Club Month: Third Week Of Practice

We should basically be perfect by now...

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!

We’ve now gone through Week 1 and Week 2 of practice. We’ve mastered our Defensive System and perfected our In-System Offense. Right? Right???

Of course not. We never master anything, certainly not in youth volleyball. But, I like to keep rotating emphases as that creates a distributed learning effect. A typical club season is going to have somewhere in the ballpark of 50 practices from start to finish. If we can take our system and distill it down to somewhere between 6 and 12 practices, that gives us 4 to 8 times where we wave through each concept that we want to teach. Ideally, we’re a little stronger each wave and we’re cresting (to extend the metaphor) at the end of the season.

So we’ve hit our Defensive Systems in Week 1, which also puts the idea that defense ends with a transition attack in our team’s mind. So there’s a Transition component too. In Week 2, we introduced our most important Offensive System concepts, particularly In-System, particularly from our middle attackers. Now, in Week 3, we build out our Serving and Passing systems, which will allow us to actually play some defense and hit some balls.

Why Week 3 And Not Week 1?