Make Them Play Queens

A small group game to teach managing the game...

If you read this newsletter regularly, you know I’m a fan of the Make Them Play concept:

Make ‘Em Pay Or Make ‘Em Play

Yes, that’s just a long-winded way of saying, “it is good to serve the ball in and hit the ball in.” But it really does matter! Both indoors and on the beach. We want to teach our players an appropriate level of risk-taking. Some players are too risk-averse and need to be taught to go for it more. Many just don’t recognize the situations when they need to manage the game, because they don’t have a realistic chance of producing a point.

Since we’re talking about Out-of-System play this week, this topic is especially relevant. We see that, even at higher levels, having the ball in an OoS situation isn’t much more than a 50/50 proposition, so there’s lots of situations where effectiveness becomes less about winning the point directly and more about keeping the ball in play and trying to win in Transition.

To help with this, a small-group game I like is Make-Them-Play-Queens.

What It Looks Like

MTP Queens is normal Queen-of-the-Court but… the teams don’t win or lose until one team “doesn’t make them play.” So it’s not an every point wave through, like typical Queen of the Court. What are the didn’t-make-them-play errors?

1. Serving Error

2. Getting Aced

3. Setting Error or “Letting the ball drop.”

4. Hitting Error

And in this case, #s 3 and 4 only apply to the first ball attack. MTP is off once you make a dig, so make transition errors to your heart’s content. Actually don’t, but you just don’t automatically get bounced for a transition error. MTP only applies in first ball.

So therefore, if the serve goes in, and the receiving team gets the ball back over the net and in the opposing court in any way, the game will continue. The teams are now playing for the right to serve the next rally. This means that some of the games will be 1-rally, where the serving team misses a serve or the receiving team gets aced or makes an error. Some of the games will be 2-rallies, where both teams made them play for the first rally, one team earned the next serve, and then there was a failure of MTP on that rally. And some of the games will be 3-rallies and 4-rallies and so on.

Note: this means that, unlike regular Queens where the serve always comes from one side, in MTP Queens, the first serve always comes from the same side, but the 2nd or 3rd serve in a multi-rally game could come from the receiving side.¹

Basically, the incentive here is that by “making them play” you can’t necessarily win (by bouncing the other team out and getting to play somebody else) but you also cannot lose. Even if you lose a bunch of rallies, you will get to stay on as long as you keep the ball in play.²

Once a team does fail to MTP, they get bounced to the back of the line, the winner waves through or stays on the receiving side, and the next team serves.

Variations

Depending on your level of play, you can also consider a “Make Them Really Play” rule where a freeball/downball given also counts as an MTP Error. This would mean that overpassing the ball now eliminates that team. Turning a bad pass into a bad set leading to a freeball now eliminates that team. For me the threshold is, “you must jump and attack the ball to count as MTRP.”

An intermediate variation is that sending a freeball doesn’t automatically eliminate you but if the freeball-getters kill that ball, then you’re out. So getting aced directly is the worst. An overpass is bad, but if you can dig a ball and not allow them to kill the ball directly, you stay alive.

These MTRP variations are an attempt to (1) avoid the teams just playing pepper over the net with each other and (2) not have teams be so risk-averse that they start sending free balls when they should swing.

Another rule I like is that there’s a 3-rally limit. This can be good when you have a full court, perhaps of 15 kids or something, and you risk players waiting too long and tuning out. In this case, if the game goes to a 3rd-rally, that’s sudden death and whoever loses that rally gets kicked off.

You can play this game just as you do your normal Queens, with all sorts of different combinations of players. Meaning, you could just have straight 3-player waves. You can have 3-player waves plus setter(s) fixed on one side or both. You can have 2-player waves because you have a libero always passing in zone 6 on the receiving side. Etc.

Distribution Of Points

If we’re at a high level, the MTP number is a bit over 70%, so you get a rough ballpark of:

30% of games are 1-rally

21% of games are 2-rallies

15% of games are 3-rallies

10% of games are 4-rallies

25% of games are 5 or more rallies.

But of course, we’re introducing constraints here, and the whole purpose of that is to change the game theory by introducing new affordances get your players to do different stuff. So you’re likely to get players to keep their serve in a little more and be a little more conservative with their out-of-system attacking.

That’s a good thing! Generally speaking, juniors players make too many errors and aren’t mindful enough of errors. So if they start extending games by making them play, then you introduce a new game like GP Sideout or FBK. Constraints aren’t magical, get them to improve at one, and the next one will present itself.

Here’s the length of games from a session I ran with a mixed group of 14 year-olds, which I think is probably pretty typical for that level of play. Over half the games were 1-pointers, with a mix of 2 and 3-pointers plus a couple longer games and one that went to sudden-death. This is pretty common for middle schoolers. The theoretical distribution of rallies I listed above is for higher-level teams, so if you’re coaching less-skilled players, they will have more 1 or 2-rally games. Which is fine, because normal Queens is a 1-rally game.

Also, note that only 1 of the first 12 games³ went more than 1 point, and it was only a 2-pointer. After that, we started seeing a bit more multi-point games. This is common when you introduce new constraints and is generally a good thing. If you have a group of middle-schoolers, notice how few rallies end with a kill. It took a while for this team to adjust, but the introduction of this scoring system started to influence their ability to "Make Them Play" and that's all we can ask for!

1. Example: receiving teams gets a pass-set-kill on the first rally of the game. Since this was not a MTP error, the game continues. They will then grab a ball and go serve from their side for the 2nd serve of the game.

2. It’s often that you will experience an uptick in practice performance by your weakest players in this drill. It’s often the case in juniors volleyball, for example, that you have a wide range of ability on your team and you have a couple of “drill killers” who frustrate their teammates by making too many errors. I’ve seen it more than once that this drill teaches those players to stay within themselves a little more and keep the ball in play. This in turn means more extended rallies which helps the overall quality of play at practice.

3. I recorded in columns, so the first 10 games are the first column vertically, plus the next two “1s” to make the first 12 games.