Don't Plan To Fail - Part 3

Filling out your templates

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 1
Don’t Plan To Fail Part 2

Building A Template

You’ve sketched out your season phases. You’ve planned your Big Rocks for your first training block. Now you need to start figuring out what each practice is going to look like. I recommend planning out every practice in a training block all at once- ahead of time. The first step to this is having a general template that you work off of. I’ve written about this before in this post:

Here’s the template I really like for club volleyball. It’s assuming you have about 2 hours to practice and about 12 kids at practice. You can modify to suit a bit more or less time and different numbers of players, but here’s what I like to get in the ballpark of:

10’ - Self-Toss Spiking (or sometimes: an individual skills tutor)
10’ - 4-Ball Passing (or sometimes: Dig-Set)
10’ - Doubles (or sometimes: Transition 4s)
25’ - 2-Way Hitting (usually First Ball, but sometimes Transition)
20’ - 1-Way Sideout (or sometimes: BSBH)
45’ - 6v6 (ex: Aceball, GP Sideout, etc)

If you parse it out, it kind of makes two general templates:

Sideout-Oriented
Self-Toss Spiking
4-Ball Passing
Doubles
2-Way Hitting
1-Way Sideout
6v6

Defense/Transition-Oriented
Skills Tutor or Doubles
Dig-Set
Transition 4s
2-Way Transition Hitting
BSBH
6v6

I can mix and match too… there’s no reason I can’t sprinkle some Transition 4s into a Sideout-oriented practice or some 4-Ball Passing at the start of a Transition-oriented practice.

I also don’t always do every drill on the list every single practice. Sometimes I might skip the Self-Toss and the 4-Ball and get right into Doubles as a way to get the energy up right at the beginning of practice, and that also allows more time for 6v6. Or I might not always do 1-Way Sideout PSH (this is pass-set-hit against a block out of your full serve receive, but not playing the rally out) and I might just go right into 6v6¹.

But this is my general template setup. These are pretty much all the drills I’ll ever do at practice. This means I can write practice very quickly. What this also means is that practice becomes less about planning the drills and more about planning the teaching.

Planning To Teach

With a general template to work off of, you can now spend more of your mental energy on planning how you’re going to run each drill that day and what you’re going to teach because of it.

Examples:

1. Maybe you’re going to spend most of your time in Self-Toss trying to iron out the two goofy-footed hitters on your team. This will probably involve them doing a couple reps of footwork without the ball, then a rep or two off a coach toss, then trying a rep or two on the self-toss. You might be able to give feedback to your other hitters, but this will probably take most of your attention. And maybe the next practice the goofy-footers need to try to remember and work on their own a little (with an occasional reminder) while you work with a couple of your other hitters on improving their rotation through the ball.

2. Are you going to coach the passers more in 4-Ball Passing or the servers? Do you have a different teaching emphasis for each or are you going to introduce one general passing key to the group and reinforce with everybody?

3. When you do Transition 4s, will you focus on coaching the transition footwork or are you going to emphasize your defenders digging to target?

By definition, you can only focus on so many things.

Sometimes what you want to teach also slightly affects how you run the drills. For example, if you enter the 2-Way Hitting with a bowl, you’re going to get mostly in-system passes and a lot of in-system offensive reps. But your passers won’t get much out of these reps. On the flip side, if your servers are going full-tilt game reps, your passers will get challenged but you might lose a few in-system reps for your offense. If it’s day 1 and you’re trying to just introduce the idea of tempo or introduce the Pull, then maybe you do more bowls. But don’t get so fixated this that you end up entering with bowls for the whole training block.

How I’m Doing It

Here’s how I’m planning out one segment of the current training block for a club team:

You can see that I have either a Sideout or Block/Defense/Transition emphasis for each practice. The templates for those are pretty similar to those shown above. The main difference is that I have a soft start to practice, because we practice early and there’s nobody in before us. Since not every kid ends school at the same time or takes the same amount of time to get to the gym, they get there and start doing the Atomic Speed/Spike² workouts in pairs as they arrive. I’ll also grab kids to do some pass/set tutor as well. So basically the Self Toss/4-Ball Passing/Doubles gets all rolled into the pre-practice and then we “start” with 2-Way Hitting and then go to 6v6. If I had a late practice where we were waiting for another team to get off the court, then I would have a more fixed structure to those drills.

In terms of planning, you can see that I’m mostly planning what I’m going to teach/emphasize in that drill. One day, my main focus in 6v6 Aceball is Passing Posture/Positioning. That means that before every whistled serve I’m going to look at our reception line and make sure they are in the right position (location on the right court) and standing in the posture that I want them in. I’m not going to whistle serve until I see that. I’m also going to give plenty of feedback on passing prep and reception in general. Now of course, I might coach some other stuff in that drill and I might look at a few other things, but that’s the main thing I’m looking at. If I don’t see a substantial improvement in anything else, okay no big deal, because I know we’re going to make progress on one important thing.

You can see that Pass/No-Pass Footwork is an important piece of this training block. I dedicated two articles to Pass-and-Go footwork last week, so clearly I think it’s important. I’m hitting those mechanics multiple times in this training block, so the goal is for the athletes to have a pretty good understanding of these moves by the end of the block.

If you’ll notice, what I teach also generally flows from one drill to another. For example, on 11.26 I’m planning to tutor Setter Entries in the pre-practice, and then reinforce them in the game setting in Aceball. The next week I’ll tutor them again, but they won’t be my main focus. Instead, I’ll flip back to P/NP footwork. I generally have a secondary focus listed for most of the 6v6 stuff, but it’s really hard to see Setter Entry and P/NP Footwork at the same time. If you’re watching your setters footwork as they enter from serve receive, it’s really hard to see your outside hitter’s shuffle footwork at the same time. However, I can generally see whether a middle hit their Basecamp to start their approach, so that’s listed as a secondary emphasis on that day. The next practice, when I’m focusing on P/NP Footwork, I have “Middle-Middle” as a secondary emphasis. Even though the practice is mostly focusing on Sideout, I still want to see my zone 6 defender stopped and balanced in middle-middle and coaching that doesn’t conflict with coaching the P/NP Footwork.

Other Applications

This method of practice planning also works for high school, collegiate, and professional levels. The main difference is your increment of planning. At the NCAA level, you play each week, as opposed to 1-2x per month. And you’ll also get a detailed statistical report after each week of competition and you likely have office hours to plan more frequently than a club coach. However, there can be some downsides: you don’t want to be over-reactive to the last match either. Keep an idea of your general plan for the training block and update as needed.

You also might be planning video review, weights, and team meetings. I don’t want to turn this into an article on tracking NCAA hours, nor does anybody want to read that article. But the same principle applies: you want everything in the training block to be cohesive and sketched out ahead of time, so that your adjustments as you go are adjustments, not plans built from scratch.

Practice Planning Webinar