Post-Tournament Recaps
A refresh
In 2023, I wrote a paywalled article for club coaches about doing a post-tournament recap:
I just removed the paywall, so that’s now available for all free subscribers. SmarterVolley has grown a bunch of the past 2 years, so many of you haven’t seen this article yet, feel free to check that out.
5 more thoughts after coaching a team through a 3-Day MLK tournament:
1. Planning Priorities
I discussed this in the Tournament Prep Webinar, but planning your Priorities for the weekend helps you steer the ship and avoid being reactive. It also helps give your assistant coaches guidance. It also helps bridge the gap to plan your next training block. For our team, we had 3 priorities going into the tournament. 1 of them is going to need to continue to be a major focus in training because we’re not solid enough in that phase of the game yet.
2. Serving Zone 1
I’m a big fan of serving zone 1. Many passers tend to pass balls back into zone 2 when they are receiving in 1 and many club setters struggle to set the left side as effectively when the pass is back in zone 1. It’s no guarantee, but it’s a tactic I like to have, yet it’s the least common one in club volleyball. More servers serve from 1 or 6 than from 5, and most right-handed servers who do serve from 5 tend to push the ball over toward 6 rather than down the line.
3. Patch The Defensive Holes
Other teams run different offensive systems than you do, so they will highlight some areas of your block/defensive system that you haven’t trained yet. If you’ve been following my In The Gym page, you’ll know that I’ve been emphasizing the sideout phase more than the block/defense phase. This is pretty typical of how I like to plan. I think defense can be a little more quickly upgraded as the season goes along, and you can use some tournament experiences to tighten things up defensively.
4. See What Fades
It’s pretty typical for some things to sharpen up over a weekend and for other things to fade throughout the weekend. The areas of the game that aren’t as habitual for players will tend to decrease in execution over the course of the weekend. For example, most of my team isn’t yet automatic on clean, no-spin contacts on their jump float. Day 1 we were pretty solid. In Days 2 and 3, we were still targeting effectively, but there were fewer clean floaters as we went. This remains a priority for me to train.
5. Practice Adaptibility
This goes along with #3, but being adaptable is a trained skill. You’ll need to adjust to certain things on the fly in order to beat certain opponents. Making those specific adjustments is important in the moment, but even more important is the general quality of being adaptable, as in, able to adapt. The quicker you can problem-solve, the more of an edge you’ll have on your opponents.
I’m going through all my tournament video right now, so I’ll share some statistical analysis and a little more about my process as the week continues.