Announcement: I’m putting on another Subscribers-Only Small-Group Workshop at the end of October. The planned date/time is Thursday, October 27 at 9pm Eastern (Note: earlier I had 8pm, note the change!). The topic is Blocking Lessons From The 2022 Men’s World Championship. There will be application to all levels of volleyball, but I’m going to take plenty of space to touch on some higher-level concepts, so it won’t be aimed at beginner blockers. It’s open to all premium subscribers and I’ll send out the links as we get closer.
Most of September on SmarterVolley has been spent looking at Sideout Offense from the perspective of different pass qualities.
Now as we get into October, we’ll start looking at preventing our opponents from siding out, what we’ll call the Break Point phase. Just as we broke down Sideout by Pass Quality, we’ll do the same for Break Point.
In Part 1 of this series, we looked at defending Opponent In-System Sideout. In Part 2, we looked at defending Opponent Semi-System Sideout. Now, we turn to the most enjoyable part of Block/Defense, defending Opponent Out-of-System Sideout.
Why Look At Break Point By Pass Quality?
It’s important to look at Break Point By Pass Quality because you want to have a plan for each situation. This is how you build volleyball IQ. Volleyball IQ is this elusive concept that we probably have as coaches (due to our experience), but our players probably lack- due to their inexperience. What Volleyball IQ means is probably something like making the right decision based on how the play is unfolding.
We, as coaches, understand that when the other team is Out-of-System, they are more likely to tip or shoot the ball, they are more likely to go to the big part of the court, and we don’t need to get super dug-in on defense. We also want to be more conservative with our blocking, not wanting our block to get used when our defenders are in a good position to dig anyway. On the flip side, when the other team is In-System, they are more likely to set middle, more likely to set the ball fast if they go to the pins, hitters are likely to use sharper angles and attack toward the edges of the court, and our block probably needs to take some chances to stuff some balls because the digs are harder.
As the level gets higher, there also starts to become some decisions about, what is physically possible in this situation. For example, certain teams set Slides so fast that your middle blocker cannot realistically take a full X3 crossover swing block move. You may decide that, when they are in-system, we will always X2. These decisions vary a lot by level and the capability of both your team and your opponents, so I don’t want to get too into specifics on this. But these are decisions you need to make as a coach and having a framework for when those decisions will occur helps communicate situational awareness to your players.
How Often Is The Other Team Out-of-System?
This depends on level. As you go to a higher level, the other team is both likely to (1) pass more balls well (2) extend their systems farther off the net. A U-14 is in semi-system practically as soon as the setter takes a step off of perfect. Professional teams are still running quick from beyond the 10’ line.
In previous posts, I talked about this 50/30/20 In-System/Semi-System/Out-of-System ratio that we see at the NCAA-and-higher levels. We also know that the best Juniors and High School teams might be at this level of play as well.
We also know that this can easily invert. If you’re a typical U-14 team, the passing distribution is less of a 50/30/20 split and more of a 20/30/50 split, so the other team could be Out-of-System fully half of the time.
The distinction between Semi-System and Out-of-System is also important here. For me, the defining characteristics of Out-of-System are:
They only have 1 option.
The set is likely to be of poor quality.
The better your opponent, the more situations they can threaten two options and the more situations they’ll be able to set with good quality from. For that reason, I like to focus more on Semi-System Block/Defense than In-System for most higher-level teams. But for the same reason, lower-level teams can focus more on Out-of-System Block/Defense. There’s a good chance that once the setter gets on the move at all, the set is likely to go to the left side and the set is likely to be of poor quality.
What’s Important For Out-of-System Block/Defense?
I think that the more In-System the other team is, the more you are relying on your block, and the more Out-of-System they are, the more you are relying on defense. This might not be true at the highest-level of men’s volleyball, where such a high proportion of balls are touched by the block OoS, but in women’s volleyball, I think that’s a decent paradigm.
Continuing from the previous section:
The defining characteristics of Out-of-System are (1) they only have 1 option and (2) the set is likely to be of poor quality.
This implies that we can have a defensive response to exploit these two things. That is likely to be our blockers cheating a certain way (usually toward the left, but it could be toward the right if the pass is shanked that way) and employing an X5 move (meaning a shuffle + a traditional X3 swing block) to make sure there’s no doubt that they’ll be at the point of attack and getting straight across. It also means that we’re going to put at least one defender in full tip responsibility mode. This could be a line defender or it could be an off-blocker but we never let them tip out when they are Out-of-System!
The two big things I look for Out-of-System Block/Defense are:
Stuff-to-Tool Ratio
Dig Quality
If you haven’t seen a previous post about Evaluating Blocking, you might want to check that out.
Traditional blocking metrics tend to just look at stuffing the ball. And that is the most important part of blocking! But the next most important part of blocking is not getting tooled. This is particularly imporant for Out-of-System blocking, because you don’t want to give the other team an out shot when they are Out-of-System. You’re expecting your block to be organized and high-quality. Don’t settle for sloppy blocking in these situations!
In general, I’m a fan of taking line Out-of-System on most hitters, so you don’t give them that easy tool down the line. It’s also important to make sure that all tips have to go up and over the block. Don’t let them drop tip out down the line.
Shifting from block to defense, what’s important here? We know that, especially in women’s volleyball, we’re going to dig a lot of balls when the other team is Out-of-System. We’re going to get a bunch of block slowdowns and secondary shots and these balls are dug at a high rate. But what I’m really looking at here is the Dig Quality.
I’ve talked in Beach Week threads about this idea of a Dig → Create → Convert chain
But this applies just as much indoors as well. If we want to win points in Transition (which is a lot of what being good in Out-of-System Break Point is about), then we need to not just dig the ball, but dig it with high quality. Get it high and on the 3m line. If it’s a really easy ball, maybe we’re pushing it up a little closer to keep our middles involved in trans. But we’re never losing swings because we dig too tight or too far to the sidelines. Keep the digs in control and in the center of the court.
One of my primary evaluations of liberos is looking at this Dig → Create → Convert chain. Of balls attacked in your zone, how often do you dig the ball? Of those digs, how many turn into Transition attempts? Of those, how many are killed?
How Do You Evaluate Your Out-of-System Block/Defense?
The most important overall metric for Out-of-System Block/Defense is, of course, your Break Point % or your Opponent Sideout %, whichever way you like looking at it. Personally, I prefer looking at Opponent Sideout, because I like putting them side-by-side:
If I’m a NCAA D1 team, and I use this ballpark of 67%/60%/50% as average levels of Sideout for Perfect/Good/Bad (3/2/1 on a 3-point scale), then I can assess both offense and defense in that way. Since we’re looking at Break Point specifically, I’d see that we were about average defensively when they were In-System, about average defensively when they were in Semi-System, but below average when they were Out-of-System. That allows me to assess and prioritize training moving forward.
One wrinkle in this is that Sideout is affected by Transition, whereas FBSO is not. Because of that, for an individaul match, I also like to look at First Ball Kill % by Pass Quality. This just helps check to see if there was something weird in the Transition data. If the other team only has 16 Semi-System receptions in a match, 3 Transition rallies could drastically swing the Sideout %. So just make sure you don’t have small-sample weirdness going on and check the FBK numbers too.
The above applies to all situations, but what about Out-of-System specifically?
Stuff-to-Tool ratio. I could look at this in summary, but in Out-of-System we need to be better than 1:1 in NCAA women’s volleyball.
Dig Quality. We need to dig a lot of balls and the majority need to be quality digs.
Transition Rallies won. I want to win 2/3 of Transition rallies when my opponents are Out-of-System.
Here’s what I mean by that. Say they are Out-of-System 20 times in a match. Let’s say they kill 6 balls against us, they make 2 unforced errors and we stuff them 2 times. That means that 10 of those balls are going into Transition. Of those 10 balls, if we win 7 of them, we’re in great shape. Remember that we get first chance to Transition, and if we dig with good quality, we should kill 4 or 5 of them straight away, with a chance to win 2 or 3 more of the 5 or 6 that go into secondary transition. If we win 6 of those 10 Transition balls, that’s not bad but not great. If we win 5 or fewer, we’re in bad shape.
The summary point is that we want to be able to identify when they are Out-of-System, be really solid and clean with our block/defense, and then punish them in Transition.