Odd Week Short Takes
I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the fourth week to beach volleyball. Since there’s 5 Mondays this January, I’ll use this week for some random odds and ends that don’t quite fit into full articles.
ALSO: On Wednesday, Feb 2 (aka “in 2 days”), I’m doing a workshop with Luka Slabe, recently Assistant Coach for the gold medal-winning USA Women’s Olympic Team as well as the Head Coach of NC State. The workshop is at 12pm ET and will be open to all paid subscribers. The topic we’ll be “spring and off-season training,” which is topical because… it’s spring. If you have questions you want to make sure get included in the discussion, drop them in the comments.
Some of my favorite drills for juniors right now are “Make Them Play” queens variations. And specifically, “First Ball Make Them Play.” For example, play your normal queen-of-the-court, however you do it. However, the players don’t wave off the court until one team fails to make them play (in first ball). So the serving team has to serve in (if they miss their serve, they have not, “made them play”) and the receiving team can’t get aced or make a first ball error.
So as long as the serving team serves in, they can’t wave off. As long as the receiving team doesn’t get aced and gets the ball back over the net off the serve, they can’t wave off. Of course, you still want to win the rally, because you want serve. Juniors have more First Ball Errors than they do Missed Serves.
So the game can be a 1-and-done where the server either misses the first serve, serves an ace, or the receiving team makes a first ball error. Or, the game can continue for multiple serves because the teams keep “making them play” and creating washes.
You’ll still get a lot of 1-and-done rallies, but adding the ability to extend the game by playing low-error is a nice variation for lots of teams.
This image, courtesy of Peter Wong.
This is looking at the usage rate of attackers compared to their efficiency. And this is only for in-system attacks out of serve receive. The ideal is to be as far to the top right as possible, which means you’re getting a high usage and being very efficient with it.
We see the line with a slight downslope. Meaning: higher-usage attackers tend to be a little lower-efficiency. Which does make sense. But… this is only in-system attacks, where in theory, you can set everybody. The very tentative assumption is, “maybe teams should use their secondary attackers more often.”1
Digging the long angle is really challenging. Here’s Nebraska making it look easy.
The challenge for many players is negotiating the depth. This is fundamental eyework, but it’s really hard. You have to understand “deep to deep” and “tight to steep.” Because you need depth on that play, but not on this play:
Sometime it’s a fine line between “reading” and “guessing” but the best do it well. There’s no shortcut to it; it takes a lot of work and training. Young players generally can’t keep their width and crash in on everything. So the first ball is getting them to keep some width on the long angle. “Just stick left back in the corner,” isn’t a bad strategy.
You can get good that way, but you can’t get great. At a certain point your crosscourt defenders have to be able to see depth and width and make these small adjustments based on where the ball is taking the hitter.
Had a really good conversation with a coach I respect a lot. We were talking about evaluating transition play and assigning every opponent kill to an aspect of defense, in order to troubleshoot how to spend training time. He used the phrase:
Positioning, Toolbox, Effort
Which I really liked as a mental checklist. I’ve used the phrase:
Positioning, Posture, Perception
Because I thought it sounded cool and I like alliteration. But I think I like his triad better. Are you in the right spot? Okay yes, do you have the defensive tool in order to dig that ball?2 Okay yes, then did you make the maximum effort?
When I’ve been in a defensive coordinator role, I’ve always gone through every day of play (practice or match) and watched all the kills and done this exercise. You’ll find out quickly things like, “we’re missing a dig every day because we can’t pancake,” or, “we only miss a dig once every other week because we can’t pancake,” or, “we have no idea how to dig long angle,” or, “tipping to zone 2 when we help on a gap is an automatic kill for the other team.”
This little triad of “Positioning, Toolbox, Effort” is a really good heuristic for you to use when you’re scanning your defense.
I’m buying the dip.
Book and media recommendations since November:
Highly-recommended: Good Blood and Dark Blood by Billy Allen. You knew Billy Allen had game on the court, but he’s a good writer too! I love fantasy adventure and Billy’s books are legit. Plus, they’re on Kindle Unlimited. Can’t beat that!
Highly-recommended: The audiobook of Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I’ve read his other books in book form. But when I saw Ray Porter3 was the narrator, I had to go audio. I really relate to the inner monologue that Andy Weir writes for his characters.
Highly-recommended: The audiobook of Once An Eagle by Anton Myrer. But only if you have a long commute or you listen to books at 2x speed while charting volleyball matches.
Highly-recommended: Boom Town by Sam Anderson. I never knew I wanted somebody to combine urban planning and basketball into one book.
Highly-recommended: The Tropical MBA end-of-year episode. I’ve been a 4HWW guy since well before Tim Ferriss turned into the Ophrah of Silicon Valley. There’s probably a few other semi-nomadic volleyball coaches out there that might like this.
Moderately-recommended: The audiobook of Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. I finally got this one after seeing it recommended a few different places. The Durants are giants in the field of history and there’s some good distillation of their massive “The Story of Civilization” series. (Still working my way through that one..) but I can’t say I found it groundbreaking.
Moderately-recommended: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow. There’s some controversy over their scholarship, but Graeber is always a good read in the, “wait, what if this assumption I’ve made about human society isn’t actually true,” sense. There’s probably lessons for volleyball coaches in here, but I haven’t figured it out yet.4 This book is also long af and didn’t give me the same payoff as Debt did.
Unrecommended: Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. I freaking love Michael Crichton and I think this is the only book of his I’ve never read. It felt too cliche to get this book in 2020, but I spun through it a few weeks ago. Just didn’t really grab me the way most of his other stuff did. By the way, the best Michael Crichton book is Travels.
Unrecommended: Unidentified by Douglas Richards. Richards dominates the Kindle Unlimited game. He’s like Michael Crichton spent very little time on good prose and more on cranking out interesting near-future thought experiments with very formulaic characters. Unidentified didn’t hit with me. Split Second and Wired are two that I liked more.
Drop me some book/audiobook/podcast recommendations if you have them for me. Love to hear them.
There’s a lot to untangle here though. Outsides and middles who play next to the setter will have both a higher-usage and a more challenging attacking assignment almost definitially.
If you don’t know how to overhand dig, or pancake, or no-step sprawl, there’s certain balls that just aren’t going to get dug.
I’m a big fan of his narration of Jack Carr’s books as well.
It’s David Graeber, so he’d probably fire all the coaches and set up a system where you can reset the scoreboard if one team gets up by too many points.
I am looking to join your workshop on Feb 2nd. Thank you.
I am looking forward to your discussion on Wednesday and I want to join in. Thanks.