Club Season - Getting Started

Assembling Your Team

November marks the start of the season for many juniors club coaches. Last year I made November Club Month at SmarterVolley and a lot of you enjoyed some content that was more tailored to the club level. Here’s some of those posts if you haven’t checked them out yet.

U-13 Analysis
U-15 Analysis
U-17 Analysis
All About: Doubles
All About: Triples
All About: Fours
First Week Of Practice
Second Week Of Practice
Third Week Of Practice

Since you all enjoyed it last year, let’s run it back and double-down. I’ll be making juniors and club volleyball the focus of the next 3 months- not exclusively but that will be the emphasis. So here we go.

Season Plan

If there’s one thing that can make your season not only more effective but also more enjoyable, it’s a good season plan. I’m going to assume that most of your are not full-time club volleyball coaches and thus you’ll operate on a slightly different tempo than somebody an NCAA coach. If you’re coaching as your full time, you can set down every morning and plan your practice out. But if you’re coaching juniors volleyball, odds are you work something like a 9-5 before heading over to the gym for your 6pm practice, or whatever.

Even NCAA coaches who are coaching full-time, and who have morning office hours, etc, can find that planning practice every day is a recipe for getting overwhelmed. Meet in the morning to go over practice with your staff and tweak the rough draft of a plan you already have in place? Yes. Write it up fresh from scratch every time? No.

So plan your work and work your plan. Okay, how do we do that?

Phases Of The Season

Let’s start by dividing the season into either 3 or 4 parts. I used to use 3 as my default:

1. Pre-Season

2. Mid-Season

3. Post-Season

This tends to map on well to how you might plan a high school or NCAA season, which have even more well-defined Pre-Season and Post-Season blocks of time. But it works well for club. For club teams, I tend to think of these phases as:

1st Practice: Pre-Season Begins
MLK Day Tournament: Pre-Season Ends, Mid-Season Begins
1st Qualifier: Mid-Season Ends, Post-Season Begins

And that Post-Season block runs all the way through Nationals or whenever your season ends.

What Goes Into Each Phase?

The purpose of dividing the season into phases is to make planning each phase easier. Three things you have to plan for are:

1. Team Systems - What offensive and defensive elements are you trying to teach?

2. Practice Content - What drills you do, what skills you emphasize, what etc.

3. Playing Time - Play everybody v play-to-win?

For each phase, I look at it like this:

Pre-Season
- Get core systems in place. (Where you stand in serve receive, base defensive system, main offensive plays/sets)
- Get your core drills in place with a big emphasis on fundamental skills.
- Play a lot of lineups and keep your options open.

Mid-Season
- Add 1 or 2 tweaks to offensive and defensive systems (Ex: Start experimenting with a Slide… add 1 blocking tactic/adjustment, etc)
- Focus on fixing weak points in your fundamentals that have been revealed by competition.
- Keep playing multiple lineups but get an eye toward finding your best lineup and the 1-2 most likely alterations.

Post-Season
- Focus on eliminating offensive and defensive elements that have been less helpful.
- Focus on playing to your strengths at least as much as fixing weak points.
- Narrow in on your best lineup(s).

Examples

Alright, let’s translate this into a practical example for a junior club team. Say you’re a competitive U16 team and your first practice is on Monday, Dec 4.

Pre-Season: 6 Weeks (~12 Practices + a scrimmage or two)
Starts Monday, Dec 4.
Ends with MLK Weekend tournament on Jan 13-15

Systems Emphases:
(1) Base reception system: Spacing, seam responsibilities, short/deep responsibilities
(2) Offensive systems: 3rd-step middles, tight to the setter. 2nd-step outside/rightside on freeball, 1st-step otherwise.
(3) Defensive systems: Base positioning, freeball/downball, defending left/middle/right

Skills Emphases:
(1) Serving: 4-step jump float footwork and rhythm, flat contact
(2) Passing: Posture, simple angles
(3) Setting: Posture, serve receive entries, footwork
(4) Attacking: Pass-to-attack footwork, transition footwork
(5) Blocking: Footwork, BSBH eyework
(6) Digging: 2A2F, Cut-it-off, Overhand digging

Lineups:
(1) Rotate all outsides through O1 and O2
(2) Rotate all middles through O1 and O2
(3) Play both setters in a 5-1

Mid Season: 11 Weeks (~20 Practices and 4-5 tournaments)
Starts Monday, Jan 15
Ends with Big South Qualifier March 29-31

Systems Emphases:
(1) Serve/Pass: changing depth on serves (deep/drop alternations), libero shading toward a likely serving target, middles helping pass short serves
(2) Offense: adding Slide for a promising M1, seeing if we can go 2nd-tempo to the leftside on serve receive as well as freeball, adding in Pot Throws out-of-system
(3) Defense: 5-step block moves when left side in obvious out-of-system, blockers seeing the set and adjusting wide or inside, defensive floor skills (pancake/dive/sprawl)

Skills Emphases:
Identify 2-3 focuses for each player and work on them until progress is made. Likely changing every ~6 practices.

Lineups:
(1) Decide on 6-2 or 5-1
(2) Fix M1 and rotate other middles as M2

Post-Season: 11 weeks (~20 practice and 4-5 tournaments)
Starts Monday, April 1
Ends with AAU Nationals the week of June 20

Systems Emphases:
(1) Serve/Pass: Consistent changing depths of serve as well as cross/line serves. Specific adaptations to get our best passers passing more balls and covering for weaker passers.
(2) Offense: Identify 1-2 most effective sets for each middle attacker. Dial in tempo for serve receive on the left, will we go fast or high? Clarify where the boundary is between fast and high. Is it 8’? 10’?
(3) Defense: Be great with our blocking eyework. Get all players clean and simple on floor skills. Identify how we’ll cover different tipping or off-speed strategies: tip to 2, roll to 3, chop to 1,e tc.

Skills Emphases:
Continue with individual emphases, and also:
(1) Add power to every attacker’s best shot (cross or line) and get them comfortable with their secondary shot when their favorite shot is not there.
(2) Incorporate some setter tutor for difficult situations: moving backward, high and tight, digging balls out of the net, etc
(3) Make sure your high ball setting is good by everybody. Make sure your freeball/downball ball control is there. Don’t lose points at Nationals with sloppy ball control!

Lineups:
Find your best lineup and go to it in the playoffs. Make sure you know your 1-2 most likely changes and alterations.

The further away the date, the less specific the plan will be. So you’re not going to pre-plan your practices that are 6 months away, but you want to have a rough draft, so when it comes to fill in specifics, you don’t have to figure out where in the season you are and make it up from scratch.

But your Pre-Season block IS coming up shortly, so in the next article, we’ll discuss how to script out your first 12 practices or so.