Club Season: Tournament Review Pt1

Getting the information you need to plan the next block

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.

In this 3-part extension to the Club Season articles, we’re talking about building the next training block:

Tournament Review Pt1
Tournament Review Pt2
Planning The Next Block

Also, if you’re new to SmarterVolley, you might not have seen the Post-Tournament post from last year. This article series will go into quite a bit more depth, but that’s a good starting point.

Tournament Review: The Fast Way

How much should you rely on stats? And how much should you rely on your eye? I get asked this a bunch. I think it’s the wrong way to phrase the question.

In order to review something, you need information. Information comes from observation and recollection. Sometimes people view The Stats as being some separate entity from The Game, but stats are just defined observations with a good memory. They aren’t distinct from just thinking about the match and recalling what happened.

So to me, it’s not about Stats or Eye, it’s about using the tools you have in the time you have. Stats take time to collect (during the match) and process (after the match). But the good thing about stats is that their memory is perfect. If your observation was accurate at the time, it will still be accurate 2 years later as long as you don’t lose your statsheet. On the flip side, your eye processes things in real-time. You’ll need time to sit and reflect on the match, but the time loop is obviously faster. The downside is that there are all kinds of biases when you don’t record your observations in real-time. Sometimes this can actually be good; maybe a little distance from the situation can make your assessment better. But be aware that it happens.

Okay, so let’s take the base assumption: you’re coaching a club team by yourself. You either don’t have the ability to video every match or the time to go back and review and/or stat your whole tournament after the fact. What can you do?

First of all, you’re not going to have detailed statistics. If you’re coaching by yourself at a tournament, you need to be a coach, not a statistician. So you won’t have all the fancy stuff. But, remember, there is one very important statistic that’s always kept at every match. That’s right, the score! And luckily, with AES or whatever tournament-tracking software your tournament uses, you can even pull this up after the fact.

But there’s one other important piece of information you want to know as well: who played in each set.

If you’re Rotating Lineups, then you’re playing some different players in different sets. You want to know that. If you video all your matches, then you can go back and check. But let’s assume you’re not. In this case, you want to write down who played in each set in your handy notebook. If you have all of your lineups, and the score of each lineup you then have:

Point Differential (Overall)
Point Differential By Lineup

This is good information! If you were rotating lineups at practice and recording scores of games in practice, you have one piece of information to evaluate your lineups. But the matches give you even more information. Part of the Mid-Season arc of the season is to find your best lineup, so now you have the most valuable data you can get for that: real competition.

Okay, but let’s face it, that’s a pretty small amount of data and none of it is specific to training. “Hey girls, let’s increase our Point Differential next tournament.” Ooookay, thanks buddy, real helpful there.

Now we need to add some subjective observations to our objective data.

This will go way easier if you’ve been keeping your handy Notebook!

If one of the downside of subjective observations is that their accuracy is affected by time, then… write them down in real-time! And look, you’re not going to write a treatise for each match. But even a couple of the notes that you jot down during the game can help you remember what you were thinking, feeling, and saying during the tournament.

And then take a minute to sit and reflect. Try not to get bogged down in grand epic questions like, “how did the tournament go?” Imagine that you every question you ask yourself has to be answered in 140 characters or less and you’ll start asking better questions. For example, in our last training block, here were the spiking emphases:

1. 4 Steps, Slow-to-Fast

2. Double-Arm Lift

3. Open And Close Rotation

4. Rotation (landing positions)

Simply asking, “how did each hitter look in these areas?” Will give you some good fodder for reflection.

So, to summarize:

1. Get your Point Differential data and compare to your lineups.

2. Review your In-Match notes.

3. Reflect, using your practice emphases as prompts.

Is this as good as having the army of assistants and reams of data that D1 and Pro coaches have? Actually… maybe. Sometimes less is more, and, if you’re a club coach, this might be all you need to plan an effective training block leading into your next big tournament.

A Secret Sideout Statsheet

There’s actually a few more very critical pieces of information you can get for free at your club tournaments, and that’s the score sheet.

At all your club matches, there will be a work team keeping the book. If they keep the book accurately¹, you actually have all the information you need to get Sideout information by rotation. At one point back in the day, when I was coaching club without an assistant to keep statistics, I would simply walk over to the table and take a picture of the score sheet after the games.

I’ll show you how you can get Sideout information by rotation from that score sheet.