The Midseason Review

Because just shrugging your shoulders would seem unprofessional

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 8pm Eastern. 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 well into the girl’s and women’s fall seasons here in the USA. Non-conference schedules are over and we’re into the heart of conference play. As we transition from pre-season to mid-season and starting looking forward to post-season, the idea of a Midseason Review is helpful for a lot of teams.

What Is A Midseason Review?

A Midseason review is a review… of the first half of your season. Okay, cool, but really, what is it?

You know all the stuff you’re going to do after the season is over? Analyze your stats, look at the critical matches, review what went well and what didn’t. We’re going to do as much of that is possible, but just not wait until the season is already over to do it. Hence: Midseason Review.

When To Do A Midseason Review?

Many conferences nowadays play unbalanced schedules, but many still have the traditional format where you play everybody twice. In these cases, I always liked to have that midseason review after you’ve played everybody one time. When I coached at LMU, this would typically happen toward the end of October. For High School coaches, this will likely happen earlier.

You also may need to look at your schedule to see if you have any short breaks. Do you typically play twice per week and have a week where you only play once? That can be a good time. Do you typically play Thursday/Saturday, but you have a week where you play Friday/Saturday? That extra compression at the back end gives you an extra day to work with at the front end.

What Should A Midseason Review Contain?

Here’s what I consider the 5 most important pieces of a Midseason Review

1. Overall Triangle analysis.

2. Overall Sideout and Opponent Sideout analysis.

3. Won Sets and Lost Sets analysis.

4. Staff Feedback

5. Player Feedback

Let’s take these items 1 at a time:

Overall Triangle Analysis

If I haven’t beaten this horse to death enough this year, I like the Triangle method of analysis. You can (and hopefully are) using the Triangle to analyze individual matches. You can also use the Triangle as part of a multi-match analysis.

When you run Triangle numbers for an individual match, you’re going to look more at raw numbers:

Yep, you better believe I’m only posting the Triangle from the World Championship match that we won.

But when you run Triangle for the full-season, you want to do one of two things:

1. Analyze each aspect on a % basis.

2. Analyze each aspect on a per-set basis.

I used to do %, but I’ve been leaning toward per-set now. To me, this uses more human-scale numbers as your per-set numbers are going to be somewhere between -4 and 4 most of the time.

You may feel differently, but I always love when I can frame things in terms of, okay we’re 2 points behind in this area and 1 point ahead in each of these other areas… which one do we want to focus more on? It just seems maximally-relevant to me. YMMV.

Sideout And Opponent Sideout Analysis