5-Play Friday: Setting

Why is everybody teaching setting wrong?

I haven’t done a 5-Play Friday in a while. Here’s a few previous editions:

5-Play Friday: Men’s VNL
5-Play Friday: Beach Week
5-Play Friday: Beach Week #2

I thought this topic was relevant to the discussion of How We Learn To Move. Inherent in the How is also the What. How do we best teach and what sort of movements should we teach.

A couple friends of mine were talking setting and here’s the gist of the conversation:

Why does (almost) everybody in the US teach players to set with a left-right finish footwork when (almost) all of the best men’s setters in the world set (a lot of the time) with a right-left finish?

Here’s the fantastic Coach Donny getting 1.5M views with a very good setting fundamentals video.

Here’s the great Jimmy Mac at a GMS clinic teaching right-left-right.

Here’s Art of Coaching:

Here’s Sports Performance featuring a young Lauren Carlini:

There’s some variation there. Some of the coaches are a little more like, “you have to finish left-right every time,” and some of the coaches are a little more like, “ideally you finish left-right but sometimes you’ll have to make some other moves,” but none of them say, “we want to finish right-left.”

And yet…

Janusz