Hitting Toolkit Part 1

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Hitting Toolkit Part 2
Hitting Toolkit Part 3

Yesterday we talked about a team profile of Terminal Serving Strength. This sort of team has an edge in the serve-pass battle, serving more aces than they give up and/or missing fewer serves than the opponent. If I’m coaching that team, I want to maintain that strength, while improving some other areas of the game. The first thing I’m going to check is our hitting errors, particularly unforced hitting errors. Are we even giving ourselves a chance to score? And when we hit the ball in, do we kill it? This ties into the concept of a hitting toolkit.

How Do Hitters Score?

Chris McGown was the first coach I heard say the phrase, “hitting toolkit,” and I’ve heard similar concepts from lots of other high-level coaches. In an old episode of my podcast (since lost in the cloud… “nobody understands the cloud!”) Milan Zarkovic credited much of Hawaii’s improvement in his tenure to hitters understanding what shots to use at the right time. And recently when I was in Anaheim working with the USA Women’s National Team, I had the chance to talk with Karch about their points of emphasis leading into the Tokyo Olympics. Improving their hitting toolkit was one of these emphases and he helped me understand some teaching points for the group I was working with.

Simply put, the hitting toolkit is a metaphor for the different types of angles, speeds, and contact types a player can use once she is in the air attacking the ball.

What Do Young Players Need To Know?

I find that young players have very little awareness of their attacking beyond, “did it go over the net?” And when I say young, I’m even talking 17 or 18 year-old players. Even players who are very effective at the high school or juniors level often don’t have a great awareness of what shots they are setting up and how to hit them. So much of our hitting coaching is focused on what happens before they get to the ball (and for good reason) that players don’t have a great sense for what happens after contact.

You certainly can’t coach hitting footwork enough. When I do camps and seminars for young players, something I stress is: if you get your first step in the right location, at the right time, pointed in the right direction, the ball almost hits itself. So I’m not talking about over-indexing on arm swing or yelling at hitters to, “get your elbow up!” What I’m talking about is actually helping hitters understand how their approach actually ties into where they want the ball to end up. And once they are in the air, how their relationship to the ball will either allow or prevent them from hitting that shot.

Where To Start Hitting Toolkit Work?

A hitter needs to be able to attack high, hard, and deep in line with their approach. Early in my coaching career, I was really eager to teach players how to hit deceptive cut shots and no-look line shots and I was really into what then-USA WNT coach Toshi Yoshida called, “system 1,” and, “system 2,” hitting, which emphasized significant wrist turns to hit the ball away from the line of the approach. I think there’s some validity to that. But most volleyball players don’t struggle because of the block, they struggle because of the net and the defense.

What I mean by that is that players at the high school level make far more unforced errors than they will be blocked. On average, high school hitters hit out 5 times more than they get blocked! What this means is that early hitting toolkit work isn’t focused on beating the block in the way that Toshi was teaching undersized Japanese players to create one approach angle and hit the ball away from it, it’s actually teaching players to understand how to create a line of approach to attack the ball hard in the direction of your approach, and then build from there.

So What Is My Line Of Approach?

I like right-handed outside hitters to approach to the deepest part of the court. If you imagine a line from the start of your approach, going through the hitting window where you expect the set to be, that line should extend to the back corner of the opponent’s court. This gives hitters the biggest part of the court to hit with. If I’m a high school hitter and I hit 1 out of every 6 balls out of bounds or in the net, I need to give myself the most margin for error. So approach the long part of the court.

The Gov setting up a great line of approach in an out-of-system situation.

If I can release from serve receive or get a clean transition, I can set this approach angle up easily.

(I like that little extra width as the setter comes into zone 5.)

But sometimes transition is tricky or I need to pass-to-attack on an inside-out arc. But even if I can’t get my whole approach in line to the long angle, I can finish my last two steps there and get my body open to the court.

She gets a little hung up as that serve comes into the seam between her and the middle-back paser, and then she only has limited time to shuffle in order to hit a fast set. So her overall approach is on an arc, but she still step-closes at an angle (look at where she takes off and lands, her jump is slightly angled toward the ball, not straight at the net), which keeps the ball on her hitting shoulder and gives her more range options.

Once I do this, I have the ability to hit into the deep corner. That shot scores a lot! Even at high levels, hitting hard to the deep corner will score. And as we said, that gives me the most margin for error. And from there, hitters can learn to upgrade to a sharper cross swing by just putting their thumb down a little and cutting it a little sharper. (See above.)

They can also go line from there as well. But what’s important for young hitters to know is that setting up my deep corner shot actually helps me hit the line better. It’s a counter-intuitive notion for some young players, but it has to do with their relationship to the ball.

Where Should The Ball Be As I Contact?

Here’s a still from that last attacking video.

When the ball stays on my hitting shoulder, I can attack clean in that direction. But I can also bring the ball down the line by either using a thumb-up contact, rotating my body, or a combination of the two. More on that in a future article.

Many young hitters let the ball cross their hitting shoulder and get on top of their head. Once this happens, even though the ball is now closer to the line, they end up pushing the ball back crosscourt. This is because they have to lean their body to the left to make contact and they lose body rotation. It’s hard to hit line with no body rotation, and their crosscourt swings will lose a ton of power. You also expose yourself to injury, since you are landing hard on one foot with your body going laterally across your knee.

Here’s a still-frame that you’ll see a thousand times over the course of a juniors volleyball season:

Notice the difference in posture at contact. Jordan’s torso is on top of her hips, so she has much more rotational power. (Try to do any rotational ab exercise while also bent to the side and see how much strength you have.) And look at where this hitter’s left leg goes in order to counter-balance in the air. This is why the idea of “1-foot landing” is mostly irrelevant. Both hitters will land on 1 foot. But Jordan is going to land on 1 foot with that foot under her torso. Human bodies can absorb that force all day (it’s called “running”). But the hitter below is going to land on 1 foot with her foot stuck out to the side. That’s not a long-term healthy proposition.

Hitters who do this will hit some shots that go into zone 1, but they are almost always still tailing away from the line, the hitter just pulled it from over her left shoulder, usually on a wide set. If the block doesn’t get there, this shot will score. And blocking is hard, so if these sorts of hitters have good arms, they can still score a lot, but not as much as they could if they opened up all their shots. Again, see the above picture and you can see that, because of approach mechanics, she couldn’t hit line if she wanted to, even though the line is wide open!

(And note that I coached this hitter, so all these faulty mechanics are my fault!)

Here’s an angled approach where the hitter can use a slight thumb-up to go down the line. The ball is every so slightly on top of her head (compared to Larson), but overall I think the mechanics are pretty good here.

3 Basic Shots For An Outside Hitter

So once a hitter can create a good angle of approach and contact the ball in a good relationship to her body, she has the ability to hit deep crosscourt corner. She also has the ability to upgrade to sharper cross and down the line. Creating drills with targets or bonus points for hitting these shots is an easy upgrade to many drills. You can also create penalties for hitting the ball into zone 6.

There’s a lot more to hitting toolkit that I’ll cover in future articles, but just these concepts will go a long way for many hitters who have never thought about how their approach relates to where they want the ball to end up.