Wrapping Up Pre-Season

Odds, Ends, and where to go from here

This winter I’m focusing on content for juniors club coaches. In this cycle of articles, I’m walking you through an example pre-season training block, which would go from the beginning of your club season to your first major tournament.

Getting Started
The First 12 Practices
Getting Into It
Practice #3
Another Week Of Practices
The Halfway Point
7 ate 9

Most teams reading this are finished or about to finish their first major tournament of the year.

Also: if you’re playing this weekend, you might enjoy this article:

Here are the last 3 practice templates of the training block:

Practice 10
10’ - Self-Toss Spiking
- Rotation emphasis (land and look at your feet)

10’ - 4-Ball Passing
- Goldilocks arms (straight/bend)
10’ - Doubles
- Narrow-court, full-length, with antennas
25’ - 2-Way Hitting
- Pass-to-Attack Footwork emphasis for outsides
20’ - 1-Way Sideout
- 2nd Ball bowl to outside attack to pass-to-attack
45’ - 6v6
- 4 rounds of 21-22 FBK.
- Use extra time for Last Ball Bounce 6v6 (fast-paced)

Practice 11
10’ - Self-Toss Spiking
- Attack depth change (hit one deep, roll to the pot)
10’ - 4-Ball Passing
- Inside/outside angles
10’ - Doubles
- Narrow-court, full-length, with antennas
25’ - 2-Way Hitting
- Shuffle footwork emphasis
20’ - 1-Way Sideout
- 2nd Ball bowl to outside attack to pass-to-attack
45’ - 6v6
- 4 rounds of 21-22 FBK.
- Use extra time for Last Ball Bounce 6v6 (fast-paced)

Practice 12
10’ - Doubles (Left-hand Jamball)
10’ - Dig-Set
20’ - 2-Way Hitting (Transition emphasis)
15’ - Transition 4s
20’ - BSBH
- Medium pass reading left or right
45’ - 6v6
- 4 rounds of 21-22 FBK.
- Use extra time for Last Ball Bounce 6v6 (fast-paced)

I appreciate all the feedback I’ve had on this series; it’s been arguably the most popular series of articles I’ve ever written for SmarterVolley. Which is good, because (due to pro season obligations), I wasn’t able to do my usual intensive analysis of the NCAA Women’s Championships. Those have previously been the most popular articles on SmarterVolley, but in previous years they’ve probably taken ~50 hours to write all-in.

Coming up on the docket will be an article on reviewing your training block, how to plan the next one, as well as a mailbag compiling all the great questions I’ve gotten.

For now, a few odds and ends that fit better here than a mailbag.

Technical v Outcome Cueing

I’ve said a few times here that I like to vary between Technical cues and Outcome cues.

By Technical Cue, I mean a cue with the goal to change how the player moves, without necessarily scripting where the ball will go or do.

By Outcome Cue, I mean a cue with the goal to change where the ball goes or does, without necesarily scripting how the player moves.

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing how to build good cues. If you’re new to SmarterVolley, the 99 External Cues series is required reading for you.

But an additional distinction is whether the goal of the cue is changing a movement or changing an outcome. I guess, at the end of the day, the goal is ALWAYS changing an outcome, but the question is whether we’re going to encourage the athlete to completely self-organize the movement solution or whether we’re going to script the movement solution a bit more.

For example, let’s look at a couple of the cueing suggestions from the recent practice template.

In Practice 10, the cue is to “land and look at your feet.”¹ As the wonderful little gif of Plotnytskyi shows, powerful spikers rotate through the ball and often land with their feet 90 degrees from the line of attack. This is especially apparent when you watch jump serving video because the line of attack is much more linear than front row attacking when you’re dealing with a set and block. (Rotation still occurs in those instances, but it can be harder to see)

In Practice 11, the cue is to alternate hitting a ball deep and then rolling the next one to the pot.

What this means is that, in Practice 10, the player is successful if they change how they are landing when they attack. We’re not too worried about the outcome of the ball. We’re just asking them to land in a certain way. You do that, you get a high-five from the coach. And then hopefully, all their brain is asking their body to do is land in a certain way. If they do that, they give themselves a little mental high-five.

AND YES OF COURSE… we have good reason to suspect this will increase hitting power, which is the ultimate goal. So there is an outcome. But players sometimes get stuck. When I first learned Motor Learning from Carl McGown, the terminology was Motor Pattern. This athlete has a good motor pattern. This athlete has a janky motor pattern. When a motor pattern isn’t working, we need to give them a new motor pattern. Now the language of Bosch and others is Attractor Valley.

Whatever way you think about it, the idea, as I conceptualize it, is this:

Athletes generally learn well by “just playing” and, via trial and error, will generally self-organize into better solutions over time. If they want to hit harder, their bodies will find the best short-term solutions to hit harder. But, in self-organizing into short-term optimal solutions, they sometimes create road blocks and barriers for themselves. In these cases, a coaching intervention is needed to “create a new motor pattern” or “get into a new attractor valley” or whatever you want to call it. Let’s just call them solutions.

So for example, a very common solution athletes use is just square up to where they are hitting and basically “swing from the arm” to hit the ball. The more they use this solution, the stronger the muscles get in that solution. Eventually, they can hit a point where changing that solution might not immediately get a better result. They might not actually hit any harder with a “swing from the body” rotational solution. Or, they might hit a little harder, but they might make more errors. Or, their body just might not be attuned well to whether they are hitting it harder or not. Etc.

Because of that, we’re going to need to destabilize their current solution.

Whew, it’s been a long way to get here, but now we’re back to Technical v Outcome cueing.

Technical Cueing destabilizes their solution by giving them less of an outcome to worry about. Hey, I’m not too worried about where the ball goes, let’s just see if you can rotate through and land perpendicular to the net. Oh, would you look at that, you’re starting to hit some of these balls harder. Cool, keep it up.

Outcome Cueing destabilizes their solution by giving them goals that force changing solutions. You simply cannot hit the ball deep in the exact same way that you roll a ball to the pot. For players that tend to roll over the ball a little too much, their body might get an inherent feeling of trying to drive through the ball more to hit it deeper. For players that lack touch on the ball, rolling to the pot will be a challenge and they’ll start doing some different stuff in order to complete that task.

Technical Cueing is probably less powerful, but you’ll get a more predictable response. Outcome Cueing is probably more powerful, but your players may try to accomplish the goal in less predictable ways.

Because of this, I don’t have too many technical cues. I try to stick to the ones that I’m pretty sure will elicit a positive change. For example, I don’t talk a ton about feet when passing (I do talk about it a little, just not a lot), because both good passers and bad passers move their feet a ton. I don’t see footwork being the differentiation between good passers and bad passers. But I do see a disproportionate number of good passers who shape their angles well when compared to bad passers. So I cue how to create and manipulate platform angles.

Team v Individual Cues

In a perfect world, everybody would have their own personalized, idealized cues and drill structure. In reality, this is difficult, even at the NCAA or professional level. The more resources you have, the more you can personalize things. At the juniors level, I really like to script out “team cues” for each/most drill and then, if necessary, modify for a player or two that need to focus on something else.

I also like to plan these team cues out quite a bit in advance. The reality is that once you get into a training block, you’re likely to get influenced by the last training session or by the one or two players that you’re trying to get over a particular habit. And then 4 weeks of practice can go by and you realized your players didn’t get any work on X piece of the game.

Rather than default to what you did last week, default to your plan, and then you can always have a player repeat last week’s keys if they need more work on it.

Going Forward

Up next, we’ll talk about conducting post-tournament review and how to plan your next training block.

If you’ve used these practice templates, or any of the ideas from this article series, drop me a comment and let me know how they worked and how your team did this weekend!

1. I’m not too worried about the “internal” aspect of that cue referencing a body part, because it’s after the action occurred.