Big Rocks 2025
For the freeloaders
This article is Part 2 of the Don’t Plan To Fail - 2025 Edition article I released last week. Premium Subscribers got access to all 3 parts up front. Become a Premium Subscriber to get access to multi-part articles sooner! (Including Part 3 of this article, which will be released next week for free subscribers, but is included at the bottom of this article, below the paywall.)
Part 2 - Big Rocks
Once you have your overall season blocked out, you can start to put in your Big Rocks. You’ll know about your points of emphasis for your first training blocks and less about the later ones, but you can get some ideas.
Let’s look at some practical application here, in my case for a U16 girl’s club team. The level of this team is USA/Premier. We’ll play Open in your “normal” multi-days (MLK, President’s Day, etc) but at our 2 Qualifiers we’ll play USA division and we’ll play Premier at AAUs. So a strong, competitive team, and many of these players have realistic aspirations of playing collegiate ball, but we’ll be a step down from the true Open teams.
This level of team is a fun level to coach, because they are really right in the middle of that Big Flip where both teams can consistently beat the net, Make Them Play, and be tough to score at. But we’re not so solidly across that demarcation line that we won’t be high-error at times, that we won’t struggle to sideout at times, that defensive systems won’t break down at times, etc.
Here’s what these Big Rocks look like for me:
Pre-Season #1 - Learn To Learn
Learn the drills; learn the pace and flow of a typical practice
Feedback gets a response. Look a coach in the eye and respond.
Interactions with teammates. Eyes, hands, and names.
Pre-Season #2 - Prepare To Compete
Get solid on defensive positioning and responsibilities.
Know how to be in rotation; be solid on standard overlaps, entries, etc
Introduce the basics of offensive timing and tempo.
My pre-season block is almost split into 2. I don’t have a hard demarcation, but I like to emphasize meta-learning — or maybe “meta-practicing” would be a better way to call it. When you have a new team, especially of kids, there’s only so much skills and systems teaching you can do in the first two days, because everybody is getting used to how to practice. This is sort of a gradient, because it depends on how quickly we can get everybody comfortable with me and with each other, and how quickly the kids can get in the game in terms of talking to each other, talking with coaches, etc.
The first practice of the year, I’m talking about the basic expectations for playing on our team:
Do the right thing. You usually know what the right thing to do is. It’s okay to make mistakes. We’ll learn to “do the thing right.” But it has to start with doing the right thing.
Respond to feedback. We’re here to have fun, get better, and most importantly: have fun getting better. It’s fun to play well. My job as a coach is to help you play well. If I say something to you, it’s because I think it will help you. Be appreciative of feedback and respond to it. It’s a good habit to look at a person when they speak to you, so practice that habit with me as a coach. Also, when you look at me, you’ll have an easier time understanding what I’m saying, which means I don’t have to repeat myself and you then spend less time listening to me talk and more time playing. Also, when you respond, it can help me see whether or not you understand. If you don’t understand something, that’s my fault. If you don’t understand something and you don’t respond in a way that let’s me know that, that’s your fault. Feel free to argue with me! I’d rather you say, “that doesn’t make any sense,” then to just walk away confused. The minimum response is eye contact and a nod, but verbal response is preferred.
Eyes, hands, and names are our tools of communication with teammates. When I do 2-Way Hitting, at the beginning of the season, setters and hitters must make physical contact with each other, look each other in the eye and speak. Teenagers generally have undeveloped communication skills and this is a valuable life skill that sports helps teach. Many team conflicts (and the plot of like, every romcom ever) stem not from fundamental conflicts in values, but from bad feelings that stem from a simple misunderstanding. “Ugh, look at that hitter turning away from me and walking with her head down back to the line while I was asking her if she needed the set higher. She hates me!” No… she’s mad at herself because she thinks she was late. If you two had just met in the middle and slapped hands, you would have had that straightened out in 2 seconds.
I don’t view this Learn To Learn block as entirely distinct. I think more like, “okay, 100% of Practice #1 is going to be just explaining drills and behavior and giving kids a ton of high-fives and stuff.” And then each practice we have to explain/introduce a little less and we can start adding in our teaching points until we get to the Big Rocks that are the actual volleyball part of the Pre-Season Block.
In terms of that Organization - Mechanics - Skill framework, the pre-season is about:
Organization - Teaching defensive positioning and responsibilities are important, because players are coming from different high school season, and most of these kids didn’t play for me last year. I like to start this before introducing offensive systems.
Mechanics - There’s a few basic mechanics I want to introduce, but a lot of the next couple blocks is going to be dedicated to getting great at these mechanics. The job of the pre-season is that players have at least heard of all the foundational pieces of the puzzle.
Skill - With all the informational processing going on with team systems, etc, I find it’s natural for ball control to be pretty poor in the pre-season. That’s okay with me. It will get there. I want kids to understand digging targets, setting targets, etc, but I’m not hammering kids about perfect touch on the ball just yet. What I do think is important is to get a Template in place that allows for enough reps for skill to develop over time. The sooner you get that in place, the sooner the “skill clock” gets started and you allow your athletes a longer learning runway.
The Early Season phase for me starts after our first competition, and I already have a good idea about what those priorities will be:
Early Season Big Rocks
Consistent offensive tempo. (Consistent at identifying in-system vs out-of-system, consistent timing for each situation)
Block/defense eyework
Improve defensive toolkit. The pre-season is going to be a lot about positioning, so as we get into the early competitive season, I know I’m going to have to build the solutions defenders have available to them — extending to the ball, overhand digging, diving, pancakes, etc
Mid-Season Big Rocks
This starts to get a little harder to predict. I can definitely expect one of the Big Rocks to be “determine our best lineups.”
After that, it’s going to be about The Triangle and what parts of the game need extra emphasis going into our Late Season push. We’re still going to train each piece of the game, but I’ll shift the 6v6 emphases between games like Aceball, MTP, FBK, etc, in order to emphasize where we need to be a little better.
Late Season Big Rocks
It’s hard to say what we’ll emphasize here other than the general principles of a Late/Post-Season training block: emphasize your strengths, be good at what you’re good at, etc. We’ll probably not be trying to add more offensive wrinkles, but instead we might eliminate a few. If I have a middle who is much better on Pull than Push (or vice versa), I’ll probably try to modify a few serve receive entries to hit these routes out of some different serve receives, etc.
A final note on Big Rocks: don’t have them be a secret! Let your players know that these are the most important things for the next few practices. Check in with them, get their opinions on how progress is going and share your thoughts with them. There should be a sense of everybody pulling in the same direction.
Part 3 (Building) A Template is below the paywall.
