MTP 6s

Using the $7 Study

On Wednesday I shared some data on the concept of Make Them Play and how it correlates to winning at various levels.

Previously, I published an article on using MTP scoring for a 3v3/4v4 Queen of The Court variation. That’s a pretty popular one, either as a warmup for more advanced teams or as a competitive bridge drill for high school or club teams leading into 6v6. The idea that you stay on until you directly give up the ball is an important one for club teams. “Make them beat us!” A lot of club teams just give games away via unforced errors. Don’t be that team.

My favorite variations of 6v6 are usually 1-Way drills with specific targets based around siding out X number of times before Y bad thing happens. For example, Aceball, maybe my most important drill for high school and juniors volleyball teams, is based around the concept of earning 6 sideouts before getting aced twice (or maybe 3 or even 4 times, depending on your level). Let’s unpack why.

MTP… but first: Aceball

At most levels of volleyball, you’re trying to get somewhere in the ballpark of 12 sideouts in order to win the game. In a 50% Sideout environment (typical for high school and lots of levels of club), 12 sideouts means another 12 points earned serving which puts you at 24. And if you use 50% Earned Sideout¹, you’re adding in another 3-ish missed serves which puts you at 27.

Real games don’t happen based off mathematical averages, and service runs are more randomness² around an average than something you can calculate exactly. But for the purpose of designing drills, these numbers are useful, because 12 sideouts happens to be 2 per rotation, so drills based off getting 6, 12, or (less-commonly) 18 sideouts before…. something… work well.

Aceball is the simplest and, for many levels of volleyball, the most powerful illustration of this concept. I’ve shown before that strong volleyball teams at many levels of girl’s volleyball:

Miss 2 serves or less per set
Serve 2 or more aces per set
Allow 2 or fewer aces per set

Those 3 factors are good ballparks for winning the Terminal Serve battle. If your team can, on average, accomplish those 3 factors, you are going to have a successful season at most levels of volleyball, particularly girl’s volleyball which is based more around low-error serving.

So, if we are trying to get 12 sideouts while allowing 2 aces or fewer, then it follows that we’re also trying to get 6 sideouts while allowing 1 ace or fewer. Thus… Aceball is scored at 23-19. Receiving team rotates and gets a point for every sideout. Serving team only scores with an ace. If the serving team wins the rally without an ace, you wash it and nobody gets the point. Reminder, these are earned sideouts, so if the server misses, I bowl in a ball, which (a) hopefully won’t be an ace! and (b) forces the receiving team to earn the sideout by still winning the rally.

So… MTP?

I started with the Aceball scoring because it’s easy to see, but you can use the numbers from the $7 Study MTP standards to create drills based around MTP or MTRP.

A good standard for lots of levels of volleyball is just to knock a point off the serving team and score the MTP game 22-19. This means that, in order to win, you need to earn 6 sideouts before you make 3 MTP errors (aced or unforced hitting error).

If we’re at 50% Earned Sideout, it will take about 12 balls in play to get the 6 sideouts. 3 MTP errors on 12 balls is 25% MTP-error or 75% MTP-positive, depending on how you want to view it. 2 MTP errors on 12 balls is 17% Error or 83% MTP positive, which is exactly where the best club teams were.

This is a pretty good ruleset for a lot of levels of play. But, for many teams, even 75% MTP in a practice setting where you’re rotating through multiple lineups, working on things, etc, is a pretty high level of execution.

Tweaks

NCAA teams, or very strong club teams might find 22-19 MTP a little on the easy side. One option is to tighten it to 23-19. Another is to count overpasses they get killed directly as an MTP-error. One notch beyond that is to count overpasses that lead to any rally win by the defensive side as an MTP-error.

You can also go to MTRP³ which means the receiving side must get an attacking attempt. You get to decide where the line between genuine attacking attempt and just getting over is. You can go “MTRP-lite”, which means that if you don’t get an attempt you can still wash the rally, but you can’t earn the sideout. Or you can go MTRP-strict, which means that any reception that fails to produce an attacking attempt gets blown dead immediately and they lose the point. My suggestion is to start with one variation, run it a little bit, and add little tweaks as you go. Players like the progress of feeling like they are executing so well in sideout that coach has to start stacking the drill against them!

Many club and high school teams will need to use 21-19, 20-19, or even 19-19 MTP, because they will be so high-error early in the season. I often use the example which led to the creation of MTP as a stat⁴, which was my first year coaching high school boy’s volleyball. I would simply serve put them in a 6-person serve receive, serve a ball over the net and have them play 6v0. You had to jump and hit the ball in the court, no tips. In the beginning of the season they would routinely “lose to nobody.” As they progressed, they could beat… nobody. (And actually: they had a nice season… it just goes to show the level of ball control that boy’s high school teams tend to have at the beginning of a season where most of them weren’t playing club.)

A 21-19 MTP game means you can win with 70-75% MTP⁵ and you lose with MTPs in the 60s. That’s right about where most decent-but-not-great club and high school teams can shoot for. Most club teams will struggle to achieve that in a tournament due to passing troubles, but they can get it for short bursts in practice.

If you play a lot of Aceball and are looking for a variation, give one of these MTP rulesets a try. Let me know how it goes in the comments.

1. Meaning: you don’t count sideouts from missed serves, only when the ball is in play.

2. Sometimes REALLY random in club volleyball amirite?

3. Make Them Really Play

4. At least, in my mind.

5. 3 MTP errors on 10-12 chances.