Organization Mechanics Skill

The main portion of VNL is now over. The top 8 teams advance to the playoff round in Italy, and the rest return home to evaluate their progress, and prepare for the World Championships. For me as an assistant coach on the Canada MNT, that means that the next two weeks will be spent (a) reviewing our performance in VNL and (b) planning our next phase of training. We'll have a 3-week training block in Canada, with another 10 days of training in Europe before competition starts in Slovenia for Worlds.

Since it's easiest for me to write about what I'm currently doing - on court or off, expect some articles about match reviews and training prep coming in the next couple weeks! But, those should also be relevant for those of you coaching women's NCAA or high school ball, as you prepare for the start of your pre-season training block.

I've written a lot about statistical analysis in this newsletter, and will continue to do so. But today's lens is a blend of objective and subjective analysis. I call it the Organization - Mechanics - Skill framework.

Organization

Organization is the first layer of how you put your team together. Without Organization, you aren't a team, you're just a bunch of dudes on the court playing volleyball at the same time. Organization is what allows players to link individual skills into complex and robust patterns of play.

Mechanics

Mechanics are the building blocks of how intent is translated into performance. Mechanics are necessarily movement-related; how does your body move, which steps do you take, what do your arms do? The mechanics that are important for your team should have names. Was that block a crossover-3 or a quick-3 move? Was that dig a sprawl or a dive? Putting names on important mechanics helps you teach them.

Skill

Skill is the ultimate result of the play. If knowing what tempo your outside hitter is supposed to be on when the ball is passed in-system is Organization, and the specific footwork she uses is Mechanics, then what happens when her hand actually contacts the ball is the skill portion of the action.

To summarize:

Organization is What we do.

Mechanics are How we do it.

Skill is How Well we do it.

Using This Framework To Analyze Performance

Okay, so how does this become a tool for analyzing and (more importantly) improving our team performance? First let's understand the time horizon of each component:

Organization can be improved quickly, perhaps even by the next match. Even beginning players are capable of making a quick change when the change is, "stand here, not there."

Mechanics are a medium-term investment. Sometimes the changes can happen fairly quickly. Probably not by tomorrow, but with an investment of time and attention, you can make mechanical changes in a training block.

Skill has the longest arc of improvement and it is the least predictable. Some improvements happen more quickly, but improving touch on the ball takes time. Developing power and timing takes time. How often have we worked and worked with a player on a particular area of the game and seen no improvement... until the next season? Skill development is critical, but it takes time.

So understanding the time horizon of these components helps us them to analyze and structure our feedback. The most important use of this framework is to identify Organization improvements, because those offer the most immediate return on coaching improvements. As an example, if your setter is setting the ball too low because he lacks power and touch, that can take quite a bit of time to improve. But if he's setting the ball too low in certain situations because he thought the hitter was coming on a quick set instead of a high ball, that's a change that can even be made mid-match.

Next, I identify the most important Mechanics that we need to train. And it almost classifies into two types of identification. (1) Mechanics that we aren't using because we don't know how to do them and (2) Mechanics that we are kind of doing that are really under-developed. This is why this framework has a subjective component, because there's some slight blurred lines between Organization and item (1) and there's some blurred lines between Skill and item (2).

Finally, we look at the areas where we are skill deficient. Unfortunately, there often aren't quick fixes. Every single team in FIVB Men's Volleyball gives up several points a match because their blockers fail to align properly on the spiker and give up a hard hit past their block. If there was a magic wand to fix this, every coach would have waved it by now. Reading the set and spiker to align your block perfectly is one of the hardest things to do in the game and improvement is slow. But what we can do is make sure we're giving our team enough opportunities during training to practice these skills, and then, to a degree, it becomes on the player to improve.

Translating Into Points

One way that we can add an objective component to this framework and make our coaching more efficient is to try to translate this Organization - Mechanics - Skill review into points. For example, I see that my outside hitters have two situations where Organization is lacking. (1) They aren't on the right timing of their approach on good passes in serve receive and (2) They are a little unorganized on their timing and approach footwork after they pick up a tip on defense. Which should I prioritize in training?

At most levels of volleyball, the answer is clearly (1), because that situation happens much more often. If you can't take a good approach to spike the ball after a good pass, you're going to have a terrible time winning volleyball games. But teams win matches all the time in which their outsides hitters never kill a ball after picking up a tip on defense. (1) just happens way more than (2).

To give a concrete example, here's how I used this framework to review one of our matches on defense

This is the summary of one match. The column on the left in black is the “Skills” column. The red items are Organization and the blue are Mechanics.

The numbers are point totals attributable to each action. For each opponent kill, I assign a primary responsibility to either a blocker or defender. Or, I assign it as a “half and half.” A good example of a half-and-half situation in international men’s volleyball is a ball hit hard past the blocker that a defender is unable to dig. The defender has some responsibility, but, at this level, even when the ball gets hit at you, it’s still a 50/50 shot at best to dig the ball, so the blocker bears responsibility too.

This method allows you to get an idea of how many points different actions translate to. You can see the two biggest sources of opponent kill are “Block no touch” and “Blockers tooled high.” These are difficult changes and I put them in the skill category. There’s not necessarily a glaring error there. You put up a decent block but the opponent hits the ball by you, or tools you high. It can happen to anybody, but it happens less to more skilled blockers.

On the flip side, there were some points lost to improper defensive positioning. While these didn’t lead to as many opponent kills, those are also very easy fixes. Everything in red is an easier fix than everything in black. So, we focus on that first.

Having some organization to how you review things helps you prioritize your coaching feedback for training. And giving players an understanding of Organization - Mechanics - Skill helps them understand the performance curve and to invest in what can help them improve the fastest.