How Does Player Ability Affect The Way You Coach - Part 2

Stay tuned later this week as I’ll be posting the video and takeaways from the Armswing Mechanics workshop that I moderated on Monday. It might have been the most popular session I’ve ever done. People love talking about armswing!

Get in that opposite pocket!

Okay, on to the article.

In Part 1 of this article series, I explored the following question:

Based on your experience on coaching at different levels of women’s volleyball, how big of a difference in player ability are there between International vs D1 vs D2?

 I ask this because I had some good takeaways from this weekend but I am curious of what I need to take and put into the context of D2 volleyball?

The three aspects I discussed in Part 1 were:

1. Principles don’t change, but applications do.

2. Physical differences change tactics.

3. Higher skill levels open up more options.

There are two more aspects of this topic I want to discuss today.

Technique Is Similar, But Not Always Relevant.

Even some U-12 kids can learn to pancake and dive and sprawl and overhand dig in very similar ways that an Olympic player do. Even some young kids can execute blocking moves or take approaches in basically the same way that an Olympic player does. But because of the difference in power of execution, some of these moves are relatively less important.

Let’s use the example of a Crossover-2 blocking move. This is a great blocking move for high-level blockers to close against a fast in-system ball. Here’s a high-level female athlete blocking a ball with a Crossover-2 move.