Set To My Window

And spike by the light of the... fluorescent bulbs.

This spring I’m doing 3 different running article series.

On Tuesday, I’m releasing articles aimed at giving you a small, specific tool to make your in-practice or in-match coaching more effective. On Fridays, I’m writing about ways to increase the physical capability of players. On Sundays, I’m releasing a more statistically-oriented beach article.

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Here’s a quick and easy external target for your hitting drills. In particular, I like to use this when I run 2-Way Hitting.

The Antenna Window

Here’s what it looks like:

This is from a small-group clinic, so it’s only going 1-way, not 2-ways but you can see the setup.

The two antennas form a window 1m wide. I move the outside antenna in a half-meter. So the two antennas are 0.5m and 1.5m from the sideline on both sides. So the windows are like this:

Why?

The efficiency of wing attacking drops significantly once the ball gets even with the antenna or wider. So I want the aiming point for a setter to be 1m inside the antenna. Therefore, we give a little bit of leeway for the setter to miss the target long, but still have the ball be (slightly) inside the antenna.

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I explain more about why I like the aiming point to be 1m inside in my Offensive Concepts Seminar. Registration just opened, so contact me to now to reserve the best date for you and your program.

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I think the biggest training effect is just creating that window for a setter to see and get instant feedback. The most space-efficient way for club teams (or NCAA teams who don’t always have multiple courts) to get a training effect from these antenna windows is to use them with 2-Way Hitting. But if you have multiple courts or the time for setter tutoring, the antenna window can be useful in setter tutoring:

If you put the right-sized coach on the right-sized box, you can actually get pretty close to the exact contact point you’d like a hitter to attack at. At the high school or club level, you usually don’t have enough training time, and the hitters aren’t really powerful enough, to take too many swings. At that level, you’re usually trying to get more more more swings into your practice. But at higher levels, the legs and arms of your hitters might be the limiting factor. So getting a realistic setting target to set into is nice. You can see in this early-season setter tutor that this setter is having a little trouble finding the window. Good. That’s the point of putting a window up.

Often at the club level, setter-hitter feedback is a challenge. The good thing about the window is that you get automatic, intrinsic feedback that the setters and hitters can use to build understanding for future feedback, because most of the time you won’t have the window up.

The hitter’s goal here is to spike line through the window. We have a 14 year-old setter trying to find that window and this first ball, as she comes off the net, she leaves the set short and the hitter can’t hit through the window.

This can be a challenging situation for young setters and hitters, because they don’t always have a good feel for where the ideal hitting window is. The setter might feel she located well and wonder why the hitter didn’t hit line. The hitter might assume she just screwed up.

Here’s another:

Obviously this is a nice swing for a high school kid, so setter and hitter are going to be excited about that. But, as a coach, you want to steer the excitement from, “yay good hit, we hope the good hit fairy visits us again,” to, “that was a good hit BECAUSE the hitter was on the right step and the setter put the ball in the window.” That way, players can learn to produce this result more often.

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I’m back from Korea and touring the USA (and Canada! and Mexico if anybody wants to invite me!) doing camps, clinics, and seminars. Check out the Summer 2024 Seminar page to reserve a spot now.