We Now Return To Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Plus SmarterVolley Live and Pancakes

Greetings Earthlings! Checking in from Japan where the Canada MNT prepares to play Argentina this evening as the final week of Men’s VNL gets underway. If you’re a free subscriber, this is the first you’ve heard from me since May, because June was Subscriber month, all the articles were behind the paywall.¹ Consider giving me some money supporting the newsletter if you want to check some of those out.

Interested in a Live SmarterVolley Session?

For the past few years I’ve run a variety of camp and clinic settings for players and coaches alike. I do the standard big public Gold Medal Squared clinics where there’s a pretty well-defined curriculum, and I also do some separate sessions focusing on some more specific pieces of the game. Some of these are more fundamental skills-based, some are more systems, etc.

A format that clubs and schools often like is a one-day event with 2 practice sessions (one morning, one afternoon) for the players that is interspersed with 2 or 3 coach sessions- typically a morning presentation, lunch presentation, and Q&A wrap-up at the end.

I’ve been developing an offensive session format based around some concepts that I’ve seen be (a) highly effective and (b) under-taught, especially at the HS level. I have an opening the weekend of July 16/17 open up unexpectedly and wanted to open up interest to the SmarterVolley audience first.

The session is based around teaching a team to go from, “setting and hitting,” to, “running an offense.” So clearly there’s a strong setting component, but one thing I see with players who transition from the high school to NCAA level is that they need to expand beyond just executing their individual skills to understanding how they need to interact with each other’s skills to produce points.

The ideal format here is probably for a club program. I’d take a “team” of 12-18 players (so this could be players from a couple of teams) through two training sessions to teach them these concepts, but even more importantly, as demo training to teach the coaches how to continue the teaching. This is going to skew a bit more advanced, so the target is less “kids who are learning how to take an approach,” and more, “kids who have a decent grasp of fundamentals and need to learn how to score more effectively.” Probably 16s or 17s is ideal although you could swing a bit younger if the kids have some skills.

We’d go something like:

9:00 - 10:30 Coach Session
11:00 - 12:30 Player Practice Session
12:30 - 2:00 Lunch and Coach Session
2:00 - 4:00 Player Practice Session
4:00 - 5:30 Q&A Wrap-Up

If you’re interested, drop me a line.

Pancakes

I was talking with a coaching friend of mine about pancakes. Lately I’ve been emphasizing taking a “No Steps Pancake.” Our (edited to protect the innocent) conversation went something like this:

I’ve been working on this with some of our Canada guys and get a similar reaction. But the funny thing is, most pancakes that are dug are already dug with no steps (or just a backstep), the guys just don’t realize it!

When I was on the WNT staff, I always saw Kayla Banwarth as one of the best models for playing defense in a simple, efficient way.

You can argue there’s a step or even two there, but I call that a “No Steps” or a “Backstep” because there’s no intent to run forward. She’s just reorienting herself from a more standard lateral defensive posture to put a foot back (which provides the push) and then she’s extending out.

Here’s a few in action for Canada in the VNL:

The first move is that 1-2 foot re-orientation. The second is as close to a true “no steps” as you’ll get, he basically just timberrrrrs down from his base. The third one has a slight backstep.

So I’m calling all of these under the concept of “No Steps Pancakes” because I think the idea is all the same:

1. Understand the distance of your No Steps Pancake. If you basically just lay down and stretch out, how far is that?

2. Get in a position that allows you to get a bit inside the 3m line with a No Steps Pancake.

3. Play in a balanced defensive stance that allows you to dig the hard stuff, and if they tip, you just lay down and stick your pancake under.

The mistake that players make here is they actually take too many steps. It’s not uncommon to see players miss pancakes because they either (a) almost overrun the pancake and end up doing an awkward flipper/punch more or (b) they get well within pancake range, but, because they’ve taken too many steps, they don’t get the cake down in time.

I think there’s an idea that a pancake is a bit of a lazy play. Russ Rose commented on that in his latest (highly recommended) CYBO episode. So players feel like they need to “work hard to get the tip,” and then the pancake is the last resort. But that leads to waiting too long to pull the trigger on the pancake and missing it anyway. What good is all that hard work if you don’t control the ball?

The ideal is to read tip and stay on your feet and get it with two arms. But the reality is that it won’t happen all the time unless you’re in a specific tip rotation defense. If you have any kind of dual responsibility, there’s going to be times when you are ready for hit and the defender disguises the tip enough so that you can’t run under it with two arms. In that case, just lay down a clean pancake and pop the ball up.

Thoughts?

1. I also produced less content in June because VNL is such a busy time. So I figured good for premium subscribers to get that value while the overall output was lower.