Setting Workshop

Two USA greats share their thoughts on a setter's journey to mastery.

Last week, some superior humans premium subscribers and I sat down with a couple of Olympians to talk about setting. I figured while Alisha Childress and Carli Lloyd were stuck here in Dallas with me that I might as well rope them into sharing some knowledge on setting with the Smarter Volley community. They didn’t disappoint! I kicked the session off with some questions, and then we had a bunch that I relayed from the session attendees.

Some previous Workshop Sessions include:

Marv Dunphy

John Mayer

Riley Salmon

Kirsten Bernthal Booth

Betsi Flint

Luka Slabe

Here’s some takeaways from the audience from the session with Alisha and Carli:

NG: Building around your setter’s strength. Alisha was a great volleyball player and understood the game and then worked really hard to build the technical aspect of her game. Carli is big, athletic, pretty technical and worked to continue to understand the game at higher and higher levels. Not to mention both playing other positions!!

JG: It’s hard for setters to run fast tempo with middles on high digs/passes.  Make sure your tutoring reflects that.

KH: One thing we are working through in our gym is the idea of timing middle sets that Carli really dove into... We tend to jump hard, but too early and we end up on the way down and slowing down our middles or setting them too high. I completely agree with Carli on this topic

I had some similar takeaways as well. We weren’t necessarily intending to dive deep into setting the middles, but the conversation went that way and a few audience members commented on getting value out of that. Which is also why it’s great if you can make these sessions live, you get to help shape the dialogue. I’m working on the next few guests; leave some suggestions in the comments and I can work on it!

Finally, I mentioned that all newsletter proceeds from when I announced this session to when we had it would be donated to GiveDirectly. Well, we didn’t quite make it to $1000, so I just rounded up:

A great session for a great cause! Thank you to all you readers, and here’s the video, below the paywall.