Aceball

Yesterday, we discussed the concept of Terminal Serves. As a quick review, a Terminal Serve is an ace or a service error by either team. Our Terminal Serve points are our aces plus the opponent service errors. Our opponent Terminal Serve points are their aces plus our service errors.

Terminal serves are about 15% of points at the NCAA level and between 25-35% at the high school level. We saw that a team that wins this game-within-the-game wins nearly 70% of the time. So this is important stuff.

A favorite drill of mine that draws attention to this aspect is Aceball.

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Reminder: On Wednesday, Dec 8 I’m doing an online workshop with the one and only Riley Salmon. We’re going to talk Serving and Passing (aka, the stuff the makes Terminal Serving happen) and break down some video. We’ll also do some live Q&A and open it up to Smarter Volley subscribers. I want to keep the session small enough for everybody to participate and get the chance to ask questions and interact. There’s just 3 spots left for this session; comment on this post to claim your spot. No cost! The session is at noon PT, 3pm ET. I’ll put the video up later this week.

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What Is Aceball?

Aceball is simple: you play normal volleyball and you can only score an ace. If the serve is not an ace, both teams keep going, but you’re then only playing for the right to get the serve… and have the chance to serve an ace. This makes Aceball less of a specific drill and more of a scoring modifier to other drills.

You can play Aceball as a 2-way drill or a 1-way drill. The simplest way to play is as a 2-way drill for time. Divide into two even teams and play 6v6. There will be three possible rally results:

1. Serving team serves an ace. Great! (Well… for them, at least.) They get a point and keep the serve.

2. Serving team does not serve an ace, but they win the rally in some way. They don’t get a point, but they keep their serve.

3. Receiving team wins the rally. They don’t get a point, but now they get the chance to serve for an ace and earn a point that way.

What To Do About Missed Serves?

Servers tend to be higher-error in Aceball than some other games, because the game forces you to be more aggressive. I also like the offense to have to earn the point. Because of these two factors, I recommend replacing a missed serve. You can have a coach give a freeball to the receiving team, or have the next server just pop in a controlled standing serve.

What’s An Ace?

It sounds obvious, but when you get a competitive game of Aceball going, your team is going to want to know some specifics. The first thing I like to see is my team actually arguing their case. As a general principle, I don’t want to be the only ref in the gym. Players must be their own advocates. And a great effect of aceball is that players start putting out a little extra effort to save an ace. Maybe it’s a backcourt player stepping in and trying to pancake a ball before it hits the floor or a setter try to jump and save a ball before it goes into the antenna.

What eventually starts happening is that a player will barely get a second touch but the ball is never truly controlled and both teams will argue over it. My criteria then becomes, “3 touches, or getting the ball over the net makes it not an ace.” So if the ball is passed into the net and the setter gets a touch but nobody can get a third touch, I still call that an ace.

1-Way Variation

Aceball offers some good options if you want to go 1-way. In this case, you need an idea of how often teams get aced and how often teams sideout at your level. At certain higher levels of play, the ace % will be about 10% and the sideout % will be about 60%. So the receiving team might get 6 points for every 1 ace the serving team scores. But for many younger teams, like a JV high school team, the ace % will be 20% or more and the sideout % will be closer to 40%. So the receiving team might only get 2 points for every 1 ace the serving team scores.

For a HS varsity coach, a good balance is to start with the receiving team down 22-24 (or 19-23) with the rule that the serving team can win by 1 but the receiving team must win by 2. If you find the receiving team consistently winning, have them start down 21-24 or 18-23 and adjust the scoring to keep it competitive.

Who Serves?

There’s a few ways to do it. If we’re playing 2-way, I like to split into 2 teams and play 6 rounds for time. 3 minutes is a good amount of time. That makes for about 20 minutes, at which point you can either play a different 6v6 game or switch teams and play a second group of 6 rounds. And I have the same server serve for the whole round. So if you are playing 2-way and have 12 players on the team, everybody gets a round to serve. Modify if you have more than 12, etc.

If you are playing 1-way, a competitive 19-23 round takes about 3 minutes to play, so 6 rounds again works well. In this case, I’ll have 2 servers team up to share the round, and 6 rounds will hit every server. Add a 7th round if you have 14, etc.

The core concept is to give a server the full round. At lower levels, any server is a threat to serve an ace. But as your team gets a bit better, what you’ll find is that certain servers just can’t serve for an ace. This isn’t mean to be defeating for that server. What you’re hoping for is that they start changing their serve. Maybe they hit it flatter, maybe they try some different spots. The motor learning geeks would say that we’re trying to increase affordances.

And on the other hand, you’ll find certain servers will win easily. In that sense, 1-way Aceball can almost act like a “leveling up,” game, especially if you have a clear starting team and a clear second team. Maybe your starters can win a 18-23 Aceball game against the second team, but can they win when the best server from your starting lineup goes over to the serving team? Can they win against your tough-serving assistant coach?

Teaching A Lesson

This isn’t quite Aceball, but a variation I used when I coached high school boys was helpful for them to understand the importance of ball control. The game was simple: I served from one side and they played 6v0. But they had to hit the ball. Tips and freeballs didn’t count. So all they had to do was pass the serve and hit the ball in the court.

In the beginning, they struggled to beat me, even if I wasn’t serving my absolute toughest. They might get aced a couple times, have a couple miscommunications, and then when they got a set up, they’d swing for the fences and hurt the bleachers. And just like that, I’d be up 8-4, just by serving the ball in the court. In time, they learned to communicate, the keep the ball off the floor, and when to swing hard and when to swing 80% and keep the ball in.

For some high school boys who will take 10 swings in the net but remember the one that they bounced straight down, this was a good teaching tool! (We also didn’t have enough boys to play full 6v6 or even 5v5, so I had to think of creative variations.)

Small Groups

Aceball is good to play as a variation on 3v3 or 4v4 games. With fewer players on the court to track down errant passes or pick a ball out of the net, there are more demands on the passers and more demands on communication. 3v3 or 4v4 also tends to have players in serve receive who aren’t typically primary passers, so they will get aced more. Aceball isn’t a good format for workup or wave formats (like Queen of the Court) because it takes an unpredictable amount of time to score a point.

On The Beach

Aceball is a great variation for beach volleyball. Simply not getting aced is both a huge task and an influential factor in winning. And a missed serve seems to be less costly (as it relates to winning %) in beach volleyball. So many beach teams play a very tactical, “serve it in and block and defend,” style of defense. Playing Aceball can snap you out of that and get your players thinking in some different ways from the service line.

Low Level Teams

I don’t love Aceball for low level teams. If I’m coaching a U-13 team who only serves in at 75%, and our passers get aced on 20% of serves (these are typical numbers for U-13 volleyball), then I don’t play Aceball. These teams don’t need to increase the number of Terminal Serves to raise their level of play, they need to decrease them. In this case, I choose other variations.

Future Content

Tomorrow I’m doing the small-group session with Riley Salmon. (Reminder, last chance to comment on this post to claim a spot!) I’ll have that video up at the end of the week and I’ll also post an analysis from this current NCAA tournament, breaking down a match where Terminal Serving made a signficant impact on the outcome of the match.