Spotlight
Going beyond bonus points.
This week is Beach Week at Smarter Volley. I dedicate the first 3 weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the 4th to beach. This particular concept has quite a bit of transfer between the two surfaces, so I think coaches of either discipline can gain from it.
Yesterday I talked about applying the Triangle framework to beach volleyball. There are good statistical reasons to focus on those specific areas of the game and to use that lens. But there’s something that I talked about toward the end of that post that’s even more important. If you understand what aspect of the game you want to work on, you can design drills and games to improve that aspect of the game.
On one hand, this is pretty obvious. “No shit Trinsey, what else would we do at practice besides try to get better?” But… let’s also be honest. How often do coaches design practices to specifically improve one area of the game? And how often do they start with drills they like and hope it ends up teaching a coherent lesson?
I’ve said before that John Mayer is one of the best that I know at this, and I’ve learned a ton from him. On Friday I’m going to a post a coaching workshop we did together where we talk about how to design practices in this manner. But today I’ll go over one game format that I like. The game is called Spotlight
What It Looks Like
You play volleyball. You keep score. And you also keep a second score. That score is the Spotlight score. This is simple. I like simple games.
What this means is that there are two scores a team must win in order to win the game: the normal score and the Spotlight score. If you’re reading this, you’re smart enough to understand that we’re going to choose that Spotlight deliberately in order to teach players some lessons about the game of volleyball.
A simple example is to Spotlight on Terminal Serves. A team must be ahead in Terminal Serves (Aces and Service Errors) and ahead in the normal score. So say you are playing on the beach and Team A is up 21-18, but they have only served 1 ace and missed 3 serves, while Team B has served 2 aces and missed 2 serves. Here’s the breakdown of that:
Total Points: 39
Team A points: 21
Team B points: 18
Total Terminal Serves: 8
Team A Terminal Serve points: 3 (1 ace and 2 Team B service errors)
Team B Terminal Serve points: 5 (2 aces and 3 Team A service errors)
Total Live Rally* points: 31
Team A Live Rally points: 18
Team B Live Rally points: 13
(*A “Live Rally” is any play that didn’t involve a Terminal Serve. So it’s the combination of First Ball and Transition Points.)
Now we have a situation where Team A is ahead in the normal score but behind in the Spotlight score. You can do one of two things at this point. Option 1 is to keep playing until one team is ahead on both scores. Option 2 is to declare a draw and move to the next drill or game. How you structure your practice depends on what you’ll do. I like the option of continuing to play until one team wins both the rally score and the Spotlight score.
Spotlight Lessons
The goal of Spotlight is to metaphorically, “shine a light,” on an aspect of the game. Since you are drawing a direct comparison between the regular score and an aspect of the game, there is any easy comparison to how that aspect of the game affects winning and losing.
One lesson this can teach a team is: If you don’t win this area of the game, you won’t be successful at the level of competition you want to compete at. This will get taught if you play Spotlight games that focus on that team’s strength. They’ll see that when they win the Spotlight, they are almost always ahead in the normal score. And when they don’t win the Spotlight, they are losing in the normal score as well. This can be good for late-season practices when you want to reinforce your strengths.
Another lesson this can teach a team is: There are a few different ways to win a game of volleyball, if you don’t have one in your toolkit, what are you going to do when a team takes your usual strength away from you? This will get taught if you Spotlight a team’s weakness. For example, a team can consistently win the normal score but they are rarely ahead in First Ball when you spotlight that. The lesson then becomes, “You get in a hole in First Ball, and rely on your transition skill to dig yourself out of it. What are you going to do when a team can match you in Transition? Or has such an overwhelming edge in First Ball that you can’t overcome it?”
In this way, what you Spotlight links to how you’ll use it to teach. Early in the season, I want to discover a team’s strengths and weaknesses, and encourage them to work on their weaknesses. I like the idea of, “Can you win a match this way? What about this other way?” Late in the season, I like for a team to solidify their strengths. I like the message of, “This is who you are; this is what you can rely on when the going gets tough.”
Some Practical Spotlights
Terminal Serving is a good Spotlight. It’s pretty common that a team will be relatively stronger or weaker in that area. Ball control teams tend to be pretty good in Terminal Serving, while other teams with more physical players might give up a couple points in that area, but dominate once the rally goes live. It’s also easy to keep track of.
First Ball points are another good Spotlight. Easy to keep track of, easy to understand, and teams might have a strength or a weakness there.
Transition points can be a good Spotlight, but I also recommend putting something like a 4-point cap on the normal score edge. So if one team is up 21-17 or better, it doesn’t matter what the Spotlight is. This is because a dominant team won’t even allow the ball to get into Transition.
You can get more specific than just the Triangle aspects. A good way to do this is to Spotlight types of kills. For example, more on-2 kills or more kills with shots. The other effect this will have is to actually create more Transition rallies. The more you restrict a hitter, the more Transition rallies you create.
Have you used something similar to this? What Spotlights would you use? Any questions about how to use this concept? Drop me a comment.