More Mailbag

Olympic stuff, middle tempo, and Atomic Spiking

We’ve got a ton in the mailbag hopper as we wrap up the summer. The next phase of the analytics-oriented articles will revolve around Defensive Profiles- similar to the Offensive Profiles I broke down this summer. Right now, like most of you, I’m loving all the Olympic volleyball. In particular, the men’s indoor tournament has probably been the best televised volleyball event I’ve ever seen. So much high level play, so many dramatic moments, and we still have the medal rounds left to go. If you haven’t yet, check out the Olympics Live Blog for some commentary that I’ve been dropping in periodically as I’m watching.¹

First, I want to share this video highlight of Chiaka’s block party v Serbia. Balltime posted it on their Instagram page and I just love it because of all the different ways these blocks happen. In order, I see:

1. Quick-3 shuffle move

2. Crossover-2 off 1 foot

3. Abbreviated swing Crossover-3 in a medium pass situation

4. A bigger Crossover-3 swing blocking move in a medium pass situation where she stops short when the set is inside

5. A big Crossover-3 swing block move in an out-of-system situation

6. Another one

7. A “jump from where you are” to block a middle quick

8. And finally, another big Crossover-3 swing move where she clamps and gets way over on an out-of system ball

Now let’s hit some mailbag questions.

A subscriber asks, via Substack DM:

Okay, first of all, $7/month does pay for a personal mentorship, so everybody go sign up now for Premium, if you aren’t already.

This coach is on the right track, because I think about it the same way, which might seem a little counter-intuitive. I think there’s a perception that, “the better you are, the faster you can run the middle.” There’s probably some truth to that if we’re talking about middle school and maybe even JV-level players who struggle to control the ball. This coach is talking about a solid high school varsity team. At this level, I think the setters have some degree over setting the ball a little higher or a little lower, especially once you give them a decent amount of practice time.

At this point, the question is less about, “which tempo of middle attack can the hitter do better in hitting lines,” and more about, “which tempo of middle attack is going to score more?”

A slower middle tempo is both easier to hit and easier to block. It’s also possible to set from more locations on the court and in more situations. So I like a slower middle tempo if you have a stronger middle.

A faster middle tempo is both harder to hit and harder to block. Or perhaps, the blocker needs to be prepared more in advance. It’s also limited to better passes, so you can’t set the middle as much if you’re trying to run them really fast.

That’s why I actually prefer to set weaker middles faster at the high school level. If you have a big beast (and for some reason she’s not on the left), lob her up a 2nd-step tempo that’s a little higher than the antenna and let her go to work. But if you have smaller, less physical middles, you don’t really want to set them on medium passes anyway. You’re perfectly fine tossing those balls out to the left. If you try to sneak in slower middle balls on a medium pass to middles with no arm, they are just going to get dug anyway.

But where these less-physical kids can do some damage is setting them faster in better situations so that they can just get up and place the ball down. Maybe they can take a full swing, or maybe they just get up and jam/throw/power tip the ball down to a spot. You’ll only get them a few of these a game, but it’s a way that a less-capable hitter can actually put pressure on an opponent in a way that them swinging normally on a slower ball can’t do.

---

This probably deserves a whole article at some point, but a couple people I’ve talked to during the Olympics have asked essentially:

Hey what do you think about intentionally setting a little tighter out-of-system to play for recycles and wipes vs keeping it off the net and blasting away?

My answer boils down to:

1. I like some of those plays, but I think you can overdo it.

2. I like playing the ball tight on long-distance bump-setting (where you’re less likely to score anyway) and less on shorter-distance hand-setting where you can set more accurately and take big swings.

3. You have to train it as a cohesive part of your system and you have to train the specific coverage for what you’re going to do out of the coverage. This is where I see women’s teams lacking compared to the men’s teams. Turkey women set tight quite a bit, particularly to Karakurt, but she doesn’t really play for the recycle. She’s just trying to score direclty. Okay, she’s pretty good at that, all good. De La Cruz for Dominican, same deal. But I see so many teams recycle into an unorganized cover which just ends up with another crappy bumpset to the same hitter who just recycled. Well, might as well have just swung at the first one, right?

More on this in the future.

---

A reader asks via email:

Thanks for the new section in your blog. It's nice to see concretely how you organize training for different age groups.

One question regarding Atomic Spike that I found on the In the Gym blog. If I understand your idea correctly, we do a similar type of exercise on Tuesday mornings. Could you elaborate on what Atomic Spike contains?

My "Atomic Spiking" workout is based off an idea from legendary HS track coach Tony Holler's Atomic Speed workout. He describes it as "10 in 10" and "2 in 6" where the "10 in 10" are a series of 10 preparatory drills performed in 10 minutes and the "2 in 6" are 2 maximum-speed sprints performed with a 5-minute rest between them. As he says it, just like the word "Atom" means basically "the smallest unit", this Atomic Speed workout is the smallest unit of a workout that an athlete could do to stimulate speed development.

I've patterned my Atomic Spiking workout to be