Beach Week + Betsi Flint

This week is beach week. I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to the indoor side of the game and reserve the fourth week for beach-focused discussion. Tomorrow’s post will be more general, but today applies specifically to the beach. If you’re not interested in beach volleyball, feel free to skip this one.

Also: I’m hosting the fantastic Betsi Flint for a Q&A on Thursday, Dec 30, 1pm Eastern Time. We’ll be talking Terminal Serving on the beach. We’ll talk some passing, but when you have a chance to ask the only player in recorded AVP history to average over 1 ace per set¹ about serving, you do it. This Q&A will only be available for premium subscribers, so join up!

If you can’t make it, and there’s a question you want to ask, drop me a comment and I’ll make sure I get it in.

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Many of the concepts I’ve talked about so far (such as the Triangle) fit nicely into an analysis of beach volleyball. There’s plenty of differences, but it’s nice when the tools are similar. Since we’re talking about Terminal Serving on the beach, we want some training ideas that help us win that aspect of the game.

A couple weeks ago, I talked about one of my favorite games on the indoor side: Aceball. Aceball is a good game indoors, but it might translate even better to the beach. Here’s a quick refresher if you don’t want to click through to that article.

What Is Aceball?

Aceball is simple: you play normal volleyball and you can only score an ace. If the serve is not an ace, both teams keep going, but you’re then only playing for the right to get the serve… and have the chance to serve an ace. This makes Aceball less of a specific drill and more of a scoring modifier to other drills.

You can play Aceball as a 2-way drill or a 1-way drill. The simplest way to play is as a 2-way drill for time. Divide into two even teams and play 6v6. There will be three possible rally results:

1. Serving team serves an ace. Great! (Well… for them, at least.) They get a point and keep the serve.

2. Serving team does not serve an ace, but they win the rally in some way. They don’t get a point, but they keep their serve.

3. Receiving team wins the rally. They don’t get a point, but now they get the chance to serve for an ace and earn a point that way.

What To Do About Missed Serves?

Servers tend to be higher-error in Aceball than some other games, because the game forces you to be more aggressive. I also like the offense to have to earn the point. Because of these two factors, I recommend replacing a missed serve. You can have a coach give a freeball to the receiving team, or have the next server just pop in a controlled standing serve.

Variations For The Beach

Aceball works well in a lot of contexts on the beach. In particular, variations that manipulate the serve work really well in a beach volleyball context. With only 2 servers, there are 3 times the frequency of service rounds in beach volleyball. Anything that affords the server a different action when they go back to serve tends to work well.

So one good implementation is to just play a straight-up game of Aceball to a set score. Just imagine it as a natural progression in line with Rally Scoring and Sideout Scoring. In Rally, you get a point for every rally won. In Sideout scoring, you only score as the server. In Aceball, you only score as the server AND if you serve an ace. They fit together in that way.

At the NCAA level, teams average a bit under 2 aces per set. So an Aceball game to 2 works pretty well for advanced teams. They’ll get 2 aces faster than playing a full 21-point game, because servers will ramp up the aggressiveness. At the juniors level, you’ll likely want to try 4 aces per set until you get a feel for what the level is.

If you are doing work-up variations on multiple courts, things can get a little messy because games will end at unpredictable times, but it can usually be done well. Plus, it adds some nice pressure on the passers when the teams who are waiting to get on the court stand nearby and start yelling at the passer to shank a ball so they can come on the court.

Doghouse Aceball

Aceball can also be a good way to get going toward the beginning of practice. Doghouse Aceball is played 1-way, meaning one side is always serving, and the other side is always receiving. I like doing this with several teams on a court, which is pretty common practice for juniors and even NCAA teams at practice. For example, you start with 2 pairs on the serving side and 2 pairs on the receiving side. I don’t like more than 2 pairs on the serving side, so if you need to have have more than 8 players (4 pairs) on one court, put the additional players on the receiving side.

The serving side is the, “doghouse,” and you want to serve your way out of the doghouse. You can only get out with an ace. If you serve an ace, you get out of the doghouse and go over to the receiving side. The team that got aced goes over to the doghouse. You can play this way as a warmup or transition between more technical drills and more competitive drills. To make it more competitive, you can score it.

If you’re scoring the drill, you can only score a point on the receiving side. If you win on the receiving side, you get a point and receive again. If you lose on the receiving side, but didn’t get aced, you just come off and the other team waiting on the receiving side comes on. If you get aced on the receiving side, you go under to the serving side. If you win the serving side, you don’t get a point, but you get to serve again. If you lose on the serving side, you come off and the other team on the serving side steps on to serve.

Young Players

I don’t love Aceball for young or very beginning players on the beach. With those players, the ace rate can be 30% plus, and with aces that frequent, you don’t need an extra focus on that area. For those players, I like drills that focus on multiple-contact control and pass quality, rather than just aces and errors. Aceball works best for teams that are at a level where they can (1) consistently serve in, and (2) sideout with some consistency.

At that level, some servers can slip into patterns of, “just serving it in,” rather than understanding how to mix speed, depth, and location in order to create a point directly off their serve. And once that starts happening, your passers should be capable of responding to the increased serving pressure. If your players are missing 30% of serves and the game is getting too sloppy, switch off of Aceball and into another game, because you’re no longer getting the benefit of the game.

1. They have only made these statistics publicly available for 3 seasons. :)