Practice #3

The end of the first mini-cycle

I previously outline a 12-practice pre-season training schedule for juniors coaches:

In this article, I broke down the first 2 practices and now here’s #3.

Practice 3
10’ - Doubles (Tennis)
10’ - Dig-Set
20’ - 2-Way Hitting (Transition emphasis)
15’ - Transition 4s
20’ - BSBH
- Is it over?
45’ - 6v6
- 4 rounds of 23-19 Aceball.
- Use extra time for Last Ball Bounce 6v6 (fast-paced)

One thing you might notice is that, while the overall flow of the practice is pretty similar, it has a bit of a different emphasis and a slightly different ordering of the drills.

Different Doubles Applications

There are two main ways I like to use Doubles drills:

1. To increase the density of passing and (especially) serving reps.

2. To get a bunch of random touches and unlock some creativity and problem-solving.

In Practices 1 and 2, I used Narrow-Court Doubles with a serve. That’s the first application. It’s a bit of a rigid construct: the court is narrow and thin and it basically forces you to get your TACo right. In this way, we’re just using the fun and adrenaline of the competitive 2v2 setting to lock in a technical cue.

In Practice 3, I’m using the second application. There’s a bunch of different doubles games that I like. In fact, you can and should make up new ones all the time with small rules quirks. The point here is that the athletes aren’t really thinking about technique at all but are just enjoying playing a game and we’re letting that engagement create some good stuff on the court.

A lot of teams play different variations of “Volley-tennis” but the commonality is that you’re playing 1-touch. I like 2v2 1-touch because you can cover the full court and there’s some communication that needs to happen between the 2 players.

Dig-Set

In the If I Had $1000 article, I mention that setting targets are nice to have. If you have them, definitely use them when you run Dig-Set. Here’s what that looks like at our practice.

Ideally you run this 2-sided. You put half the team on one side and half on the other. An easy way to cycle players is “whoever sets comes off” but you can make up whatever way you like.

A couple keys here:

1. This is a SETTING drill. Don’t turn it into a coach-on-3 defensive drill because (a) those drills mostly suck when the coach is on the floor and (b) you’ll never end up getting any quality sets. Notice that digs are pretty easy here. Easy is relative and means that “at least 4 times out of 5, somebody gets a chance to set.” If your team is less skilled than mine, you need to keep the ball entries easier than what you see here.

2. You need to have some sort of target to measure.

#2 is critical. If you’re just setting to somebody who is catching or whatever, it’s like serving without a net and an endline. How do you know if the serve is any good. Sure you can eyeball it, just like you can eyeball a set, but without measurement you won’t progress.

Most of the time setting has a natural measurement: the attacker. This is why we like to have an attacker hit as often as possible. However, it can be worth it to cycle in some higher-rep setting activities. If you watch the above clip, you’ll see 7 sets in 20s if you count both sides of the court. That’s a pace of 21 sets per minute, or about 200 setting reps for your team in a 10-minute block. This is about as many as you can get while still maintaining what I deem to be the minimal viable game context of spatial orientation and the ball coming off a platform dig.

Because we can’t attack anywhere near 200 sets in 10 minutes, this Dig-Set drill is worth doing. BUT… we have to have a way to measure if our sets are any good and if you just set the ball into space your players will not judge it very well. So I really like the setting targets for this. If you notice, I jack them up as high as they go (I want to find a way in the off-season to actually extend them up a bit higher) and put the target parallel to the ground. This forces the ball to go up and down, which is what we want from our high ball setting.

If you can’t do that, use a ball cart or a couple ball carts stacked on top of each other. But you’ll also have to mandate some minimum height threshold, which is annoying because you’ll probably also have to be the downball enterer, etc… but do your best. The ball needs to get set high, go up and down and be able to land within the court.

Transition Elements

Here’s how I like to train these skills for juniors teams.