Tactical Tuesday Part 1 - Practice Preparation

Exemplar Planning, Plan For Error, Double Plan

Summer School is in session here at SmarterVolley. We’re on a mission to get better at the process of teaching this game of volleyball. In addition to the takeaways from my 3 favorite books on teaching in sport:

The Language Of Coaching - Nick Winkleman
How We Learn To Move - Rob Gray
Coaching Athletes To Be Their Best - Rollnick and Fader

I’m also sharing some idea that the book Teach Like A Champion has sparked in my mind. Unlike the other 3, this book is not about sport, so not everything translates perfectly. Nonetheless, it might help you make some connections- I did and I’ll share them with you here.

Practice Planning

The second¹ section in Teach Like A Champion is titled Lesson Preparation. Here’s 3 techniques that gave me connections to Practice Planning for coaches.

(1) Exemplar Planning
What does it look like when you’re doing it right? To quote from this section:

Exemplars… are correct answers that you write out to your own questions. They are the answers you hope a student will give to your question. It would be easy to overlook this step or underestimate its value in planning. It seems perhaps both obvious and redundant. You might argue that you have the answer “in your head” and don’t need to write it out. But this simple action might be the single most important step in preparing to teach.

Sport is different than the classroom. (I will just copy and paste that sentence every 200 words in these articles, so be prepared)

In a volleyball practice, it’s less that a player is going to get a correct answer and be done, but I think we want to really know a few things. We want to exemplar plan:

(1) System details. An example from practice recently:

Out-of-System play. Chaotic set, not a good situation to swing. I ask players, “what sort of off-speed are we looking for in this situation?” The answer I looked for was:

Throw/push to the pot/at the branches.

And, “if it gets dug, who digs it?”

The middle-back defender.

“Why not a soft drop tip in this situation?”

It’s hard to have placement on drop tips in a chaos situation. Their block is going to be better lined up. You can’t get a recycle on a soft tip.

Those are specific answers I was looking for. If you play for me, you know those answers, can recall them, and (hopefully) make those decisions in the game as well. I don’t want to get this article too bogged down in the offensive system details. What I want to emphasize here is this: I have a piece of my system that I want players to learn and I have written out in my coaching notebook these Exemplar answers. If a player cannot quickly and enthusiastically answer these questions, I need to teach better.

(2) Team Culture. For example:

If I ask players on my team, “what are the 3 basics of communication?” I will hear:

Eyes, Hands, Names

This doesn’t always mean their team communication is perfect or that no player has ever missed a high-five… but they do know the importance of these 3 things. If I need to tune up a player’s communication with teammates, I start by asking them that question. I then may follow up with something like, “okay, so you know that’s important… now I need to tell you that I see you missing eye contact with teammates, especially after a mistake.”

If a player cannot give me this Exemplar answer, then my follow-up counseling is going to be less effective.

(3) Practice Habits. For example:

Like many club teams, we practice in a multi-court facility with other teams practicing. There are divider nets, but sometimes balls make their way over. We also have walls not too far from the endline, so missed serves out the endline will often bounce off the wall and roll back onto the court. And of course, throughout practice there’s just balls from drills, etc rolling around.

If you come watch my practice you will never see a player kick a ball to the side or roll it off the court. Ask them, “hey, what do you do at practice when a ball rolls on the court.” They will all say, “pick it up, throw it to a coach.”

This is important to me. I have a clearly defined Exemplar answer for this. This may or may not be important to you, but you should take a minute to write out (not every practice, but like… once a year) what the Exemplars are of the Practice Habits you want to see in your gym.

It’s also worth noting that these things can change from year-to-year and team-to-team. When I coached professionally, I’m perfectly fine with a player kicking or rolling the ball to the side or endline because (a) there’s more space and (b) there’s usually plenty of staff or extra players there to pick balls up as they accumulate around the perimeter and to prevent them from coming back on the court.

(2) Plan For Error
Plan for error is, in my conceptualization, the flip side of Exemplar Planning. When teaching something, what are the most likely mistakes you’ll see. To quote: