Beach Week: On-2 Attacking

A piece of the Transition puzzle

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. (That said, I don’t think some of these concepts are necessarily bad for indoor players either; there’s some ball control and hand-contact concepts that transfer over.)

In Monday’s post we looked at the World Championship match between the Brazilian team of Andre/George v the American team of Schalk/Brunner.

We saw that Transition was a huge factor in this match and we noted that about 1/3 of Brazilian’s Transition opportunities when they were serving came after a block touch. This mean’s that a significant amount of Transition came as On-2 Attacking rather than the more traditional Dig-Set-Hit sequence that we associate with Transition.

If you’re coaching at the Juniors girls level instead of the FIVB Men, you’re not going to see as many block touches, but On-2 Attacking can still be a valuable tool in your toolkit.

Instead of focusing too much on all of the technical nuances, let’s look at a few drill constructions that can help train different situations where On-2 Attacking can be a factor.

Downball On-2s

This is about as simple as it gets. Two players off the net in a 2-back formation. Coach hits a controlled downball in to one player. That player digs high and in front of her partner. Her partner step-closes and attacks the ball, ideally up the deep middle.

This can be a good warmup drill to work on some ball control and shot-making, so you can go through in lines, or you can use this to initiate the rally, and have a team on the coach’s side, and then play it out, anything-goes after the initial On-2 attack.

But this form of On-2 attacking can be a legitimate offensive weapon on easier balls for younger teams who are going to spend a lot of time either pulling early or just starting in a 2-back formation to begin with. This sort of corresponds with the idea that warmup drills for advanced teams are often good training drills for beginning teams.

Pull To On-2

Similar concept, but now we’re adding the idea of a pulling blocker. The pull has to be high-quality in order to dig with enough control to attack On-2, so there’s also lots of chances here to coach our pulling blockers.

Cutshot To On-2

This is a nice one, because it directly simulates a play that could happen, or you can get some level of simulation of digging off a block touch that is falling short in the court. The defender starts in a Centerfield defense, and digs a cutshot that the coach initiates. The blocker blocks, turns, and attacks On-2. It could be with a swing, a short roll, or a deep poke.

Cover Your Block To On-2

Okay, last variation, and probably the trickiest one to run. The coach is going to initiate a ball for the blocker to (maybe) touch, and then cover herself and lay up a nice On-2 ball for her defender partner to attack.

You can do this by literally trying to chip the ball off your blocker’s block. That’s going to get the most realistic touch, but it can be difficult to get a good rep like that at times. You can also have them block and just toss in a ball somewhere around them so they have to land and play the ball. To me, that’s more up to the control that you and your player have for how you want to run this one.

Putting It Into Practice

I like all of these as drills as warmup activities that you can do at the start of practice to get going. You can keep the entries fairly easy, to allow a faster flow of reps, higher-quality dig/sets and some hand/arm work to hit shots all over the court on the On-2 balls.

If you want to use this as a more gamelike drill part of practice, put another team on the side of the coach and play a 4-ball wash drill with this as the start of the rally and playing it out from there. If you do it this way, remind your players that only the initial attack has to be On-2. After that, anything goes. But hopefully… this provides a bit of a reminder cue to help them recognize the right times to go On-2 within the live play.

Have each partner on each team get an entry this way and play out the 4 rallies. If they are tied 2-2, then rock-paper-scissors to choose serve/receive and play the tiebreaker point.