Club Special Pt2: Post-Tournament

Aka: writing out the stuff that annoyed you over the weekend.

Last week’s post on in-match coaching tailored to club coaches was pretty popular.

Club Vball Special: In-Match Coaching

So, here’s a follow-up. I’ll use some specifics as well as highlight some general concepts and hopefully that mix gives all of you a couple of takeaways. So here’s my to-dos after coaching in a President’s Day weekend tournament.

Cancel Tuesday Practice

If you do Nationals, your kids will play 4 days in a row. And high school teams play 4 days in a row, etc. So, in theory, your kids are capable of having practice tonight. But I like giving the kids the day off. Hopefully your practice gym has a more forgiving surface than Sportcourt laid over concrete with little-to-no underlayer. 3 days of that can be hard on bodies, particularly shins and Achilles. Honestly, I’m a little sore today and all I was doing was coaching!

If I was coaching a Nationally-competitive team that built this into the schedule, I would have planned to bring the kids into the practice gym and then done some non-impact movement and bloodflow work. (A light lift if you want to think about it that way.) And then we’d watch some video, take some notes, and set ourselves up for the next practice.

For my specific situation, I’m coaching a 14s team that is playing a mix of Club and Open tournaments and not going to Nationals. Also, I just started filling in for this team a couple weeks ago, so we don’t have any sort of lifting/physical training built into the schedule yet.

Make Some Video Clips

I’ve done a couple of team pre/post-practice video sessions so far, but instead of bringing them into the gym to do that tonight, I’ll just clip out 5-10 clips from one set of one match and send them to the kids to watch.

If anybody is interested in what I would do with more of a Nationally-competitive team in terms of film review, drop me a comment and I can follow up on that in a future article.

But some of you suckers wonderful people actually have jobs outside of volleyball, so you may not have the time for multi-hour video review. Or, on the flip side, some of you may be technical directors or advisors for multiple teams. So you can’t spend 3 hours on each team if you need to review some video and prep notes for 6 different teams. So here’s what I do:

(1) Pick one game, ideally the closest set where they played well. So don’t get a 25-15 blowout win, but also don’t use a 15-25 blowout loss.

(2) Try to find a mix of “doing it right” and “need to improve.” Ideally your video sessions isn’t nothing but showing them how much they suck at volleyball.

(3) Have a specific list of about 3 things that you’re looking for. This will help you scan the game quickly because you already know you’re looking for. For most club teams, scanning for these things will be pretty good:

1. Anytime you send a freeball/downball. Did you take appropriate risk to make it tough on the other team while not making errors? (You can broaden these to general “tough swing” out-of-system situations at all. Basically, situations where your hitter is unlikely to get a kill but you can still make a good zero.)

2. Anytime you get a freeball/downball. Is the team ID’ing the situation and moving (or not moving) to the right spots?

3. Tips and shots. Is the team ID’ing tips and shots? Are they controlling the digs and getting good transitions and sets in these situations? There are lots of tips and shots in club volleyball, so digging them is important, and they are also easier to transition out of than digging hard-hit balls. So do them well.

(4) Use a screen capture program to clip 5-10 second clips. I use Movavi, but I’m sure there’s other programs that work just as well.

(5) Clip 5-10 of these clips (sometimes less is more!) and send them to your players via preferred channel. If we were having practice, we’d just come in a little earlier and I’d use a projector, but you can also send. I prefer a Whatsapp group (avoids any weird iPhone/non-iPhone group text stuff), but the club I’m working with uses a group app called Band. Again… whatever. As long as everybody will see the message, I don’t think it matters too much how you send it.

When sending the clips, I preferably narrate over them if I’m sending them out digitally (in Movavi, you can choose whether to turn your mic on or off while recording), but sending notes is also fine. The downside of narrating is that the clips get longer. If I narrate the clips, I tend to mash them into a 2-minute or so long clip with talking over it as I pause and unpause the clips. If I send notes, I’ll send the clips individually.

Some of that is super-specific, and some of the specifics don’t matter, but what matters is the collective adds up to something that takes you no more than 20-30 minutes to do and no more than 10-20 minutes for the kids to watch- and shorter than that is great too. If your post-tournament video review last 3 hours it’s going to be hard to duplicate. And if the kids need more time than “the car ride home” to watch, you increase the chance that some of them won’t watch or won’t watch all of it. Lessismorelessismorelessismore.

Review Your Stats

I don’t have any stats from this weekend. And also, it’s 14 Club. I’m not too too worried about stats. In an ideal world, I’d have some, because they are a good way to show improvement. But it’s not the end of the world if you can’t get them. I didn’t have an assistant, and I am not keeping stats when I head coach. I’m obviously a fan of stats, but I firmly believe that coaches need to coach first in the match. If the stats are important enough, you’ll need to have an assistant do them, or else stat after the fact. Otherwise, you’ll just have to use judgment.

If I had stats, what would I like to review?

Copied from an old club team’s stats.

So obviously you see the elements of the Triangle there. And there’s a few other things that I really like… in general, but particularly at the club level. If you’ve seen the Club Analysis I did, some of this isn’t going to surprise you.

(1) Do we miss 2 serves or fewer per 25-point set?

(2) Do we get aced 2 times or less per 25-point set?

(3) Are we in the ballpark of 50% Good Pass? (For a good club team, lower-level teams won’t be anywhere near this)

(4) For higher-level teams, GP Sideout and BP Sideout become important. For lower-level teams, it all blends together. For higher-level teams I also like to look at Good/Medium/Bad Pass… Sideout By Pass Quality.

(5) Ideally we get blocked more than we hit out and we hit out more than we hit in the net. Again, at the lower levels, other teams just won’t block you that much, so this will be hard but also… don’t hit out! And definitely don’t hit it in the net.

All that can be done by hand.

Review Your In-Match Notes

Here’s my notebook for the tournament, with personal details edited out.

The first thing I write on there is the schedule and the focuses for the day, like I outlined in my pre-tournament article.

Since I just started filling in for this team, I need to remind myself of the rotations. Since it’s a younger team, I’m also running a 6-3 with them, and that rotation is slightly wonkier than the standard 5-1 that I tend to run with older teams. So I wanted to make sure I had some reminders about rotational orders.

So I always have the big emphases ready at hand up top, and then I might have some specific game notes as games go on. The big emphases are most of what I’m trying ot reinforce throughout the day, so a lot of what I’m saying is just different phrasing of that.

I don’t like to call a timeout unless I have something to say, and I want to have something useful to say when the other team calls a timeout. So I’ll often write a couple notes to reference during timeouts or in between sets. Of course, you might just say whatever is at hand if it’s relevant, but sometimes I’ll write a note or two if I know it isn’t the right time to make that comment, but I want to remember it later in the match. I usually cross the note out if it’s no longer relevant.

Nothing too magical or different than what most of you are already doing.

Something I’m doing today is re-reading those little notes. There’s a few things that I wrote multiple times, so those are probably things I’ll need to address in practice. If they aren’t able to make those adjustments in-tournament, they aren’t proficient enough in those skills and need practice reps in those areas.

During the tournament, I’ll also write a little column of stuff I know I want to talk about after the tournament. Sometimes it’s something little like, “I have to teach these kids that we need to find a spot off-court to line up all of our bags so we’re not piling them up on the bench and taking them on and off every match.” Sometimes it might be something specific like, “get some pancake reps because the kids aren’t fluid in that move.”

And now when I’m planning my next few practices, I want to make sure those things are worked into the plan. Again, nothing magic, just reviewing so nothing slips through the cracks.

Follow-Up With Players And Parents

In an ideal world, I’d send every kid and her parents a short note the morning after the tournament with a summary of what went well and what we are going to work on in the upcoming practices. In the real world, you don’t always have time to do this. So you may need to do what you can, and then talk to some other kids at practice.

I generally try to send an email or text message to the parents of the kids I have the least-developed relationship with. The kid you’ve been coaching for 5 years and know well might already know what you think, because they are practiced in listening to you and processing what you’re saying. The kid that is more shy and you are more new to working with will need some follow-up with her parents. The main thing here is that you don’t want a kid to think you hate them when you actually are pleased at the progress they made, but you spoke to the sternly one time. And you don’t want a kid to think she’s about to start every game of the next tournament when there’s actually some changes coming that might reduce her playing time. Stuff like that.

Plan Your Practices

Okay, there you go. Now for the easy part. Take everything you learned and incorporate it into your practice plans. Need some help? Try this article:

Organization Mechanics Skill