All About Triples

Incorporating Triples Drills Into Your Practice

November is Juniors Month at Smarter Volley. Juniors clubs have been underway in Europe for a little while now, and in North America most boys have already started and girls are just now getting going. Because of that, most of the content this month will be geared around the Juniors game and be directly applicable for Juniors coaches. But, a lot of it will be useful for coaches at other levels, including this one, as well as last week’s post: All About Doubles. Enjoy!

(Reminder if you’re on the East Coast to consider registering for the Offensive Concepts seminar weekend Dec 17-18 in Wilmington, DE.)

What Are Triples Drills?

I define Triples drills as drills where you have a team of three people. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all doubles drills are 3 v 3, and, to twist the term even a bit further, due to practice logistics, you sometimes need to have 4 people on a triples team. Let’s see what that looks like.

Why Triples?

1. Triples drills generally fall under the category of Small-Group Games. Coaches have always used Small-Group Games, in volleyball and other sports, for a variety of reasons: they are fun, players touch the ball frequently, players interact with the ball in slightly different ways, etc. Let’s just assume that Small-Group Games are useful and move on.

2. The back court has 3 people. So Triples drills tend to translate well to passing and defending in a system that looks a lot like your full 6 v 6 system. In this, Triples offer an advantage over Doubles.

3. Triples, while not quite as simple logistically as Doubles, are still pretty flexible and easy to work your team through. Additionally, they lend very well to rotating tournaments. 3 teams of 3 players is 9 and you can add Supporting Cast (see below) if you have more than 9 players on the team. These 3 teams of 3 can rotate in a simple way to play a 3-round tournament that gives you an individual winner to the tournament, which can be fun.

Sample 3 x 3 tournament for a team with 6 pins and 3 middles. In this example, you would fix your setters/liberos into a Supporting Cast.

Types Of Triples Drills

I want to make this less about any one specific drill and more about different classifications of triples drills to allow you to mix-and-match them as you see fit.

Full-Court Triples

Pretty simple. Throw some kids in a gym and there’s a good chance they’ll start playing some full-court 3 v 3. You can go full serve or enter with downballs. You can go Queens, Doghouse, or Speedball style.

Full-Court Triples works a bit better than Full-Court Doubles, because, even with 12 players, you only have 2 teams waiting, rather than 4.

Full-Court Triples With Supporting Cast

Here we have possibly the most common drill in the history of Juniors volleyball, at least in the United States. Full-Court Triples with setters at the net. Hit out of the back court with the setters blocking or not blocking. Simple, you get good serving/passing/digging reps, etc.

See last week’s Doubles article for more information on what I mean by Supporting Cast if you’re not familiar with that concept. But you can see with the Triples variations how useful the Supporting Cast concept is to adapt a Triples drill to your number of players. If you only have 9, maybe you run a straight Full-Court Triples. Or, Doubles-that-looks-like-Triples with fixed liberos and a setter on the receiving side.

If you have 10, you can run Triples with just a setter on receiving side. If you have 11 you can run Triples with two fixed setters, who can also alternate when the receiving team setter doesn’t side out. And on and on.

Single or Combination-Skill Circuits

Triples doesn’t lend itself quite as well as Doubles to Single-Skill Circuits, but there’s plenty of variations that work well. Here’s a variation with a left-side passer/hitter and a middle-back passer. The 1s and 2s can cycle through middle-back receiver → left-side passer/hitter → off while the 3s enter serves. After say 5 minutes, the groups can cycle. In 3 rounds they’ll have 2 rounds of pass-to-attack (1 off each setter) and 1 round of entering fill serves. Enter serves with a slight offset so setters can block and you don’t nail each other in the head while you’re trying to hit.

Partial-Court Variations

A previously-mentioned upside to Full-Court Triples is that a 3-person back court replicates the back court in a full 6s game. This can also be a downside though, because it means you’re digging in the back court and attacking in the front court, which, while not necessarily harmful, doesn’t replicate the most common Transition demands of the game. Also, 3-person back courts in a Triples game means there’s no block.

What you can do in these situations is to run Partial-Court Triples. One example is a Crosscourt Triples game where the outside attacker has to attack into zones 4 or 5 with the setter blocking in right front. Partial-Court Triples are great when you only have 9 or 10 players and are prevented from running all of your full 6 v 6 variations. You can use Partial-Court Triples or 4s variations to isolate specific areas of the game to work on, without needing 12 players.

Incorporating Into Practice

I like using Triples in one of two ways:

1. Start with a Doubles variation that has more of an individual focus (like 4-Ball Passing) and then progress to a Triples where receivers have to pass next to each other. In this way, the Doubles allows you to focus more on the Mechanics while Triples lets you coach up the Organization more.

2. Start with Triples and build from Single-Skill to Competitive, and then go to 6s from there. I might even use something like Exchange as a full-court warmup, and then go to something like the Triples PSH above and then go into Crosscourt 3s as a competitive drill.

Again, similar to Doubles, I’m looking to do about 3 drills over the course of the first 45 minutes and accomplish three things:

1. Warm the players up. They should be sweating, they should be verbal, and they should have had some competitive moments before you get into your main 6 v 6 phase of practice.

2. At least one phase where we can focus on something technical. Triples variations gives you the chance to work a full 3-person reception or defensive alignment, so there’s a good chance you’re going to dedicate one of those 15-minute portions to teaching that phase of the game.

3. Compete. Triples naturally lend to that, although I like to skew toward something where there’s attacking and blocking at the net, like in Crosscourt Triples, or 20’ Triples.

Give some of this a try at your next practice! Do you have any other Triples variations that you like? Drop them in the comments.