The Double Push
Digging the ball is hard. And the higher the level, the harder it becomes to dig balls with control. As a coach, you have limited practice time. How much of it do you spend on sideout and how much do you spend on defense? And if you’re going to spend time on defense, how much do you spend on team systems (where to stand and who digs what ball?) and how much time do you spend on individual mechanics?
In past training articles, I’ve focused more on drill-level concepts. But today I want to dive into a specific individual defensive mechanic. It’s not the cure-all for defense, but, for players that are capable of making this move (more on that below), I think it’s worth at least one extra dig per match.
(Also: this post is gif-heavy, if all the gifs don’t show up for you, right click → open image in new tab.)
When I was on staff for USA, a good portion of my off-seasons were spent in the following way:
Karch: “Hey Joe, I was thinking about this aspect of our team. How much of this [incredibly specific information] do you have?”
Joe: “Umm… I’d probably need to watch a couple hundred hours of video to know that.”
Karch: (Locks the door to my office from the outside.) “Okay, see you in a couple weeks.”
One of these off-season projects involved studying every dig attempt (or, in those cases that horrify us as coaches, non-attempts) and mining for information. I started with a few categories of defensive action and added and re-classified as I went. And I got some actionable info out of it.
Today I want to lock in on a particular move that I started to see in this study and continue to see when I watch some players. And more relevantly, that I continue to NOT see when I watch most players. I have given it the (uninspiring) name of the Double Push.1
That is a really clean example of this concept. Here’s a montage with a whole bunch more.
These are all clips of circa-2018 Nebraska and Illinois, because I made them for a clinic I did with Kayla Banwarth and Alfee Reft- who at that time were assistants for those two programs respectively. (I’ll put a link to a video workshop with Alfee talking more about this and other concepts at the end of this article.)
But you see this concept on all sorts of teams, even if they are calling it something different or not specifically training it. It’s just what good athletes do:
That clip is nice because it’s slow-mo and she stays on her feet. So you can see the simple weight transfer. Stumler’s a pretty unique defensive athlete (especially for an outside, as opposed to a smaller libero) and she moves really well in the back court. When she makes this play, it seems very routine. “How else would she move?” But you see players move in less powerful and efficient ways all the time.
There’s a hierarchy to this movement class. The worse mistake is what I call the “backfoot swivel.” That would be the previous clip from the UT match. There’s not really even a first push and the back knee goes down, causing the body to just twist and the arms end up waving at the ball. And to be clear, people dig balls like this all the time! Sometimes the ball comes at you in a weird spot or you’re not in a great body position and it’s all you can do to get some sort of surface on the ball. Even great defenders will do this at times:
But habitually making that move is a red flag to me.
Now let’s look at the next move in the hierarchy:
On one level, there’s nothing wrong with this dig. After all, a dig is a dig and that ball was settable. I wouldn’t necessarily correct this play if it happened at a practice. But what I would want to do is answer the question, “does this player have the capability to make a second push, or are they always falling to the knee?”
This sort of move, which isn’t as bad as the backfoot swivel move, but not quite as good as the double push, seems to be to me something that players get acclimated to, because it does work for a fair amount of situations. If the ball is about waist-high, you can fall to a knee and dig the ball on the way down and things tend to work out- especially if the ball isn’t hit especially hard.
The problem is that you don’t have great range with that move. Expanding your range requires the double push. Don’t just fall to a knee but maintain the ability to push off the front foot. It gives you range laterally, but, more importantly, gives you vertical range as well. You see it all the time: the ball is hit shoulder height, a couple feet to the side of a player… and she ends up falling to a knee. The ball was high, why are you on a knee? Because they don’t have this double-push mechanic.
If you put your finger on where the ball is contacted, and let the play loop, you’ll see that this ball is hit nearly shoulder-height. If he falls to a knee, he’s going to end up with his platform below the plane of attack and not dig the ball. Getting that second push enables him to not just extend laterally, but to push to a higher contact point than “fall to a knee” allows.
There’s a degree of leg strength involved in making this move. When you first start training it, you’ll find that some athletes simply cannot propel themselves “out of the hole” that they lunge into. They will need to take a smaller, perhaps even negative, step in order to have the leverage to push. And your practice of the move will be almost like strength training: as you practice the move, you’ll gain the strength to get a stronger second push.
For more on this move and other defensive concepts, check out this webinar with Alfee Reft, beyond the paywall. (Remember that now is a great time to go premium if you haven’t already. You’ll have access to this webinar, the upcoming session with Carli and Alisha, and your subscription cost will go directly to charity. Win-win!)
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