Beach Week: Digging Technique

Short and Technical

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, although we’re talking digging technique in this post, and you might find that there’s some transfer between surfaces.

On Monday we looked at some statistical analysis related to the Transition game.

Beach Week: World Champs Analysis

It’s hard to Transition if you don’t dig the ball. So, let’s look at some digging moves from this World Championship Semifinal.

Reads

There were a few really nice read moves in this match.

The first is a classic Centerfield read and dig by Tillmann. I like that she got the crossover step in, which allows her to stay on her feet to transition. By making her first step a small jab where her foot turns out, that allows her to extend and make her crossover bigger, which would allow her to get all the way to the line if need be.

The second is a nice upgrade to the cross as the set goes wider. I like players to think, “set’s wide, get wide,” both as a blocker (getting wide to get on the hitter’s shoulder) and the digger getting wide in the other direction. The wider the set, the sharper the cutshot available and Tillmann plays this nicely.

The third is one of those where it’s either an early read or a really late play call. If this was a “4” then well-done, they hid it really well. If it’s a read, then even better!

Angle Depth

So we’ve seen some of the reads to get the right width in the court, now let’s look at the depth when you read angle. And in this match, we saw Tillmann and Bukovec using a different strategy.

In this clips, we see Tillmann generally aligning deeper, looking to keep the ball on her arms and body. We see Bukovec cutting the angle off shallower, which puts her in position to have to dig overhand.

There’s tradeoffs here. The deeper you get in the angle, the more time you have to see the ball, keep it in front of you, and dig with your arms. You’re probably going to dig a higher % of balls that get hit on the angle that way. The tradeoff is that you cut off fewer angles. It’s easier to cut sharp angle on you. You’re also a little deeper to transition attack, which is often not ideal, although Tillmann is dynamic enough where it probably doesn’t affect her too much.

One downside to cutting the sharper angles is that you get locked into playing overhand and you only have a split-second to see the touch off the block. Bukovec got called once in this match for finger-digging a ball that had been micro-touched by Wilkerson’s block.

In general, I favor Tillmann’s positioning, but I get why Canada, with Bukovec as a big defender (converted blocker) wants her to play shallower and use her size and overhand physicality to cut off more court and make it harder to roll short on her.

Digging Heat

There’s a couple examples in the prior video, and here’s a few more. Let’s specifically look at Tillmann handling hard-driven spikes.

The thing about digging hard-driven balls is that there’s a bit of a balance between, “aiming for ideal biomechanics,” and, “having some touch in awkward positions.” By definition, hard-driven balls get you in some weird spots.

What I like about Tillmann is that her body and arms are generally synched up. I think of the four broad ways of taking heat off the ball as:

1. Shoulders give

2. Elbows break

3. Hands break or J

4. Body rolls back

In the first attempt above (3s) the ball catches her right in on her torso, so she doesn’t have room for shoulders to give. And in that close, you can’t use your hands/wrist to manipulate the ball up. So she rolls her body back and the elbows break up to keep the ball on her side.

In the second attempt (12s) you can see she’s using body and elbows again, with maybe a little J of the wrists. It’s not quite enough to keep it on her side, but I think the overall technique is pretty sound.

In the one angle-depth clip above where the ball gets on her a little slower, she has a little more time to get her platform in front of her, where she can use her shoulders to manipulate the angle of the ball as well. That gives you more control, but you can’t always do that when the ball gets smoked on you.

Push Mechanics

Many of you know this is a hobby horse of mine.

The Double Push

While the technique isn’t going to be exactly the same on the beach as it is indoors, the mechanics largely are the same. The human body accelerates best by pushing with the foot behind center-of-mass, relative to where you want to go. So if you want to move right, you have to push with the left foot and vice versa.

Let’s look at a few single-push moves from this match.

In the first two clips you see a situation where the defender gets to the ball, but they are falling at it and there’s less control. One results in a dig, but poor-quality, and the other gets pulled off too much for the setter to get to.

The third clip is a typical demonstration of where a second push is needed. The first push moves toward the ball, but since there’s no second push, the defender is falling to the ground. But doing so as the ball passes her shoulder. So center-of-gravity is falling as her arms are trying to rise to the point of contact. Digs are made like this, but not at a high percentage. Engaging a second push slows the rate of descent and allows the arms to stay in the digging window longer.

Very few defenders on the beach regularly double push to dig balls that are not pure dives to the line. And there’s a logic to it. The single-push, fall-to-the-knee is a move that’s easier to recover from to attack in transition. We’ll see this in future posts, but winning the transition game is more about dig-to-attack than pure dig volume. So the instinct is right. In general, you’d rather dig 1 fewer ball per match if it means you hit 10% higher on all transition attacks.

But… it’s still a good tool to have in the toolbox, and I think players can apply double-push moves more to control these balls in transition. After all, you can’t transition a dig that you don’t make.