Cueing Doubles

Simple application for external cueing strategies

The spring is all about teaching here at SmarterVolley. If you’re a newer subscriber and you haven’t yet, check out the January Major Competition Analysis or the November Club Analysis for content that is more statistically-oriented.

Earlier this week, I introduced one of the pillars of my coaching trivium, Nick Winkleman’s, The Language Of Coaching.

And Now For Something Completely Different

The core theme here is more cueing, less feedback. Get players thinking last about correcting the last rep and more about their intention for the next rep. And sometimes those can be the same, right? If you’re in a more blocked setting, a more introductory phase of teaching a concept, the next rep is likely to look a lot like the last rep. Beyond, “you just passed a ball, so now you’re going to pass another ball,” and more like, “we’re learning how to set a middle quick for the first time and we’re just going off a coach toss, so the next ball is going to look exactly like the last one,” so saying, “set it higher,” is not only feedback but also not the worst cue in the world.

But other than that, we want more cueing than feedback.

And if we’re doing that, we’d like that cue to help add an external focus of attention rather than an internal focus of attention.

Let’s look at how we can combine that into one of my most common drills: Narrow-Court Doubles. Quick refresher on the setup here:

You can run this Queen of the Court style, Pool Play style, Workup style, etc. You can play games to 1, games to 3, games for time, etc. Let’s not get too bogged down in how the players will circulate. What’s happening here is that Team 3 and Team 1 are going to play a game of doubles. The shaded area is out-of-bounds. Cool, easy.

I used to do a straight-up “split-court” doubles with the dividing line in the middle of the court. Two reasons I made the change. First: Safety. This is less of a concern when the players are smaller but as they get bigger the risk of a collision is a lot higher. The buffer zone helps.

Yeah yeah, we don’t want our players to get concussions, come on Trinsey we’re trying to win matches here. Okay, okay you bloodthirsty strawman, here’s another reason to have the court narrowed to 3m (10’ in freedom units) instead of half-court: it will make your servers better.

“Serve Down The Hallway”

This is one of my most reliable and important cues for playing doubles. While there’s some setting and hitting and blocking and defending going on¹, I consider narrow-court doubles primarily a serving (and, to an extent, passing) drill. Here's why:

1. It’s logistically very easy to coach and cue.

2. There is clear intrinsic feedback.

3. It directly applies to serving situations that will be used in-game.

So back to serving down the hallway.

Winkleman argues that as movement coaches², our most important job is to control INTENTION and ATTENTION. I agree.

First: Intention. The intent is to serve the ball down the line and keep it in 1/3 of the court. This is a good goal for serving practice for a lot of volleyball players. At a certain level, this is probably a little too difficult. In that case, I just move the service line up. If we’re at a level where they can’t serve over consistently from 20’ then we’re probably below this drill being useful.

But this is a really nice intention for a lot of players. It’s more room for success than hitting a mat target, for example. Good (but not great) high school servers can still hit it in that third 80%+ if they are focused. To me that’s a great success ratio; they have to be focused to succeed, but there’s more immediate chances for success than the <50% you get with a mat target.

Plus, we have a live passer and a game situation to play. Of course, you can’t get as many reps as target serving on a mat, but it’s still pretty fast-paced.

Now: Attention. We want to design keys that aid an external focus of attention. Rather than thinking about hands or feet or elbows, we want to think about the effect of the serve. Creating this lane to serve down is a really clear intent for players. And we can augment the setup in a couple ways:

(1) Add an extra antenna. This provides that visual line cue at a distance 30’ away from the players, which helps extend their focus away from their body.

(2) Add elastic. This gives you the visual cue to serve under. With the extra antenna, it’s basically a 10’ x 3’ rectangle to serve the ball through. The elastic will sometimes mess up your attacking but hey, we know this is primarily a serve/pass drill. Play through.

These visual cues are really nice, but I don’t like putting them up there all the time or even most of the time. I get leery of creating a visual crutch. The ideal to me is to use those cues to help focus attention and see if attention can still be focused properly when you take the crutch away.

I really like pairing these environmental cues with verbal cues that enhance this image of a long, extended field of vision.

Serve down the hallway. (“Down the hallway”)

Finish down the lane.

Approach and finish down the runway. (“Down the runway”)

etc

Clear Intrinsic Feedback

You either hit it down the lane or you don’t. And if you’re using elastic, you either hit it under or you don’t.

This is kind of the case with serving, in general. Which is part of the reason that serving is the skill that players get good at the earliest and fastest. There’s a lot of clear skill that’s intrinsic to the skill.

But as servers get better, this feedback goes away a little. Passers provide feedback; either you beat the passers or you didn’t. But passers are also variable: sometimes you hit a mediocre serve that a passer shanks because they are in their own head. Sometimes you hit a tough serve that a great passer just makes a great move on and sticks.

I like the combination of this narrow lane of an environmental constraint along with the passer out there. This again helps with our external focus of attention because we can start thinking about serving in relation to that passer, etc.

Again, nothing that you can’t, in theory, do with any other drill, this setup is just well-suited to enable this.

Match Application.

Hitting a target down the line is a critical serving situation that happens all the time. Those of you who have worked on this on-court with me know that I am all about serving 5-to-1 down the line, especially against certain rotations:

(1) Standard Setter-1 with the outside pulled back to serve. This is the worst rotation in both NCAA and Juniors volleyball for a reason.

(2) Setter-4 with a DS in for the opposite, so the libero is in 6 and not 1.

(3) Setter-3 with a DS in for the opposite, so the libero is now over in 5; even farther away.

Others too, but those are really valuable. And obviously you have your 1-to-5 serves as well, but players are more familiar with that, because it’s by far the most common serving strategy.³

So I love that we can be in a critical situation in a match and say, “this is just like when we play doubles… line up straight on with that passer and drop it low in front of her.”

Conclusion

So there we go. Nothing magical about this drill, but the magic is in the application. If we take the ideas of cueing and, in particular, external cueing seriously, we can start amplifying the existing drills we’re already doing. I’ve found this combination of drills and cues powerful and I bet it will help some of your teams as well.

What cues have you used that would be helpful in this situation? Share them in the comments!

1. I think doubles benefits those skills more the less-advanced the players are. At U-14, your hitters can get a lot out of just trying to beat the net. At U-17, the setting and attacking angles are different enough from what you’ll be doing in a game that it’s more of a warmup for attackers and rounding out some general ball control than improving their ability to actually kill a ball.

2. There’s a lot more to being a team sport coach than coaching the movements of the game. But right now let’s just ignore tactics, lineups, relationships, logistics, etc. We’re at practice, trying to teach kids how to hit better serves.

3. Assuming you don’t call “serving 6-to-6 and hoping the ball stays in the court a serving strategy. Because that’s the most common serve in juniors volleyball.