Beat The Puller 2.0

A few more variations

This spring I’m doing 3 different running article series.

On Tuesday, I’m releasing articles aimed at giving you a small, specific tool to make your in-practice or in-match coaching more effective. On Fridays, I’m writing about ways to increase the physical capability of players. Since today is Sunday, this article is part of the Sandy Sundays series discussing the beach game.

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The last few posts I’ve been discussing some statistics and sharing some example plays where the blocker has to make a decision between pulling or staying and blocking. I’ve mentioned one of my favorite training drill for this, Beat The Puller.

A coaching principle I believe to be true is that good warmup drills for advanced players are good training drills for less advanced players and vice versa. Beat The Puller is probably too constrained to be the primary defensive training for an FIVB, but the constraint seems to be just right for juniors. But BTP is a good lead-in drill for advanced teams, and the overall constraint is one of my favorites.

Here’s a three ways to expand or add variety to the BTP format.

Don’t Beat The Puller

Of course, one way to add variety to BTP is to flip it around. Instead of having to attack at the puller-side, the attacker has to score away from the puller. First of all, this actually does help your ability to attack the puller. Having the vision to see the puller and hit away from them also helps you have the vision to see the puller and attack at the puller.

It’s also going to work some different shots. Are you balanced enough to hit the ball hard? I think the general mindset of attacking at the puller is a good one. But taken too far, you get players hitting slow-speed shots at a pulling defender who can move fast enough to pick them up easily. And if the defender hangs out in the middle of the court, the attacker is really hurting for chances to score. So if you can develop that sharp, low cutshot, it pulls the defender away from the center of the court and then opens up some more space around the puller to score.

Pull Cross Or Line

The base model of BTP revolves around line pulls. For most teams, even fairly good teams, the vast majority of their pulls are going to be toward the line. Being able to do this at a consistent level is going to you pretty far.

But eventually, you might want to start incorporating some other defensive strategies. And just as, maybe even more, importantly, you want to be able to attack against some other pulls and defensive schemes. In the beginning, you can pre-determine which way the puller will go and the offense can know it in advance. Eventually, the defensive can mix at random and the attacking team needs to maintain vision and communication to attack different schemes.

Off-to-On or On-to-Off

You don’t want to overscript things every time you run this drill, but, as your players get better, it’s going to feel a bit weird to have the blocker pull when you pass perfectly and set well. The next step, as I mention in the previous article, is to give the blocker the option to stay and block. But then what you’ll have is the blocker staying to block most of the time, which will lead to a ton of high-line shots against a defender who is not allowed, by the scheme of the drill, to run to the line early.

What I like for this level of team (which can even include high schoolers as they get good) is to do an Off-to-On or On-to-Off script of their passing/setting.

Off-to-On means the passer has to pass the first ball to the back half of the court. The setter is then going to try to get the set on the net. This is a great drill for blocker vision, because this situation is both (a) one of the most common situations to pull and (b) one of the most common situations that pullers get beat on. When teams successfully get that set to the net and the blocker pulls too early, that’s when the attacker can either unload on an open net or just tap a little short pokey in front of the defenders.

You’ll do Off-to-On quite a bit, but On-to-Off is a good variation. You can either have the passer deliberately pass the ball all the way into, or almost into, the net and have the setter try to produce a set by picking the ball out of the net or making a low lunge and producing a set. This alone will often produce plenty of randomness on the set, which will create good pulling situations, as well as a few sets that go super-tight where the blocker is going to get a joust. You can also have the passer pass tight-but-controlled and have the setter deliberately push the set off the net. This is good for attackers to deal with and also create some different angles for the defenders to see and read.

Have you used any other variations of Beat The Puller? If so, leave me a comment and let me know about them!