Step Forward....

Step ahead…

WE have just returned from the Lea Marc tourney at University of Winnipeg.  We finished a respectable fourth.  The tournament was a good opportunity to see how we have progressed from last weekend.

We had a large focus on blocking with the middles and Right sides this past week and into the weekend.  The left sides we focused on serve reception and out of system attacking.  Ashley Creighton was able to make most of the practices this week so she spent a large portion of the time working with the blocking group.  She would attack off the hitting boxes early to get them to feel the power in the block.  Most young athletes try to use arm swing to create the block.  Instead we want a nice stable block with a position of strength, feeling it all the way through the core to the tip of their fingers. This is what creates the stuff block, not the swinging of the arms.  Next she had them attack against each other.  Once they understand what a blocking posture feels like then we work on vision.  Vision is everything in blocking, especially middle blockers.  Situations will happen that will eliminate or make it hard to set certain players so then life is easier.  The sooner players can recognize the situation the easy blocking becomes for them.  Too often as coaches we stand behind the blocks watching their footwork when really we need to see their eye patterns to determine blocking. We were much better at blocking.

We lost Kellie Baker our starting setter to an injury late in the week, so this would be Jenna’s show this weekend.  To be honest Jenna must have been exhausted by the end of the weekend.  5 matches and some very average passing, she probably ran the Boston Marathon twice… It was a good thing for us to work with Jenna, we had a chance to clear up some vocabulary I use that she had a different definition for.  We also had a chance to work together on the creation of different types of game plans, getting her to think a bit more the Bobcat way.  There was a lot of learning happening fast.

We still worked out hard all week, four practices, three weight sessions and two different circuit-training sessions. We noticed by the last few matches the players were starting to show fatigue.  We started missing lots of serves.  When you are jump floating and the legs start to go the net seems to get higher.  We also noticed the fatigue in blocking.  It is normal under fatigue and stress to go back to what is comfortable.  So the middles hands started to get lower and lower.  We used the term having your hands in your pocket.  Opposition middles would contact the ball and our hands wouldn’t have reached the top of the net yet.  So we had to relearn the skill of high hands in a tough way.  But hopefully this lesson has stuck.

We also wanted to cut down on our unforced errors, but as fatigue kicked in our errors went up. We average over 40 errors a match.  WE talked to our team, it is like we are playing a match to 25 and the opposition are only playing to 15.  Handicapping our selves some times.  If we can move our opponents serving aces to under five percent of our total passing I believe that will be a big difference in the 23-25 matches, and we played in a lot of them this weekend.

We have a break this weekend for Thanksgiving so we will train hard and give the athletes four days off.  This should bring them back ready to fly for the remainder of the pre-season.

Becky again went undefeated this weekend.  I went 1-3 starting to feel a bit of pressure to get a few W for my own sake. Plus her uncle is my athletic director…