Plus 4

This week is beach week. I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to the indoor side of the game and reserve the fourth week for beach-focused discussion. If you’re not interested in beach volleyball, feel free to skip this one, although the general concept of this drill could be applied on the indoor side.

ALSO: On Wednesday, Feb 2 (aka “next week”), 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.

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This week’s Beach Week focuses on First Ball Sideout on the beach. The ability to FBSO is highly-correlated with winning. For those of you who coach indoor as well, you know how importance First Ball is in indoor, but, especially at higher levels, First Ball is even more important on the beach.

Last month we talked about Terminal Serving on the beach, and we looked at some variations of Aceball that help attune our players to that area of the game. Today, we’ll look at a game that focuses players on the First Ball sideout aspect of the game.

What Is Plus 4?

Plus 4 is a simple concept:

1. Players want to get to a score of, “Plus 4.”

2. If you get a First Ball Sideout, you get 1 point.

3. If you get aced or make an unforced hitting error, you lose 2 points.

This scoring system puts an emphasis on the quality of play in First Ball. There’s a few different variations that we’ll get to, but the basic idea is to get players focused on scoring on their first opportunity out of serve receive while still playing clean and not making too many errors. Teams tend to struggle in one area or the other. Some teams can terminate, but make too many errors. Other teams keep the ball in play, but don’t terminate enough.

Early on, we talked about the idea of, “Make ‘Em Play or Make ‘Em Pay,” and this coincides nicely with that concept.

Plus 4 is played as an opposite volleyball game, which means that, when you win, you receive. There’s also some wash plays:

1. If the receiving team gets a First Ball Sideout, they get 1 point, and they also stay on receive.

2. If the receiving teams wins the rally without getting a FBSO, they don’t get a point, but they do stay on receive.

3. If the receiving team gets aced or makes an unforced hitting error, they lose 2 points, and they serve.

4. If the serving team wins a rally, in any way, they switch to receive.

Adjusting The Scoring

This scoring is good for a certain level of play on the beach. NCAA teams are capable of scoring over 40% of the time in First Ball, and successful teams will be closer to 50%. NCAA teams also want to have their combined ace and unforced error rate below 20%. The most successful teams will generally have that rate closer to 10%.

So the Plus 4 scoring I outlined above makes the team need to First Ball Sideout over 40% and/or keep their error rate below 20% in order to accumulate points. Most NCAA-level teams are capable of doing that without the game lasting too long. If two teams are playing at this level and going back and forth, they’ll hit Plus 4. For example, earlier today I happened to be watching some footage of Cal Poly playing Stanford in the 2021 National Championship. In one set, it takes a team less than 3 minutes to get to Plus 4, and that’s including a missed serve (which you’ll replace when you play this), so strong teams can play this game quickly. Typical time is going to be 4-8 minutes to get to Plus 4, which is good for a practice drill.

For a very high-level team who wants the drill to go a little longer, you can increase the score requirement, so that Plus 4 becomes Plus 8. That will extend the game to 10+ minutes. You can also adjust the negative for an unforced error to be -3 instead of -2. You have to make sure your team is playing at that level, or else you can spiral this into a game where neither team can get out of the negatives. Using -3 as the negative will mean your FBSO needs to be close to 50% and/or your first ball error rate needs to be under 10%. Those are tough demands, especially at practice.

Juniors teams can try playing with +1 for First Ball Sideout and -2 for First Ball Error. They may get stuck and unable to keep their score positive, but strong juniors teams will do fine with that scoring. For juniors teams that aren’t yet at that level, there’s a few options:

1. Try a +2, -3 scoring and play to, “Plus 6.” In this way, they need to average getting more than 3 FBSOs for every 2 First Ball errors. This is still a challenge for many juniors teams, but more doable than +1 and -2 scoring.

2. Enter with a bowl instead of a serve. This make the drill much easier, because now the players (hopefully) won’t be getting aced at all, and you’re only comparing attacking errors to kills. This will focus the game even more on First Ball points, because you’ll have no Terminal Serves and, with the pass quality high, players will be able to take aggressive swings. Those are all good things, but you have to be careful about playing too many games where you aren’t entering with a serve.

3. Try +1, -1 scoring. This is appropriate form many juniors players who don’t have as much experience or ball control.

Multiple Teams

This drill works well if you have more than 2 teams on a court. In that case, you use the opposite volleyball rules of, “If you win, you stay on and receive. If you lose, you come off and the team waiting comes on with a serve.” Each team keeps their score individually.

Playing 1-Way

You can play this game 2-way, as described above, or as a 1-way sideout drill. Let’s use an example of having 4 pairs at practice. Instead of 2 pairs on each side as above, each pair gets a full round siding out to try to get Plus 4. The serving teams will stay on that side for the whole round. You can have them get to stay and serve again if they win the rally, or just rotate every point.

Playing this way can be good for developing the sideout ability, since the receiving team will see a greater variety of servers, blockers, and defenders, and they have to fight against the scoring system the whole time. If you do this, keep the time it takes to get to Plus 4. Whichever team gets Plus 4 the fastest wins that round. A round will typically take about 5 minutes, so plan accordingly.

Drill Considerations

You might notice that there is a penalty for unforced errors, but no penalty for getting blocked. This is deliberate. There’s a few reasons for this. First, at most levels of beach volleyball, there is little correlation between getting blocked and winning or losing. (This is not true at the professional men’s level.) Second, developing players (and I’m looking all the way up to the NCAA here) tend to make significantly more unforced errors than they get stopped by the blocker. Young players need to learn to hit the ball in the court and, “make the blocker block you.” Finally, by eliminating the penalty for getting blocked, you increase the number of points that will be decided in the First Ball phase.

If you imagine a scoring system that’s inverted from this one, where you have a penalty only for getting blocked, the players will avoid the block. This will lead to more shots, more digs, and more transition opportunities. That might be appropriate in some situations, but it’s the opposite of what we want to accomplish with Plus 4.

A last note: I recommend replacing all missed serves with bowls/tosses in this game. You want players to have to earn the sideout, not get a free one with a missed serve.

Give “Plus 4” a try and let me know how it goes. Or let me know what scoring modifications seem to be working best at your level.