How Much 6v6 To Play?

Your players suggest: 100%

A coach who is both a SmarterVolley subscriber and a GMS clinic attendee¹ asks:

I wanted to get your thoughts before diving into my varsity summer camp. I love your blog and have used your articles many of times in my practices and enjoy when you are a clinician because you have coached a large amount of regular high school kids, you have been very influential on my coaching since 2018.

I knew this guy was smart.

The way [a coach] described his practices for some reason just made a ton of sense when paired with the science GMS always employs about motor learning and how to get these keys or new skills to translate to a match. It is always about maximizing reps and feedback, specifically game like reps. His practices seemed to be about 1 1/2 hours of 6 on 6 in some capacity which would maximize game like reps. My question is how viable do you think this is when we are coaching the age range of 7th grade-high school? 

Your blog and comments at the clinic about focusing on one thing at a time as a coach can make practices like that a lot more possible. But I just wanted to hear your thoughts on the way he laid out his practices and what your take is on their viablity, and can playing that much 6 on 6 each day stay fresh? Is there a point where we need to correctly teach movement patterns very blocked or should we just correct the movement patterns in these game like situations?

Great question. I was going to tackle this one in a mailbag but I felt it deserved its own post. It’s kind of the foundational question of practice planning. This post has been sitting in my queue for a few weeks² as I add thoughts to it. Time to finish it out.

What Are Game Like Reps

I’ve posted before about the idea that The Game Teaches The Game. Unquestionably it does. The question is: “what game is it teaching?”

There’s no doubt that playing 6v6 is going to stabilize the performance of your players. For most players, stabilization is a good substitute for improve. So, to a first approximation, playing 6v6 volleyball, even in a relatively uncoached setting, is going to yield a positive result.

Also, and perhaps more importantly than yielding a positive result is that it is unlikely to yield a negative result. And that’s not something to be taken lightly. We know that there’s lots of Fake Fundamentals out there. Spending an hour on drills that produce Fake Fundamentals will yield a negative result, so just playing relatively uncoached 6v6 has you ahead of the game there.

That said, and this is going to sound bizarre, but sometimes playing 6v6 doesn’t actually produce these much-desired Game-Like Reps.

Hear Me Out On This One

When high school-aged teams, especially 6v6 that’s relatively unstructured, there’s some things that are going to happen a lot. You’ll get players passing a lot of the most common serves for their level- relatively hard, relatively in the center of the court. You’ll get left-side attackers a lot of reps hitting medium-tempo balls. Your middle-back defender (or whoever has this responsibility in your system) will get a lot of chances to dig balls in the middle of the court.

Here’s what high school-aged kids won’t get a chance to do as much:

• Pass shorter, dropping serves

• Middle attack, especially in transition

• Defend the middle attack, especially in transition

• Hit a ball at a faster-than-average tempo

• Hit a true high ball against a well-formed block

• Block against a hitter who is max-jumping and bombing away out of system because the set was high enough and she waited and went slow-to-fast

Etc, etc. That list will be different at various levels, it will be a little different depending on the volleyball culture in your area and what is more or less popular in terms of offensive and defensive systems. But there are going to be certain ways the game is played that will ensure your players get lots of Game-Like Reps doing certain things and very little Game-Like Reps doing other things.

And here’s the deal, some of those things are really important! For example, if a high school middle blocker wants to play at the next level, a big part of that test is being able to go match up against a physical outside bombing away out-of-system. Can she finish square and extend across the net against a big swing? Next time you have a practice, record how many times that actually happens in an unstructured 6v6 game? My guess is that it will happen <= 2 times every 10 minutes.

It doesn’t matter how game-like the drill is, you don’t get better at most skills that you do twice in 10 minutes. You need a higher volume of repetition than that.

So Do We Stop Playing 6v6?

No, of course not. We need to do a ton of stuff in a 6v6 environment, because that environment provides the context we need for learning to happen. To use the hypothetical middle blocker as an example, she’s not really going to learn how to do this by going and making block moves against a coach on a static box. The context just isn’t the same.

Might she do some of those block moves, every now and then, as part of introducing her to the movement pattern? Maybe. But we know that perception and action are coupled, so, outside of an introductory phase or as a warmup, the lack of perception demands are going to mean that blocking that hitter on the box isn’t going to do a whole lot.

So we have to do this balancing act where we try to get the context right but in a way where the repetitions can increase in frequency.

But If It Doesn’t Happen Much In The Game Why Is It Important?

Excellent question. To flesh this out, the logic is: