Activation

A 6v6 game to unlock more serving pressure

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been discussing some different serving profiles and how they translate to winning and losing. Since those are looking at large data-sets and translating macro-level team stats to macro-level team Win %s, those posts necessarily have a results focus. There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes as coaches, we want to be more process-focused.

Activation Serving

Activation is a 6v6 constraints-based game designed to unlock some extra serving pressure from your servers. It’s true that games like Aceball and GP Sideout also do this. However, those games are scored based off the result, ignoring how the result was achieved. Mostly, I think that’s good.

However, sometimes getting more micro and drilling down on a particular aspect of serving helps a player level up in that area. And if enough of your individual players level up an aspect of their serving, then your team as a whole will level up in that area.

So, in activation serving, you’ll set a requirement for a certain aspect of the serve. When the ball is served, the coach assigned to measure this aspect either:

1. Yells out “POSSIBLE!”

2. Does nothing

Depending on whether the requirement is met.

The easiest way this can be done is by measuring speed with a radar gun. One coach stands behind a server and clocks the speed and gives a call if the server exceeds the target velocity. Since serving at a high velocity requires both a good contact on the ball and a relatively flat trajectory, activating off speed is a pretty good, dummy-proof way to run this drill.

How The Drill Is Scored

This is best as a 2-way drill where 2 servers are effectively matched up. There’s 4 potential results that can happen when the ball is served:

1. Activation is achieved and serving team wins the rally.

2. Activation is achieved and serving team doesn’t win the rally.

3. Activation is not achieved and serving team wins the really.

4. Activation is not achieved and serving team doesn’t win the rally.

In the case of (1), the serving team gets a Big Point and serves again. In the case of (2) and (4), nobody gets a point, and the serve flips over to the other team. In the case of (3), nobody gets a point but the serving team keeps the serve.

If you have a 12 player roster, you’ll naturally want to play about 6 rounds, because then every server gets a turn in the drill. 5-minute rounds are a pretty good length, which means 6 rounds will take about 30 minutes. At the high school level, serving teams will win more of the rally, and it’s not uncommon to get 3 or 4 big points in a 5-minute round. But at higher levels, 1 or 2 big points is often enough to win.

Activating Off The Radar Gun

In high school or club volleyball, simply getting the gun out and setting a speed threshold of 37mph will do wonders. You’ll likely have a few kids on your team who naturally serve at or above that velocity and a bunch that don’t. For the kids who don’t naturally serve at that pace, this drill can do wonders to help them learn to put more velocity on the ball in a game setting.

Of course, this drill isn’t ideal for a server who is physically incapable of hitting that velocity. But most high school kids are (and certainly just about every collegiate-level server) capable of serving at that velocity, they just get in a comfortable groove of arcing in slower serves.

What About Dropping Serves

Here’s 4 ace serves from the Canadian U18 girl’s National Championship. What’s cool here is, thanks to Balltime’s new feature, you can actually see the velocity of the serves.

(Side note: so far, as I’ve tested this feature out, it seems to work best when the server is on the near side. In certain camera angles, servers at the far side don’t seem to have as an accurate of a speed calculation, which makes sense. So use this feature accordingly.)

What you’ll notice is that a couple of these serves are higher-velocity serves, while a couple are shorter, more dropping serves.

The first thing to know about that is: off-speed serves work best in compliment to higher-velocity serves. That’s a very good U18 team on the other side of the net. If they were playing against a bunch of U13s barely getting the ball over the net, they would just crowd up and easily pass all the shorter, slower serves. It’s the fact that the serve might be served deep that makes the shorter serve more effective.

And it’s not just an issue of anticipation, the more that the two serves resemble each other by following a similar serve tunnel, the better. This means that the first step is being able to drive the serve hard, deep, and flat first. Then, you develop an effective dropper based off that hard + flat tunnel.

I’ve noticed that 5-6mph is about right for the ball to appear the same to the passer. Most high school kids will have trouble consistently getting serves above 40mph to stay in the court, so 38-40mph is a good target for them. This means that 33-34 is about the sweet spot for shorter, dropping serves.

Men’s Volleyball

If you’re clocking spin servers, then it’s both easier and harder for you as a coach. At certain levels of men’s volleyball, serves below 110km/hr just aren’t all that effective. At other levels of collegiate volleyball, a target of 100km/hr (62mph) or 60mph (96km/hr) are more appropriate.

But what you’ll also find is that this doesn’t necessarily adapt as well to individual differences. For example, a high school team might have one bigtime guy who can crank it up to 60mph, a couple kids who can get into the 50s consistently, and then a bunch of guys who have never hit above 52mph in their lives. Setting a target at 55 is going to be silly for most of the team, while setting a target at 48 isn’t going to challenge the 3 best players.

So here’s where you can decide either (a) if you can’t crack a certain velocity in individual drills, you have to float serve in the 6s or (b) have individual velocities. The latter is a little more complicated, but not much so. Have the guys write their target velocity on the whiteboard. Since one server is going to take the full round, it’s not that difficult on the coach who is calling velocity.

Other Activation

Velocity is the easiest way to play Activation, but there’s 3 other qualities you can Activate off of. They are:

1. Flat. Serving a ball at a trajectory that peaks below the top of the antenna.

2. Float. Serving a ball with no spin.

3. Space. Serving a ball that is either shorter/deeper than the reception line and/or in the seams between passers or between a passer and a sideline.

These require more judgement by a coach and can be subject to a bit more arguing from the players. However, hitting the ball flat is arguably the more important quality, as it unlocks that serve tunnel for both deeper driving serves and shorter dropping serves.

Try some of these variations and see which ones unlock some additional serving pressure for your team!