The First 12 Practices

A premium subscriber mega-post

November marks the start of the season for many juniors club coaches. Last year I made November Club Month at SmarterVolley and a lot of you enjoyed some content that was more tailored to the club level. Check the first post of the 2023 series for links to the 2022 series as well.

Club Season - Getting Started

In that initial post I talk about planning out your season. For a typical American club team, it might look like:

1st Practice: Pre-Season Begins
MLK Day Tournament: Pre-Season Ends, Mid-Season Begins
1st Qualifier: Mid-Season Ends, Post-Season Begins

And we’ll look specifically at that Pre-Season phase:

Pre-Season: 6 Weeks (~12 Practices + a scrimmage or two)
Starts Monday, Dec 4.
Ends with MLK Weekend tournament on Jan 13-15

Alright, so you have about 12 practices (maybe more if you get started earlier, can practice 3x per week, etc) from the start of your season until your first tournament. What should those practices look like? Glad you asked, because that’s what this article series is about!

Typically when I have multi-part content, I put it out piece-by-piece over time to ensure subscriber retention make each piece easier to digest. I’m going to do this series a little differently. For free subscribers, I’ll lay out this practice cycle one at a time, but for Premium Subscribers, I’m going to have the whole phase available up front, so you can see it all and use it to plan your pre-season phase. That way, you have the whole roadmap available ahead of time, and then on a week-by-week basis I’ll discuss 1 or 2 of the details to help make things work.

Also, Subscriber Note: If you want to view all the practice plans at once, it may be too long for email, so you might need to click through to your browser and/or bookmark this to refer to it later.

The Template

Here’s the template I really like for club volleyball. It’s assuming you have about 2 hours to practice and about 12 kids at practice. You can modify to suit a bit more or less time and different numbers of players, but here’s what I like to get in the ballpark of:

10’ - Self-Toss Spiking (or sometimes: an individual skills tutor)
10’ - 4-Ball Passing (or sometimes: Dig-Set)
10’ - Doubles (or sometimes: Transition 4s)
25’ - 2-Way Hitting (usually First Ball, but sometimes Transition)
20’ - 1-Way Sideout (or sometimes: BSBH)
45’ - 6v6 (ex: Aceball, GP Sideout, etc)

A few notes:

1. The higher your level of spikers, the more you’re likely to do Self-Toss Spiking after 4-Ball Passing and Doubles, because they’ll need more time to warm up for full-power spiking. For them, the 4-Ball Passing can be an arm warmup by hitting standing float serves over until their arms are warm and the Doubles will usually have less poweful attacks than their Self-Toss. For lower-level players, the Self-Toss is a good way to start because it gets their arms going and they will hit better serves in the 4-Ball Passing.

2. Sometimes I like to play atypical doubles games like Jamball or Tug-of-War first in the practice to get the juices going and mix in some odd contacts.

3. For the 6v6, especially with a younger team, I like to schedule my rounds to not take the full 45 mins. So for example, a typical round of Aceball is going to be about 12 points, which takes about 6 minutes. I’m going to schedule 4 rounds of Aceball - each round with a different lineup. Sometimes you have to repeat rounds because you don’t get it, etc, and it might take close to 45 mins. But sometimes you might get on a roll and knock those 4 rounds out in 24 minutes or less, which means you have a “free” 20 minutes at the end of practice. In that case I might go to a straight scrimmage or just a fast-paced last-ball bounce game that’s a little more free-flowing. Or sometimes you can circle back to some “hitting lines” type skill tutor at the end to work on a few things you didn’t have enough time for during the normal flow of practice.

This practice template is how I’d write a competitive-level 16s or 17s juniors club team. For younger or less experienced teams, there’s some things you would alter and/or scale back. I’ll discuss that in some articles as we go.

And here’s that template with the first 12 practices laid out: