There Is No Silver Bullet

And you don't want there to be one...

A high school coach who has been to my clinics reached out via email to ask for some advice for her setter. To paraphrase a few of the things this setter said:

I’m good during drills, but struggle in game situations.
I don’t always judge the pass well and get off-balance.
I don’t think it’s my hands, I know I can set the ball well.
I’m know I’m so much better than this.
Then, I get down on myself and play worse.
Being told to “keep practicing” just makes me mad because it isn’t helping.

In this particular situation it’s a setter, but it doesn’t really matter what position we’re talking about, because this could be any player. And forget high school, this could be any player at any level. Some of you coaches who are reading this are nodding along because you’ve heard this stuff before.

I’m good during drills, but struggle in game situations.

So is everybody! That’s why you need to Overtrain Your Technique. Every player, at every level, regresses technically from training to the game. There’s whole fields of study that are concerned with how to better get practice results to turn into improved performance in various domains.

Think about when you learned to tie your shoes. First, you had to think really hard about it and you could do it when a parent guided you through it. Eventually, you got to the point where you could tie your shoes, but imagine what happens to a kid who just learned to tie their shoes and now they are hungry and their parent is in a hurry and rushing them out the door and they want to go get ice cream. That’s when the left shoe ends up on the right foot and the bunny ears aren’t loop-swoop-and-pulling and it’s chaos and tears for everybody.

On the other hand, most adults can be 11 minutes away from a meeting that starts in 10 minutes and jam their feet in their shoes and get them on while hopping down the stairs and make it out to their car in one piece.

That’s kind of like this player’s setting. They “know how to set” but that’s not really how to think of it. They have solutions for certain setting problems, but not all of them.

Here’s a good way to guide a player like this: