A Quick Study and Pet Peeve.

As season ends a person  would think things would slow down for coaches, but really recruiting heats up.  As a by product of recruiting  I have the opportunity to watch a lot of matches. I like to use this time to do more than evaluate players often I will do a little study of my own.  This year the study came up from last summer.  Last summer as a mentor coach I spent a lot of time with Dan Gilbert and we discussed lots of different parts of the game. (See Gilberts 7 things). http://coachingbobcats.blogspot.ca/2012/08/gilberts-and-his-7-things-first-guest.html

  In particular we discussed warm-ups.  We often discussed what is important in the hitting portion of the warm-up, number of contacts or quality of contacts.

I have a pet peeve of coaches tossing balls to attackers during their 5 minutes of attacking.  Yes I realize almost every coach does this during their warm-up. I have to admit I used to do it as well.  But as I start to analyze different things about the game it has made me dislike this part of warm-up.

Supporters of tossing balls to attacker say it is because they get more contacts.  I wondered if this was really true.  I decided to count contacts during matches I watch.  I just used the U-17 provincials in Manitoba to do a quick study. In the 10 matches I watched the average player had 7 contacts.  I would pick the first middle player and then count how many time she had an opportunity to swing on the ball.  I chose middles because I think this is important part of timing.

 The range of tossing to attackers was extreme.  The one coach who tossed to every player in all three front row positions had 7 contacts. But only four then were from the setter to the attacker.  Another coach who toss directly to her setter and then had her set the attacker  had 7 contacts,  but all 7 were from a setter. A team had two coaches tossing in two lines and had the players hit 2 balls each before they changed to the setter controlled drill.  They had one more attempt than the other teams. This makes me wonder if getting 1 more artificial contact is better or not?

I personally believe that coming from a setter directly is way better.  We are teaching the athletes that their timing is always in relation to when the ball is in the setters hands.  With this explanation a toss ball from the coach doesn’t give the visual cue we ask the attacker to look for.

With our team we start with both  setters on the same side of the net for 1.5 mins.  One will set left side and the middles will hit their shots infront of her.  The other will set rightsides and middle attacks behind her.  They do this for 45 seconds each and then they switch.  Our players serve  to  passers and liberos who pass to the setters.  Leftsides will pass and attack out of the leftside of the court, the libero passes out of rightside. After 1.5 minutes our second setters sets alone for 1 minute. We move to 3 passers with the libs passing out of the rightside still.  Then we have our starting setter then finishes off the last 1.5 minutes.

This type of warm-up moves us closer to the actual game plus we still get 8 or 9 attempts. The number varies on if many serves are missed.  We have coaches standing on side if a serve is missed they will toss a ball in to keep the movement going.