Lineups Pt 1 - Practice

How to not be surprised at a tournament

We’ve been heavy into a discussion on juniors club volleyball this winter. Most of those articles have been about how to plan your initial training block leading into your first major tournament- which most of you are probably about halfway towards right now.

However, I want to take a brief pivot into some details for how to plan lineups and playing time rotations. This is where club volleyball is actually a bit more challenging than high school/collegiate/pro volleyball. So everything we’ll talk about here applies to those teams, but I’ll also hit on some of the aspects that are unique to club volleyball.

But before we talk about playing time in competition, let’s talk about practice.

Roster Composition

In club volleyball, you get to choose your roster. Kind of. As a coach, you have a few decisions to make:

1. How many players on your team?

2. What positions will those players play?

3. Will they cross-train in different positions?

Each of these topics could warrant a larger discussion. In the interest of brevity, I’ll hit a few examples:

12-Person Roster
2 Setters
2 Liberos
2 Opposites
3 Middles
3 Outsides

This is my ideal roster for a competitive, older team in juniors club volleyball. 12 players is great for practice and if you’re up front about the need for everybody to rotate on and off the court during tournaments, this can work well. Your setters, liberos, and opposites will play about 50/50 and your middles and opposites will play 2 sets for every 1 they sit.

If you drop down to 11, the most common way to do it are:

• Drop a libero. So you have one true libero on the team and you might have a backup outside or opposite who is capable of playing as a defensive sub if necessary or as the libero if the libero is injured or needs to miss a tournament.

• Drop an outside or opposite.

  • Rather than 3 outsides and 2 opposites, you just have 4 “wing spikers” who switch between left and right.

  • Keep your 3 outside rotation and have 1 (or more) of your middles cross-train as a right-side hitter.

For competitive high school-aged teams, I am firmly in the camp that you need to have 3 players who can play middle. Or, perhaps I might say: 3 players who are willing to play middle. There are few things more contentious in club volleyball than a player who joined the team with the intention to play outside hitter now being forced to play middle because one of your middles gets hurt halfway through the season.

I am also firmly in the camp of needing to have 2 setters on the team. You can get by with 1 “main setter” and 1 player who is kind of a utility sort of player. Maybe they set on their high school team and they’ll set sometimes for you and sometimes play DS and sometimes play opposite, etc. You have to manage those roles carefully but it can work.

9-Person Roster