Club Month: First Week Of Practice

Let's get it started.

November is Juniors Month at Smarter Volley. Juniors clubs have been underway in Europe for a little while now, and in North America most boys have already started and girls are just now getting going. Because of that, most of the content this month will be geared around the Juniors game and be directly applicable for Juniors coaches. But, a lot of it will be useful for coaches at other levels, including this one. Enjoy!

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Also: We have about 8 spots left for my Offensive Concepts seminar in Wilmington, DE on Dec 17/18. If you’re interested in attending, send me an email. If you’re interested in hosting me and running an event at your gym, send me an email.

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Club season will be underway soon in the United States. Some of you have already had tryouts and some of you might be conducting tryouts this weekend. Either way, you’re probably already thinking about getting in the gym and practicing with your team. What will you work on first? Do you start with the fundamental skills? Or do you start trying to figure out your starting lineup? Do you emphasize offense early or defense?

Over the next 3 weeks, I’ll outline what my first 3 weeks of practice might look like. I’ll talk about the big concepts we want to get in place and share some specific drills that I like to use. You might use this exact layout, or you might adapt these principles to fit your own specific situation. Either way, I hope this gives you a head-start on your new season.

Before You Hit The Court

The tendency when you write practice is to start thinking about what drills you want to run. I do this too. “Okay, so we’ll get about 20 minutes of passing… then do some hitting work… then scrimmage…”

But there’s some really important stuff to do before you start thinking about sketching out your drills. Getting this right can set you up for success and getting it wrong can put you in a hole that you’ll have to dig out of.

Define Roles

I’m a huge fan of role clarity. This is an article in and of itself, but to make a long story short, “people can handle disappointment, but they can’t handle uncertainty.” Your first practices are the prelude to your first tournament, and in your first tournament you will have a certain amount of playing time to apportion to your players. You should not be defining your starting lineup before you start practice, but you should be thinking about the path that gets you to your starting lineup. Who will compete for what positions? What will your playing time policy be? If you will have a clear “starting line up and backups” situation, you’ll want to communicate that early and plan opportunities to compete. If you will have more of a shared playing time arrangement, you’ll also need to communicate that and make sure you are training for depth.

Frontload

Explaining things from scratch is hard at practice, and it can be particularly difficult in a club environment, where you might be in a gym with multiple other teams. That turns up the noise and distraction factor and can make it very difficult for you to explain new concepts.

Hopefully you have an idea of the basic systems you want to teach. I’m talking less about specific technical details and more about the overall organizational concepts. Do you want to run a 3-person serve receive? Where will your defenders stand on defense? What kind of offense will you run? Depending on how well you know your players, you may not know the answer to all of these questions. But what you do know should be communicated.

And also: you might not be able to communicate it all in one meeting. That’s okay! I recommend starting with outlining your Block/Defense system, because that’s probably less personnel-dependent than your Offensive system, and, as you’ll see below, that’s the first system we’ll get in place in training.

So how do you frontload this information? Putting together a few slides or a 1-page outline and sending it to your players is a good way to go. Even better is to get them on a Zoom call, and better still is to get them in a classroom or quiet part of your practice facility about 30 minutes before you start your first practice. But figure out some way to give them this info before you hit the court, that way you can hit the ground running!

On The Court