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Watching some 80-year-old volleyball players at the U.S. Open and seeing their joy for the sport has me wondering why any kid in the last few decades stops playing. Kids I teach keep playing the game after high school and college; but I keep seeing the dropout rate for kids playing after high school and college. I hear of “burnout” – but I learned by playing and never burned out. We played doubles until they kicked us out of the gym, or on the grass/sand for hours. In the end, losers bought the winners Slurpees and together we got painful cold headaches at the same moment. Nobody made me go to learn, I wanted to. I see this in young players, those under 13 with the love of playing and doing things for and with teammates. Then, for too many, this love of learning and the game is gone. It is beaten down by drill after drill, technical demands, coaches demeaning players and parents consumed with the outcome rather than the process of learning to be a player.

Technique is important, but not at the expense of kids not wanting to play our game. It’s not about being a perfect volleyball machine, it is about getting better at the game with the core techniques that are understood to be the goal. Show them and let them do it. Check for understanding, then guide their discovery AS THEY PLAY,  as they WANT to get better. They are going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time A LOT when young. This is why we play doubles on smaller courts; so the reading demands are limited and expanded as they learn to read better. If they can show you they can demonstrate the core technique WITHOUT the ball, they KNOW the technique. They just need to learn when and where to do it in an imperfect game.

One coaching friend shared this video with me recently about basketball “training;" where the kids reminded me of robots. I know many coaches and parents  can relate to the feeling of how “right” these drills seem to be. Indeed, another coaching colleague shared this discussion with a parent in his club that I found of value for other parents.

This weekend, I saw a parent watching a match on the court next to us. As our match ended and the girls had a break, I wandered over to see what he was watching. As we chatted he said, "I love how disciplined both teams are. I'm not complaining. I know you have your way and your theory on how to teach volleyball. But look at those teams – the way they warm up, listen to their coach and play. It is like watching a choreographed dance. Everything is controlled, directed and just seems 'right'." I watched for a moment and then started pointing out some things. That girl was just subbed out because she missed two spikes in a row. That libero was replaced because she missed a serve receive. Why is the only thing the coach ever says to them pointing out their mistakes? Then I asked him one question,"They look great, but do they know how to play? Or do they only know what their coach tells them to do, when, where and how he tells them to do it?" The next day, we beat one of those teams in the quarterfinals. And the other one in the semis. Both were shocked to have lost to this “ugly” little low-cost team from the boondocks. 

Consider this Phil Jackson quote:“If the players were going to learn the offense, they would have to have the confidence to make decisions on their own. That would never happen if they were constantly searching for direction from me. I wanted them to disconnect themselves from me, so they could connect with their teammates – and the game.”

Recently, U.S. Women's National Team Head Coach Karch Kiraly noted that the U.S. women play out of system 48 percent of the time. My 13s play out of system even more. The serve reception, no matter how perfectly done technically, does not fly to the intended in-system target often as human reaction time does not allow for final adjustment in the last .2 seconds of incoming ball flight. With less experienced athletes of ANY age, if you don’t know where to go before the ball crosses the net, your serve reception success will be low as you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can machine them by giving the ball right to the players in training, and they will robotically look good in practice. This same thing I see happen when we pepper, and failing to hit at your partner you say, “Sorry!” Then when the realities of the game happen, and no ball is directed AT you, you struggle to perform the skill, and “technically” have a two choices 1. Look good technically and miss the ball 2. Contact the ball some way even though your technique is “flawed.” 

I want players, not robots, who can read and get to the best possible place at the right time time to deliver the right next ball flight, even if technically they are out of form. When the ball does something in that last .2 seconds of flight, you get even five-time Olympians like my friend Natalie Cook receiving like this picture and get to simply say, “Way to keep your eye on the ball Nat.” and move on to reading the next serve. There is nothing more to say to her for, as you can see in the picture, her technique is flawless, showing a platform any coach or player would be joyful to see in competition.

Having watched the Premier Volleyball League at the U.S. Open recently, I would estimate half the time these talented men and women made contact with the ball in ways that simply is not learned in the traditional techniques drilled into the players. Playing balls out of the net or tipped over you as you land from a block, chasing down errant digs and serve receptions to deliver a perfect “set” with a one-arm swing, keeping the ball in play with their non-dominate hand and countless other saves and split-second adjustments – all forms of “bettering the ball,” which great team players do for each contact.

This skill is not learned in a drill. I find it remarkable that the Amish play volleyball and learn to play it simply by playing. They have no coaches throwing/hitting/tossing balls for them. They just play, anchoring the net/standards to buggies on each side. I wish I had a penny for every ball moving over the court from just two places - the robotic coaching spots of middle-deep-left-back-toss-to-the-setter and the left-front-off-the-court-hit-at-the-defenders, as I would be a millionaire. Ball after ball thrown on the same arc to the setter from the same spot. You could calibrate the GPS satellites of the world by how the balls come from the same spot on the court for decades, even though the ball cart has wheels. 

Coaches who train robots want us to ignore specificity of learning. We don’t play a game where there needs to be a “perfect golf swing.” We  play a game where we need to pass off our arms, set off our fingers, block with our arms and hands, serve off our palm and dig with our whole body. How important is “technique” over learning by playing? Well watch these teams battle covering the whole court and tell me about their “volleyball technique.” When I show this to coaches who demand technique over playing/reading skills, they usually are speechless. We play a game where we don’t EVER get to hold onto the ball, except to start our toss to ourselves for serving, which is the only closed-motor program we do amidst an infinite number of random open-motor programs. So as important as the core techniques are, it is more important to keep the ball off the floor.

Yes, there are programs who tell us the best way to start in volleyball is with drills. Station after station of doing pieces of a skill and “learning.” Tens of thousands of wall and partner straight-line drills. Sit in a chair. run around it and then pair pass a thrown ball. Stand on a box and spike, even using a double arm lift. Blocking on a net that is lowered, even though the child will not be able to block for years to come. These athletes, of any age, are not learning the game, they are learning the drills. The leaders training them are happy as the athletes look good in practice, yet are befuddled when their athletes cannot play the game. It is my experience that some programs win despite their drilling/robotic training for three reasons: 1. Their recruiting; 2. The sheer amount of training hours in the gym and 3. The tournaments where the players finally get to compete; where the game is played, and cannot be drilled; where the players can finally merge the technical demands into the game’s realities. We want players to have more and more options and solutions, while keeping things as simple as possible so we reduce the impact of variability.

Motor learning as done by the men’s side since before the 1984 Olympic gold medal is now being fully applied to the women’s game. Not just back-row attacks and jump serves, but training ugly. That is what Karch says about their training in the National Team gym. I think this increase in training is scaring some coaches who simply want to be in control and feel that perfectionism is a good thing. Brene Brown in the excellent book Daring Greatly notes wisely that “perfectionism is a hustle,” which is also selfish – something that goes against the special uniqueness of volleyball as a truly team game

Why do so many kids come out of the little state of Hawaii? Why do those kids keep playing after college? Why do they have thousands come watch them play? I address this in Ohana, as it is part of the reason but it is because they are instilled with a love of the game – one that will get them to keep loving it even when they might cross paths with a controlling coach. 

In the end, it is not what you know as a coach, but what your athlete thinks. Your job in not making robots. It is to guide their discovery of when and where to jump, and why. Do not tell the player, but get each athlete to better coach their unique self and understand what that feels like.  In motor learning, an athlete/coach four-square game of learning looks like this:

Yes/Yes Yes/No
No/Yes No/No

The goal is YES/YES (Player did it right/coach saw that the player did it right). It is also OK to have NO/NO happen (Player felt it was done wrong/coach sees same wrong technique or option). The vast majority of coaches struggle with the Y/N and N/Y, where what YOU see, the player simply does not know kinesthetically. Bring out the BAM video delay options on computers and tablet apps, as the player hits live sets in grills or games. You can just look at the player from off the court and if their ‘thumbs up/down” matches yours, you smile and keep playing. When a Y/N or N/Y thumb response is seen, bring the player over to the replay option you have set up and guide their discovery together on what you know and the player does not.

I found a table in the first chapter of Cheryl Coker’s book Motor Learning & Control for Practitioners about Gentile’s multidimensional classification systems where a volleyball skill was compared to 15 other options in the motor program grid. It showed that you can make robots in other, simpler motor tasks. Volleyball, however, is the most complex, where body transport/object manipulation and moving/variability are at the highest challenge of a human’s motor skill activity. This goes not just for serve receive (shown), but for ALL volleyball skills but one – the closed motor program of serving. I might want my player to be more of a robot in serving, as a model of consistency with only subtle variations. But for every other skill, I need a player who can play the infinite time and place variations that will happen in our sport. 

What fun it is to experience all this chaos and random variations in just one game, the lifetime sport we call volleyball. 

…And start working much more on improving what you can control as a coach to increase your players learning of volleyball skills.   There, I said it.  The previous “STOP” blog, STOP Doing  Drills, brought out the disgruntled and doubters like moths to a flame, even more than those who I failed at teaching/getting learning to happen through other STOP blogs – like my STOP Teaching Passing blog from three years ago.

When technique is taught in not only blocked drills, but progressions, we lessen the time a player has to learn the realities of the game and develop their techniques in those essential realities. It is not that I think technique does not matter; it does as it is a founding part of volleyball skills. What too many coaches do is spend too much time making the technique “work” in a blocked drill, and not create more time that very technique performed in the random nature of game play.

At the Olympic Training Center Conference several years ago with Dr. Richard Schmidt, author of the best “Drill” book around – Motor Learning and Performance, Principles to Practice, was asked how many trials a player in any sport should do, in a blocked fashion, before going into the gamelike realities of play. His answer was that it should be as many trials as it would take for the player to show a “very gross understanding” of the technique – and that would likely be 6-10 trials. What we see instead is thousands, even tens of thousands of repetitions in static, part and blocked training.  I offer again to email any reader, free of charge of course, Drs. McGown and Bain’s paper – “The Superiority of Whole Training.”  There those seeking first to understand, then to be understood can find about seventy reference papers to guide that understanding.

Coaches set limits on their players. Sadly, coaches also set limits on other coaches. This most recent trip to Dubai, UAE, allowed me to both give feedback to coaches and players, but to also -for the first time they said- get the coaches to share their secrets with each other.  I did it both in practical sessions, where the coaches taught, and in theory classes, including a 90 minute spirited discussion on things learned at their last international clinic. When I shared the new National Thailand Schools VB highlight film that I produced with Sport Development staff (thanks again Cassie Weaver and Leslee Harms), they could not believe the boys and girls playing were 11 and under.  (CLICK HERE to see this great video) I am proud of the work we did to bring and edit this film to bring this level of play to the awareness of the volleyball family. In just a month, the FIVB YouTube version has seen nearly 100,000 views! You watch this highlight film and you see players doing multiple one handed/arm saves (a skill founded in the technique of two arm forearm/overhead passing), giving free balls back in extra high ball flights  (a skill, delivering at a more challenging place and time), you cannot help but marvel at these young players VB IQ. 

This game is unique. What if we added fouls to it? What if we said the libero can go to the other side and distract any player – can’t touch them or the ball, but distract away - keeping it non-contact still. What if we made other sports rotate after scoring, or shoot/pass after three contacts, or jump as high as they could before batting or throwing a ball. The list is long, and I share it with you to share with your players and parents here. Staying with humor – the technique of flying vs the skill – birds fly instinctively, they know the technique. What they spend a lifetime doing is developing skill.

I enjoy the open discussions over in “Old School Volleyball” on Facebook, where they speak about the game “back then.” The thing is, for nearly 50 years, the beach game grew, and talent blossomed in technique and skill. So as a player worked his/her way up from novice through the Bs’ to the highest level of AAA ratings, based solely on competition – just how many beach coaches were there?  None, for the skill was acquired by playing higher level opponents in game play.  Bubba Watson gets it. Now we have new technology, to use great SELF-teaching programs like BAM Video Delay on the iPad to give a player the power of self-feedback. Or get your partner to trade videoing using $5 apps like Coaches Eye, Ubersense, and Dartfish Express.  Coaches are important, but their real role is to empower the player, not to control.

A discussion about technique over reading has been exchanged between national team staff. Asked if they would want a player with great technique, and not so good reading skills, or great reading skills and not so good at technique, and 100% of the coaches opted for a player better skilled at reading. When you watch the great series of X digs in X min – like this one of 133 digs in 3 minutes - you see the importance of doing whatever it takes to save the ball, regardless of the “technique violations” a technical coach might find happening.

Tradition is hard to change  There is a great quote by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - “The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it”  This quote and another that shouted out to me about skill over technique “I have never seen a player tackled by a cone” came from a great football (soccer) blog  that I would ask you to read in full -  I concur 100% whether in a contact sport like soccer or lacrosse, or a non-contact game like tennis or volleyball. I have never seen a hitter blocked by empty space. When I coached lacrosse, we always had a defender hassling the ball carrier – not a cone. When we block, if 97% of the time you will be facing at least a single blocker – you develop your skill at reading the block and hitting past it, not by focusing on technique but by choosing one of many options to hit past or off the block – a skill, not a “technique.”

Please take time to understand these words from this same blog -“When we test a players skill level under conditions that do not reflect the performance environment, the player will alter his behaviour and base his response on the test environment.”  And this observation too -  In his book “Se På Spelet” (See the Game) - Andreas Alm identifies a problem with much of today’s technique and passing drills children as young as 6 years of age are exposed to. It develops ball watchers.  “We are ball watchers, because we have been fostered this way”  The more traditional technique and passing drills rarely encourage use of the ball using perceptual information thus “fostering a generation of players that through thousands of hours of repetition learn to madly and intensely stare at the ball.”-  This need to develop players experience is also covered in this article. 

I have spent almost 20 years in the Paralympic and Wounded Warrior world of sitting and standing volleyball.  These heroes remind me how lucky I am to make an impact in the lives of these amazing athletes and their coaches. While in Dubai doing a zonal symposium on “Modern Trends in Coaching Youth,” I introduced the coaches to Kendra Lancaster, 3x Paralympic medalist, as she drove 2 hours after work from her home to share her ideas and experiences with them (and have dinner with me after, my treat of course). Helping Mike Hulett and Denise VandeWalle coach those young women in 2004 from a 0-24 European trip in May to a Paralympic bronze medal and multiple victories over those same European teams in August at the Athens Paralympics, will be one of my favorite years in a lifetime of coaching.

Watching my son do the same with the Special Ops team in less than a month, also to a bronze medal, is icing on the cake. More importantly, he got to learn from true heroes like Silver Star medal honored soldier Michael Day, who took 27 shots and survived.  These brave men make it easy to strive to be your best. You simply think of what our wounded warriors and those who gave all have done for us, and work harder to teach coaches to be better.

As this is about stopping teaching technique as much, I will share some thoughts regarding a technique that many demand, to the point of stating that players who are doing it “wrong” are doing so due to poor coaching.  I have been watching hundreds of hours of play, and looking through tens of thousands of motor drive photo sequences that I have personally taken, of NCAA, Junior, High School and international women’s and men’s volleyball – and from what I can see, well over 50 percent of the players are landing on one leg after spiking, and after blocking almost as much.  Yet there are coaches who are adamant that players must always land on BOTH legs in either skill set.

I completely understand that athletes with more strength, power and endurance are likely more capable of withstanding competition and training loads than others. From a technique focus, mechanically it is clear that landing force can be twice as high per leg/muscle for a player landing on one leg vs. two. Teaching the technique of landing on two legs is understood, but it is reality based?  In dialogue with Peter Vint, our USOC Director of Competitive Analysis, Research and Innovation, and some national team staff about one vs two leg landing, the question was posed if it was training poor technique or reality. Peter noted that that the game is not planar. Ever. Then he went on to say:

“That doesn't mean I support training "poor technique" but rather training in a way that not only recognizes but emphasizes the dynamic, multi-dimensional nature of the game. It is highly variable and often random. While planar training (and I'm not suggesting this is what's exclusively happening) will almost certainly provide some fundamental improvement in neuromuscular capacity, the expression of these forces will not be fully realized in multi-planar movements.

My point about addressing proper approach/takeoff mechanics has as much to do with perceptual skill as it does technical skill (and the physical capacity to execute them). Athletes that may consistently mistime their approach, leave early, and have to jump back out and cartwheel away from the center of the court are inevitably putting themselves in more precarious landing positions than athletes that can properly time the approach and align their approach trajectory to intercept the ball in a way that allows them to land on two legs more often than not.

We'd like to think the former will be injured more often and/or more severely…I've only rarely seen examples of "controlled" training that remotely addresses the velocity specific characteristics of multi-dimensional landing or even jumping. One of the best lessons I've learned as a biomechanist is "in order to jump higher, practice jumping higher". I feel there is a parallel here to what Kessel and Karch speak about in terms of "the game teaches the game". This is in no way to diminish the value of having greater neuromuscular capacity. Rather, it's to emphasize the reality of the way the game is played....variable, dynamic, often random.”

In a related way, there is another technique promoted that does not address the reality of our sport. For the purposes of this section, by right, I mean the player’s dominate side in skill performance.  If you taught only right legged dribbling and shooting in soccer, or right handed dribbling and shooting in basketball, any coach in those sports would believe you are not doing a proper job in coaching athletes of any age. Yet in volleyball, almost every coach teaches only to the right hand. Over 75 percent of volleyball athletes injure their non-dominate knee side, based on insurance injury reports. Given what the antenna does to outside hitter demands, our national team says that balls set past the antenna are zero percent success balls – to ensure that balls are set by all players inside the antenna. As teachers of this random game, we need to increase every player’s abilities to use the non-dominant hand.

Another observation on skill over technique comes from serving. Rather than let players develop a great, powerful serve to put into the court- coaches tell their players where to serve.  This is inconsistent for me with my coaching philosophy of developing amazing leaders, so I don’t do it, but when a golfing coach sent me his thoughts on creating a putting circus and getting his players to deal with the chaos in his sport, I replied as seen below with more science – which is about developing a servers/golfers skill, not their already known technique. 

When I read your post I just flashed back to what Dr. Richard Schmidt said in his book on motor learning....in 1991 no less... page 204-205, after a picture of a golfer hitting a bucket of balls that has the caption "A common form of blocked practice, producing good performance at the time but not very effective for long-term learning" - he then writes "Repetition is deeply rooted in many traditional training methods, like the basketball coach who has her players shoot 100 free throws at the end of practice or the tennis coach who has his students do serve after serve from the same position on the baseline. Hitting a bucket of balls at the driving range with the same club over and over is another example.....My golfing friends tell me they 'can do anything' at the driving range, implying that they have risen to some new level of skill. When they return to the golf course to test their skills, though, their games are no longer better than before the driving range practice. Why?" - The answer is that blocked training is inferior in retention, and also it gives a false sense of skill/accomplishment.  In the criterion version of the skill section he then writes how the context for what you are ultimately practicing is very different from the blocked practice done in practice. One of his examples is, and again I quote "On the golf course (the criterion context), one never hits two golf shots in a row with the same club (unless the ball goes into the lake on the first one) and most shots are preceded by a long walk (or a search for the ball, in my case). In golf, the problem is to decide which club to use, how large a swing to take, how to adjust the stance on the sloping ground, and so on, requiring the solution of an almost novel movement problem, not just a minor variation of what was done a few seconds earlier as in blocked practice. Furthermore, the golfer only gets one chance to make this shot, with no possibility of modifying it on the next trial. Blocked practice at the driving range does not simulate the criterion skill very well."  I played 52 holes a day growing up sometimes with a HS golf teammate you might know - Corey Pavin.  Like Bubba Watson, and like I learned to ride a bike - I learned by letting the game teach the game. How can Bubba win two of the last three Masters, without ever having lessons or a coach?  Yes, teaching/mentors are important, but mostly in how good they are at guiding an athlete's discovery, not in telling them what to do.

Trevor Ragan is working hard to bring the science of motor learning  to another very traditional sport – basketball – if you are still reading this deep into this blog, you will find his newest newsletter – Training Ugly, a valuable read I believe, as in the interest of being a better coach, he  just recently spent several days with Karch and our US Women’s team, players and staff, in Anaheim. Jump on over to his blog NOW. 

One final comment on developing volleyball skill founded on technique.  Age group competition has grown exponentially over the years.  What used to be double age groups, 18, 16, 14 and under, now is single age groups as in 18,17,16 etc. What has vanished for the most part is where kids play against or with adults.  What helped develop both Karch Kiraly’s skills and those of Misty May, was the chance to play doubles with their fathers, and against adult teams.  I urge all coaches to get give their players a chance to develop their volleyball IQ by playing doubles every summer against adults on grass or sand. Sure, the kids should play some junior tourneys. They just need to compete and learn from adults – even if it means they lose on the scoreboard.  Remind them about sunscreen, then let THEM learn intrinsically....

Let THEM pick their partner

Let THEM pick the side they want to play on

Let THEM pick when to call time outs

Let THEM learn from more experienced, savvy, older players

Let THEM pick their uniform

Let THEM pick their music

Let THEM pick the ball they want to play with

Let THEM call their own blocking/defensive systems

Let THEM determine their own “playset” options/offensive decisions

Let ATHLETES be ATHLETES…and support them as humans who spend part of the life enjoying being a player.

Thanks for giving back to our sport by coaching, and since you are reading this blog to the end, for being a lifelong learner.  Feel free to share your thoughts and comments – and thanks for your help in growing the game together.

Okay, this version of my STOP series is likely to be a tough one for many coaches, but its truth is well founded in science, just not implemented well in our teaching practices.  I just watched perhaps my 2,000th “drill” on YouTube, as I seek to find any new ideas that others have created to help us grow and develop our sport.  On the Kudda website, I saw drills getting viewed nearly 100,000 times which were so….so….hmmm…well my mom said if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, so I will leave it at that. I could only shake my head in disbelief and disappointment. Too many coaches simply do not know the science of motor skill learning.

Want to get a good turnout at a clinic or online? – Title your session along the lines of “I promise you will have 50 more drills after you hear me talk to you.” Never mind the fact that our three-time Olympic coach Doug Beal, when asked how many “drills” he did in training, responded with “maybe a dozen.”  Before the advent of the Internet, there were drill books, which went in their titles from 100 drills to 300, then 400 drills. Now  you “google” in the video section the term “Volleyball Drills” and you get about 3,000,000 choices.

I watched coaches telling the viewers that “heading” set balls over the net, “shouldering” them and playing “bloody knuckles” were drills that were teaching the players gamelike timing, judgment and whatnot…coaches who actually said the term “gamelike” for a drill that had players standing with their backs to the net on one side, while teammates kicked balls from the other endline along the floor, with the blockers being told to shuffle into the way of the rolling ball – all to teach “blocking positioning.”  These teachers choose to ignore the principles of specificity and opt to create even more methods.

One of the key reasons for this blog’s title is simply to ask every teacher and coach reading, to stop creating drills, and start creating learning opportunities.  There are vast amounts of energies being spent by players to learn the vast intricacies of so many non-gamelike drills; it could probably power our entire nation’s energy system for a good day or two. The game is chaotic enough just by playing it small sided to full 6 v 6 games (or 9 v 9 for the Chinese men’s version that is so entertaining on a 10x20m court). The key though is that we need to look at what we are doing from a learning point of view – as we want players to know how to respond properly in a game, NOT in a drill. With Reading and Learning being the most important skills in volleyball, we need to create learning of reality reading based opportunities. It is that simple. Learning in isolated drills simply does not work. It looks good in practice, but the athletes simply have to start learning once the actual game play starts.

Consider this fact – in a game, how many points are scored without starting with a serve? Since the answer is just a rare few by an official’s card, something to consider is how many of your drills start with a serve? At one level the athletes know this, as they are always begging to play monarch of the court, or speed ball, or scrimmage – learning opportunities/games which start with a serve.  It’s not that every drill or game you do should start with a serve, but it does mean more should. That is just part of training in reality.

How can you be so prescient when an opponent tips on your team, such that you could walk, not run, onto the court and save the ball, and your players watch it fall to the floor? Is it your walking “technique”? No…due to your knowledge of the flow of the game – the previous block(s) on that player, their underrunning of the ball,  the score of the game and so forth  - which only comes from game play, not drilling.  How do you know what play is likely at key points of a game or favorite shot of an opponent at those same key times. It is learned through play.

In an attempt to transition coaches to make drills more gamelike, we have begun naming them “grills” in the IMPACT manual – a gamelike drill. The thing is, in the end everything you are doing in your practices are learning opportunities – a special deliberate practice period that combines the opportunity for team building every minute, and team/individual game based learning at the same time.

My webinar teaching of the motor learning chapter of IMPACT has lately brought back a question that Dr. Richard Schmidt would “answer” with to coaches at a national symposium at our Olympic Training Center here in Colorado Springs a few years ago. In this case it was not just any coaches, but a large group of top Olympic and Paralympic  coaches including our own two- time Olympic medal winning USA Volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon. I would estimate Dr. Schmidt, one of the top teachers and authors in the science of motor learning, said back “ARE YOU PRACTICING FOR PRACTICE OR FOR PERFORMANCE?” about a dozen times. In every case the coach was putting forward an isolated, blocked drill they thought had worked for them in learning their sport. We all, from Olympic coaches to elementary school teachers, regards of skill level or age, are wanting our charges to perform – in either a competition on a world stage, or in a test in the class.  While I won’t go into it here, sadly too many classroom teachers are now having to teach to the myriad of tests, rather than being able to give kids problem solving reality-based teaching in every subject.

Coaches, in this practice vs. performance statement by Dr. Schmidt, there is a huge difference between a player who has technique, and a player who has volleyball skills.  Drills teach technique, while games teach volleyball skill – as in “volleyball IQ”.  Let me say it again- the vast majority of drills used by well-intentioned coaches teach technique, and not the volleyball skills necessary for successful performance. In addition, because of the scoring that comes in a “game” always – deliberate practice levels, that internal focus on solving novel situations and striving to get better every day, is higher in the chaos.

The motor learning principles that are core to understanding the question are specificity, implicit vs. explicit learning, whole vs. part training, and random vs. blocked learning... I have covered the related concepts of “Learning by Doing” in a recent blog by that title, including the importance of retention in learning. The problem is most drills are: 1. Run by the coach, not the players, 2. Part based in either actual technique or as related to a whole game, rather than whole and 3. Blocked for “success” in practice, rather than chaotic like the game is in its inherent randomness.  The coaches are doing things that make a practice look good, but which do not transfer to the game nor are retained as well by the athletes, while giving them the all-important volleyball “IQ” of a real player.

In a discussion with Brian Swenty, who founded the great Volleyball Coaches and Trainers (VCT) Facebook group, he noted how many coaches struggle with the whole vs part principle in how to provide appropriate feedback, or what to coach and how technically. "If I don't run this drill with them passing on their knees how will they learn to keep their platforms straight"? "If we don't put kids on a box, how will we isolate their armswing or blocking technique"? and on and on.

Brian writes “The key is something I call "Single Item Focus Video Review". It is what you have been saying for years, but it is how I was able to justify really spending time running "Grills" instead of drills. This is particularly effective when I want to train technique as well as outcome based skill. - So, we will run the video delay software or Ubersense...I really like setting up the iPad with the video delay and making it a station. We will play our game or whole skill drill and isolate one thing we really want to see. Serving is the easiest to start with as it is closed motor and oh so important (toss, armswing, contact point, blah blah), but can be done with anything. I am still dealing with ball strikes to the stand (hasn't really happened too badly) and when rallies go beyond the 15-20 secs on the delay, but I digress. The delay works really well in the Butterfly as you can make it a station to review the previous skill then "bump" to the next one.”

During the symposium, I guesstimate the word “specificity” was said about 2,000 times. With some 30 different sports represented, the principle kept being brought up when examples which were thought to be specific would be shared, but the presenters would then note that such an example or drill was not really specific.

One of the items shown was what I remember being called a “Russian leaper,”    where a belt went around the player’s waist which was attached to heavy elastic cording which was anchored to the floor.  When the device would show up on the screen, the presenters were asked if it was something that would help their players.  Every presenter said, “nope, not specific enough.” These were not just volleyball trainers, but top coaches/trainers in other Olympic sports that knew motor learning.  

Same thing happened with the “Speed Ladder” which brings me to a quote from Dr. Richard Schmidt’s Motor Learning and Performance – Principles to Practice book, now in about its 5th edition. “It is fruitless to train such fundamental abilities such as quickness and balance, so concentrate on the fundamental skills instead…”  Still, we live in a land of quick fixes, gimmicks, and late night television ads. So you will always see people telling you to hit this ball frozen in time, run this shuttle run or weave, or pattern your feet through my handy dandy speed enhancement device. They can’t sell their method to you if they call it a non-specific, no-skill transfer, profit-for-me device.

When Dan Coyle started his great blog titled, “The Talent Code,” he tried to help coaches understand the difference between the tradition of “quickness” over the realities of reading and gathering information, writing:

Science is showing us that our instincts about quickness are wrong. The best performers, it turns out, aren’t reacting more quickly (thanks to limits of nerve-conduction speed, human reflexes are pretty consistent). The best performers are using time differently — namely, they’re using it to get more information.

For example, let’s take the classic case of a tennis player returning serve. You would instinctively think that the best returners are the ones who react the quickest. But you’d be wrong. Experiments show that the best players succeed because they wait longer before they make their swing. They use that time to gather information about the ball, the spin, the opponent’s position, and make decisions about it. And in tennis — as in many other areas of life — the better data you have, the better result you tend to get.

In other words, being quick isn’t about speed; it’s about information. It’s about learning how to wait."

It is hard for traditionalists to change from drilling to game situation learning opportunities, for it just looks so messy. Kinda like when kids first start drawing with crayons, stagger, weave and fall like a drunk when learning to walk or wobbling and crashing as they learn to ride a bike. They want the “look of success” in a blocked drill, as players “pepper with control” on the same side of the net, even though those same athletes can’t dig a ball in a game very successfully. When national team hopefuls at a recent USA Volleyball High Performance clinic went from pair pepper to actually digging and hitting a ball over a net, Hugh McCutcheon turned to the crowd and said “Looking a little squirrely out there,’ as the “skill” of pepper was humbled by the game’s realities.

Over the years I hear from scholastic coaches who in their change to motor science-based and game- based training, find themselves in an interesting quandary. They are winning more, and often going to their level of playoffs, only to be struggling with their Athletic Director who, despite the success, is expecting, even demanding that they stop playing so much and start drilling more. One solution I have to this problem is that each coach should have 2-3 drills that that a team can pop into when the Athletic Director drops by.

A classic drill that still gets some reality happening, is the “butterfly” drill, with the athletes doing the throwing (heaven forbid they serve, that is too chaotically “unsuccessful”).  Lots of success in that running, throwing and catching – not serving, receiving or setting. Make it even more gamelike, but a bit more chaotic, by having the usual target either catch the ball like a setter (rather than the traditional catch it any way you can) or even better, set and COVER their set. Want to ”risk” getting even more gamelike? Add a second passer so a gamelike decision of “mine or yours” has to be made. Even more gamelike? Run it same side of the net in “Front/Back” format so you stop setting left side to only zone four, and give every player setting the experience of back setting to zone two. Even more chaotic – just play 6 vs. 6 and make each side rotate after their ball goes over the net. And finally the most chaotic of them all – play 6 vs 6 with TWO balls – serving at the same time to start, and only winning the game when BOTH balls are dead for one side of the court – the first dead ball being able to be brought back to life by the “losing” side running and getting the ball back into play with a serve.

If the athletic director stays longer than the best controlled version of your butterfly drill, then regress back into some sort of coach controlled circle drill, or even a form of coach on three (sorry, I just can’t propose coach-on-one), where the coach, not the players, are in control.  Once the AD is gone, return to the player controlled games where you are out of the game and thus able to see what the players are doing in the game between contacts, and to provide questioning to individuals or small groups, while the ball(s) remain in flight.

In closing, I wish to share a favorite poem of mine, from the book The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton published in 1965.  I find its lesson helpful when dealing with those who choose to ignore the science in sport and not change how they teach. Maybe it will help you in your journey to become the best teacher you can be in helping us grow the game together.  As always, comments welcome if they are something my mom would find of value and approve of.. Indeed, perhaps I should retitle these STOP series blogs to PLEASE Stop, after all, it is important to say please…. 

THE EMPTY BOAT

If a man is crossing a river

And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,

Even though he be a bad-tempered man

He will not become very angry.

But if he sees a man in the boat,

He will shout at him to steer clear.

If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,

And yet again, and begin cursing.

And all because there is somebody in the boat.

Yet if the boat were empty,

He would not be shouting and not angry.

If you can empty your own boat

Crossing the river of the world,

No one will oppose you,

No one will seek to harm you....

We are back with another one of our STOP series, in this case a look at a practice that I hope can be changed in creative ways, to allow many more kids the chance to make volleyball their sport. This challenge to create programming that gives everyone wanting a chance to play the game, comes simply from the core of Long Term Athletic Development (LTAD) – to keep as many athletes playing a sport as long as possible. We must limit the number of kids who are cut, so that more kids can experience the lifetime sport that volleyball is. How can we be cutting kids from programs at age 13 or so, when we have a sport that has a 75 & over age group national championships?

Volleyball is a late specialization sport, as compared to gymnastics for example. Many people think that an athlete needs to specialize in a sport early in life to succeed at that sport in college or professionally. The facts are that only about one percent of high school players get a college scholarship in their sport, so the real reason for participating in any sport, volleyball included, is for the life lessons to be learned. It is fine to specialize early, if the athlete loves a specific sport. It is also fine to experience many sports and come to love a sport later.

Take a look at this “late bloomer” wiki entry to see an amazing list of those who found something they loved later in life.

So what might be some of the solutions?

These are just a few of my ideas I have used over the years, and I look forward to seeing more of yours in the comment section.

Create once a week training SCHOOL teams to train alongside the top school teams which practice daily.

Create once a week training/playing club teams. A pattern interruption here now….These first two are the places that every USA Volleyball coach reading this blog can first make a difference. Did you know that USAV national office has a FREE 8 and under membership option? That 11 and under USAV membership for just RVA play can be just $15?  Ask your region about these and other memberships like league and summer play – so we can better grow the game, and cut fewer players…

Practice or play at earlier or later times like swimmers and ice hockey programs do. – When I coached Doherty HS ice hockey team, as the new program on the block, we would have 11pm ice time one day, and 5 am ice time the next day – so just a five hour break in training. Swimmers often train at dawn. Why can’t we change our culture a bit to be like ice hockey and swimming to have more kids being able to train early in the morning?

Start a before school coed training /play program to let both boys and girls discover the game. Just one adult supervisor, let the kids teach each other from how to warm up to scoring variations.

Have one, two or even three “training only” slots on each team – These are much lower cost practice slots you reserve in a win-win situation – your travel team is only 9-10 for competition, while your practices can have 12 players. This allows for two full teams for grills/scrimmaging, or three 4 person/four 3 person teams for double court training situations, competitions and other learning opportunities. Thanks to BJ Leroy for adding this important idea. 

Create open gym programs any time there is a court open.  I so enjoyed hearing at the last NCAA Women’s Volleyball Championships that when Karch was a teen, he would break into gyms late at night, to play games with his friends. At those times, he and his friends were discovered by security guards and they would just say, “sorry, we just found the door open so we wanted to play…” On a more formal and legal front, find gym time at any facility where you can host a simple open gym for an hour or more.

Create open tournaments using the “Mad Hatter.

Create more courts – smaller ones on regular indoor courts; courts in unused racquetball or squash courts;  six courts on a single outdoor tennis court which has chain link fence to create a rope wall anchor and a unique very short “divider net in the middle;  multiple linked courts on grass fields; courts in cafeteria spaces.

Open “gyms” in the summer on grass fields – I love the Nebraska State Champion coach who put up 3-5 nets in his large back yard, put out a big container of lemonade, then went inside to chat with the parents while the kids each evening formed their own teams and tournaments, letting the game teach the game. Do the same at a park and have some doubles with parent/child teams competing.  Some places in larger cities have summer volleyball spots where nets go up after 5pm till dark – like the Washington Mall in DC and Washington Park in Denver. 

Share the gym – by running a 3-4 small net system from side basket to side basket, you can ask to expand your program by just having HALF the gym for use. It is great when the other sports’ players peak around the divider net and see the joy of volleyball play – you often get some converts, in addition to not cutting the kids who first play on the volleyball half of the gym.

 Reach out to other facility sites, what USAV calls our Affiliated Organizations, and partner to have volleyball programs to fill their activity schedule. These range from the Boys & Girls Clubs, to Jewish Community Centers, YMCA/YWCAs, and of course your area Parks and Recreation places and spaces – indoor and outdoor.

Enroll kids into adult leagues, led by a volleyball playing adult mentor/parent, who gets the kids first to serve and serve receive well, thus enabling the kids to hang in there against most adult level park and rec players.

Give volleyball a chance to be a player’s favorite sport.                                                                                                  

While I have your attention, a final plea… to add one other STOP tradition to please change – STOP hitting and flying under the net. This is in both warm ups and any spiking drills – usually those without a blocker. While talking with some coaches at the Penn State vs. Princeton match they spoke of their frustration with their players’ inability to hit and then transition to hit again. A training I attended in Pennsylvania had a coach working just on “transition hitting.”  So what if we simply started here and now attacking, landing and then immediately moving back off the net to hit again…then went and chased the ball?   No more fly towards the net on landing, but landing and flying AWAY from the net.

I am certain two things would quickly happen – 1. Your players would be much more efficient at moving back off the net after landing (rather than so amazingly skilled at flying under the net into the other court) and 2. Your players would know better how to land more off the net and thus fewer lower limb injuries would occur.  It is a powerful tradition right now, one that has some players already ducked and under the net before their spike even hits the floor. It is a tradition that needs to change, so we have better skilled players, not to mention healthier ones…

Now, what are your ideas to help us grow the game together by stopping the cutting of youth players from this sport for a lifetime? 

This blog in the STOP series is a plea for coaches to please understand one of the most important principles in the science of motor learning – that of specificity – as it particularly applies to conditioning/running.

Sadly, there are coaches who, either because of old, no longer true traditions or their beliefs and opinions, think that running the mile or more in less than some amount of determined minutes, is a valid way to 1. Train for volleyball, 2. Warm up for volleyball or even worse, 3. Eliminate a player from even trying out for a volleyball team. If you are one of those coaches, please stop doing such running.  You are not training according to the science and research known, and you are being a less effective coach in your training.  Your players need be taught how to play volleyball, not taught how to run long distances.

Let me share an email discussion with Dr. Carl McGown, professor emeritus of Motor Learning at BYU about this, important principle of specificity as it regards conditioning.

“Training is specific. The maximum benefits of a training stimulus can only be obtained when it replicates the movements and energy systems involved in the activities of a sport. This principle may suggest that there is no better training than actually performing in the sport. This text maintains that the principle of specificity is the single most pervading factor that influences the improvement of performance from a physiological perspective. Training effects are, in the main, so specific that even minor departures from movement forms, velocities, and intensities result in undesirable training effects. This means that incorrectly designed training activities will have no carry-over value for a particular movement form, and may even have the potential to negatively influence activities.”

Like we all have learned how to bike ride by riding a bike, playing the game of volleyball teaches players how to play the game of volleyball.  There is a program in another team sport, women’s soccer, where at the collegiate level one coach and school has won about two-thirds of all championships in history. The head coach, Anson Dorrance, has some great books out, including the classic, Training Soccer Champions.  In two chapters, Anson‘s core statements are: “In the Entire Off-Season, All we do is Play…” and “Conditioning is Homework.” 

A reference back to motor learning science that relates to the importance of both specificity and developing fundamental abilities is found in the IMPACT manual over the last two decades with the following quote by Dr. Richard Schmidt. “Drills and lead-up activities take considerable practice time and do not produce much transfer, so use them sparingly in later practice stages.”  AND “It is fruitless to try to train fundamental abilities (e.g. quickness, balance) so concentrate on the fundamental skills instead.”

Getting in shape to play is important, but the non-game specific options should be done when you do not have time to play on the court.  Marv Dunphy understood that when, in a season that he felt his Pepperdine team to be behind his opponents in skill and team play, he cancelled all scheduled conditioning/weightlifting, and moved that time into gym training and play.  At the highest levels, conditioning is a core part of training. At the medium to lower levels, it is skill and team play, not conditioning, that wins the match. You can see this clearly in adult play where the Masters teams, in nowhere near the shape of their younger opponents, can easily defeat these youthful teams. The far better conditioned younger teams will win the warm up, but lose the match.

The most important “skill” in our game is reading, which is not conditioning dependent. Being a good runner does not help you be a better reader of the game. The flow of the game and actions done by a player long before the actual ball contact of the player, are essential to development of this skill, and only occur in game play, not in any drill. Indeed, as a lefty myself, we are, again based in specificity in training, harder to read and play against, as almost all reading done by players is against right handed players.  In an important paper by Drs. McGown and Bain, they note that regarding specificity in training in blocked (as in most drills) vs. random training (as in game play) that:

The random versus blocked practice methods represent a fundamental paradox regarding athletic performance during training and subsequent performance during competition [29, 30]. Based on performance measurements during practice, blocked activities, in which athletes repeatedly rehearse the same task, result in superior performance during the training session [2, 31]. In comparison, performing tasks and skills in random order decreases skill acquisition during training. Consequently, based on measurement of performance effects during practice, many coaches and players believe that blocked practice is superior to random practice [25]. Such a conclusion however, mistakenly assumes a positive correlation between performance in practice and long-term skill retention [32]. The paradox arises from the fact that blocked practice is in fact very ineffective for transfer of learning to competition as performance improvements measured during practice degrade rapidly, and inefficient because retraining on the same skills will be necessary [29, 31, 33]. Conversely, random practice is both effective, transfer to competition is high, and efficient, skill acquisition is relatively permanent. Indeed, the superiority of random practice has been substantiated for a large number of sports skills including volleyball [34, 35], badminton [36, 37], baseball [38, 39], basketball [40], tennis [41], and soccer [42], and its utility and training applications thoroughly reviewed by Schmidt and Lee [2]. Finally, scientific research into the neurological reasons for this superiority have revealed that variable activities increase and strengthen the brain connections that are responsible for learning motor skills whereas simply repeating the same activities exerts no measurable effect on these brain connections [43-45]  The neuronal explanation for these effects are perhaps best exemplified by our own observations (Bain and McGown), of inexperienced coaches training novice players where the instructor(s) become frustrated by the performance variability and lack of successful repetitions of new learners. As a consequence, these inexperienced coaches limit or abandon whole teaching methods for part, and random practice for blocked. Unfortunately, this course of action deprives the learner of the environmental variability and sensory inputs that are essential for the formation of motor maps and implicit behaviors, which are ultimately reflected in the acquisition of functional skills and expert performance [13, 18, 19, 29, 65]. In total, the evidence on this topic is clear; drawing distinctions between training methods based on age or ability is a coaching practice that has no foundation in either motor learning science or in the application of motor learning principles.

Yes we are back with perhaps one of the most important “STOP” lessons of all – the need for coaches to stop teaching “Free” balls, especially the way the vast majority of coaches around the world teach it, and start teaching “Mean” balls.  

First we have the traditional ball slapping coach, who I see in coaching control mode, all over the world. They line up 3 blockers at the net, then slap the ball to trigger the pavlovian response of salivating players who move off the net as the ball comes over to them to play out.  This response of retreating off the net for the free ball is so well trained that when I do clinics, I set up three players at the net, tell them we are doing a “free ball drill” and then I slap a ball. Immediately all three players back off the net.  I never stop finding the ironic humor in this – and oft offer to start selling volleyballs on late night TV for people to carry as a self-protection device; yes ladies and gentlemen, you simply slap this ball you carry around and people bothering you will run away.

The key thing to understand, as a coach who knows why, not  just the how, is that when you train this way, you are actually training your players to be late…moving off the net as the ball is thrown over by the coach.  Why late?  Experienced players recognize this situation after the flight of ball contact number two, not after contact number three. If the second ball contact is going to not be able to be spiked, but will need to be forearm or overhead passed over the net, at the moment, long before the impending third ball contact is sent over the net, is when the front row player start their retreat, and the back row players also make their adjustments, often including a setter running to the net.

The second and even more important tradition to change is to teach your players to not send over “free” balls, but to still attack the ball.  At any level, I find this to be a top 10 skill set to develop in your players – tied into increasing volleyball IQ, teach your players how to score points even on the worst of free ball situations, the forearm pass send over.

Why are we not fully on the offensive and doing a better job of sending over an aggressive, slimy, court smart “free” ball?  Because our traditions right now have the COACH becoming the best skilled in the gym at sending over the third ball, not the players. Thus we need to STOP teaching free balls as we have and change.

You see, over the decades I have watched almost all coaches stand off the court, outside the antennas and hit at teams on both sides, often in 6 v 6 drills and even wash games.  “Train in Reality” I so often say, thanks to Marv Dunphy who taught me that phrase. Coaches, including  hopefully older former players giving back to the sport by coaching,  are not just off the court, they are most often near zone four, with a bucket of volleyballs by their side, and hitting balls to their side of the court for the players to dig/set/hit, or turning to hit the ball over the net to the other side, for the same dig/set/hit response.

My questions to my readers are these:

  1. Who is thus becoming the best at sending the third ball over the net?
  2. Can the coach send the ball over the net to areas 1 and 2 when they are standing off the court near zone four?
  3. How many “free” or “down” balls come at you from between the antenna vs. outside the antenna?
  4. How many opponents spike a ball from off the court to you on the same side of the net?
  5. How many opponents still two handed tip or even forearm pass the ball over the net, vs. standing spike the ball, at your level?

Point 1 – The sad answer is, the coach…yet last time I checked, the coach does not hit a single ball over the net in a match to their opponent. In this evolution we seek to empower the players more, both in volleyball IQ / reading and in skills, it is the PLAYERS who need to be skilled at sending aggressive, point scoring, crafty third balls to their opponents every single time. Again, NOT the coach. The coach should thus become the SECOND contact person in the gym, and do any of these variations:

  • Throw the ball low, and teach your players how to be great at sending a forearm passed ball aggressively and wisely over the net to the holes in an opponent’s court.
  • Throw the ball a bit higher and teach the same aggression and skill in sending over an overhead pass
  • Throw it even higher and teach them powerful, confident standing spikes over the net.
  • Throw it even higher and allow them to develop the skill to maneuver, jump and in the air spike the ball over the net.

    • Point 2 – ALL teams, from Olympic level to youngest kids, should send the vast majority of their “mean” balls to zones 1 and 2. When the coach stands outside the court at zone four, they cannot hit balls over the net to these two zones. Ask any setter where they LIKE the ball coming from most of all, and they of course will tell you from the “ball cart coach tossing the ball to me” zone at the 5 and 6 seam. They have seen thousands of balls from this spot. Ask them what they dislike/are not as skilled at and they point to zone 1 or 2. This is due to the steeper angle they must set to any hitter, and as it is something they simply have not done at much of – any all levels of the game. So we need to then pour most the “mean” balls we send over on imperfect play volleyball to the very zones the setters dislike the most. Simple.

    Point 3 – When the coach stands off the court in zone four – every ball they send to either side comes from outside the antenna. In game reality, some balls are that wide, certainly, but they still come from BETWEEN the antennas, not 100 percent from outside the antenna as the standing coach is training into their players.  When the coach becomes contact #2, not #3, they can send balls into the court in far more gamelike ways and the ball will come from between the antennas, as it most often does in the match.

    Point 4 – Like all forms of standing on the ground pepper, when the coach stands and hits, the players learn an angle to dig that is not gamelike. This certainly is also the case for the players on the same side as the coach who then dig the ball – they are digging not just a standing on the ground attacker but one who is actually outside the antenna.  When coach sends the ball over the net to the other group, that coach will never hit it outside the antenna to those players. Yet standing there, ball bucket at the ready, coaches have no problem hitting totally unrealistic hits to be dug/set/hit. Again, when you finally break this tradition, the ball, if outside the antenna, will still pass between the antennas for either side. Another little thing that adds up over time…

    Point 5 – Invariably the coach hits nearly 100 percent of the balls, swinging with “ball control” and hitting it top-spinned right to the player.  Who hits that well on the teams you play? Most of us know not many opponents. At the lower levels the shots we must handle are two handed tip shots, fist shots saved over the net, forearm passes and even reverse forearm hits. If they do hit it, it goes up then over more often due to opponent height/lack of jump. At the higher levels the reverse is true, but the failure to train in reality when a coach hits remains the same.  Would any of you reading this hit a ball at the USA men at the level they see coming even on down/free balls from the 2012 Russian Gold medal team?  Sorry, but for 99 percent of us the answer is no, I would not hit a ball as the USA men have to handle from their opponents they play. So it is far better to have Clay Stanley or David McKienzie hitting a ball over the net, than me as a mere mortal coach.  Since reading skills are vital at all levels, again having the players send the 3rd ball over is vastly superior for training that essential read.

    So now what you get to be doing is moving all around both sides of the court, not frozen at zone 4 married to your ball cart. Remember, there is a reason the ball cart has wheels…so move it, deeper, and endline as well and to zone 1 and 2 side, circling the court. Randomly toss balls of various heights and teach your PLAYERS how to send mean balls to the other side with forearm passes, overhead passes, roll shots, standing spikes – all not being hit the way you face – to Zone 1 and 2 from no matter where they are on the court.  When you throw from behind the endline, turn and look like a teammate chasing and errant serve reception down and even back forearm pass the ball into the court. Low, medium or high, they then have to learn to be aggressive and skilled at sending the ball over, with your guidance on how to be slimy and mean, not giving the opponent a free ball, but a mean one that is still hard to handle. In the beginning, they will err, and often, but we are teachers and they will improve.

    In the end, you get to players who earn awards for getting the opposing coach to slam their clip board and scream at their players “You guys that was a FREE ball for gosh sake, how did you let it drop!!!!”  The how comes from you – who have taught your players to be great at hitting “better the ball” third contacts at all levels. Hitting it to the spot that the back row setter is vacating., and it falls…hitting it to the setter, who has to then handle the first ball and get someone to back them up, not nearly the offense that would have been run if the setter was able to set the second contact.  Since we are teaching our players leadership and to be empowered as players, this way of play to pressure zones 1 and 2 happens not just in 6 v. 6, but in speedball, monarch of the court and other smaller number per side games. Stop being happy that they just got it over, and give your players the time and contacts to be mean ball players, not free ballers…

    So I have covered a related idea in my blog  “Tennis Anyone?,” but I need to bring that game/warm up favorite of both genders of our national teams.  When you play one hit over the net tennis warm up variations, you get 1. Players who are GREAT at still scoring points on a third contact forearm or overhead pass. 2. Players who can READ those one hit over the net contacts by the low skilled players they face, or even high skilled ones who simply err and overpass. Those balls just no longer drop after a great serve; they get received and converted into a transition kill that is so valuable.

    At the other side of the court, the team RECEIVING this ball should be thinking “OPPORTUNIYISNOWHERE”  That some reading this older blog title see it as “nowhere,” is a topic for your sports psychology staff visit – and I hope you read it as “now here”…for it is! It is too bad in English that opportunity is a FIVE syllable shout, and not a single one as it Is in other languages, and perhaps we should not call “Free” but call “Chance!” as another tradition to change. Nonetheless that is often what is occurring with teams not trained as we have noted above, and it is a chance to score the ever important transition kill that gives you a lead in rally scoring.   With the ball coming from more zones 1 and 2 now, you get batter at converting these opportunities no matter where your team gets the ball from, as you help all 12 players, both the starters and non-starters, to be mean ball players who then can convert even off of a mean ball.  Remember, this skill should be developed not just in 6 vs. 6 play, but in speedball and monarch of the court games and the like.

    Now you get to run the quick set front row player attacks with the bic player coming from back row.  You get spikers/attackers (not hitters…lol) who look at the other teams block and swing hit from one side to the other side of the court to attack against the opponent’s weakest blocker….You get the setter to stay back, not run to the net to set, so that teammates can forearm pass/overhead pass a ball to the net that they can hit on two, or twist in the air and set the trailing attacker who hits a meter ball while the opposing team lands from trying to block the setter hitting on two…. Players who know where the gaps are and can attack them better.  In other words, players who can play and score off even the meanest “free” ball, as their own teammates have helped them be able to convert those toughest and meanest balls by giving them to themselves….It may not always be rainbows and ponies out there, as Hugh McCutcheon notes and we all found out in the gold medal women’s match, but these little things add up, and this one, to teach MEAN balls by the players, not free balls or no third contact over the net skills by the players, is in my top ten changes we all need to make…

    Off to London to jury the sitting volleyball venue for the Paralympics.  Knock on wood I will not have a situation like badminton’s or fencing’s juries did in London 2012, or the #1 volleyball jury change of taking the USA win over Japan away, due to a missed red card, and triggering the men’s team shaving of their heads in support of Bob Samuelson…That is a history lesson for a jury that I hope I do not have to enforce.  Like my journeys to Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004, I will be blogging daily from London with a “Growing the Game Together” focus,  so look for those soon and Go Team USA! 

    Ah yes, we are back with another "STOP" request – in this case to train gamelike and create hitters with volleyball IQ, and not create one dimensional players who are good at spiking into the net….I was fortunate in the 1970s to be coached by a Stanley, in this case, Clay Stanley’s dad, 1968 Olympian Jon Stanley. Jim Coleman, coach of that 1968 team, shared with me that the Russian scouting report on Jon read like this…and is an important quote about spiking

    “Never hits where he looks….always hits where you aren’t….unstoppable” 

    What you see in this are two core concepts that most players do not learn at a young enough age – to not just hit the cross court angle, but to learn early on to hit across body and away from their body.  This can be learned even in an over the net warm up, starting at the youngest level.  This skill should be started young, in warm up games playing the game 1 vs. 1 (one of the ways William G. Morgan created the game to be played, if you look back to his original rules of 1897 – CLICK HERE), and continued through ALL sessions players learn to spike.

    Hitters normally hit cross court, on the same angle of their approach, and as that has the most distance for the ball to fly and still stay in, they get comfortable doing what they like to do, and need the teacher in the gym, aka coach, to remind them to do things they are not as good at, so they become spikers with a wide range, not one dimensional hitters.   Other sports have devices to hit the ball with – bats, racquets and clubs. What we need to help our players learn is how to make their armswing, including the striking area of the hand, into a multidimensional spiking device – made from bone and flesh.

    When coaches teach spiking, they often train hitting against a wall, to “develop wrist snap” – players enjoy the repetitive swing, bounce ball on floor, ricochet up off the wall and repeat rhythm.  This is to develop “Wrist Snap” – which, given the .008-.01 contact time of a good spike, simply does NOT exist.  Since this is a very important contact moment, and many coaches believe in this myth, I am sharing an email exchange I started between Dr. Peter Vint, Sr. Sports Performance Director of the USOPC and Chuck Rey, college coach and author of the excellent blog “Teaching Life’s Lessons Through Volleyball http://coachrey.com

    From: Chuck Rey
    Sent: Friday, April 27, 2012 4:26 PM
    To: Peter Vint, John Kessel
    Subject: Re: Smash ball

    Awesome. I do understand and that makes sense. I should have followed your ways years ago...Thanks again for the thought provoking Friday afternoon. We need to start Fridays with Vint and Kessel (kind of like a Mike and Mike in the morning ;)  Have a great weekend guys. 

    USOPC/USAV Response:

    Not quite… There are several ways to describe how the velocity (which includes both speed and direction) of a golf ball is created. The easiest to describe is by the impulse-momentum relationship. In this expression, the velocity of the ball is completely dictated by the force imparted to the ball by the club, the mass of the ball, and the time over which the force this contact force is applied. Specifically, the relationship is V(release) = Impulse/Mass (where Impulse is the sum of all forces applied by the club to the ball multiplied by the  duration the forces are applied).

    There is a bit of a "fudge factor" in this equation which accounts for the imperfect elastic response of the ball. In the case of the golf ball, the deformation of the ball creates a loss of energy (which is much less than the loss of energy the deformed volleyball had). It's incorrect to state that deformation creates energy. It always loses it – but the elastic properties of the ball dictate just how much energy is lost.

    The loft of a club head serves two purposes. First, when struck correctly (unlike most times I make contact), the loft will change the orientation of the action/reaction force to in turn changes the direction of the initial ball flight. Second, the loft of the club can influence the general point of contact of the club head on the ball (getting beneath the ball to induce back spin). The depth and geometry of the grooves can also influence "spin" by changing the extent to which reaction and friction forces are applied to/by the ball.   

    To your question, the orientation of the hand or clubface will absolutely influence the flight direction. To what extent depends on the alignment of the hands velocity with the orientation of the hand (e.g., think of an armswing that is entirely directed down the line but with only a hand that is angled back into the court. This would be like a club head which is driving perfectly forward, but the club head does not close at impact – the result is that the ball still goes MOSTLY forward with some lateral deviation.). The SPIN, however, is always dictated by the size of the force, the duration of contact, and exactly where the force is applied, relative to the object's center of mass. Spin is not dictated by club loft per se but how the club is designed to accommodate contact below the ball center.  

    From: Chuck Rey

    Further thoughts... The head of a golf club does not flex like a wrist, yet a golfer is able to make the ball spin based on the principles discussed on hitting under the center of the ball. (Power is given to the ball by the initial contact of the club, the compression of the golf ball plus the angle of the club is the "second" contact that creates the spin). A golf club is the "myth buster" to wrist snap on a volleyball.
    But, a golfer can put more spin on the ball, based on the loft of the club. Applying that principle to hitting a volleyball, a player should have their hand at an angle (like a golf club) above the ball upon contact?  I understand the science behind the creation of topspin based on a contact point above the center of the ball and not the hand "snapping" on top of the ball. But as you both viewed video on ball contact, there must be some compression on the ball. Logic tells me that the harder one hits the ball, the more the ball compresses and the absolute center of the ball is pushed forward, thus a player would have to hit more on top of the ball (higher above center), in order to force the ball down. In other words, the harder one hits the ball, the more on top of the ball they must hit.  Of course there is a point when hitting too high on the ball would be counterproductive.  I could also see the height the player is above the net and the angle of arm-swing on the ball would be a factor.  I assume there is a "sweet spot" for every contact that is different for each set, each jump, each arm-swing, each player, inflation of the ball, etc...the randomness that is volleyball. It's those that find the sweet spot most consistently are the ones that will execute best (theoretically).  Thanks for the Friday thoughts outside the box (or inside the ball).

    USOPC Response

    First – Hi Chuck! Great to hear from you!...Second, the REAL issue about the myth of the wrist snap is that, based on research using high speed video and film, the wrist does not actively flex (snap or bend forward) during ball contact.  The photo you shared is static and therefore doesn’t allow us to see the movement that is (or, more likely, NOT) taking place during the very brief time in which the hand is actually in contact with the ball. But, based on this perspective, I’d even speculate that the wrist is in a NEUTRAL position. It does NOT seem to be flexed (bent forward) and this is my primary point. The wrist is usually neutral and is NOT actively flexing forward…

    Related to this myth of wrist snap are the spiking cousins of throwing tennis balls and pepper. Specificity in training simply means you are getting better at throwing tennis balls over the net, not hitting a volleyball.  This often then builds to hitting off of coach’s throws and then the setter sets off of a throw from the hitter, thus not learning the micro seconds of timing needed and reading cues to both start and adjust your spike approach at the fastest possible speed, and the best time and place to jump.  This time and place to jump at the “sweet spot in time” takes many thousands of spikes to acquire –and of course as we know from specificity, it is NOT learned by standing on a box above the net learning “to spike.” However, coaches choose to train this blocked/ungamelike way due to both tradition, and the desire to have practice look good, even if the science shows the best way to become a versatile spiker is to spike set volleyballs.

    Another world wide tradition we must replace is “the circle of hitting…”   Around the world, when I shout “OK, Let’s Hit!” in their language, the hitters do the following:

    1. Stand about 1 meter outside the court sideline, in Zone Four.
    2. Toss the ball to the setter
    3. Approach and hit.
    4. Land and fly at supersonic speeds after the ball (if they did not hit it into the net) under the net.
    5. Get the ball, and wait in a line on the other side of the net to hit the ball from zone four again…and again, and again….

    Hitters do that, failing to learn to transition outside – as they are standing outside the court throwing the ball to the setter – thus they are actually “contacting” the first ball out of bounds. I would prefer that my players read and let that ball go out. These hitters then are getting to be great at landing and moving fast under the net, a skill that looks somewhat like a chicken pecking for food, and one that is NEVER done in a match. Thanks to tradition, we have players who know how to fly under the net after hitting, but not back off the net to transition fast again, or land safely to then block or move down the net. Spikers on the other hand, like all beach doubles players, know they need to pass/dig a ball on the court for first contact (either from over the net or from their setter), then transition to hit. Once they hit, spikers then land and do a new skill. They land so they can block, or transition away from the net to ready to hit again or celebrate. They land and move down the net to block at a different zone tactically, and might even move along the net to complain at the referee about a touched ball. For the beginning part of spiking training, every player spikes the EVEN SET next the next ball, then go retrieve a ball. Everyone on the team needs to deliver a spikeable ball when called on in game play, so spikers will attack, then set, not just the setters ALL the time… It is a hard habit to break, and one of the funniest moments in clinics where the hitter, knowing they are supposed to then set, first hit, land, and fly to about the other 3 meter line, before realizing…oops, I am supposed to set. Talk about pavlovian responses…

    Hitters hit zone four, and four and four…. This is a KEY place we need coaches to change their traditions.  Spikers on the other hand, first take swings at the back row, swinging on the three choices of “A”, “pipe/bic,” and “D” first and after a certain amount of time, then spike sets delivered to zones 4 AND 2 and even 3.  We must increase our spiking time from zone 2, which has the advantages of making the opposing team’s setter often handle the dig, and thus not able to run the offense. As most diggers send the spike back to the attacker, the ball, if not dug by the setter, returns back towards the other team’s zone 4, as you hear the opposition’s setter screaming “Help!”  The reason Clay Stanley is so great at spiking from zone 2 is simple, he has practiced at it.  Same goes for 12 year olds….

    Hitters hit on good sets and tip on the bad ones. That is backwards from what great spikers do, who learn to spike on bad sets and tip at times on perfect sets. Hitters are developed by coaches who spend the majority of their time hitting against no blockers. That is fine for younger players, who in game play, are not blocked.  However, if you are coaching older athletes who might have a block against them 90 percent of the time or more, well, they need to be getting blocked about the same percentage of time in practice, so they become spikers.

    I will close this blog with two quotes from our Olympic Gold Medal volleyball coach Marv Dunphy….First, “Since we learn best from things that are gamelike, the ideal spiking drill is a pass-set-spike drill; the ideal setting drill is a pass, set, spike drill, and the ideal passing drill is a pass, set, spike drill – while likewise the ideal digging drill is a dig-set-spike drill.” Finally – he simply and accurately says – “Train in reality….” I couldn’t agree more, it is how you develop great spikers.

    After the dialogue from my blog called “Stop Teaching Passing”  - I felt as this junior season starts up that it is important to give all you teachers of the game a few more titles to chew on. What in gosh sakes am I saying here, when I spent last season teaching my kids a 6-3 system, so half of my 14ers were learning how to set?  That a previous season “middle blocker” not only was one of those setters but also made the varsity team is part of the reason for this title, but there is lots more than that of course.

    This time I am challenging you all to think on two large fronts – the first is to not allow your younger players to believe or even call themselves “a setter.”  We must remain true to the concept of teaching players to be all around players as juniors, good at all the skills – not just “setting.”  Decrease the pass-set-hit drills where just the “setters” on your team set the ball, and make EVERY player set for a part of practice. Have every player hit…THEN SET…then go get the ball. It is humorous how many repetitions it takes for a “hitter” to stop chasing the ball like some Pavlovian dog and instead hit, then set, THEN go get the ball. Equally important however in this concept is that we want “setters” to also think of themselves  as hard working, hustling diggers, and hitters, and if their height allows, blockers. Not all hitters can block, but all setters CAN and MUST hit. It is sad, and senseless to cross paths at training camps with kids who say they are only a setter, and have never hit.  Of course all setters must also be effective, aggressive, intimidating servers, regardless of their height. Other volleyball nations get  this well, with Canada implementing a LTAD – Long Term Athlete Development – model for many sports. This info has been shared by free webinar last season and will be woven more into our own IMPACT teaching this year.

    The biggest part of the concept we must understand and teach is this – stop teaching setting and start teaching HOW TO RUN AN OFFENSE.

    This is again NOT a play on words; it is a very important and not well understood part of teaching the GAME of volleyball, not the techniques of the game. With young players, you must start at the very beginning to teach them not just how to set, but what, where, when, what and why to set the other five teammates.

    Even in the doubles games, these principles apply, as you set the only attacker you have, determining the best option of the five “Ws” that guide your teaching of setting an offense. Why five when there is only one teammate? As the “who” (or maybe mom would tell me to say “whom” here, but that does not fit the poem…) really in setting an offense might be the setter – dumping, shooting, or attacking on the second ball.

    I have a sign in my office that I give to every new intern working for me over the last 25 years. It is a quote that fits into today’s blog, by none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson again.

    I have six friends

    That serve me true

    Their names are What, Where, Why,

    How, When and Who.

    I ask each intern to make sure these six friends have been checked with, before they turn a document or a request into me. We both save time and reduce errors when these friends are covered.

    The same thing happens for learning HOW to set an offense – these five “W”s should to be checked at the start of each rally.

    Where are the opponent’s best blockers and my best hitters in this rotation?

    What are my front row hitters favorite or likely most successful set options.

    Who is my safety valve hitter if passes go awry? Are they front row or is the best option back row for this rotation?

    When should I most likely set them in this rally, first ball side out attempt or in transition?

    Who has the best match up, blocker vs my front/back row teammates?

    Why did they succeed in the last rotation(s), game, tourney, practices?

    These decisions evolve from having to think about it, to being able to do it, and make the best choices, without as much thought, but with more art and game sense. It is no different from the evolution of a quarterback, who at younger levels runs a simpler offense, which gets more complex at high school, college and then the pro level. The main difference in volleyball and football is the speed and size of the players as you move up in age and level. Cody I just dropped off at Princeton for his frosh year – but this summer I got to spend some time with a classmate of his, Ryan, who will be the school’s varsity hockey goalie. I asked Ryan one time, what is the biggest difference for him as he has moved up the ranks to being a top level netminder. His answer was the same – speed and size. The principles do not change and the sooner you teach them to the kids seeking to run your offense as the setters, the better.  As teammates develop in their attacking skills over the season, the choices evolve, the playsets become more complex, the options more varied.

    I will say again, we MUST start teaching our player at a far earlier age than we do now, to play on the right side of the court. We develop kids so long just hitting the left side, that when I do grills (aka gamelike drills) where players are choosing to attack zones four, three and two – only 10 percent of the kids will give zone two any time for spiking. That also means our setters have a vastly more limited offense to run – and we have athletes who cannot either set to zone two, or attack from that side of the court.  PLEASE start with more “front/back” grills so the players learn to attack BACK row first, from both the left side AND the right side.

    Other guiding principles for running your offense need to be shared, especially that of “bettering the ball.”  This is a cornerstone concept for ALL who put up the second ball in the offense, whether they be the intended setter, or a teammate who answers the call of “HELP!” and then steps in to set.  Who, where, even how concepts need to be guide and taught – for it is better to set a hittable ball with a bump set, then to “set” a ball with one’s hands, only to see it not make it high and/or far enough in the air for a teammate to jump and crank on the ball.

    The person running the offense must first put up a hittable ball. Nothing is more important. Secondly, it should go to the best hitter for the options available – considering factors such as where the ball is passed to and the positions of the opponent’s best blockers in that specific rotation, etc. If a hittable ball can be set to more than one option – then the setter can become “tricky,” but not without the first two concepts being achievable.

    The person(s) running the offense are key to any team’s success, as they touch every second ball. They should be good athletes, able to pursue and improve any pass. They must be creative, not patterned by some blocked drill to look good in warm up but unable to set anything that is out of system. Remember, for the majority of teams, your offensive system is likely to be more “out of system” than “in system” – as your players grow in their serve reception and defensive system skill sets. While covered before, the ability of every player to set, and to jump and attack from any part on or off the court, is vital, and best learned in random training, not blocked. I find most players in the world are able to run their offense to zone four must more successfully than to zone two – not because it is harder to set behind, but simply due to the fact that about 85% of the training is done towards zone four, only infrequently backset/trained behind.

    So ask your team this question at the next practice…who delivered the gold medal point set in Beijing for the USA men?  I doubt they, and even maybe you reading this, know that it was Ryan Millar, the middle blocker for the team and the setter on the cover of our free USAV Minivolley (PDF)book. Lloy Ball ran the team offense, wonderfully well in his fourth Olympics, but in the end, the final set choice was properly made by a person who also knew both the skill of setting, and more importantly, how to run the offense at that moment. So learning to be on the offensive, even after a bad reception where the “setter” must call for help, your players all should know the right setting options within varying levels of play.

    Lately there has been more attention to Brazil’s training. Three experts came in – Toyoda from Japan, Ivstan on LTAD from Canada, and yours truly.  Then many federations, led off by Brazil’s presentation followed… Brazil  understands well  the importance of all around players, and they put their words into action by requiring ALL teams playing 6 vs 6 nationally and below, to run a 6-6, from the ages of under 15. Each player sets from either zones 1,2 or 3. Imagine what a gift we would give our own junior’s player development to have our own national championships to be played with mandatory 6-6 offense. I think it is worth implementing at your club level, even if you feel you can’t at the scholastic level for various reasons.

    I would like to thank Laurel Brassey Iverson, who remains a dear friend, for her help over our years together in getting me understand how to run an offense.  As a member of both the 1980 boycott Olympic team, and the 1988 Olympic women's team, she put up ball after hittable ball, no matter how challenging the pass came in, and lead the team with her spirit and savvy.

    No matter where I go in the world to teach, the traditional coaches mantra of “Can’t pass, can’t hit” is one of the first statements I hear in any language.  Then, when we introduce our sport to new players of any age, the first skill taught is almost always “the pass” – followed by incantations by the priest of the court on how important passing is, and then demonstrations of the form of the holy passer. While the Black Knight of Monty Python and the Holy Grail might be my hero for his perseverance, those who have been following this blog know the importance of humor and critical thinking in being the best coach you can be.

    So I ask you today, to stop teaching passing. Before I get more international and national “what #&!@” type statements from coaches whose long standing traditions are being assaulted, I must explain that I am not asking you to stop teaching the skill found in most first ball reception – the forearm pass. What I am asking you very powerfully to change, is that you must teach from the start, and every practice, the skill of serve reception. 

    You see, being the world’s gold medalist at “passing” (both overhead and forearm forms) as taught in pair passing, wall passing and all sorts of other forms of partner and straight line training, actually gets in the way of being able to do the MOST important skill of receiving serve.  This is NOT a play on words. This is getting to the heart of the matter that too much time is spent skill developing the pass, when what matters when you get onto the court and attempt to win a game, is your serve reception skill.

    So many coaches are saying they are “training gamelike” while the things they are doing on the court are far, far from “training in reality.” Case in point…how many points in a GAME start with a serve – and have either an error/ace/serve reception?  OK, how many of your drills do? The answer simply is…not enough.  Think of why the kids love to play queen of the court or speedball so much. What starts each of those games, and if you err on your serve or serve reception – you’re gone!  The winners stay on training in these games are simply giving great experience in winning state or the USAV Jr. Nationals….where winners advance and losers prepare for the next season.

    The technique of passing is pretty easy to grasp. Below the waist, the forearm pass has the arms contact the ball ideally above the wrists (meaning players need good eye to forearm skills, one not done in any other skill or sport, so a bit of a challenge to start). That contact spot is formed at an angle which will deliver the ball to the target.  Not a lot of motion, start hands on knees, move your arms in the most efficient way to the correct served ball contact point, and send it on its way to the setter. Stance is a bit upright, as we want to "err" up, not low/parallel to the floor laser ball flights. Simple. 

    Here is how USAV puts the "ready position:"   Feet pointed straight forward, knees in front of toes and butt underneath; back more straight than forward; arms in line with knees and out from body with palms up; feet are flat on the floor but the weight is forward and over the big toe (not knock-kneed); square to the ball; wide feet, but not so wide that you can't take a good first step."

    When you get balls coming in higher, well above the waist, you do the overhead pass skill – but again you need to know how to handle a flat hard serve, not a looping friendship partner rainbow set done back and forth. This is an overhead serve reception, not a set. So the ball is contacted in such a way above the head in a setter type ball shaped hand pocket, and you direct it to the setter.  This skill starts off a bit more successfully, as we have usually established eye to hand coordination.

    The skill of serve reception starts by watching the habits of the server you are seeking to pass - watching THROUGH the net, not when the ball rises above it. Watching their ball bouncing habits, mannerisms, body position, and the toss. All these lead you to be a better serve receiver over the long haul of experience, as you learn to anticipate and what will happen even before contact. The servers whole skill up to, at and right after contact gives the receivers important hints as to what serve is likely to come. This is why even Misty May at the USAV Beach Coaches Accreditation Program training agreed that over three quarters of the success in serve reception for a beach player happens BEFORE the ball comes over the net. We learn these tips over time by receiving serves, not passing in front of a net with a partner or against a wall. Watch how less experienced players have to learn how to adjust their overhead pass technique for a the skill of receiving hard, flat floater or spin serves - no matter if it is a jump or a standing version.  

    How many times in the game do your players get “throated” misjudging a serve and being stuck with the ball in the no-man's land too high to forearm pass and too low for an overhead pass? Here is where the “alligator” pass, hands pressed duckbill-like together to pop the ball UP (not back to a partner), with one hand below to put the ball up. Your hands are almost in … Or you can reverse pass, the national team calls these a “tomahawk” to pass the ball off the “bottom” of your forearms and wrists together, to still put the ball up high on your side of the net.   We need to give our serve receivers skill sets which help them at least send the ball up, if not to the setter, when they misread a serve and can’t perform the overhead or forearm pass. Go for it.

    The other thing about the technique of “passing” is that the best serve receivers, while always seeking to be as simple in motion as possible, more often than not are found in less than ideal “technique” positions. Nonetheless, they still send the ball to the setter very well, if not perfectly.  They know that the ball in serve reception does not know how old or experienced you are, or which foot is forward or if you are a disabled player or not. The ball only knows the contact angle that the .05 second contact duration is on a player’s body. As Carl McGown puts it, “the ball knows angles.” So even if your body is not in any good “passing form,” it can serve receive wonderfully well, as long as that contact point sends the ball to the setter target.

    One other thought that you might consider adding to your program is to pass as many of the serves that likely up to now have simply been flying over the net and hitting the floor. For many years, as serving is so important, I taught serving as a high priority. We served a lot. Tens of thousands of balls a season in doing “serving drills,” or simply focusing on serving. Except I also was wasting tens of thousands of chances to practice…serve reception. Letting ball after ball, hundreds per practice, simply fall to the floor in or out of bounds.  Remember how important it is for your players to know the most important skill of READING, including the concept of “out.”  Serving into the net does not teach what “out” might be when there are serve receivers, but neither does serving in or out when nobody is there to read and serve receive the balls that do fly over the net. Now we no longer let the serves fly over the net to land unread and undesired on the floor. Instead we start with at least one person reading the other side’s servers, and that player serve receives the ball up to herself then goes back to serve.

    So, given that the #1 and #2 things that are shared between medal winning teams at the highest international level and at the 12 and under level in juniors is who serves the best and serve receives the best – we need to teach those two skills more. Luckily we know that since we learn best from things that are gamelike - the ideal serve reception training is – serve receive-set-hit, the ideal setting trainings are serve reception-set-hit, and the ideal hitting training is serve receive-set-hit, so we simply need to train that way more.