Youth Volley Clinics
My Youth Volley seminar is available for coaches/organizations who want to book me for Summer 2024.
This is a coaching clinic disguised as a player camp. I’ve been running sessions on coaching young kids and/or beginners for years now. Coaching beginners is how I got my start in coaching and remains one of my favorite parts of volleyball.
In this seminar, I run young players through full practice sessions, as if they were players on my team. I set up and run my favorite practice templates for youth players, which are slightly different than what I favor for high schoolers. This seminar has some overlap with my Running The Template seminar, because the 13-to-15 ages are where things blur a bit. Some U-13 players can be bordering on advanced and can benefit from some of the same concepts that U-16 or U-17 teams benefit from, which some U-15 or high school freshman teams can function more similar to U-12s if they are inexperienced and/or unskilled.
However, even for advanced young players, there are some particular considerations that coaches should keep in mind for the development (and enjoyment) of their teams. And if you’re interested in getting 8-10 year-olds (or even younger) into the sport, there’s definitely some different variables in play, regardless of how athletic they are.
I also outline and teach both players and coaches the 6-3 rotation system, which is, in my opinion, the best to use for “young teams who are ready to move beyond a 6-6.”
Youth volley programs also vary a lot from place to place. There’s a big difference between how to operate a competitive U-13 team where most players have already played 1-2 years of club vs trying to start a 12-and-under in an area where kids almost never play before 7th grade vs adding a U-8 program to an already well-built out club infrastructure. I have modules for each of these and can tailor the amount of time I spend on each to what you, as the host, need to get out of it.
Formats
The Youth Volley seminar requires a demo team for at least part of the time. I can run this seminar as fully (or almost-fully) player-involved, or, if you want to target your coaches, we can do mix between demo team and coach-only sessions. Some example formats:
1-Day Camp
Wave 1 (U-12) → 9:00 - 12:30 (30-minute break halfway)
Lunch + Coaches Q&A → 12:30 - 2:00
Wave 2 (U-14) → 2:00 - 5:30 (30-minute break halfway)
2-Day Camp (repeat schedule both days)
Wave 1 (U-8) → 9:00 - 10:00
Wave 2 (U-10) → 10:30 - 12:00
Wave 3 (U-12) → 1:00 - 3:00
Wave 4 (U-14) → 3:30 - 5:30
1/2 Players, 1/2 Coaches
U-12s → 8:30 - 10:30
U-14s → 11:00 - 1:00
Coaches → 2:00 - 5:00
More than any of my other seminars, the duration and number of session will depend on exactly which part of the youth segment you want to learn and target. A 3.5-hour morning is not appropriate for 8 year-olds just being introduced to the sport. But a 3.5-hour session (with a break) is a great format for a group of 12 year-olds who are looking to play competitive club in the winter. So I’ll flex the format to adapt to your needs.
I may be able to do this in an evening-only format 2-4 nights in a row. Contact me to see if the travel and other logistics work for that.
Cost
My rate is $1200/day + travel. See the Summer 2024 Seminars page for specific examples of how that pencils out.