Beach Week: First Ball Kill Locations

Visuals are fun

This week is Beach Week at SmarterVolley. Typically I dedicate the first three weeks of content to indoor volleyball, with the fourth week focusing on beach. If you’re not interested in beach, then feel free to skip this one.

Earlier this week, I highlighted a recent match between USA and NED on the women’s side of FIVB beach.

Beach Week: First Ball Weakness

We saw the American pair of Kolinske and Hughes get a big win on the FIVB Pro Tour despite losing the First Ball battle. We’ve seen before that one way to use a profile is to highlight your strengths (“How can I win with this style?”) and the other is to bring up your weak points.

So if you’re working with a pair and you want to bring up your First Ball game, what can you do?

Winning the First Ball battle is about (1) Killing The Ball (2) Making Them Play (3) Stopping Opponent From Killing The Ball. Let’s focus on (1) and (3) right now. How can we produce more kills? How can we prevent opponent kills?

There’s a technical side of this. Pass better. Set better. Hit better. But if we’re using the Organization - Mechanics - Skill framework, the first thing we need to do is look at what we’re even trying to do in the first place, before we think about how well we do it.

Organization Mechanics Skill

So if we want to get more kills, it would be nice to know where the balls we are killing right now are happening. And if we want to prevent opponent kills, it would be nice to know where those balls are being killed. This is the most macro level of looking at offense and defense, but coaches often skip it.