Winter 2023 Mailbag: Part 2

Questions from you, answered by me

Continuing on from Part 2. Most of this is behind the paywall, so thank you my premium subscribers for helping me keep this thing going. Part 1 here if you haven’t seen it yet:

Winter 2023 Mailbag: Part 1

From a Reddit thread response that people seemed to like:

But sometimes it's hard to understand the game sense or thought process or how blockers process information so fast at a higher level

That's just the nature of it. There's no magic.

Are there tactics and strategies you use to gain edges, especially at the higher level? Sure. But one of the hallmarks of elite athletes is their superior information processing ability. It is built over time. This is especially apparent for blocking, which is context-dependent. When you coach at the professional level, you see that it is rare for a young middle (fresh out of university, etc) to be a better blocker than an attacker. By definition, these middles have spent almost no time reading and reacting to a professional offense, so they are a beat slow.

This is the case in any sport. Look at how fast a tennis forehand goes from one player to the other. It's not that elite tennis players are simply faster in their physical movement (they are), but they are also picking up all these micro-cues that help them sense whether the ball is going one way or the other.

How would you go about practicing this kind of decision making and footwork in the first place

Blocking is eyework, footwork, and handwork. Let's set aside the footwork and the handwork. That's relatively easy. Not that you don't continue to perfect, but the movements themselves are not complicated.

Blocking eyework you are looking for direction, speed, and location. Direction is the first and primary cue.

All setters will "tell" you where they are going. Watch even an elite setter in slow motion and you can see as the ball is released that it is "obviously" going forward, or back, or straight up in the center. The only thing is... you don't get to read in slow motion in the game. But the point is, if you could see the game with slow motion clarity, you could read even the world's best setter. It's just the physical properties of the ball. It cannot redirect in the air.

As soon as the ball leaves contact with the setter's hands and travels 1cm, you, in theory, know the velocity and the vector. You can, from 1cm of motion, plot exactly where the ball is going.

But you cannot. So you you need to watch the ball a touch longer. Maybe you need to see it 5cm, or 10cm, or 2m out of the setter's hands before your brain has processed enough information to predict where the ball will go.

And there's shortcuts. Elite blockers will start to move before the ball is even released, because they have enough clues. When setters set forward they let the ball come forward a touch so they can apply leverage behind the ball. When setters set backward they come under it a touch. Etc. Beginner setters do this more. Elite setters do it less.

So elite blockers might start moving a touch before the ball is released because they already know the direction even though they might not know the exact location just yet. They know the ball is going backward, and on their way toward that hitter, they will pick up whether the ball is going all the way to the antenna or 1m inside or 1.5m inside. And they lengthen their stride or cut it short. (And this is why middle/pipe combinations or gap/outside combinations are so devastating, because the direction of the set is almost the same between the two hitters but the speed and trajectory is just a hair different, which takes longer to process.)

But the unfortunate thing is, there's no shortcut! The only shortcut is adding information to your data processing bank. Your brain is a pattern recognition machine and this stuff does not happen at the conscious level! You cannot force your brain to process faster. That's called guessing and is detrimental.

So we tell blockers it's okay to be late, but it's not okay to be wrong. And over time, their processing speeds up.

What your conscious brain can do is two things. (1) Block out non-relevant information. So make sure your eyes are not bouncing all around the court. Put your gaze in the window where the setters hands will make contact with the ball. And (2) after each blocking rep where you are reading, try to use your internal instant replay. "Okay, let me replay in my mind what the setter looked like as he was going to the ball and how the ball came out of his hands and where it went."

And then practice practice practice. There's no magic.