Club Season: Planning The Next Block

Using your post-tournament review

This winter I’m focusing on content for juniors club coaches. In this cycle of articles, I’m walking you through an example pre-season training block, which would go from the beginning of your club season to your first major tournament.

Getting Started
The First 12 Practices
Getting Into It
Practice #3
Another Week Of Practices
The Halfway Point
7 ate 9
Wrapping Up Preseason

Most teams reading this are finished have just finished their first major tournament of the year.

The club season feels a lot different before mid-January than it does from mid-January to mid-April. Once you start playing tournaments, two things happen that seem to distort your perception of time as a coach:

1. Tournaments come quickly, giving a sense that the season is flying by.

2. You’re constantly being pulled backward by reacting to what happened last tournament, giving a sense of running in place or getting stuck.

What this means is that it’s much harder to maintain a clear sense of progression down an orderly path once the season hits. You find yourself reacting to the last tournament as well as losing some of your technical progression because you “just want to get in a rhythm for the weekend.”

And this happens at all levels!

So what can we do? Plan your work and work your plan. We need to set up a flow where we can review the last tournament, plan out a reasonable training cycle, and then work through that plan. Then, we evaluate the results at another tournament and reassess.

Other parts in this series are:

Tournament Review Pt1
Tournament Review Pt2
Planning The Next Block

Not All Tournaments Are Considered Equal

I think one thing you have to be willing to do as a coach is, at least for planning purposes, treat some tournaments differently than others. It’s going to be hard to create good training blocks if they only last 3 practices. What you want to do is fix 2 major tournaments in your mind and then plan the training out between them. So while you might have smaller or less-important (or simply less-conveniently-timed) tournaments in between your 2 bigger tournaments, you won’t necessarily plan your training block around them.

For example, for many juniors teams, MLK Day weekend and President’s Day weekend are 2 big tournament. You’ll likely play 2, maybe even 3 tournaments between those 2, but you’ll set MLK Day weekend and President’s Day weekend as the bookend around which you’ll plan the next training block.

After President’s Day weekend, a common next big tournament might be a Qualifier or other big multi-day in late March or early April. For example, the Big South Qualifier, one of the biggest events on the calendar, is March 29th - March 31st.

A team planning a training block in between President’s Day and Big South would have about a 6-week training block. Depending on various factors, this means about 10-15 practices to plan for.

Using Your Review

In previous posts, we talked about creating a tournament review. You might have to go mostly off notes and recollection, or you might have extensive video. Regardless of your resources, we’re trying to answer two fundamental questions:

What should we do?
How should we do it?

These are just variations of Rules #1 and 1a which are: Do the right thing(s). And do the thing(s) right.

As the great Stephen Covey says, “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

So, how do you determine the main thing? Lucky for you, I’ve been writing about this for quite a while. First, where does your team fall on The Triangle? Next, where are you at in the Sideout Flippening and do you need to prioritize the Pass-Set-Hit sequence (as most club teams do), or do you need to emphasize block/defense more? And finally, you might consider your offensive strengths and weaknesses in different situations.

An Example…

Let’s say you’re a strong U-17 club team. You’re not packed top-to-bottom with P5 recruits and you’re not going to medal in Open at Nationals, but you have aspirations of going to Nationals and maybe even winning some matches there. After playing in both your MLK and President’s Day tournament, along with a couple others, your stats might look like: