Back-to-Back

Simple upgrade for help blocking

This week we’re looking at picking up some Break Points when the other team is In-System:

Break Points Pt1: In-System

If we want to slow down our opponents when they are In-System, we have to have some ability to defend the quick. Life would be nice if they ran their quicks right at your middle blocker¹ and your middle blockers were good enough to shut them down 1-on-1 from a read. Unfortunately, it’s usually not that easy, so one of two things generally need to happen:

1. Your middles need to front or commit.

2. Your wing blockers need to help.

I don’t love my middle blockers fronting and commiting, because I favor a philosophy of touch the quick, stuff the pins. Once your middle blocker starts chasing their middle hitters around the court, you’re asking them to be 1-on-1 on the pins all match. Even worse, you’re going to start following their middle hitters even when they can’t get set, and now you have crappy blocks against their Semi and Out-of-System swings, which is when the odds could turn in your favor.

So, we like help blocking rather than fronting.

The Low Triangle

The biggest danger when you help block is letting the hitter score in the Low Triangle. Reference the anatomically-scaled drawing below:

The advantage to front is that you are uh… in front of the spiker. When you are help blocking, the hitter is often in a gap between two blockers. As the blockers reach to help, there’s sort of a triangle of space that appears for the blocker to score.

If they hit High Triangle. Okay, good job by them. Hitting high and hard on a middle quick is probably going to score regardless of your tactics. It’s also hard to do. Even at the highest level, quite a few middle attacks cross the net fairly low.

So here’s the deal. If they bomb high and hard, we’ll just get back in serve receive and move on. But we can’t let them score Low Triangle. And this happens quite a bit. As humans, we like to face danger. The hitter is dangerous. So there’s a tendency for the help blocker to stay square to the hitter rather than the net. This causes the low triangle to open up and allows space for that ball to get through. It happens to even the best teams:

This still from the tv feed shows this play as the ball is crossing the net. The middle blocker is facing the hitter a bit, so his right hand is peeling off, and the right side blocker, who started to swing block on the outside and tried to come back in, has allowed his left hand to come way off the net.

And this is the advantage of a world-class setter, of course. He sneaks the ball in there and the blockers are a bit twisted-up and now a little slapper can trickle down the front of the blockers for a point.

So how do we prevent that? Let’s see below.

Usually my Wednesday articles, which are a mix of Drills, Technical Keys, and Philosophy or other random bits of coaching thought are free. But I spent a lot of time on this one and it has a lot of content! So I’m putting the rest behind the paywall. I think I put enough of it for my free subscribers to get some value from it, and the good people Premo Subscribers get to see the rest. Seems fair to me.