Another Week Of Practices

Plus some outside hitter footwork discussion

Okay let’s keep the Club Season discussion going. We’re focusing on building out a pre-season training block targeted at juniors volleyball. In case you missed the previous articles:d

Getting Started
The First 12 Practices
Getting Into It
Practice #3

In this post, I’ll share practices #4 and #5 in this training block for everybody and then I’ll put some additional clips and discussion of outside hitter footwork behind the paywall for the premium subscribers. (Note: the premium stuff is a bit gif-heavy so it might play better on your browser than within your email if you want to see the videos clearly.)

The Second Mini-Cycle

By now, you’ve probably noticed an overall trend to how I lay out these practices. As an overall theme, 2-out-of-3 practices focus more on Serve-Pass and Sideout and 1-out-of-3 focus on Defense/Transition.

I think that’s a pretty good ratio. It’s not that Sideout is necessarily a bigger factor than Transition. But when we look at the data, we see that there is a trend over the course of club volleyball: at younger levels teams kill more balls in transition and, as the level gets higher, the share shifts more toward First Ball Kill.

In fact, I’m sure some of you have seen U-15 teams that (unintentionally) employ a strategy of, “just get the ball back over the net and hope to get a freeball back that we can actually kill.” Pass-Set-Attack is really difficult for young teams and it takes a lot of training time to get good at it.

So I tend to batch these practices in groups of 3. 2 practices that focus on Sideout and 1 that focuses on Transition. This tends to work well whether you practice twice a week or three times per week; you’ll just get through the cycle at a different pace. We’ve been through the first 3 practices, so now let’s look at practice #4 and #5.

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Practice 4
10’ - Self-Toss Spiking
- Double-arm lift emphasis
10’ - 4-Ball Passing
- Goldilocks Posture (Stance depth)
10’ - Doubles
- Narrow-court, full-length, with antennas
25’ - 2-Way Hitting
- Pass-or-Don’t Pass
20’ - 1-Way Sideout
- 2nd Ball bowl to outside attack to pass-to-attack
45’ - 6v6
- 4 rounds of 21-22 FBK.
- Use extra time for Last Ball Bounce 6v6 (fast-paced)

Practice 5
10’ - Self-Toss Spiking
- Goldilocks the tosses (too far/too close/just right)
10’ - 4-Ball Passing
- Too high/too low/just right
10’ - Doubles
- Narrow-court, full-length, with antennas
25’ - 2-Way Hitting
- Pass-to-Attack Footwork emphasis for outsides
20’ - 1-Way Sideout
- 2nd Ball bowl to outside attack to pass-to-attack
45’ - 6v6
- 4 rounds of 21-22 FBK.
- Use extra time for Last Ball Bounce 6v6 (fast-paced)

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If you notice, I use more explicit, technical focuses in the first practice of the mini-cycle and I plan out more of an implicit, outcome-oriented focus in the second practice of the mini-cycle. I can and do individualize these at times; some players to repeat a focus or they are stuck on something other than you have planned. But I like to have a default focus for each drill so I don’t get stuck totally freestyling it.

2-Way Hitting

You’ll notice that I use 2-Way Hitting as a primary way to teach Pass-to-Attack footwork. Here’s what it looks like.