Winter 2023 Mailbag: Part 1

Questions from you, answered by me

Every 3 months or so I put together questions that come in via Substack comment, email, or text message and post my responses here. I have a few other mailbag posts that you might want to check out as well. I had so many good questions and comments that I had to split them into 2 parts. Part 1 will be unlocked and Part 2 will be behind the paywall later this week. Enjoy.

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From a reader:

This goes along with the idea that The Other Team Is The Best Teacher. It’s hard to get good at defending what you don’t see in your gym every day. Everybody reading this has probably had the experience where you play a match and the other team is running something offensively you haven’t seen before: maybe it’s a Gap-Go overload, maybe it’s a tall setter who dumps a lot, maybe they have a particular offspeed shot that’s a bit unusual. It’s normal for teams to be caught flat-footed by something they are unfamiliar with.

On the flip side, I also see what this coach is talking about. Whatever your team’s offensive strength is, it’s not uncommon to be good defending that. If you have a lot of great slide hitters in your gym, it’s easier to get good digging the slide.

Try to understand what your team is good at offensively and plan around that to make sure that you can get good at defending what you aren’t as good at offensively. At the collegiate level you try to do this with scouting, maybe having a staff member step in to replicate an offensive pattern your team is less familiar with, etc. There’s no perfect solution, but being aware of it helps.

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Email from a reader who was preparing for their high school state tournament when they sent this in:

Quick story - so we warm up and play server vs sideout team at the beginning of practice. We kinda do aceball but instead it’s hittable ball from a handset to not lose a point. Do it every practice then yesterday I take our audio from losing to [X] in tourney last year. Loud and obnoxious. I play it loud. Man we totally crumble. Every serve is an ace or error. They really had a hard time calming themselves. I am curious to see how we adapt going forward

Pretty cool concept here. After losing in a tough state tournament match in a hostile crowd this coach played the crowd noise at practice. Without revealing too many details, this coach’s team had an extremely successful state tournament this year, so that’s an idea some of you might want to steal.

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Email from a non-coaching dad who is so awesome he subscribes to this Substack to learn more about volleyball.

I have two quick questions for you if you don't. I'm not a volleyball coach and have limited experience, but my daughter has started playing volleyball. Are there resources you would recommend to help her get started with things to do at home? She's about to finish with her school and will start back with one of the local academies soon.

Also, is this the jtrinsey from the old db hammer proboards?

First of all, yep! Same guy. I miss that forum! It's actually interesting to see a lot of those fringe concepts be so much more mainstream. A guy like Ben Patrick "Knees Over Toes Guy" isn't 100% mainstream, but some of that DB Hammer stuff is way more mainstream now. Pretty cool.

In terms of your daughter, probably the best thing she can do at home is the physical piece. Stronger, more robust, more explosive, better range of motion, etc.

I think for kids (and especially girls), throwing activities are great. Have a catch. Make it fun. Throw a baseball, throw a football, throw a jav... hopefully not at each other for that last one. Get out in a grass or sand area and throw a med ball a whole bunch of different ways: shoves, slams, backward scoops, etc. Throw the med ball then jog to get it, or barecrawl, or skip, or make up any way of moving. Keep the heart rate up but keep it aerobic.

Jumping rope is a great low level plyo drill. Ankle complex springiness is lacking for a lot of kids. Dancing can be great low-level plyo stuff. My daughter is only 3, so our physical prep work is obviously highly unstructured, but almost every day I turn on some music and we dance in the mirror. I intentionally make a lot of my dance moves look like low level plyos or stuff you might do in an agility ladder. And she imitates it and hops and jumps around.

In terms of volleyball specifics, I think more kids could benefit from just watching volleyball! Put on the volleyball game like you'd have a football game on around the house. One of the cool things my daughter's been able to do is interact and meet a lot of these players. So when we mess around and play games (not necessarily even volleyball) and she's saying that "I'm going to be so-and-so" player that she knows. I think that's fun for her.

I think of everything that we think of from a coaching end in sports, the technical aspect gets overrated. I think the difference between a player "making it" or not usually doesn't come down to whether they dialed in their passing technique a little more. I think if the mentality (understanding of the broader concepts of teamwork, playing systems etc, as well as individual concepts like hard work, curiosity, toughness) and the physicality are there... the technicality, so to speak, is pretty easy to teach if she can get access to any kind of decent coaching. Which.... if she's physical and a good team player, the good coaches will find her.

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From a Reddit post about whether to play the libero in zone 5 or zone 6:

So would you say that my feeling that I get few touches on 6 is some kind of subconscious bias? Genuinely asking, I know that it is very easy and possible to have a flawed perception like that.

Most likely, but also it could be your defensive system. If you are stepping to your right in zone 6 when the outside attacks and the libero is filling the ball that gets hit toward the crosscourt corner, he's going to actually be in zone 6 to dig that ball even though he started in 5.

Here's a good discussion on the topic that I contributed to:

https://coachesinsider.com/volleyball/meet-in-the-middle/

Also:

https://www.blog.goldmedalsquared.com/post/middle-middle-defense/

Defensive touches including deflections off the block? Do the stats account for difficulty of the touch? Because hypothetically speaking (not saying this is the case), I would rather have the libero in the spot where 5 actual swings are going, rather than the spot where it's just (relatively) easy free balls off the block

I think you'd be surprised at how many balls still get hit hard to 6! This is a pretty common swing:

And especially at sub-elite levels, blockers are not reliable at all.

One thing about heat maps I have seen is that they don't take into account the speed of the attack and whether or not it would have been considered a dig if the attack were actually dug. You can plot digs or attack hits but not kills that would have been digs. You follow me?

So if you had a heat map of hard attacks only, I would be interested in how that looks as the levels progress. I suspect that even tho 6 almost always gets the most balls at every level, 6 would get the most hard attacks at lower levels only and as you progress, 5 and 1 would start to light up.

Idk, maybe a program already does this? Thoughts?

I think it's just a matter of what you can record. You can do (and I have done most of what you are talking about. I generally record both kills and digs when I chart. (I plot "where would a defender have needed to be to best dig that ball")

And I think, broadly speaking, you are in the ballpark there. Zone 6 still gets a lot of balls at high levels, but a lot of the most difficult digs are in 5 and 1. I think people overrate what the block takes away; there's a lot of A-level people out there that think their block is good enough to take away the center of the court, when in reality they aren't anywhere near "high level." (Which is no offense, just reality.)

So it's like, yes, as the level climbs, you start to have this tradeoff between "more balls" and "more difficult balls", but the slope of that curve is not as drastic as people tend to think it is. (Of course, that's a broad generalization; may not apply to everybody.)

I think the hard part is separating "hard attacks" from "really hard attacks," ya know? For example, I made this chart:

https://imgur.com/a/8s7LGI7

When I was coaching in the German league (men's). I made that chart by hand, so I know that it's only containing balls that were "difficult to dig," there's no pure block slowdowns leading to freeballs, etc. However... there's a difference between a ball that guy hits at 96 km/hr because he's going high over the block and a ball that a guy hits at 115 km/hr because he's finding a seam.

It's really hard to differentiate that in an objective criteria, and I hesitate to do some.

To me, it's just understanding the two complementary principles: "put defenders where the most plays happen," and, "put defenders where plays happen the fastest," and then use your judgment about how to handle the trade-offs between the two.

In high school girl's volleyball, I'm pretty comfortable saying, "just put your libero in 6," because the sheer volume that goes into the center of the court is so high, and, at lower levels of play, "there's no such thing as an easy play," applies. As the level climbs, you have to start making trade-offs and thinking more critically about how to deploy defenders.

For example, with the USA WNT, we won a World Championship playing the libero in zone 5 when Jordan Larson was in the backrow and playing the libero in zone 6 when she wasn't. So I think you have to know the principles, and unfortunately, the stats only get you about 80% of the way there. The final piece has to come from judgment and your perception of, "how these players might work together." And the stats will be able to confirm or deny that... but only until after you've already won or lost! Because, especially when it comes to defense, the data piles up slower. So by the time you have enough data to statistically analyze your defensive system, the season is over. Reception, attacking, etc, you get data on more quickly so you can rely more heavily on it.

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That’s it for Part 1. Premium subscribers, check back later in the week for Part 2. Terrible people who haven’t subscribed yet, now’s a good time!