First Ball Kill

Yesterday we looked at a team profile of Transition Strength. In February, we looked more at First Ball strength or weakness profiles and discussed that a main consideration is: how many rallies at practice are going to start with a serve and how many are going to start with another type of entry? This is also the case when you focus on Transition, because you’re thinking about, “how many rallies will get into the Transition phase?”

Points Of The Triangle: Transition

One way to do this is by increasing alternative entries. For example, when playing Transition Wash, most rallies are not started with a serve, so your team has lots of opportunities to attack in transition. Another way to do this is by adjusting the scoring to increase or decrease the emphasis on First Ball or Transition. First Ball Kill is a variation that increases the emphasis on (obviously) First Ball. Your hitters will be incentivized to kill the first ball out of serve receive, which also puts increased pressure on your blockers to stop them.

If your team is strong in Transition, playing some First Ball Kill can help reinforce some areas of the game where you aren’t as strong.

What It Looks Like

First Ball Kill is very similar to Good Pass Sideout. Like GP Sideout (and Aceball), FBK is more of a scoring variation than a specific drill. You will most likely play this game 6v6. The ball is served, the rally is played out, and one of three scenarios happens:

1. The receiving team kills the first ball.

2. The receiving team does not kill the first ball, but still wins the rally.

3. The serving team wins the rally.

Also like Aceball and GP Sideout, the main decision is whether you are going to play 2-way or 1-way. Playing 2-way for a timed round is the simplest way to play most games, FBK included.

Playing 2-Way

The easiest way to play 2-way is to have the points go back and forth and play for a set time in each rotation. Since the game is focused on siding out, you’ll play with an opposite volleyball format:

1. If the receiving team kills the first ball, they get a point and STAY ON RECEIVE.

2. If the receiving team does not kill the first ball, but still wins the rally, nobody gets a point and they STAY ON RECEIVE.

3. If the serving team wins the rally, nobody gets a point, and they switch to being the receiving team.

If you don’t often play opposite volleyball formats, your team will probably need a few reminders, because the team that wins the point receives instead of serves. But it’s a pretty easy adjustment once you get into the game. Opposite volleyball formats are good for high school teams, because they put the focus on siding out as a team. A good server can’t go on an individual run, you can only go on a run by siding out.

Pushing your sideout % from under 50% to over 50% is often the difference between a losing and winning high school team, and opposite volleyball is a tool to illustrate the difference between the serving team having the advantage and the receiving team having the advantage.

Stay in one rotation for the full round and then rotate both sides of the net. Staying in the same rotation gives your setter a chance to understand how to sideout in that rotation and gives your hitters some opportunities to respond to feedback. It’s also easier to coach things like hitter release footwork and setter entries since you are staying in the same rotation for a few times.

When playing First Ball Kill, I like to have the serving team constantly change their server, so the receiving team gets practice against different serving looks. While the scoring system is not specifically tied to pass quality, it is a lot easier to kill a ball when you are in-system than out-of-system. So passers are critical to the success of this drill.

6 minutes is a good amount of time per round. You can get through all 6 rotations in about 40 minutes. 8 minutes per rotation pushes the total play time to close to an hour, once you consider a couple water breaks and a few timeouts to stop and teach. So the length of the round is dependent on how much time you want to spend in this 6v6 drill and how much time you want to spend on other things at practice.

Playing 1-Way

When you play 1-way, one team is going to stay on receive and the other will stay on serve for the full round. I like playing these variations as an end-of-game format, so we focus on being good siding out for short bursts of time. That’s how we develop the confidence in our ability to sideout as a team.

Once one team wins, you either flip the teams between offense and defense, or keep the teams in their same roles and rotate. The former develops everybody equally, the latter is useful for when you want to focus on the ability of your starting lineup to sideout leading up to critical competitions.

When setting up end-of-game formats for 1-way drills, it helps to know the sideout and FBK numbers for your level. I used “earned sideout,” for this drill, meaning that I’ll replace a missed serve with a toss or a standing serve. The focus of this drill is First Ball Kill, so we want the offense to earn the point, rather than get a point from a missed serve.

Good high school teams will earn the sideout more than 50% of the time, with a kill % between 30 and 40%. So, like GP Sideout, a good variation is starting with either an even 21-21 score or with the serving team down 21-22. The more you play with a true starting lineup as the receiving team, the more difficult you will want the situation to be. A strong high school team with a big separation between starters and 2nd-team might even start this drill with the servers up 22-21.

Other Variations

I don’t like this variation for wave formats like Queen of the Court, since the length of time it takes to earn a point is somewhat unpredictable. I also like at least two blockers in frontrow, because we’re not just focused on killing the first ball, we’re trying to stop the other team from killing the ball. Our block is part of that. One small-group variation that can work well is 5v5, with no middles. This is a more offensive focus, since the pin attacker are hitting against a single blocker and, at certain levels, you want to start developing the mindset that, “good pass and one blocker up? I need to be aggressive and kill this ball.”

An additional variation on this format can be useful for teams with less than 12 players. Keep 6 players on the defensive side and put 3 players on the offensive side: a passer, a setter, and an attacker. This variation emphasizes blocker handwork and touch quality; with just one attacker, the block knows where the ball is going and can be all over the hitter. But the hitter is incentivized to kill the ball, so she is going to attack aggressively and force the block to be high-quality. When doing this variation, I have the defending side stay on the ground and send a freeball if they dig the ball. This means that the hitter is going to continue to attack the block until either the hitter kills the ball or the block stops her.