Good Pass Sideout
Yesterday we looked at a team profile of First Ball Weakness. When planning around the First Ball ability of your team, 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? If our team is weak in First Ball, we’re going to do most drills starting with a serve. We’re either not getting enough first ball kills or we’re allowing too many. The first situation could be because we’re not in-system enough and the second situation could be because we’re allowing the other team to be in-system too much.
If I have a First Ball weakness, but my Terminal Serves are doing okay, then I want to see if the issue is pass quality. Maybe we’re not getting aced much, but the quality of our passes isn’t high enough. Maybe we’re serving in enough, but we’re serving too easy.
In both of these situations, I like Good Pass Sideout. This drill emphasizes pass quality, being efficient in-system, and being smart out-of-system.
What It Looks Like
Good Pass Sideout is simple because it’s more of a scoring variation than a drill itself. Typically when you play a Good Pass Sideout drill, you’re going to play 6v6 and every rally starts with a serve. In this way, it’s similar to Aceball. Like Aceball, there are 3 possible rally outcomes:
1. The receiving team passes in-system and wins the rally.
2. The receiving team passes out-of-system and wins the rally.
3. The serving team wins the rally, regardless of pass quality.
#1 results in a point for the receiving team. #2 results in a wash, with neither team getting a point. #3 results in a point for the serving team.
Also like Aceball, the main decision is whether you are going to play 2-way or 1-way. When I was an assistant at Pepperdine, working for the great Marv Dunphy, we did 1-way Good Pass Sideout at least once a week.
Playing 1-Way
If you play 1-way, then you’ll put a group of 6 to be on offense (the receiving side) for the whole round and another group of 6 to be on defense (the serving side) for the whole round. You’ll play to a certain amount of points and then either rotate or switch the teams from offense to defense.
At Pepperdine, we played “6-4 Good Pass.” The receiving team had to get 6 sideouts with a good pass before the serving team scored 4 points. Missed serves were replaced with a freeball toss. This required the receiving team to both pass and sideout at a very high level in order to win. We were a high-level men’s team (high sideout environment) and we also almost always played starters vs 2nd-team, which meant that the teams weren’t evenly matched. So, while that was a good variation for our team, and a good way to prepare the starters for a tough upcoming match, it will be an unrealistic scoring format for a high school girls’ team.
In high school girls’ volleyball, the receiving team might expect to get 3 points for every 4 points the serving team will win in this format. So evenly matched teams might play “3-4 Good Pass,” or set them up as end-of-game scenarios where the serving team starts down 21-22. If you are playing 1-way, you might be playing starters vs 2nd-team, so you could increase the difficult to “4-4 Good Pass” or start the games at 21-21.
In any case, you want to keep track of how often the receiving side is winning. If they are winning about half the time, you have a good scoring format. If they are almost always winning or almost always losing, adjust the scoring format to make it a more evenly matched game.1
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 passes in-system and wins the rally, they get a point and STAY ON RECEIVE.
2. If the receiving team passes out-of-system and wins the rally, nobody gets a point and they STAY ON RECEIVE.
3. If the serving team wins the rally, regardless of pass quality, 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. Typically in Good Pass Sideout, I like to have the serving team constantly change their server, so the receiving team gets practice against different serving looks.
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.
Other Variations
You can play Good Pass Sideout with different numbers of players. It can be a good variation for 3v3 or 4v4 wave formats like Queen of the Court. The only difference here is that I blow the whistle dead if the pass is out-of-system and the teams immediately wave through. This provides immediate feedback for the passers and often sharpens the focus for the servers. Serving in Queens can get pretty sloppy, so when the servers know that forcing an out-of-system pass is an immediate win, they often lock in a little more and take their time.
Good Pass Sideout also works well for teams that only have 9 or 10 players at practice. In this case, the receiving team gets all 6 players and the defending team only has 3 or 4. The serving team still has a good chance, because forcing an out-of-system pass is at-best a wash for the receiving team. In this case, I often play this drill 1-way, with the starting lineup (or something resembling it) on the receiving side and cycling through all 6 rotations.
In this variation, for high school teams I generally play a full 3-person backrow. I also once used this variation when coaching a professional men’s team during a stretch where we had several injuries and were down to 10 players at practice. At this level, the backrow doesn’t have much of a chance without a block in front of them, so we had the offense attack against 3 blockers and a server who would defend in middle back. They weren’t allowed to tip or hit off-speed and any dig counted as a point for the serving team- they didn’t play the rallies out. It wasn’t ideal, but it allowed us to still get some decent sideout work while weren’t at full strength.
Try some of these Good Pass Sideout variations or share some of the others that you’ve used in the comments.
This is what you want to do with every 1-way scoring variation. Test which side is winning and balance accordingly.