Integrating a High School Program - Middle School to Senior Year

Integrating a High School Program – Middle School to Senior Year
By Damon Van Leeuwen (Venice, Calif., Windward High School/Sports Shack, Southern California Region)

One of the challenges in running a high school program is ensuring that your feeder programs - the junior varsity and middle school teams - develop the players in a manner that is consistent with the philosophies of the varsity program. As coaches, we want to be able to spend our time as efficiently as possible. At the beginning of the season, we want to spend our time refining and developing skills and building team cohesion. It is obviously better to spend our time reinforcing skills rather than re-teaching skills. One way to ensure that we spend our time efficiently during the season is to spend time at the front-end of the season preparing our staff at the younger levels as well as creating fun and creative ways to build program cohesion. There are many moving parts in a high school program – what can we do to keep these parts all moving in the same direction?

Technical Handbook
A good way to create consistency in the program is to write a technical handbook. Some examples of sections you might want to include are: Guiding Principles, Fundamental Skills, Drills, Player Conduct.

Guiding Principles:
It is very important that all the coaches in your program are aware of and share your guiding principles. What core ideas do you believe should be a part of every team in the program? You may be an advocate of game-like drills. You may believe that players in the program should learn to read the game. You may believe that including a cauldron into the fabric of practice encourages and develops competition. Whatever your core principles are, it is important to communicate them to the other coaches in the program as well as the other players. Some of these may need to be adapted according to the age level. Perhaps you do not need to have every drill scored at the youngest levels. It is perfectly appropriate to adapt the drill to the development level of the players. However, communicating your guiding principles to your players and staff gives them the core knowledge they will need to organize and conduct themselves in training sessions.

Fundamental Skills:
Serving – Passing – Setting – Attacking – Blocking – Defense
How do you want the fundamental skills of the game to be taught? What techniques do you want developed in each of the six fundamentals? And most important, what common language do you want established in your program? We want our players to be able to play – in other words, we do not want their heads crammed with too many cues. They become paralyzed by analysis. So for each skill, develop a set of cues that each coach can use. For example, for passers we might say “Face the ball, angle the platform.” Or for blockers, “Seal the net.” In my experience the range of how different coaches teach the skills is actually narrower than we believe. For the most part there is a right way to play the game and a wrong way. There may be subtle differences in programs and the skill level can often dictate different approaches to the game, but much of the differences we see are not in the skill itself but in the language we use to teach and describe the skill. So, make sure all the coaches try to use the same language and cues. When you get a player on the varsity program who has consistently been trained using the same language, you can spend your time developing the skill and making corrections rather than explaining the skill.

Drills:
In order to keep practices running smoothly, it is nice to be able get into drills quickly. Having a core group of drills that can be modified is a good idea. Naming drills is also a good idea. Instead of explaining the drill each time, the coach can simply call out the name of the drill – players quickly set up the drill and now the coach can spend time giving feedback. Establishing these drills at the younger level saves time, creates an atmosphere in which coaches can give feedback and allows players to feel comfortable and focus on improving their skills.

Player Conduct:
In my experience as a teacher and a coach, players (and students) like to know “the rules.” Be firm, fair and consistent. The rules you choose to adopt to regulate player conduct are not as important as the implementation of the rules. Applying them firmly, fairly and consistently is the key. But the rules need to be communicated to the players and the parents. Laying out a code of conduct is a way to establish a good atmosphere in the program. And consistent rules from seventh grade all the way up to 12th grade will go a long way toward creating this atmosphere where the focus can be on volleyball as much as possible.

Miscellaneous Program Building
Another good idea is to create an atmosphere in which players feel involved in the program from the youngest age all the way up to the seniors. Establishing connections among the players can be accomplished in a number of ways. A few examples:

Secret Buddies - Assign each player a “secret buddy.” Before each game the player prepares a little gift bag for their secret buddy, the bag can simply be favorite snacks or a new issue of a favorite magazine. Try to mix it up so that a junior varsity player is paired with a varsity player. At the end of the season the secret buddies “reveal” themselves. This is a good way to get players to know each other.

Big Sister/Little Sister – Assign a varsity player to be a Big Sister to a middle school player. The 'Big Sister' assists the 'Little Sister' with skill development, cheers for her at games, and most importantly, becomes a friendly face for the younger player to rely on and get to know.

Kickoff Dinner – Organize a dinner or barbeque at the beginning of the year that includes all the players and parents in the program. No need to give a speech or hold a meeting, just gather together and socialize. This is a good way to set the tone at the beginning of the year that every one in the program is valued and important.

The more contact points you can establish in the program, the more the program feels like one continuum rather than a series of individual teams. In the long run, these relationships develop and begin to create the cohesion that all teams and programs need to be successful. As the leader of the program, it is important that the Varsity head coach develops and communicates a clear philosophy to every member of the program – staff, parents and players.