Club Season: Tournament Review Pt2

The last 20%

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 Long Way

Let’s say you have the time and resources to do a bit deeper of a tournament review. What information do you want? Stats? Video? Other? Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about the principles of what we want to accomplish:

1. Evaluate the effectiveness of your last training block.

2. Set priorities for the next training block.

That’s basically it. If you like to dive into the numbers (and, if you’re a SmarterVolley reader, there’s a good chance you do), then it’s really easy to get lost going down the rabbit holes. But remember that the data only matters if it impacts what you’ll do in training. So what data do we want?

The Triangle
Sideout
(Maybe) Sideout By Pass Quality

This is the data that allows you to hone in and target things a little bit more. Here’s a spreadsheet from a past club season:

So we have our Terminal Serving, our First Ball, and our Transition, as well as Sideout %s for us and our opponent.

This was for a U-14 team from a while ago, and you see a bunch of information on here that’s pretty typical of that level of play.

You can see that this level of play is the borderline of a Flippening where the Sideout % hasn’t gone over 50% for this level of play. This information is important because it tells us that this team (and most of its opponents) have not yet mastered the basic Pass-Set-Hit sequence out of serve receive. This is common even for good (as this team was) U-14 club teams. So this team needs lots of Pass-Set-Hit work. You can also see that this team had both more First Ball Kills and also more errors in First Ball than its opponents.

We also see that this team earned a slight advantage in Terminal Serving, but that was done with high aces and high errors. That’s typical of my juniors teams I coach, so I probably wasn’t too worried about it at the time. To be honest, I forget whether this sample image, which I’ve now used for a bunch of presentations, was pulled from an early-season or late-season tournament- it’s been years. If it was late-season, I’d probably want to focus on serving in a bit more. 81% Serve-In is pretty low. But early season, I wouldn’t be too worried about it.

We know that, at the club level, really good teams miss 2 serves or fewer and get aced 2 times or less with 2 aces or more. Most U-14 teams will struggle to limit opponents to 2 aces or fewer, but the best teams can.

Club gets a little wonky because you can play a bunch of 15-point sets. So I take total number of points and divide by 45. We earned 113 points and opponents earned 108, which is about the equivalent of 5 x 25-point sets. (Likely this was two 3-set matches)

But if we take this as being 5 sets of volleyball, then this team was serving about 6 aces per set, missing 4 serves per set, and giving up about 3.5 aces per set. That isn’t bad in terms of ace prevention for a U-14 team, and it’s indicative of aggressive-but-high-error serving against other 14 teams that are also error-prone.

Again, all pretty typical for U-14.

I also have some Sideout by Pass data in there. So you can see that this team was actually a bit worse than opponents on both Good Pass and Bad Pass Sideout. But they sided out better because they passed quite a bit better than opponents. Obviously their aggressive serving played a part in that, and 44% Good Pass is also quite good for a U-14 team.

So for this team, attacking is a clear priority.

Finally, you notice a couple of details down toward the bottom. A piece of information I think is really worth keeping is this:

Times Blocked
Times Hit Out
Times Hit Net

Ideally, we’d like to see Times Blocked > Times Hit Out > Times Hit Net.

This is a big hurdle for juniors players, particularly young ones. They hit in the net a lot. This team hit out a lot, but I’d rather see that than hitting in the net. And I like to show the other team how rarely the other team actually blocks us.

I also, if possible, record, “Kills against the defense” and “Kills against the block.” First of all, you’ll almost always find that your defense is much more important than your blocking at the juniors level. But in this case, we can also look at this and say, “we got blocked 5 times, but we scored 12 points off the block, so every time we attack against the block we’re gaining an advantage.”

This stuff is important for training young players because it helps direct their focus. You’re never going to completely eliminate mistakes but you can make mistakes in the right direction.

Video Review

So now that we have our statistics, let’s talk about reviewing video.