Transition Wash
Yesterday we looked at a team profile of First Ball Strength. When planning around the First Ball ability of your team, a main consideration is: how many rallies at practice are going to start with a serve and how many are going to start with another type of entry? If our team is strong in First Ball, we’re going to use fewer entries with a serve and more alternative entries.1 A staple for my teams (and for many other coaches) is Transition Wash. The benefits to Transition Wash are: a fast-pace with lots of transition reps, opportunities to coach transition footwork, and a setup that encourages tough serving under pressure.
What It Looks Like
The basic premise of Transition Wash is simple: you put a team on each side of the net and you (and ideally, another coach) alternate between transition entries to each team for an even number of reps. You can do any number of reps, but 4 is my preferred.
The most common way I do this is to have a coach with a ball cart on each pole. Team 1 sets up to block and defend Coach A, who hits in a ball for them to dig and transition attack. This starts the rally, and then the two teams play it out. Then, Coach A crosses to the other side and enters a ball for Team 2 and the two teams play the rally out. Next, Coach B enters to Team 1 and the two teams play the rally out. Finally, Coach B enters to Team 2 for the 4th rally.
By this point, each team has had an opportunity to dig and transition from both a left and right-side attack. Since 4 rallies have been played, a team that won 3 of them will have won the big point.2 Both teams would typically rotate or swap players or if you have players waiting to come on. But if those 4 rallies are split, we then have a tiebreaker. Pick one team to serve and the other team to receive. Serve and play the rally out and whichever team wins the tiebreaker rally gets the big point.3
Fast-Pace With Lots Of Reps
Coaches always debate how much of their play at practice will be, “normal volleyball,” that starts with a serve and plays to completion, and how much will be something else. The upside to drills that are entered with a serve and played to completion is… that’s how volleyball is played in a game. So you are going to get a very similar mix of reps that you’ll see in competition and in the way that competition rallies will unfold.
The upside to alternative drill formats is increasing the pace. You can get way more serving and passing practice if you do a drill where the ball is just served and passed and not attacked than you will get when you play the full rally out. And a drill where you just pass-set-hit is going to get more attacking reps than a full played-out rally. And a setup like Transition Wash, where the rally is played out, but the ball is entered by a coach will get more reps than a normal sequence where the players go back to serve each time. Normal volleyball plays 2-3 rallies per minute, but you can often get all 4 Transition Wash rallies played in a minute. So you are getting quite a bit more practice like this. For juniors and high school teams who never have enough practice time, this is valuable.
Opportunities To Coach Transition Footwork
The number of reps you get in a skill is one factor in how fast you improve. Another is the quality and type of feedback you get. So as coaches, we want to maximize reps, and we want to do so in a way that allows us to coach those reps effectively. Transition Wash puts the coach directly in front of the hitters who are about to transition. You always want to coach players face-to-face. It’s easier for a player to understand what you’re saying when you look at them and it’s easier for you to check for understanding when you can see a player’s facial expression after your feedback.
Also, just as we want to control the whistle when we work on sideout, we control the transition entry in this drill. Don’t settle for players rushing their block move or doing a weak or cheating transition. Give them a second to reset after each rally and make a good block move. Every now and then hit one into their block. Let that point count, whether they stuff the ball or get tooled. This will make them try to block the ball, which makes the transition more realistic.
Having two coaches in this drill is helpful. While one coach enters the transition ball, the other is watching footwork. If the hitters take incorrect steps, that coach that is watching blows the whistle and gives them a, “stop, do it again.” It’s hard to watch when you input the ball. You can do it, and sometimes you have to, but it’s a little trickier. So having two coaches work together makes this drill work great.
Tough Serves Under Pressure
A 4-ball sequence will end up with lots of 2-2 ties, which also means that you’ll end up with lots of tiebreaker sideouts. Hitting a tough serve under pressure is a valuable skill. Since this serve and sideout now represents the work of the previous 4 rallies, players really want to make it count. (Or at least, you hope they do. If they don’t care, you have bigger problems than drill construction!)
You have a few different ways of choosing who gets to serve. I usually pick the team who just scored and give them the serve. Sometimes I let them rock-paper-scissors and choose serve or receive. This slows things down a bit, but affords some autonomy in your players, which is good. It’s also interesting to see whether your players want to serve or receive. As your team gets to a decent level, you expect sideout % to be over 50%, and it’s good to see if that confidence transfers to your team at practice or if they still want to choose serve.
This is also a drill where it is good to have a “blitz the bro,” modifier for the tiebreaker serve. If your team is good, this puts additional pressure on the serving team, since your libero is probably pretty good. It also encourages trust and pride in your libero. If your team already has a First Ball strength, you love when they have the mentality of, “serve our libero and it’s going to be a point almost every time.”
4v4 Variation
6v6 is a common way to play Transition Wash, but I play a 4v4 variation even more. Put your players in left-front, right-front, left-back, and right-back. So you don’t have a middle blocker or a middle-back defender. I also love playing this variation with zone 6 taped off and, “out of bounds.”4 Now you have to play clean in transition and hit with range. This variation also lends well to getting your players reps in different positions as you can just rotate them though each of the 4 spots. For higher-level teams, it also gets your blockers to have to be dynamic and be good individual blockers. Since the hitter can’t hit to zone 6, blockers can now read and take a chance at either shutting down the line or dropping hard into the crosscourt.
For these teams, this is a good variation to play before your main 6v6 of the day. If you’re a college team with about 16 players on 2 courts, you can play 2 courts of 4v4 (8 players per court) before going to 6v6 on your main court.
I’m talking early season when we’re in the, “fix weaknesses portion.” Late-season, we’re probably focusing more on our strengths.
If a team wins the first 3 rallies, I generally don’t play the 4th. I just immediately berate encourage the team that lost and rotate them for the next point.
You can also enter the tiebreaker ball as a bounce, or any other kind of entry you want to do.
More in a future article, but I also have variations of this with “no Zone 5” and “no Zone 1” with the players arranged in different ways. I like them all!