Winter 2024 Mailbag Part 3

Results and importance of fitness training, split steps, and empowering young coaches

I ended up needing a 3rd part for all the mailbag questions this time.

Part 1 of this Winter 2024 mailbag.
And Part 2.

Previous Mailbags
Fall 2024
Summer 2024
Spring 2024
Winter 2023

Okay, here we go!

In a r/volleyball Reddit thread, a coach asks:

Looking for some advice! I am coaching 15s this year and feel like this is going to be a project team. Seems like I will have to teach a LOT of basic fundamentals. We have a lot of defensive players and will have to train some hitters. On top of this, a lot of my players are not the most athletic and don't know how to move! We do jump roping, plyo circuits, and quick feet at the beginning of practice and they really struggle with this. I feel like teaching athleticism is difficult but I really want them to be more comfortable with quick movements. Any drills, advice or tips would be appreciated!

Improving athleticism is a long journey with a slow payoff. It's okay to do a little bit of that sort of stuff, if for nothing else than as a form of physical education that may benefit these kids long-term. But you're not going to see much of a payoff this year from that stuff.

Your biggest bang-for the-buck things are going to be:

1. Organize your serve receive. Train them to have their eyes on their server in a good ready posture. Compress the shallow interior of the court. If your unskilled kids get beat on hard deep serves to the corner, so be it, you're probably shanking those balls anyway.

2. Organize your defense. Get a zone 6 player standing in middle-middle, the most common area where balls go. Keep your wings fairly shallow and get tips and rolls. Again, if they beat you deep to the corners, so be it.

3. Spend time every practice on individual serving technique. Be low-error. Even relatively unskilled 15s teams are capable of building to 90% serve-in.

4. Teach them how to "make the other team play" in ways other than a full-power approach and swing. You definitely want to get full-power jump and swing, when possible. But many times the pass and set won't allow for it. Teach them how to jump and tip into the shallow 6 doughnut. Or even jump and set the ball over there. Teach them to stand on the ground and hit a downball to the deep 1 corner. Or 2-hand push it there (although many kids at this level aren't strong enough to do that). Teach them when giving a freeball to turn to the side and bring it over to the deep corner, or to drop it short into 2/3.

Skill takes time to develop and so does athleticism. You want to do that. But getting your team organized and in a good sense of volleyball IQ will pay much, much bigger dividends than jumping rope or plyo drills. It's nice if you can add them in as extra workouts, but you shouldn't sacrifice time on the court for that.

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In a related question, Dwayne Wibeto asks in the In The Gym page:

Loving this series of in the gym. Curious about if you have measurable improvements from the atomic speed/swing daily workouts after 2 months? And from the non measurable side do they seem to jump higher, move more dynamically and hit harder during live gameplay?

As Tony Holler says, “speed grows like a tree.” (Meaning: slowly) I’ll take his word for it when it comes to sprinting and I think it must be true when it comes to spiking. A player who increased their PR on Self-Toss by 1mph every other month would add 6mph to their velocity in a year. 6mph is a life-changing improvement for a girl’s volleyball player. 44mph is a kill in a high school varsity match. 50mph is a guaranteed scholarship if you’re over 9’6”. And the next 6mph jump to 56mph potentially puts you in the pros.

So yes, there are measurable improvements from Day 1 to now… but there’s also a good chance there’s noise. Every single kid is faster on their sprint times. Every single kid has hit a PR on their spike velocity since November. But, if you just measured somebody 3 days in a row, there would be 1/3 of the kids who would hit their highest mark on day 3. Is that because they were more powerful after just a couple days of training or is it just measurement noise? I try to be conscious of not overstating results and that there’s a lot of noise, especially when training kids.

Probably the bigger thing that I look at is the average velocity over multiple reps or how many they are getting within a ballpark of their max velocity. For example, here was one kid’s velocities in an early November practice:

38 - 41 - 43 - 38 - 37 - 30 - 29 - 31 - 42 - 39 - 41 - 40

and here was her most recent:

42 - 39 - 40 - 41 - 44 - 33 - 41 - 39 - 43 - 41 - 44 - 38

So you go from 5/12 over 40mph to 8/12. And you go from 3 low-velocity misshits (30, 29, 31) to just one (33). That’s a good indication that overall ability to apply power to the ball is improving.

Here’s another player:

X - 33 - 43 - 39 - 34 - 35 - X - 35 - X - 34 - 39 - 46

and last practice:

44 - 41 - 34 - 39 - 41 - 41 - 42 - 44 - 40 - 45 - 41 - 41

Here’s a good example where this player hit a 46mph self-toss back in November that she has matched at a few practices but not exceeded since. So by one measure, her PR has not improved since November. But that early practice had only 2 swings over 40mph and 3 “Xs” which means she either hit in the net (we count velocity if it’s hit long but not if it’s hit in the net) or misshit it so badly that the radar didn’t pick it up. But in the recent practice, 10/12 swings were over 40mph and none were in the net.

That second example is a good reminder that power and skill are not separate. The second player clearly had power in the beginning of the season but was more raw. By practicing applying that power for at least a little bit every practice, she is learning how to be more consistent, which will also lead to improvement over time.

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A college coach asks:

I wanted to get your thoughts on the split step. Do you teach it? Do you encourage it? Have the teams you have or work with adopted it and seen its benefits?

I also wanted to ask you about arm location when serving. Some servers have moved to keep their arms (contact) hand) down instead of what we initially taught, with their elbows up. I just wanted to get your thoughts.

I don't think you need to change anything about the split step. I think if you look at the best passers, you generally see it as a natural athletic reaction when a player needs to move quickly. But sometimes overcoaching this stuff will make a player move clunkier and have stop-and-starts. We actually wrote a big post on it on the GMS site. It's got a lot of video details, etc:

https://goldmedalsquared.com/post/volleyball-split-step/

I like getting the arms a little more relaxed. I think some young players need to start with things a little higher and keep things a little more rigid, just in order to make good contact. But as they get comfortable, I think relaxing the arm, even if it means the hand is down a little is okay. Loose and relaxed is going to lead to a fast, nice rotation. I've changed on this over the past 5 years or so. I used to have players a little more rigid, which I think is okay to initially start making good contact on the ball, but unlocking the power by relaxing the arm seems to help a lot.

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A club coach who attended a GMS clinic asks:

Riding home and chatting with my brand new *young* assistants, I was wondering what your thoughts are on how to encourage and growth them; what advice do you have?

How do I allow a platform for their ideas and growth without squashing their ideas (and excitement) that don't seem to be the best use of our gym time? Our practice slots are only 80 minutes, so if you thought a 2 hour + gym time was precious, then you must get how urgently I feel we must make each minute of 80 as meaningful as possible.

This is a great question. Here’s my thoughts: