5-Play Friday - Setting

Some non-traditional footwork patterns

I shared my appearance on Dan Meske’s Out-of-Rotation podcast in my May Media Wrap post. We talked a bit about setting; where do you start with young setters and what do setters look like as they progress. I’ve touched on this in a previous 5-Play Friday, but you can’t help but notice that every video you find on “how to teach setting” (at least, to an American audience) is based around this left-right footwork, yet a huge proportion of a high-level setter’s toolkit is not that standard footwork.

I think its a mistake to say that high-level setter’s don’t use left-right footwork. They do, and there’s an example below. My view on it is: that footwork is a tool, but it shouldn’t be your only tool. I’ve been watching the ongoing VNL and here’s 5 plays from the Italy-Brazil women’s match and Argentina-France men’s match.

As always, feel free to use and share these gifs with your players as demo videos and as always a reminder that the gif-heavy posts sometimes play better in your browser than your email client.

Right-Left behind and around

Here’s that right-left jump-set footwork that many top setters use a lot. The situation here is a Rotation-4 release where Orro, as often happens, isn’t quite across the midline of the court. So she needs to get a little behind and around the ball to square back up. This footwork lends itself well to doing so in this situation.

Left-Right lowering your level going forward

Now here’s a situation where that left-right pattern works well. What I like here is that, instead of reaching out to the ball (as many inexperienced setters do), she takes a big draggy lunge step and lowers her hips. This allows her to still maintain a good contact point and touch on the ball as she moves forward. A lot of novice setters reach out, their contact point gets forward and flat and they shoot this set wide of the antenna.

Right-Left “Pop Pivot”