Fall 2024 Mailbag - Part 1

Setting tutors, sidearm serving, and a Push nuances

All around the USA, fall seasons are coming to an end. High schools are finishing their girl’s seasons and getting into the state playoffs and NCAA women’s teams are in the home stretch of their conference, with the NCAA tournament coming up soon. A lot of boy’s clubs have started up and, internationally, pro seasons are underway as well.

This winter, I’ll have a lot of content that’s geared around youth/juniors volleyball. I’ll also have some content that’s specifically tailored at club coaches. Playing in tournaments is a different animal than playing single matches, the way HS/college/pro teams do. And there’s unique challenges that travel club coaches face. I’ll be coaching a club team in my local area this year, so I’ll give SmarterVolley readers a peek behind the curtain with some specifics about how I like to run training and prepare for tournaments. I think you’ll enjoy it- whether you coach club or not.

If you haven’t seen already, the backbone of the content this fall was my Defensive Profiles series. There’s a 4-part series for each of the aspects, so a lot of content to dive into:

Serving Profiles
Digging Profiles
Blocking Profiles

If you enjoyed these articles, please share SmarterVolley with a friend or a coaching colleague. The more subscribers I get, the more time I can spend on SmarterVolley and the more content I can produce.

And of course, to wrap up a season, I have a mailbag Q&A for you all! Here’s some previous Mailbags:

Summer 2024
Spring 2024
Winter 2023
Fall 2023

And let’s get this one started.

If you haven’t read this article yet, check it out, it’s one of the more popular articles from this fall:

Some nice comments in there. Jason says:

really like this article and i’ve become a big fan of your writing. i’ve implemented/ stole a bunch of ideas from you. it has had a big positive impact on my high school team so thank you! i’m in the same boat as Ben, and i do love quantifiable measures instead of just constant feedback from me, so we have played around with a target in zone 4 and an antenna to measure height/ tempo. this way i can have the other setter watch a few reps and i can coach footwork/ neutral position under the ball. also a lower target in the gap for a 3-1 and a target in zone 4. seems like the ball just over the target in the gap is a pretty good tempo for the “go”

This is the crux of making tutors work. In the beginning, you’re going to have a lot of direct feedback from the coach. “Get your feet like this.” “Set it higher.” etc

But at some point, you’d love it if you can be freed up to give feedback in other places. It’s totally fine if you have some time when you’re only focused on one position - setters in this case. But obviously that can’t be the case full-time every practice.

One way is to set up Self-Evaluate or Partner-Evaluate systems. The ultimate evaluator is the hitter. But hitters… aren’t always the best evaluators. Let’s just say some of them realllllllly like to coach the setters. And many of your hitters might not be super-consistent on their own timing or footwork. Was the set actually low, or was the hitter late. In my opinion, it’s better for the coach to adjudicate that one.

But I do like what Jason talks about here where you get some objective markers up so setters can see it or one setter can go and the other can give feedback using an objective reference point. I've talked about using Antenna Windows before. They also can work as a height reference, but it will be hard for the setter setting the ball to see that. Having a second setter give partner feedback can be useful for this one. Of course, if you’re just setting into a target hoop, that’s a reasonably good gauge for height as well, although you’ll need to consider the angle of the hoop. More vertical hoops encourage faster, flatter sets. If you set the hoop more horizontally, it encourages loopier sets. I’ve used both, depending on what the setters are working on.

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To paraphrase a question from a 4th-grade coach, in a Reddit thread,

Should 4th graders underhand or should they have to overhand? Should they all have to serve the same way?

My response:

1. Underhand serving is fine. Few girls are strong enough to overhand serve from the endline but they should practice it (starting from the 10' line and working back to wherever they can get to) every practice.

2. Turn sideways and hit it sidearm. If you google "Sidearm volleyball serve" you should find what I'm talking about. This is generally the most powerful serve for very young kids.

3. Just keep adjusting until they make better contact. Making good contact has to be learned through a lot of repetition, you can't force it.

4. I think hitting it right out of the hand generally gets the best result. It's technically illegal, but, as you mentioned, most leagues are fine with it. (As they should be, because it helps little kids serve in more and that's good).

And the coach responded a month later:

Thank you for the sidearm advice. As soon I convinced my co-coach to allow players to serve with different styles, I practiced with my daughter for a couple of days and she really latched onto side arm serving. Last game she had 100% of her serves in play!

Sidearm ftw for the youngest kids!

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A coach who attended an Offensive Concepts seminar asks:

Hey, hope you guys are doing good, its been a while.  I saw you will be coaching the Frisco GMS clinic in Dec.  I had planned on taking my school coaching staff to the clinic so that will be good.

We are continuing to progress with some concepts that fit our team makeup.  We had our hardest district opponent Thursday and although we lost, we took the first set and did a lot of the things we wanted to do against them.  They are a good team and more experienced, so I was proud of how they performed.

Going back to our time together in August, I think the thing we struggle with the most is on the push, we tend to go past middle to much and end up swinging into the RS blocker or even a double block, instead of finding that seam.  Scrape tips seem to be a difficult thing for them to do on a consistent basis.  They tend to go over the block or even reverse the tip.  We have been emphasizing that in practice and I think its just a reps thing at this point because they are so used to doing something different.  Maybe you have experienced some of these issues and can lend some feedback though.

(Note: my response has a bunch of images/clips so it might show better in your browser than your email client.)