SmarterVolley on Volleyball By Design

Expanding on a few topics

Recently I appeared on the Volleyball By Design podcast. A lot of what I talked about will be pretty familiar to all of you, especially if you’ve been reading the Getting Started series.

I outlined those 9 key metrics, starting with eSO/MTP/FBK, working to Sideout by Pass Quality and then 3 passing metrics as well.

We didn’t get into the Triangle; we’ll probably break that down on another podcast at some point. But if you’re reading Smarter Volley, you’re probably pretty familiar with that already.

I very briefly touched on some of my Offensive Concepts stuff, but didn’t dive into that too deeply.

We did talk about some of my practice structure. I’ll get to the training week in the next article this week, but I briefly went through this 1-Spiker/2-Spiker/4-Spiker progression and a couple people asked me about that, so I’ll flesh it out a little more now:

1-Spiker

1-Spiker basically means hitting lines with a focus. When I work with juniors programs, we usually alternate: maybe 8-12 minutes of middle hitting, and then 12-16 minutes of outside (left or right) hitting. With a pro team like I am coaching now, we break off into 2 courts: 1 court of middles and 1 court of wings.

The 4 most common things I work on in 1-Spiker are:

1. Tempo. Dial in how fast you want to set the left side. Dial in what step you need your middles on when the setter is contacting the ball, etc.

2. Power. You know the route, now let’s see how much heat we can put on the ball. Most in-system routes have pretty specific rotational demands. Train them up to unlock the power for your attackers.

3. Visual Adjustments - Pass. Our middles have some specific adjustments based off where the ball is passed. Your middles might as well. You likely have an area around the 3m line where you adjust from running your left side fast to slowing it down and going high ball. 1-Spiker drills are good times to work in varied passes and train the visual adjustments.

4. Visual Adjustments - Block. This can be as simple as a left side attacking against a coach blocker who is making a clear move to block line or cross. See the block and spike to space. And you get add in plenty of other stuff to that as well.

It’s easy to lock in on one of those aspects and get in the habit of doing that constantly. So it’s important to evaluate what your needs are as a team. There’s a good chance it’s what you’re less comfortable doing.

2-Spiker

This is where you take pieces of your offense and work them in a transition between individual attacking and a full offense. And then you put between 1 and 3 blockers on the other side of the net, depending on what you’re trying to get accomplished. If you want to stress blockers more, and emphasize the overload speed of your offense, you might just put 1 blocker against 2 spikers. For example, in men’s volleyball, I like to do some middle/pipe overload v just a middle blocker. It’s challenging for the middle blockers, but it’s a situation they have to deal with quite a bit.

A typical situation might also be to run 2 attackers v 2 blockers. For example, a left and middle attacker v a right and middle blocker with the middle running a Push/Gap/31/7/B-Quick/whatever you call hitting in the 3/4 seam. This is a good format to add constraints, such as:

1. Middle blocker cannot front, they have to jump from the center of the court. This means the right-side blocker has to be good at helping, and now the setter can develop a feel for playing between their middle and left side attackers to overload a right side blocker.

2. Attackers must spike in the zone 1 half of the court. Now this is harder on the blockers because they are shot-limited and likely have multiple hands in their face as attackers. So now they have to go high hands to score.

You decide whether you want the constraints to help or hinder the offense and if that’s the training effect you want.

4-Spiker

If I had to pick a most important drill besides 6v6, it would be 4-Spiker.¹ Which makes sense, because it’s as close as you get to 6v6 without playing 6v6. But 4-Spiker is a core drill for me because it goes a bit faster than 6v6 and you get a higher rate of serve, pass, and First Ball Attack. I’m a First Ball guy, so I always want to be good here.

So all we’re going to do in 4-Spiker is Pass-Set-Hit against a live block. Generally I have no back court defense, but sometimes players like to sneak on the court and dig. All good. The main thing is, I just don’t want it turning into a full-on rally and slowing things down too much.² PSH, quick huddle, and get to the next rep.

This also allows the focus of both players and coaches to be entirely on the PSH sequence, which is good when you’re trying to get changes to transfer from more blocked drills into 6v6.

Generally speaking, when I’ve timed drills, 6v6 gets you about 2 rallies per minute, while 4-Spiker goes about 3-4 per minute. Or, put another way:

1 round (of 12 serves) of 4-Spiker takes about 4 minutes
1 round (of ~10 serves) of Aceball takes about 6 minutes.

So of course, 6v6 is the king and we need to play a lot of full 6v6, but 4-Spiker gives us close to the full training effect for sideout offense while playing about 50% faster. In 30 minutes of coached 6v6, we’ll probably get about 50 serves. In 30 minutes of 4-Spiker, we’ll probably get over 80.

And then the choice is up to you how much of each you program in to your practice.

1. For most girl’s volleyball teams, this is probably best expressed as 3-Spiker because most girl’s (and even NCAA Women) aren’t incorporating a backrow attack into their In-System offense and might even be using a DS to take out an attacker in the back row.

2. I mean, sometimes we do, but in that case, I’ll just schedule 6v6.