Don't Plan To Fail - Part 1

Blocking out your season

It’s almost winter. That means club volleyball season is almost here for juniors volleyball coaches in the USA. Therefore, much of my content is tailored for club coaches. In the past, these have been some of my most popular posts. Check out this summary post which has links to last year’s Club Winter posts.

Winter Wrap-Up

If you’re not a club coach, don’t worry! Although this article series is tailored for club coaches, the topics apply more broadly, to coaches at any level. I think you’ll still find some insights in here.

Webinar Info: Typically I do webinars at the end of a content mini-cycle in order to give bonus information to premium subscribers. In this case, since the topic is Practice And Season Planning, I wanted to run this webinar before practices really kick off. If you’re interested in getting access to the Practice And Season Planning webinar, become a premium subscriber and head down to the bottom of this article, below the paywall.

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Other articles in this series:

Don’t Plan To Fail Part 2
Don’t Plan To Fail Part 3

If You Fail To Plan…

…then you’re planning to fail, or so the saying goes.

This will be my first season coaching club full-time since 2012, with the exception of the weird covid year of 2021 where I did help coach a couple of club teams. I’ve been involved quite a bit in club volleyball in those intervening years, but it’s always been popping in and out of a season. This year, I’m in it for the long haul. I’m sure I’ll make plenty of mistakes, but ideally you’d like your mistakes to come from unforeseen circumstances, rather than easily avoidable pitfalls.

So I’m planning out my season and I’ll share that planning with you all as part of the Club Winter content cycle. If you’re enjoying this stuff I’d love it if you shared with a friend.

I’ve written about season planning before, so you might want to check that article out for some additional background information. This post will expand and offer more specifics for season planning. The main idea is that there are 3 main phases to your season:

1. Pre-Season or Early-Season

2. Mid-Season

3. Post-Season

Sometimes you might separate a true Pre-Season (ie, before any competition takes place) block from your Early-Season (earliest competitive matches that count) block. Or subdivide long blocks into two half-blocks. But these 3 blocks are the general idea.

And, to quote from that article:

The purpose of dividing the season into phases is to make planning each phase easier. Three things you have to plan for are:

Team Systems - What offensive and defensive elements are you trying to teach?Practice Content - What drills you do, what skills you emphasize, what etc.
Playing Time - Play everybody v play-to-win?

For each phase, I look at it like this:

Pre-Season
- Get core systems in place. (Where you stand in serve receive, base defensive system, main offensive plays/sets)
- Get your core drills in place with a big emphasis on fundamental skills.
- Play a lot of lineups and keep your options open.

Mid-Season
- Add 1 or 2 tweaks to offensive and defensive systems (Ex: Start experimenting with a Slide… add 1 blocking tactic/adjustment, etc)
- Focus on fixing weak points in your fundamentals that have been revealed by competition.
- Keep playing multiple lineups but get an eye toward finding your best lineup and the 1-2 most likely alterations.

Post-Season
- Focus on eliminating offensive and defensive elements that have been less helpful.
- Focus on playing to your strengths at least as much as fixing weak points.
- Narrow in on your best lineup(s).

We have the basic concepts of season planning blocks, now let’s look at specifically how club coaches would apply them.

Club Season Blocks

If You Don’t Go To Nationals
Most girl’s club teams start practice sometime in early December. Some teams get going in November, some start late December, but early December is the most common, from those I’ve talked to. Also, most teams play a tournament on MLK weekend in mid-January. Therefore, the logical first practice block becomes: Day 1 → MLK weekend. Let’s call this 7 weeks, although it will get disrupted because of holidays.

Most club teams also play a President’s Day weekend tournament, which comes 5 weeks after MLK weekend. This make a logical second season block: MLK weekend → President’s day weekend.

If you don’t go to Nationals, then your season probably ends sometime in April. Let’s say April 13 was your last weekend. That’s another 7 weeks after President’s Day weekend.

Therefore, we have a natural division of:

Pre-Season: Day 1 → MLK Weekend (“7” weeks, or about 12 practices)
Mid-Season: MLK → Prez Day (5 weeks, or about 10 practices)
Post-Season: Prez Day → mid-April (7 weeks, or about 14 practices)

The total amount of practices might fluctuate a couple in one direction or the other, you might have some weekend practices/scrimmages/tournaments in there as well. But what you end up with is 3 manageable training blocks that you can use as your base for planning.

If You Do Go To Nationals
If you do go to Nationals, your season is going until the summer- mid-June or even early-July. In this case, the easiest way is to view things as 4 blocks instead of 3.

Pre-Season: Day 1 → MLK Weekend (“7” weeks”, or about 12 practices)
Mid-Season 1: MLK → Prez Day (5 weeks, or about 10 practices)
Mid-Season 2: Prez-Day → mid-April (7 weeks, or about 14 practices)
**Break**
Post-Season: May → Nationals (7 weeks, or about 14 practices)

I think it’s important to have a break for these kids in this long season. Sometimes family travel for spring break forces break. Sometimes spring sport playoffs force these breaks, if you have multi-sport kids on your teams. Either way, I think you and your team need some break time in that late-April/early-May period. Try to have a 4 week stretch where you have no tournaments scheduled so that you can afford to give your kids 2-3 weeks either fully off or with lighter, restorative practices. Play doubles the whole practice (or better yet, have full sand practices) or other fun, less-coached games. Or switch practices to 4-person, 1-hour long small group lessons for 2-3 weeks. Your kids will come back refreshed and better able to make a push for Nationals.

How I’m Doing It

It would be weird if my actual planning looked radically different than the general concepts I just laid out. So here’s the specifics:

Most kids in this area aren’t still playing HS ball in November. There will be a few that are still going into state playoffs, but NC starts pretty early (matches as early as Aug 15) and ends pretty early (regular season ends around Oct 10-ish). So there will be kids ready to get into the gym as early as the first week in November and I think practices theoretically “start” that week. That said…

1. I won’t even be back from AU until the second week of November and I leave shortly after that for a GMS in Miami.

2. I really really think kids need a little more break than they say they do after HS season. I would rather have them dying to get into the gym together.

3. I’m not too worried about jumping right into full team systems. I want some time to get back with players 1-on-1, see where they are at after HS season, explain things a little more slowly, etc.

I’d rather start slowly to finish strong then max-out for January and stagnate in April.

So let’s call the first “official” practice week to be Dec 2.

In terms of tournament schedule, we’ll play the usuals: MLK weekend and Prez Day weekend. We’ll do a couple of Qualifiers (Big South and Show Me) and a couple other multi-day power league type deals sprinkled in there. And then we’ll finish with AAU Nationals. On the less-usual side, since I’m a believer in incorporating beach and indoor together for complete volleyball experience, we’ll dedicate some of April and most of May to playing more on the sand than indoors, which creates another sub-block.

And if we want to get really specific, after both of those 3-day tournaments (MLK and Prez Day), we have a 2-day tournament the next weekend. I actually kind of like stacking them up like that. You have your block that leads up to the 3-day, you play Sat/Sun/Mon, you take Tuesday off, you hit your Thursday practice and then go play Sat/Sun. You almost feel like you’re merging the 2 tournaments together into 5 days of play with a little break in the middle and then you can reset, process, and learn for the next block.

So here’s how I visualize my season:

Pre-Season: November → Dec 21 (“7” weeks, about 8 team practices + some individual or small group workouts beforehand)
Mid-Season 1: Jan 2 → Jan 26 (4 weeks, 8 practices + 2 tournaments)
Mid-Season 2: Jan 27 → Feb 23 (4 weeks, 8 practices + 2 tournaments)
Post-Season 1: Feb 24 → April 13 (7 weeks, 14 practices + 3 tournaments)
**Break**
Beach Interlude: April 29 → May 25 (4 weeks, 8 practices + 2 beach tournaments)
Post Season 2: May 26 → June Something (4ish weeks, 8 practices + a tournament before AAUs)

You could call that 6 blocks, you could also call it 4 blocks if you combined the two Mid-Season half blocks of 4 weeks into 1 block and if you just rolled the Beach-focused portion into the lead-up to Nationals. But it helps me plan, so I’m thinking about it that way.

Other Applications

Some seasons lend themselves cleanly to the Pre-Season, Mid-Season, Post-Season divisions. You might just neatly divide the season into 1/3s. For college coaches, you might use a strategy like:

Pre-Season: From 1st practice until 1st conference match
Mid-Season: From 1st conference match until you play everybody once (in a balanced home-and-home schedule) or until midway through conference play
Post-Season: From midway through conference play to and through the playoffs

European club teams have a longer season with a longer pre-season, so this general rule of 1/3s could still work, but you probably need to subdivide your mid-season into 2 (or even 3) blocks in order to make the planning practical and manageable. When I was in Korea, my pre-season was so long, I divided it into 2 blocks as well.

Men’s NCAA teams might consider their fall season as one block, and then a winter pre-season, mid-season, and post-season. Boy’s club coaches might also do the same, since most boys play HS volleyball in the spring. You have a fall block, a winter block, a spring block (that might be limited contact with the boys while they play HS ball) and then a summer block.

As women’s NCAA teams go through scheduling changes and the bifurcation of teams that are staying in more of an amateur/student model and schools that are going to a professional model, spring/summer will need to be more tightly coordinated with the fall season. For powerhouse NCAA programs with the ability to sign players to employee contracts, I picture the planning cycle as truly starting with the spring and then ending in Dec. Most teams try to do that already, it’s just been a challenge with transfer portal, limited control of player time during the summer, etc.

But for most girl’s coaches in the USA? The three-part or modified three-part system works really well, as I’ve outlined here. Let me know what your planning is looking like and drop some questions in the comments below.

In the next installment, we’ll move from the logistics to the curriculum and start thinking about what we want to teach in each of these blocks, knowing that we’ll be more specific about the early-season block and less-specific as we try to forecast further out into the season.

Practice Planning Webinar