Speedball 3s
A nice variation on a classic drill
Announcement: I’m putting on another Subscribers-Only Small-Group Workshop at the end of October. The planned date/time is Thursday, October 27 at 9pm Eastern (Note: earlier I had 8pm, note the change!). The topic is Blocking Lessons From The 2022 Men’s World Championship. There will be application to all levels of volleyball, but I’m going to take plenty of space to touch on some higher-level concepts, so it won’t be aimed at beginner blockers. It’s open to all premium subscribers and I’ll send out the links as we get closer.
We’re looking at defense this month. September was spent focusing on Sideout, so I shared a Make Them Play variation of 3 v 3 / 4 v 4 that a lot of teams have enjoyed.
Let’s take a look at another small-group game that you might like running with your teams.
What Is Speedball?
Before we talk specifically Speedball 3s, let’s run down Speedball Rules in general.
When you win, you stay and receive.
When you lose, you rotate and serve.
The player who rotates off gets the ball and gets back in line.
Since the players who are off are waiting with a volleyball to serve, it lends the speed to the Speedball, because you’re able to get the next serve in quickly. You can do Speedball 2s, Speedball 3s, 4s, even 6s. The basic thing is that you stay on when you win, and you have some sort of rotation or switching on the losing side and then you enter the serve.
Making Speedball 3s Work
There’s a few different ways to do a Speedball 3s. Let’s look at a simple situation where you have 12 players, so you make 4 teams of 3.
Say the 1s start with the serve. If they lose the rally, the 2s stay on and the whole 1s team waves off. One of the 3s has a ball and they wave on with the serve. If the 1s win the rally, they stay on, while the 2s wave off, and one of the 4s (who has been waiting with a ball) serves while the 4s wave on.
This is a simple and easy way to do things.
Individual Rotation
Now say we have those same players, but we want to add steady setters at the net. We don’t have even teams of 3 to wave on and off, which is very common. In that case, you can do an individual rotation.
Now instead of waving on and off as a group, one player comes off. Each player who is waiting off has a ball and is ready to serve. If they are next in line, they serve and enter the court.
Making A Defensive Emphasis
To make this a defensive emphasis, I like to play this Cutthroat, Knockout, or Elimination style. It’s all the same thing, it just depends on how violent you like your language to be. :)
Now, if you make the error, you’re out and that player fills in for you. At a certain level of play, this is actually going to create a Make Them Play focus, because at U-14s, you might have a ton of hitting errors that players need to consciously clean up. Okay, no problem. But as the team gets more skilled, the number of hitting errors is going to be less than the number of kills. So now the number one way to get eliminated? Make an error on defense?
Now I’m scrapping to keep every ball up because I don’t want to get knocked out of the drill. And if I do, there’s somebody on my team who is ready to kick me out because they want to come on!
You can run your Cutthroats a few different ways. One way to do it is that every point eliminates somebody. Another way is that only a specific error(s) eliminates somebody. In that case, you as the coach need to have a cart handy, because you’re going to chip balls in if a rally ends but that error doesn’t occur. This can get a little dicey, so make sure you’re ready to judge!