Keep It Close

Winning The High Ball Battle

Webinar Update
The In-System Offense Webinar is rescheduled for this Sunday, July 7, at 8pm New York Time. I apologize for the change, but we’ll set that one in stone now. I’ll post a couple more reminders on that this week and then I’ll send out the Zoom link on Sunday afternoon. Thanks for your patience on that. I’ll hit some middle attacking concepts that I think you’ll all really like and then connect that to setting up the rest of your offense. This webinar is for Premium Subscribers only, so if you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is a great reason to do so!

Killing High Balls

We’re talking Out-of-System Offensive Profiles this week, so let’s look at the major component of OoS Offense, which is killing high balls, particularly on the left side. Let’s see some OoS kills on the left from the VNL Finals:

We see here that France has a extreme preference to play against the block with pushes and throws, whereas Poland likes to keep a little bit of space and swing to the corners and/or catch high hands.

One thing I notice is that both teams keep a distance that allows them to close to the ball. I don’t see either team bolting backward when the pass/dig is out-of-system. You can see the spacing here of a player not backing up too far.

I often see players encouraged to “get deeper” out-of-system, with the idea that the set might be a little off, so they need to “make space” to see the ball and adjust their approach. Something like this:

(Sorry random player from Illini Elite from like 10 years ago that I’m throwing under the bus…)

In this case, I think the player is trying too hard to get really deep and set up to get some kind of swing in a situation where she’s very unlikely to score against a good team. She hits that ball about as well as she can, given the situation, and it still only results in a relatively easy dig by the zone 6 defender and in-system transition coming back the other way.

This is probably a fairly controversial take. A lot of coaches emphasize to “get deep,” or, “make space,” or, “get as deep as the setter is,” or things like that. I think it’s really common. But I disagree. To me, the most important thing is being able to step-close to the ball with both feet inside the court.

Hitters bolting too deep off the net also creates a snowball effect where if the set does get up to a great spot, say 5’ off the net and 3’ inside the court, the hitter is often too far away. So… over time her teammates will, consciously or not, start to pull those high balls sets farther and farther off the net… which incentivizes the hitters to get even deeper…

Instead, I like hitters to keep their spacing so they can step-close to good sets that are within the 3m line, close to the hitting window. Here’s a couple good examples on the women’s side in the recent Brazil-Poland match.

I’ll be working with some hitters In The Gym on this stuff this week. Drop me a comment and let me know what you think!