Beat The Puller
This week is kind-of-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. However, since I’m in the middle of the Athletes Unlimited season, I’m still adding that indoor content this week. The beach side is going to get 2 posts, not 3 this week. Sorry!
Yesterday I talked about winning matches with a Terminal Serving Strength profile and I shared a Match Analysis from last year’s NCAA Championship.
If I’m looking at, “how do I win if I have a Terminal Serving Strength profile,” I’m thinking that I have the capability where there’s going to be some out-of-system/out-of-rhythm volleyball going on. I’m winning the Terminal Serve battle because:
Im serving tough and picking up a lot of aces relative to errors. Or
I save a lot of aces and keep the ball in play when I’m being served.
Either way, situations where the blocker can pull off the net are going to factor in; either because I’m saving a tough serve and have to attack in a tough situation (and thus, hitting against a block that’s pulled) or I have the other team in trouble and I can pull off the net to defend.
Today we’ll look at a drill construct to train this scenario.
Digging As A Puller
The traditional beach defensive terminology is that one players is a blocker and one player is a defender. Certainly at the highest level of pro men’s volleyball, that tends to be true. But at most levels of volleyball, the nominal “blocker” does more work as a digger than as a blocker.
This varies based on capabilities of the individuals on a team, but, in general, NCAA Women’s Beach blockers have more digging opportunities than blocking opportunities. That doesn’t mean that they necessarily pull more than they dig. But it means that they have more times where their digging significantly affects the play than their block.1
At some juniors levels, the blocker is there to hit an overpass/overset and that’s about it; they are pulling just about every time. There’s plenty of successful juniors pairs (and adult pairs, if you’re reading for that purpose!) that just play 2-back all the time.
The bottom line is that digging as a puller is both (1) important and (2) something that takes some time to get good at.
Beat The Puller
A drill construct I like to help train this is called Beat The Puller. It’s pretty self-explanatory. The offense is going to have a chance to sideout, and they are going to have to try to score on a pulling blocker on the first ball.
There’s plenty of technical teaching you can do, but my first goal is to use some constraints to steer players toward exploring some solutions on their own, as well as to make sure they get the repetitions they need to get good in this area.
The most basic level of this is:
Draw a line splitting the court vertically down the middle.
Bowl a ball into the offensive side.
Blocker pulls down the line, offense has to try to score in the line half of the court.
You can do this for some reps, and just have the puller try to dig a ball and then send i back over the net. You can also either progress to, or go right into, a game where the first ball of the rally has to, “beat the puller,” but everything after that is fair game if the rally continues.
I strongly favor the play-it-out version, perhaps outside of a camp setting where we’re introducing this concept for the first time. If we’re playing it out, then we need a defender on the defensive side as well. For me I like to give them a rule that they have to stay on the crosscourt of the line down the middle of the court. I generally then add another layer: if the offense accidentally hits on the crosscourt side of the middle line and the defender digs, the defense has the chance to earn a point, but all the offense can do is wash. So the defender now is a little more engaged and she’s hoping the offense makes a mistake and gives her a chance to dig, because her team gets a freeroll to try to score a point.
Progressing
Young “blockers” will just bolt off the net every time without seeing the game. In fact, my general experience with juniors players is that you have to talk them into playing up at the net rather than just playing 2-back. So one of the first things that I like to do when I start training this is to try to mix some over-sets into this drill.
In a juniors environment, a decent way to do this is to have a coach do the setting on the offensive side. So if you have 8 kids on a court for a practice, you fix two of them on defense and have the other 6 cycles through in a waves style with you on the offensive side. Have the defender on the defensive side bowl an easy ball in, and you can set on the offensive side.
When I do this, I like to bumpset most of the balls and start to mix about 1 out of 3 balls to be set fairly tight. My ideal is to bumpset the ball so that it would land right on the tape or slightly on the defensive side. The dual effect here is that (1) this is a ball you need to get up and block on and (2) even pretty beginner blockers can have some success blocking this ball. Younger blockers aren’t going to go up and roof somebody. But if they can go up and make a good play on some over-balls, they start to understand how to play at the net and have a little success doing so.
When you add this element, players start learning the eyework involved in this skill. You want to pull early… but not too early! The higher the level, the longer the blocker might need to hold. Advanced blockers might be thinking, “block unless the set flares off,” while younger blockers are thinking, “pull unless I see the set coming on the net.”
Ideally, I’d love to progress to where me, as the coach, doesn’t have to do the setting on the offensive side. With reasonably skilled high school players, this should be the case. But I still like to be over on the offensive side, maybe reminding the player who is about to set to mix in some tight balls to test the puller’s eyes. And whether it’s me setting or the players, I like to be on the offensive side, because you can see the blocker/puller’s eyes as they are making their read.
Beginning teams will almost always pull down the line. It’s a lot easier. But advanced teams will start using some crosscourt pulls. In that case, just adjust your game accordingly.
What It Looks Like
Here’s a clip from a previous Match Analysis thread.
These clips are all of the offense scoring2, but you can see the puller footwork and eyework. In the clips where UCLA pulled down the line, they opened up into the court and pulled that way. I mention this in the article, but this is one of the most common points of debate I get from coaches or that coaches want to explore. “What is the right way to pull?”
I’m not sure I have concrete evidence that there is one. Some coaches train a specific pulling footwork, while some train a system where you pull in relation to where the set is. Here’s a clip where the puller opens more toward the line:
This sort of inside-out pull happens all the time when the hitter goes behind. And there’s some other different pulling situations that happen as well.
You might have a defined system for how you want players to pull in certain situations, or you might want to just put them into these situations and see what solutions they come up with.
Either way, adding this simple constraint setup is a good way to start training and emphasizing this area of the game.
Putting this in a footnote because it’s a bit technical, but, when I analyze defense, I give a “primary responsibility” to every opponent kill. Meaning: I say, “was the blocker or defender more responsible for this kill?” Sometimes it’s pretty obvious, the ball was clearly shanked by the defender or the blocker was tooled. Often there’s some judgment. Did the blocker fail to take any significant court away and the defender didn’t have a reasonable shot to dig it? At times when I have done this sort of analysis, I’ve also added a third “half/half” category where each player is essentially assigned half an error.
Good to remember that this isn’t just a defensive drill!