2024-2025 Triangle Primer Part 2

Connecting to planning

If you are not familiar with The Triangle concept, check out Part 1 from earlier this week so you’re familiar with the terminology I use here.

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I’m a numbers guy. I always have been. When I was a young kid, I used to keep notebooks filled with imaginary rosters of football, basketball, and baseball teams. Like many kids, I would toss a ball around in my room and pretend I was catching a touchdown or shooting a 3-pointer. Unlike most kids, I used to write down which shots I pretended to make and miss and track the performance of my imaginary players. I filled dozens of notebooks in my room. My parents figured I’d either become a mathematician or a serial killer.

When I was 12 years old, my 19 year-old brother and his friends started a fantasy football dynasty league¹. They needed another $50 entry fee team so they let me join. I showed up to the draft in a suit and tie I borrowed from my dad. Several years later I became one of the top-ranked Whatifsports players in the world. Whatifsports is like fantasy football except the games are just computer simulation. So instead of pretending to have real players on your team you pretend to have pretend players on your team. Let’s just say I didn’t bring that one up on dates.

Fortunately, a few more years later and I discovered DataVolley and found out that, in 2012 many high-level volleyball programs, including the USA National team, had need of people who both knew volleyball and were oddly soothed by typing lots of numbers into spreadsheets. A few years later I was spiking balls in on Olympic court.

Sure it was in between scouting matches, but hey, I’ll take it. And in case you doubt the power of stats, see if you recognize then-stat-guy-future-PAC-12-COY with the sweet hands dishing me the ball.

But… not everybody is a stats guy. Many people know my parents were coaches and I grew up in the gym. So then people assume my dad must be like me, a number-crunching egghead. Nope. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. In many ways, my dad and I are polar opposite personalities. He was always a charismatic salesman type who thrived on creating incredible team cultures on his underdog, small-town club teams and small-school high school program.

But if you think about it, it’s natural that some of my earliest coaching experience was shaped by being a complementary assistant to my dad. He was an effort and culture guy, never too big on the technical nuances of the skill. That gave me space to learn and experiment and dive into those details. And he was never a stats guy. And in fact, that’s what would end up giving birth to The Triangle system.

What To Do With All That Data

I can remember going through all the video from a tournament and presenting my dad with a multi-page stats report and him being like, “okay great… so what do we need to focus on at practice this week?” The system that I created back then wasn’t exactly what I do now, but the roots of the Triangle were established almost 20 years ago from trying to answer that question from my dad. The reason I use this system is that it makes answering that question pretty easy.

First, you need Practice Templates. Let’s take a basic template that I’ve posted before:

10’ - Self-Toss
10’ - 4-Ball Passing
10’ - Doubles
30’ - 2-Way Hitting
60’ - 6v6 (Aceball, FBK, etc)

This practice template is well-suited for Sideout, which is the First Ball aspect of the game. Everything but Self-Toss involves a serve and pass and there’s a lot of attacking out of serve receive, which also means that there’s blocking and defending out of serve receive. There’s no next-balls, which means that there’s less transition emphasis. There’s quite a bit of serving and passing, but there’s only 10 minutes of passing-only and no specific serving.

I like to think of this practice template as my base case. Outside of elite levels where you are managing a bigger roster on multiple courts, I could run nothing but this practice for the rest of my days and coach effectively. But… we can tweak some things to change the emphasis.

Terminal Serving

Let’s say we run our Triangle numbers and we see that Terminal Serving is lagging. What do we do? Maybe instead of Self-Toss, you just do some OTM or Elastic serving.

Maybe instead of allocating all of that time to 2-Way Hitting, maybe move some or all of it a specific serve/pass drill with multiple passers. Or maybe you still do 2-Way Hitting, but instead of coaching the hitting, you coach the servers and passers and let the setting/hitting be autonomous for that practice. Or maybe you switch to a 1-Way PSH with your full 6-person reception before you go to 6s.

And then we play 6s, we’re probably playing something like Aceball (which emphasizes serving and preventing aces) rather than FBK (which is more of an attack-oriented game).

You might have different drills you like to run to emphasize Terminal Serving, but the point is that you’re now going to evolve into a template with the drills you like that focus on (1) serving in, (2) serving aces (you can combine these two into “serving good” and (3) preventing aces. Now you have that template.

Transition