SmarterVolley Offensive Concepts Seminars

Coming To A Gym Near You (assuming you pay me and stuff)

I’m taking a break from the Friday Fitness series to bring you an important announcement. I’ve mentioned before some of my live SmarterVolley seminars before. In Summer 2022 I posted a recap of an Offensive Concepts seminar I did with a high school program.

Here’s some of the feedback from the previous seminars:

Exploiting confirmation bias is the key to getting good seminar feedback.

And now I’m gearing up for the Summer 2024 schedule. I’ve had a few programs reach out to me about availability, so I figured I’d put a public post out to share some information as well as availability. I’ll update this periodically as things change.

Before we get to dates, some information about this seminar.

Offensive Concepts

This is a seminar where I put together an offensive system from top-to-bottom and show you how to run it in a match and train it in practice.

I alternate between video and on-court sessions. I start with middle attacking and then build out the rest of the in-system offense. We then get into medium pass “semi-system” and then into out-of-system “Red Zone” attacking. I build out the transition concepts as well.

In the Organization - Mechanics - Skill framework, this seminar is about:
40% Organization
40% Mechanics
20% Skill

Why?

Mechanics are a difference in kind. Skill is the difference in degree.

Taking 3 steps or 4 steps in your spiking approach is a change in mechanics. The length of your stride, how quickly you get off the ground, how you maintain your relationship to the ball in the air, your timing… those are all more on the skill end. (Remembering that there’s a bit of a blurred line there)

Broad changes in mechanics can occur within a few training sessions, maybe just one. But the skill to coordinate the precise timing? Being able to produce that movement with power? That takes a lifetime of training.

So about 20% of this seminar is still going to be skill-based. I’ll still talk a bit about how we train and develop skill over time. I’ll model some examples of how I teach. But I’ve found that, if you bring me out for 1-2 days, that’s not the most efficient use of my time, because ultimately the improvement in skill is going to be based on the work you and your players put in the gym every day.

What I have found is really effective is providing upgrades to the Organization of an offensive system and showing the Mechanics that facilitate or hinder the pieces of that system. Let’s use your First Ball attack on the left side as an easy example:

Organization
How fast do we need to set to gain an advantage? How fast is too fast?
What trajectory does the setter need to set to produce that tempo?
What timing does the hitter need to have to hit that tempo?
What location do we need along and off the net?

Mechanics
What sort of footwork facilitates or hinders a setter from setting this tempo?
What sort of footwork facilitates or hinders an attacker from hitting this tempo?
What parts of armswing/rotation can help or hurt an attacker when hitting this tempo?

I’ve found those are the biggest bang-for-the-buck because they are difference in kind. Maybe your left-side attacker has only ever used a pass-and-shuffle move and I’m going to show how a pass-and-go footwork in an arc will allow them to hit a faster tempo set. I’ve found that using a seminar like this to get a coach/player/team in the right ballpark then sets up that coach/player/team to continue to work on the Skill of executing that new System/Mechanic.

System Hallmarks
I build out a full system but I try to get you to visualize them as Lego blocks. I believe that each piece builds on each other in a multiplicative way and is (usually) best if you adopt most of these concepts together. But there’s also quite a few pieces that you can adopt on their own.

But the overall philosophy is:

Spread the net. Attack into gaps. Have some planned misdirection for when the opponents over-adjust. Know the situation and know when to kill it and when to continue the rally.

Some of the mechanics that I’m going to try to talk you into include:

Setters
Right-Left jump-setting footwork
A couple ways to pivot on the move
Being an offensive threat with multiple types of setter attack
Seeing the blockers

Wings
Shuffle and pass-and-go footwork
Transition footwork by situation
How to attack with rotation
Green Light and Red Zone toolkits
Back-row attack

Middles
Pull and Push routes
Scrape, Pop, and Wheel counter-routes
Transition (Pull and Flash)

Liberos/System
How to handle reception seams
How to get the libero in Zone 6 in every serve receive
Non-setter setting

I also show how the pieces scale from lower levels to higher levels, although this isn’t geared at U14s, for example. This isn’t an ideal clinic for, “hey, most of my kids have no idea how to take an approach, how do I teach them?” There’s other seminars or camps that are more targeted at that. This is a better fit for a team where you feel that you’re on the right path of training skills, but you want to better organize those efforts into a cohesive offensive system.

Because of that, it’s a better fit for older club teams in the 16-18s range (although the elite end of the 14s and 15s could be a fit), solid varsity high school teams, or NCAA-level teams.

Formats
There’s 2 general formats that work for this seminar:

1. Demo Team. I’ll work with 1 (max of 2, if you have 2 courts) team for a full day in an intensive fashion. Coaches learn alongside the players and I’ll get some coaches on the court coaching alongside me to work on their eye. We setup a classroom ideally in the gym (tv cart + some folding chairs) or else closely-adjacent. The morning session is 9:00 - 12:30 and the afternoon session is 2:00 - 5:30. With a player demo team, I keep the classroom sessions short and bounce back and forth fairly frequently. With this format, we ideally also run a coaches-only, classroom-only session the night before, which serves as an intro primer to all the material I will cover with the players the next day.

2. Coaches-Only. For various reasons (possibly including NCAA recruiting calendars), we can do a coaches-only seminar without a demo team. In this case, we still do need a demo “team” of at least a few coaches who are capable of getting on the court and running through some of the concepts and drills. In this case, I do slightly longer classroom sessions and we add in some macro-level content such as practice planning, cueing, etc.

Cost
My rate is $1200/day + travel.

I used to charge per person but I found it ended up to be a bit clunky. X per coach, Y per player, but Z discount for the host, etc. I do still run 1-2 camps or seminars per year like that because I can make a bit more revenue if I do all the registration and payment collection. But if I run more than 1 or 2 of those per year, I end up spending too much time on logistics and then I’m a bit pulled away from the content of SmarterVolley and my seminars, which is what I want to focus on.

So if you want to book me for a demo team event and charge 24 players $150 each for the day, then you can make some profit. Great. If you’re a high school team and you can put together the $1200 + travel from the booster club and bring me out to work with your team right before the season starts and not charge the players anything… also great.

Cost + Format Examples
Here’s what the cost looks likes like for the different formats:

1. 1-Day Demo Team seminar. Cost: $1200 + travel. This is ideal for a high school program where the players all chip in a bit or the booster club pays for it. You might do this right before pre-season or you might do it right after you’ve made your varsity selections. If you do a summer league, it also might work to do it right before summer league so your kids can practice these concepts over the summer. You can keep it closed to only your coaches or you can open it up to other coaches and charge them to defray some of your costs.

2. 1.5-Day Demo Team seminar. Cost $1800 + travel. This is ideal for a medium-sized club with 10-20 coaches in attendance. I do a run-through the night before and get all the coaches an introduction to these concepts. Then, we teach them the next day with the players, so the coaches get to learn twice. Typically, you’ll have something like a 17-1 team be the demo team. I can work with 2 teams if you have 2 courts, but I can’t do 3 teams (even if you have the court space) because a video session with 30+ kids at once doesn’t work.

3. 2-Day Demo Team seminar. Cost $2400 + travel. This is actually a really nice format for an ambitious high school program, especially if you’re within 4 hours of Wilmington, NC, because I can drive up there morning-of (if you’re 3+ hours, then we’ll probably start at 10:00 instead of 9:00 and go an hour later) and then your travel costs are pretty low. If you run this seminar right after you’ve chosen varsity players, you’re going to be able to launch into your season at 100mph.

4. 2.5-Day Demo Team seminar. Cost $3000 + travel. This is good for a bigger club with a lot of coaches or a club where you want me to work with 4 teams. I can’t do 4 teams in a 1-day seminar because I can’t teach more than 2 teams at a time and I just can’t get through all the material quickly enough. So in this case you either pick 2 teams for me to work with on Saturday and 2 teams for me to work with on Sunday. You can also have 2 teams that do both Saturday and Sunday AM and 2 teams that do both Saturday and Sunday PM.

5. 1-Day Coaches-Only seminar. Cost $1200 + travel. If you’re a club director with a good network of contacts in your area, this is probably the best way to get me into your gym for free. If you open it up to coaches outside your club and charge them something like $120/coach + $80 per additional coach, you should be able to get 10-15 coaches from outside your club to attend and then the cost to you and your coaches is negligible.

6. 2-Day Coaches-Only seminar. Cost $2400 + travel. Again, you can keep this internal-only or sell registrations to coaches outside your organization. Feel free to make a profit.

Dates
I’m going to open up a Seminars tab on the main page of the Substack, but here’s the current weekend availability:

May 11-12
May 18-19
May 25-26
Jun 01-02
Jun 08-09
Jun 15-16
Jun 22-23
Jun 29-30
Jul 06-07
Jul 13-14
Jul 20-21
Jul 27-28
Aug 03-04
Aug 10-11
Aug 17-18
Aug 25-26
Aug 31-01
Sep 07-08
Sep 14-15

I’m also happy to do a mid-week event if that works better for you and your program.

I’ll add information about other seminars as we go, if you have questions or ideas, please feel free to reach out.