Beach Week: "3 More" From NCAA Nationals

This week is Beach Week at Smarter Volley. I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the fourth week to the beach game. If you are purely here for indoor volleyball, you might want to skip this one.

The theme of these Beach Weeks has been Winter Wrap-Up. Each week I’ve taken a look at 1 of 3 major championships: FIVB Men’s World Championships, FIVB Women’s World Championships, and the NCAA National Championship. In particular, I’m looking at what the Triangle relationships were in these different competitions and seeing if we can draw any trends.

Earlier this week, we dove into the Triangle breakdowns for the 2022 NCAA Beach National Championships.

Beach Week: NCAA Championship Triangles

Now let’s dive a little deeper into a few things and look at some clips as well. Here’s 3 More Takeaways + 3 Plays I Loved from NCAA Beach Nationals.

The takeaways are free and the play clips are behind the paywall. Thanks to everybody who is a Premium Subscriber!

Takeaway 1: Two Sources Of Transition Success

This is more of a qualitative opinion, but I started to see it as I was watching the matches to stat them. Broadly speaking, Transition is really important. 2/3 of the time the winning team won the Transition battle. This was the single biggest side of the Triangle, when measured that way.

Okay, so we know the numbers, but how about what the eye test tells us?

Here’s two broad archetypes that stand out to me:

(1) The Serve And Dig Transition Team. This team uses tough serving to give themselves the chance to dig and win transition rallies. Very often, this sort of team has a blocker who is a good digger who is looking to pull. Or, it might be a team that switch blocks, so both players are more of defenders who do some blocking.

These teams tend to be good in the Terminal Serving game, but they might be a little higher-error than other teams, because they are serving tough and looking for knockouts. This team thrives on keeping their opponents off the net.

(2) The “Good Zeroes” Team. This team is more offensive and they exert their influence in Transition when they are receiving. So even if they get stopped in First Ball, their opponent digs are often low-quality and they get the ball back and kill it in Transition.

These two teams are not necessarily mutually exclusive and the best teams can do both of these. But, as you are working with your teams, does it seem like any of them fit into either one of these categories? Does it seem like any of them have the capability to develop into one of these archetypes?

Takeaway 2: Pulling Digs Are At Least As Important As Blocks

There’s just not that many blocks in NCAA volleyball. Certainly, this is team-dependent, and there’s a non-trivial number of successful 4s and 5s teams that can be described as, “big indoor transfer who is a little awkward on the sand paired with a little ball control beach-savvy player.”

For those teams, blocking is probably necessary for success, or at least it’s a chance for them to gain an advantage in a few situations.

However, you’re looking at 1.3 or 1.4 blocks per set. And winning teams didn’t block more balls than losing teams. Compare this to FIVB Men where winning teams blocked 2.3 balls per set while losing teams blocked 1.1. For the majority of NCAA Beach volleyball teams, I judge the block result to be more about the attacker making a mistake than superior blocking by the blocker, especially at the 4s and 5s level.

From a coaching perspective, this means that the ability to pull and dig and kill the ball in transition is the critical skill for most blockers. Most teams want to Beat The Puller, so that player needs to be able to dig. It’s not the norm, but it’s not unusual for a blocker at this level to have as many digs as the “defender” because they are pulling a lot and getting hit at a lot.

Takeaway 3: Make Them Defend The Whole Net And The Whole Court

I was talking with an indoor coach very recently about this concept. But rewatching some NCAA Beach video made me think about this as well.

The concept I’ve been working with indoor teams is: “make them defend 9m of net and 81 m^2 of court.”

And defenders know this as part of their eyework. “The location of the set + the way she’s taking her approach means she can’t hit there so I can shift here.” Etc

I’ve said a few times on this Substack that looking at the contrast between levels of play informs a lot of my coaching. For this article series I was cycling through FIVB Men, FIVB Women, and NCAA 4s and 5s. Something that stood out to me was how much less of the net and court the NCAA 4s and 5s use than the FIVB Women.

If you’re a blocker, there are sections of the net that you can completely eliminate from having to move to to block. If you’re a defender, there are sections of the court that you won’t have to defend in for chunks of the game at a time.

Some of this is linked to physicality of the players. Some of it is linked to technical execution, particularly setting. Some of it is linked to tactics. Organization → Mechanics → Skill.

It’s going to be different for every team, but consider looking into this idea of, “how much of the court and net are we making them defend?”

So with that, let’s look at some plays I liked. As always, feel free to grab these videos/gifs and use them to show your players!