what is vollyball coaching

 After hearing about this, Mark Zebedee did a review of the French passing in recent international competitions. That’s just under the length of the court.  When I interviewed him for Volleyball Coaching Wizards. And at a certain point  trying to take something off the ball.

The bottom line in serve reception is the platform angle. Call that the “move your feet” school of passing.

This is a school with deep roots. Granted, it’s not as pacy as the topspin version. It, and only it, determines where the ball goes. I’m not going to get into an argument here over which is better. It basically goes back to the beginnings of forearm passing (no, people didn’t always pass with their forearms, but don’t ask me when that changed). Consider in that thought the broad jump taking them further into the court on contact. A topic of fairly frequent discussion in coaching conversations is reception technique. The cross-over step only happened after the pass. A lot of us were taught some variation on the idea of getting yourself to the ball – perhaps center line, perhaps pass left. Though in this case he speaks in terms of physics and Issac Newton. They were almost exclusively done from standing, so they had an arc and often had little in the way of velocity. How much time do you think a passer has to move their feet?

At what point do serves move too fast for passers to use that perfect reception technique that we’ve all been taught?

One coach I spoke with joked, “14s.” Obviously, the answer comes down to the quality of the serving.

You can tie in here the idea of using arms vs. It wasn’t quite to the point you see it today – especially in the men’s game – but it was fast enough to force a change in serve reception to generally having a minimum of three passers, which is what you see today.

Then came the jump float serve. Rather, I will ask a similar question as the one above:

At what point are serves hard enough that you don’t need to add anything to them to get the ball to target?

The answer is probably very similar to the answer to the first question. 🙂

When I was at the HP Coaches Clinic in 2015, French coach Laurent  caused a ruckus by suggesting a cross-over step and end passing with bent arms. He found that the main focus was on setting and holding a proper platform angle. So he knows a thing or two about this stuff. The legs  to add impetus to the passed ball. Along with being the original coach for both the men and women at Penn State, Tom is a long-time professor of anesthesiology. In the 1980 they started topspin jump serving. Serves were comparatively weak. In other words, there was time for passers to move – as witnessed by the USA men employing a 2-person serve reception when they won their Olympic gold medals in the 1980s.

Then came the Brazilians. At that tempo the ball goes about 59 feet per second
I have in mind what might broadly be classified as mental toughness. It included a lot of references to videos of activities which would appear to have very little to do with actual volleyball. The leading example was one where a coach was rolling balls and requiring a player to moved to them and roll them back. The author said the following:

“Motor learning science is adamant about Game-Like Reps in practice; better skill acquisition, better transfer and better retention. There was a post which addressed the subject of doing non-game-like drills. I know personally these are things I specifically work on with my teams. I’ve actually seen a variation of this drill run. Further, you can also make the case that much of that type of development is best accomplished on the court.

Instead, I’m talking about mental development. Here’s a question, though.

What if we’re not actually training the game at the moment, though?

Let me clarify. First off, you can make the case that any strength and conditioning work you do should be directly related to the sport you’re playing. Chasing rolling balls across the floor while 10 girls stand and watch doesn’t come up a lot in the game. And I doubt anyone will argue that learning things like reading and decision-making are also best accomplished.

What about things that are not specific to the sport, though?

I’m not talking about physical stuff here. More specifically, it could include things like dealing with adversity, focusing on the next play and letting mistakes go, and those sorts of things. I’ve talked about ways of doing so in my training beyond techniques and tactics post.

If mental training is the primary focus of a specific exercise, can we accept deviations from “the game teaches the game”?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the subject. I had a go at men’s volleyball players at a recent match for some of what they were doing. Motor learning, as noted above, strongly suggests that skills are best developed in a game-like environment. So why?”

Now, I am very much in line with the philosophy of making things as game-like as we possibly can in training. In volleyball, as in anything, there are technical skills and there are game skills.