Bang For The Buck Part 1
The geometry of maximizing reps
Winter is here. That means club volleyball season is here for juniors volleyball coaches in the USA. Therefore, much of my content is tailored for club coaches. In the past, these have been some of my most popular posts. Check out this summary post which has links to last year’s Club Winter posts.
If you’re not a club coach, don’t worry! Although this article series is tailored for club coaches, the topics apply more broadly, to coaches at any level. I think you’ll still find some insights in here.
Webinar Info: On Monday, January 13 I’ll be releasing my January webinar. The topic is “First Tournament Prep.” For many coaches, the MLK Weekend is either the first tournament or first major tournament. I’ll talk strategies you can use to prepare for, and succeed within, your first big tournament of the club season. This webinar is only for Premium Subscribers, so make the jump today!
The primary challenge of club volleyball is that you don’t get enough practice time. Professional teams get too much practice time; you have to consciously limit reps to not wear down your players. University/school teams get plenty of practice time in a day, but not enough days before the season starts. But juniors club volleyball is a unique challenge in that the season is plenty long enough, but a given practice is often painfully short for what you want to get done. Therefore, we’re highly interested in maximizing the efficiency of a given practice.
In November, the Don’t Plan To Fail article series focused on practice planning, starting with a macro-level season plan and working down to an individual practice template. This article series will focus on practice execution- how to take a given practice template and get the most out of it. In order to do that, we need to:
Maximize Reps
Maximize Feedback
Maximize Engagement
I’ll add the links to additional articles in this series as I publish them:
Part 2 - Maximizing Feedback
Part 3 - Maximizing Engagement
Maximizing Reps
The importance of repetition is among the most cliched aspect of training for anything. Whether “practice makes perfect” or “practice makes permanent” or “perfect practice makes perfect” is apparently a matter of debate, but everybody accepts that you don’t usually get good at something without doing it a bunch of times. In someways, rep-maximization is the simplest of the 3 elements this article series will discuss, but the challenge of maximizing reps for a volleyball team of 10-12 players on 1 court is not just a matter of effort but also a geometry challenge.
Why I (Almost) Never Do Queen Of The Court
In my estimation, Queen of the Court is the most popular volleyball drill among American high school-aged teams. Many teams pepper when they first get on the court, but a near-equal amount will, without prompting, get some backrow 3v3-type game going on if left to their own devices. And generally speaking, if you’re running a camp and the kids are in a bit of a slump and you say, “okay, let’s go Queen of the Court!” you’ll usually get a positive reaction.
The only problem is that, as a training drill, Queen of the Court kind of sucks.
Sure, Queen of the Court is better than many things coaches do at practice. Believe me, it’s far from the worst drill that’s being done in volleyball practices around the world right now. But, at certain levels of volleyball, Queen of the Court does not either (a) optimally prepare players for situations as they present in the match or (b) meaningfully increase repetitions.
Most people accept that (a) is true, at least to an extent. Mostly because you either only hit out of the backrow (the least common attack type in high school volleyball) or, if you do set players in the frontrow, they hit against no block. For that, and a few other reasons, the transfer to game situations isn’t ideal. (There’s still plenty of value in sometimes doing things that are different than game situations in order to create affordances for new solutions to occur, but that’s another topic for another article…)
However, there seems to be an implicit idea that small-sided games increase reps for players. Indeed, in my beloved GMS Coaching Manual, we list small-sided games as one of the ways to increase reps, with the excerpt:
Small groups. It is true that a certain amount of practice should include six-on-six game-like drills, but when your players are playing six-on-six the number of chances they have to play the ball is diminished. It makes sense to schedule a number of small-group games, like doubles or triples. Generally, if a team of twelve players is divided into three games of doubles, they will play the ball three times as often as when they are playing six on six.
The problem is: this isn’t true.
It would be true if you spread those doubles games out to multiple courts, but if you’re fixed on one court, the total number of reps is going to be about the same per player if you play doubles, triples, or sixes. It’s true that the players on the court in triples get twice the number of contacts as the players on the court in sixes and the players on the court in doubles get three times the number of contacts as the players on the court in sixes. However, you have to consider the players at the practice, not just the players on the the court.
If a team has 12 players, 100% of them participate in a game of 6v6, while only 50% participate in a 3v3 game and only 33% participate in a 2v2 game. This means that all gains in repetition within-game are canceled about by the amount that a player has to sit out before getting back on the court.
If you don’t believe me, count it up, pick a given player and play Queen of the Court for 10 minutes and count the number of times they touch the ball. Then play 6v6 for 10 minutes and count the number of times they touch the ball. It will likely be about the same.
This is why Queen of the Court, from a pure maximize-gamelike-reps standpoint, fails the test. You get the same amount of reps but in a less gamelike setting. Not ideal.
Enter: Split-Court Doubles
If you’ve ever done a camp or clinic with me, you know I love me some Split-Court Doubles. There’s a bunch of different ways to run split-court setups (and I discuss some of them here), but the general idea is that you’re going to split your 1 court into 2 narrow-width courts and double the reps.
Now we see that the math is working in our favor. Doubles players get 3x the reps but only participate 1/3 the time. But now we double the number of courts. And test it out. Run Queens for 10 minutes, pick a player, and count her touches. Then run Split-Court Doubles for 10 minutes, pick a player, and count her touches. You’ll find that it’s likely about twice as many in doubles.
Which leads to a critical insight for this practice math: it’s not the number of players in the drill, it’s the number of balls!
Ball Math
If you want to increase the number of reps you get in practice, you have to solve a simple problem: how do I get more balls in play at the same time? College/pro coaches solve this by running drills on multiple courts. Run serve/pass on 2 courts and you are basically doing a split-court 2-ball drill with more space. Run position tutors on 3 courts and you are doing a “3-ball” drill with more space.
Optimize your practice construction for balls in play and you’ll maximize repetition.
Since 1 court halved is 2 and 2 courts halved is 4, the primary way I think about this is:
1-Ball Drills
2-Ball Drills
4-Ball Drills
However, there’s some setups that I would call “1.5-Ball Drills” and “3-Ball Drills” as well. Here’s some examples of what I mean
4 Balls
The main 4-Ball Setup that I do is 4-Ball Passing. I think it’s really the only 4-Ball drill that you can do on a standard-sized court, because two servers can serve at the same time (we’re talking standing or jump float serves here) without fear of injury but two hitters cannot hit in the same direction at the same time. Barring something funky, this is really the only way to have 4 balls actively being contacted by players at the same time.
I’ve seen some programs be able to rig up “side nets” by extending a rope to a wall and playing additional narrow-court doubles games on the sides of their main court. In this case, you’re getting 4-ball effect in a doubles game.
Adding Itsy-Bitsys to players when they come off in a split-court doubles setup can add 3rd or 4th balls to the mix, but those reps are pretty far down the transfer chain. I hesitate to call them true reps.
2 Balls
Any drill where the court is split length-wise into 2 courts creates a 2-Ball effect where 2 balls can be in the air at once. 2-Ball drills that I use include:
Doubles1
Jamball
Tug-of-War
Any other funky variation as long as it’s played on a split court.
Pure split-court hitting, where both hitters attack the same way, is also a 2-Ball drill.
2-Way hitting, as I run it so often in my clinics (and practices), is not a true 2-Ball drill. You can’t put the next ball in until just after the first ball is attacked. But you do get that entry in faster than a pure 1-Ball drill. Because of this, I call it a “1.5-Ball” drill. See below.
3 Balls
Sometimes I run hybrid variations of 4-Ball Passing here half of the court (split length-wise) is made up of 2 pairs of serve/passers and the other half (length-wise) could be a setter setting an attacker. It’s a little awkward and funky, but it can be a way to do some setter/hitter tutoring while getting a bunch of passing reps in. You can also tutor a blocker this way.
Self-Toss Attacking is also a 3-Ball setup. You can have left/middle/right lines and generally hit about 3 balls at once. As players get bigger and more powerful, they won’t like to hit right next to each other with all 3 at once, but that’s okay. The pace is still about a “3-Ball” pace. Therefore, Self-Toss Attacking is generally the most rep-maximizing attacking drill you can do. Each rep is less valuable than a 2-Way Hitting rep and much less valuable than getting set in 6v6, but I think Self-Toss Attacking clears the minimum bar for some productive transfer and thus is worth doing.
1.5 Balls And Other Ball Math
I call 2-Way Hitting a 1.5-Ball drill because, while you can’t get both balls in the air at once, you can get the next entry in very quickly, thus running significantly faster than the pace of a 1-way drill.
Approximate Pace Of Entries
2/min - 6v6 drills entered with a serve
3/min - 6v6 drills with an extra entry (like Serve/Bounce, 1 + 1 Wash, etc)
3/min - 1-Way Sideout Hitting (ie, attacking against a block-only, no digging)
3/min - Queens and other small-sided drills
4/min - Transition 4s
4/min - Speedball-style Queens
6/min - 2-Way Hitting
6/min - Doubles (each individual game plays about 3/min)
8/min - Doubles if you play Speedball-style
12-24/min - Self-Toss Attacking
24/min - 4-Ball Passing
The single-contact drills like Self-Toss and 4-Ball Passing2 warp the rep counts a bit, but you get what I mean.
Any drill where the next entry is already waiting with a ball gets about a 50% boost in speed. So remember, Queens kind of sucks because it’s less gamelike and it really doesn’t play much faster than 6v6. And the reasons it plays faster is because it’s a higher-error game (again, count up your service errors, attack errors, etc next time you play Queens and compare to when you play 6v6), which isn’t a great endorsement. However, if you play Speedball style, which has the rules of “if you win, you stay and receive, and if you lose, you rotate and serve,” and also, “a server is waiting with a ball,” then you get the next serve in a few seconds quicker, which takes the pace of play from about 3/min to about 4/min.
The same effect exists for 2-Way hitting. When I get a group running it properly, each hitter’s 3 (sometimes 4)-rep round lasts about 1 minute and 2 hitters go at once, which means you get about 6 reps/min.
So look over your practice template and examine (a) your court geometry and (b) how the next-balls are going to be entered. Time your pace of entries and how many rallies/contacts you’re actually getting in certain drills. If you have a drill that isn’t 6v6, you better be getting a meaningful increase in contacts out of it. Otherwise, just play 6v6!
Because I so often play narrow doubles and so rarely play full-court doubles, narrow/split-court doubles just gets to be called doubles.
Okay technically 2 contacts. You get what I mean.