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: