Beach Week: Logistics

Court organization, round length, and Itsys Bitsys

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. Even if you’re an indoor coach, you might be interested in at least the first part of this article, as I start with some coaching philosophy before I get into beach specific training tips. I’ll be back to an indoor focus next week with both club-related content and starting NCAA women’s tournament analysis.

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Coaching Roles

Let’s assume that Volleymath goes as follows:

Reps x Intent x Feedback = Rate of Improvement

As coaches, we wear multiple hats. Let’s put aside things like off-court mentoring as well as “evaluator and roster selector” and just focus on the 4 roles that are most relevant for practice:

Teacher
Trainer
Organizer
Planner

These 4 roles are related but separate. Here’s how I think about it:

Teacher
Some part of your role as coach is to teach your players about the game of volleyball. To be really general about it, you might have to teach your kids basic rules like the number and legality of contacts of the ball, net rules, how the servers rotate, etc. Beyond that, you teach your players strategies and systems. “Here’s a good strategy to set up defense, here’s a way to play against this shot and that shot.”

You also teach your players technique. “When you finish your swing like that, the ball goes there, when you finish your swing like this, the ball goes here.”

Trainer
Some part of your role as a coach might be as a trainer. Part of your practice might include inputting balls in certain drills, timing or scoring rounds, or being a Red Team player on the opposing side. If you’re a younger coach joining a high-level staff for the first time, you probably started as a Trainer. My first job with indoor NT was as a ballboy and floor wiper. My second was as a statistician. My first on court roles were as a trainer. I wasn’t in charge of Teaching our liberos about passing technique. And I wasn’t in charge of Organizing our serve receive. My job was to serve a bunch of balls when we went to positional breakouts. And to understand things like, “okay this player is trying to get better at X passing move, so start with some blocked reps where you’re repeating that serve a bunch, and then start making it more random over the course of the drill.” Stuff like that.

I find that most coaches tend to gravitate naturally toward more of a teacher orientation or more of a trainer orientation. I don’t think that’s necessarily good or bad, as long as you don’t get pulled too far in one extreme or the other.

Organizer
When I use the term Organizer, I’m using it in terms of this OMS lens. Organization means, “resolve interactions between two players, where one player’s actions affects the other’s next action.” For example:

How fast/high/wide will we set X, Y, and Z play sets?
Who is responsible for X, Y, and Z balls in serve receive or defense?

There’s plenty of examples. One role of a coach is as Organizer. These questions need to be answered and coaches need to be a part of that. And coaches have different strategies. It’s sort of a spectrum that ranges from, “this is how you’re going to do it and I don’t want to hear any arguments,” to leaving it up to players to resolve these questions between themselves. But even a very collaborative coach-Organizer has the responsibility to help players by saying, “hey, have you two talked about what you’re going to do in situations X, Y, and Z?”

Personally, I think coaches tend to focus a bit too much on Teaching and Training and not quite enough on the Organization role. For example, it takes a LOT of time and effort in your training to durably improve a player’s Good Pass % by 5%. That 5% improvement in GP will get you about one extra sideout every 2 matches.¹ But teams lose far more points than that due to hesitation or uncertainty about roles in serve receive. Focusing on eliminating hesitation and miscommunication yields better results for many coaches.

Planner
Finally, you have the job as planner. What are you going to do, when, and how will training be executed? This becomes especially important once you exceed 4 players per court, and thus, will be the focus on this article.

Beach Logistics

If you are lucky enough to train on the beach with exactly 4 players per court, your logistics and planning get really easy. If all you did was warm up and play scored games with good feedback, you’re doing pretty well on the above equation.

Transfer Reps are basically maximized.
Player Intent is about as good as it can be, from a planning perspective.
Feedback is relatively easy with only 4 players, considering they will need some timeout breaks, etc.

Even with 4 players, you might want to do some drills that aren’t just play. But the logistics of all that is going to be relatively easy. So let’s look at a few things beach coaches need to consider when dealing with more than 4 players per court.

Round Lengths

Round lengths should scale with the gamelike-ness of the drill. 1-point waves (Queen of the Court, etc) are nice for a warmup but you lose the iterative nature of volleyball. Indoor volleyball is iterative, meaning the same or similar sideout and break point situations repeat throughout the match. On the flip side, an American football team might only see 3rd and long from the opponent’s 30 yard-line once or twice in a game.

Beach volleyball is even more iterative than indoor volleyball, since servers will have 4-7 separate rounds at the service line, as opposed to 2-3 indoors. And since there’s only 2 general reception formations² while indoor teams have 6, there’s a greater within-match evolving strategy.

So… are you training this? One mistake that I see some beach club coaches make is, in the commendable desire to keep things moving and players not sitting out for long, that they rely too much on waves/Queens type drills. They don’t face the situation where they failed to sideout because the blocker pulled and they rolled and got dug and turned in trans and now they are back in receive wondering if they have to swing hard against a pulling block but what if the pass isn’t good and should I maybe just try to roll it short on the puller but what if they are ready for that too? It’s such a critical part of beach volleyball³ that you cannot neglect this.

On the flip side… you really can’t have kids sitting out forever!

The math I like to use is:

If you have 6 players, that’s like 3 teams per court. So multiply a normal game by 2/3 and play to 15 points. If you have 8 players, that’s like 4 teams per court. So multiple a normal game by 1/2 and play to 11 points. If you play Winner Stays On, you’ll sit out two 11-point rounds, which is like sitting out a 21-point set, which is fine. I prefer to play it in more of a pool play format:

A v B
C v D
A v C
B v D
A v D
B v C

In those cases, A and D never have a double-sit and B and C have 1 double-sit. With 11-point rounds, that’s an hour that’s going to move pretty well and get a good amount of play for 8 players on one court, while providing opportunity for feedback while they are sitting off.

Partner Switching
How much do you stick with partners and how much do you partner switch? At higher levels, kids (or adults) often want to play with their partner a lot. Younger kids may just sign up for beach camp/club and not really have a partner in mind. Depending on your level, you want to steer things toward one side or the other, but I recommend going all the way to either extreme.

Partner switching naturally lends itself to shorter games. For example, in a warmup phase where you’re doing Queens/waves, an odd-number of players creates a natural change in partners, which I think is really good. If you have 6 or 8 players on a court, having yourself (or another coach) hop into the waves creates an odd number and facilitates the natural partner cycling.

In terms of Volleymath, I like to plan for about 1/2 the number of points for partner-switched rounds as I do for “normal-partner” games. So with 6 players, we might play games to 7 or 8 points if they are partner-switching and with 8 players, we might play games to 5 or 6 points.

On the flip side, even if you are in more of a camp setting where players aren’t necessarily signing up with a partner, I like trying to find good partner pairs and running “full-length” (which might mean only games to 11 if you have 8 players per court) games with the ideal partner matchups.

Big Itsy-Bitsys

I’ll talk even more about how to adapt for situations with more than 8 players on a court in the future, but one of the easiest is to add an off-court round into your schedule. I’ve written about Itsy-Bitsys before, which are good for your wave-type drills. But what you can do is create an off-court round for your >8 player schedules. For example, say you have 10 players on a court, which means you have 5 teams and you’re going to play something like 8-Ball. A standard 5-team pool play schedule is:

2v5, 3 refs, 1 and 4 off.
1v4, 2 refs, 3 and 5 off
3v5, 1 refs, 2 and 4 off
2v4, 5 refs, 1 and 3 off
1v3, 4 refs, 2 and 5 off
4v5, 1 refs, 2 and 3 off
2v3, 4 refs, 1 and 5 off
1v5, 2 refs, 3 and 4 off
3v4, 5 refs, 1 and 2 off
1v2, 3 refs, 4 and 5 off

That’s 10 rounds and 8-Ball takes about 4 minutes per round, so this would take about 45 minutes. Now, instead of the 2 teams being “off”, you have them do something off the court. The two best options for that are:

1. “Ball control” type drills that don’t involve a net. So partner-setting, 3-person cutthroat pepper, etc. I don’t think the transfer from these drills is always great, and you can’t spend too much attention coaching them, because you need to coach the games on the court, but they are better than nothing.

2. Speed and strength work. 4 minutes is a good rest interval for max-power sets and 2 minutes is a good rest interval for high-but-not-max power stuff. Since they are paired up, racing is natural. Come off the court, get a little water and let your heart rate come down to fully rested and then do 1 x 36m race (endline to endline and back) and rest and recover for the rest of the off round. Or do 1 x 18m race (endline to endline), rest 2 minutes and do another.

You can even combine these. Every team is off for 4 minutes, so they can do 2 of those rounds with a ball control drill and 2 of those rounds with the sprints. Something like that.

Okay we’ll leave it there. Drop me a line in the comments and let me know what other logistical challenges you have with your beach setup.

1. In beach volleyball.

2. (1) Player A Left / Player B Right and Player A Right / Player B Left. Yeah, there’s some shading, shifting, etc… but let’s call those subtle variations of two general reception formations.

3. It’s a part of indoor volleyball too and it’s why I’m really not a big Queens guy indoors either. But it’s absolutely critical in beach.