Guest Post - CYBO
I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the fourth week to beach volleyball. Since there’s 5 Mondays this January, I’ll use this week for some random odds and ends that don’t quite fit into full articles. Today I’m transcribing some sections from a recent Coach Your Brains Out episode and adding some of my perspective.
ALSO: On Wednesday, Feb 2 (aka “tomorrow”), I’m doing a workshop with Luka Slabe, recently Assistant Coach for the gold medal-winning USA Women’s Olympic Team as well as the Head Coach of NC State. The workshop is at 12pm ET and will be open to all paid subscribers. The topic we’ll be “spring and off-season training,” which is topical because… it’s spring. If you have questions you want to make sure get included in the discussion, drop them in the comments. The link will get sent out shortly.
I’m a big fan of Rob Gray. His podcast is excellent, and his new book, How We Learn To Move, is a must-read. I recommended it in an earlier article. But seriously, get it!
Not long ago, Rob appeared on Coach Your Brains Out. I recommend listening to the whole thing yourself, but here’s a few excerpts I wanted to highlight:
An example from volleyball I always cite is they looked at how people toss a volleyball up in the air when you just ask them to practice the toss without intending to ever hit it, versus how they toss when you overhand serve. You get completely different ball trajectories.
He also cites soccer goalies who look in different places when they have to save a shot vs when they don’t.
What this made me think of was setter tutoring. I recommend getting video of a setter setting a hitter and compare it to setting into a target. In my experience, almost 100% of setters set a flatter, faster ball into a target than they do to a hitter. I’m not saying that’s wrong all the time. Maybe you need to work on setting the ball faster. Sometimes you don’t have a hitter and low-transfer reps are better than no reps.
But I think it’s worth overlaying the trajectories your setters use when setting into a target and the trajectory when setting a hitter.1
Later on:
The constraint we added was a fence across the field. A big barrier. All I told them was, “if you hit it into the fence, you’re out.” So I took away the solution of hitting ground balls. And I didn’t tell them how to get the ball over the fence, I just kind of let them figure it out on their own.
I compared that to giving them more traditional instructions like saying, “the way that you get the ball over the fence is by turning your hips this way, or by doing this with your hands…” In the constraints-led approach condition, we just added something to the practice that takes away the solution, and gives you feedback about your exploration.
And what I found was the constraints were more effective.
This is textbook constraint-led approach and directly explains the above setter tutoring phenomenon. It is easier to set the ball in the hoop when you set it flatter than when you arc it. Perhaps more importantly, it is easier to hit the hoop when you set it flatter. Even good setters understand that you’re going to dink the rim of the setting target sometimes. But airballing it? Yikes.
You can give players all the encouragement you want, but if the environment is demanding something…
His final quote from that section was, “we’re learning machines, but we need reasons… if my solution works, why would I change it.”
So now you know why your youth players shotput the ball when they serve. Rob is talking about the fence increasing the launch angle of his batters. In fact, just introducing the barrier was more effective at increasing the off-the-bat launch angle than explaining the technique that would produce increased launch angle.
What is a volleyball net? Kind of looks like a barrier to me.
In fact, go have your players do some “hand contacts” back and forth to each other and look at the launch angle. Players will often error annoyingly down at unrealistic launch angles. Which of course, aren’t unrealistic for hitting it back and forth to each other. And players will use much higher launch angles when they actually serve over the net.
So then you have to introduce additional constraints such as keeping the ball under elastic. Or the simple constraint of serving against good passers. I used to think passers couldn’t get good unless they played against good servers. Now, I think maybe servers can’t get good unless they play against good passers.2
Your drills can be constraints as well.
Make Them Play is going to produce a bit more conservative, low-error, play.
Aceball is going to produce more aggressive, higher-error, serving.3
You can Use Your Whistle as a surprisingly-effective constraint to ensure that players stand in the right spot on defense. Although Rob might point out that this is going to have limited transfer directly to competition, where you don’t whistle in this way. So constraints only work when the effect continues after you top using them.
4-Ball Passing (and moving from that to narrow-court doubles) highlights one of my favorite constraints, which is simply changing the shape of the court. Nothing has improved player hand-on-ball contact better for me than this drill. If you’re on the side of the ball, you simply can’t do 4-Ball Passing and you’ll really struggle to play narrow-court doubles.
The whole episode (both parts) is worth listening to. Check it out and let me know if you have any other takeaways.
And maybe targets could be modified to get the trajectories a bit closer.
Bad news for literally every youth volleyball coach out there!
Which also, might help your passing.