a good-but-subelite U16s team), and then there’s a portion of non-ace receptions where we don’t get an attack, our actual hitting Kill % is more like 30%. (And efficiency in the ballpark of 0.150 or so).

But while this distinction is important for elite level play, I actually like that the raw FBK number rolls all of that in. As I mentioned last week, in U16 club ball, ace prevention is more than just the passer getting aced or not. And there’s lots of tweener passes that could lead to freeballs or could lead to getting a swing. So I like that the FBK number on this sheet includes all of it.

When I talked about Standards-Based Drills, I shared this information:

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I’ve written about Mid-Season Review before. Mid-Season reviews often fit very naturally into a collegiate or pro season. In club ball, I use more of a block-by-block approach, but it’s basically a similar concept. My club team played MLK weekend, as many do. That was our 3rd tournament of they year, and we’ll play 10. From a training block perspective, it marks the completion of the 2nd of 4 “regular” season blocks:

Pre-Season: From Nov 11 through competition (Dec 13-14 in Richmond)

Early Season: From Dec 16 through MLK weekend (Jan 17-19 in Raleigh)

Mid-Season: From Jan 22 through President’s Day weekend (Feb 14-16 in DC)

Late Season: From Feb 19 through March 22 (NEQ in Philly)

After March 22, our focus is beach until early June, where we’ll get back on an indoor focus for a pre-Nationals tournament + Nationals. So depending on how you look at it, we’re either 30% through the season (by indoor tournaments) or 50% through the “regular season.” Either way, it’s a good time to review some things, see where we’re at, and make sure we have our practices dialed in as much as possible for the next few tournaments.

The Triangle

Here’s what our stats look like through 3 tournaments:

And the win-loss results:

So now let’s look at the different pieces of information that I record.

Point/Sideout Differential

We’ve won about 53% of total points or 6% Sideout Differential, depending on which way you want to look it. That leads to a theoretical ~66% chance of winning a 25-point set, which, again, theoretically suggests we should be winning about 73% of matches. So by point differential, we’d expect to win 13 or 14 matches, so we’re kind of right about expected — not getting luckier or unluckier than expected. We are 6-2 in 5-set matches, which could suggest that we’re getting a little lucky there, but we also sub a lot (we have a 13-player roster and every player plays significantly in every set1) which you could argue makes you more prone to go to 3 sets — for example I typically run one lineup combination in Set 1 and a slightly different lineup in Set 2, and then Set 3 will be whoever won. It’s less a “starters and subs” situation, but it’s more of a, “Set 3 is whoever just played best”, so it could be reasonable to expect us to outperform a bit in 3rd sets.

What’s the point of all that information?

1. From a scheduling perspective, if we were 6-13, I might think we scheduled poorly. If we were 3-16, I would definitely be trying to change our tournament divisions. As it is, I think we’re in a good spot. We are a “local Open” or “USA/Premier” level team. We generally enter Open division of tournaments where the field is mostly NC/SC/VA teams, but we’ll play USA division at qualifiers and Premier division at AAUs. So far, this seems about right for us.

2. Are we getting lucky or unlucky? Or perhaps another way to think about it: are winning more/less than our point differential would predict? Again, you could argue that we’re outperforming a bit in 3rd sets, but mostly, we look like we’re about in line. Teams tend to finish a season with a record that matches their point differential, so I might be a little worried if we had the same point differential but were 15-4, for example. On the flip side, if we had this point differential, but were 10-9, I might think that (a) we’re getting a little unlucky, so overall hold the course, but also (b) what are we doing at the end of sets that is making us unable to finish them? (Being a high-error serving team is often a cause for late-set underpeformance in club volleyball, since a lot of of sets are ended by 3 or 4-point runs…. if you miss too much, you can’t get these late-set runs.)

I don’t get too deep into these details from tournament to tournament, but I just try to keep an eye on them a couple times a year. The main message that I take from here is just: “We’re playing at the right level of competition, and we seem to be competing fairly well within that level of competition. Carry-on.”

MTP and 2-2-2

These are my two basic-but-critical stats, especially for juniors-level volleyball. We know that at certain levels of play, attacking efficiency (and just straight up ability to kill the ball) starts to drastically outweigh serve/pass in its effect on the game. And we know that, at certain levels of play, just keeping the ball in play is not enough. What’s fun about coaching this level of good-but-subelite level of 16 year old volleyball is that you’re kind of right in the middle. Teams need to start being able to terminate the ball, but keeping the ball in play is still often a deciding factor in who wins or loses.

So let’s take a look:

Well, there you go. You don’t have a ton of control over your opponent level of MTP. Yes, serving tough does affect your opponent MTP, but your opponent’s general level of ball control has a greater effect. 72% is not bad here; that’s probably pretty typical for this level of play.

The 2-2-2s between us and opponents are pretty equal. We aren’t gaining much ground, we aren’t losing much ground. And therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that the overall Terminal Serving point differential is pretty similar. We are mostly not winning games by serving teams off the court or losing them by getting served off the court.

Also, it’s indicative of our level of play that both us and opponents are solidly above 2 aces per set. In case you missed the 2-2-2 rule, we know that, at the juniors level, if you miss 2 or fewer serves per set, while serving 2 or more aces, and allowing 2 or fewer aces, you’re likely in position to win tournaments and are probably a top team in your age group.

And remember, none of this really matters unless it helps us change how we train. So what are my takeaways?

Serve/pass needs to continue to be a top priority for us in practice. Our Serve-In % is 89%, which isn’t bad at this level. We are getting aced on 15% of receptions, which again, isn’t bad at this level. But I think that if we want to have a great season, rather than a good season, we need to push open an edge in this area of the game. We are a pretty defensively and offensively, but I don’t think we can count on being dominant in either of those areas. If we want to win some matches against teams that are a little more physical than us, we need a Terminal Serving edge.

The stats confirm my eye (this is important, the stats shouldn’t necessarily dictate or prescribe by themselves, they should guide you to what to look at and confirm with your eye) that the biggest upgrade in our serving is consistency and hand contact. We can serve fairly tough. We’re serving enough aces, and our opponents are below 50% Good Pass (and keep in mind that I am using just a Good/Bad scale, not a 3 or 4-point scale, so 2-passes are scored as good on this scale), so we’re getting them in enough trouble.

(If we were at or below 2.0 aces served per set and our opponents were over 50% Good Pass, in the high 70s for MTP, I’d say we need to make some changes to serve tougher. But again, stats are reflecting my eye…)

So I want to dig in and upgrade our serving hand-on-ball contacts. I don’t have great video examples to show, because the club video setup is often pretty close to the court and you usually can’t see server approach and contact. But most of you can probably imagine that contact that comes off a little side of the hand and dies down into the tape rather than being a flat line drive.

If you followed the Jan 12 Office Hours thread, I mentioned that, in a previous tournament we missed an overwhelming proportion of serves in the net, rather than long. I am a fan of short serving, and I was probably a bit too aggressive in asking for that in that tournament. This tournament, I wanted to keep things a bit more balanced and also asked players for a little more air on the serves — we were probably trying to skim the tape a bit too much. Yes, ideally I’d love a nice flat, low trajectory serve, but not at the cost of 15% error. We upgraded that this past tournament, but we have some continued improvement here.

In terms of allowing fewer aces, there’s nothing special here. There’s usually some combination:

1. Individual player passing ability. Can this player track and make good platform contact on a variety of tough serves? How often are you just straight-up shanking balls and/or getting beat on balls dropping in front?

2. Team passing. This includes seam communication and “2nd-ball defense”, that is, the ability to instantly step in and keep a semi-shanked ball in play.

Okay, let’s get into some video examples of 2nd-ball defense here below the paywall.

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