QuestionHi, I am a young coach about to start my first season as a head coach after being assistant coach for the last three season. I was a player before that. With volleyball being very popular in the area, there are more girls then there are coaches. So for me starting out as a first time head coach and having never had the U14 age group before, I was wondering where would be a good place to start for drills and what skills to work on. I was also wondering if you had any advice on what rotation would be best for me to teach them
AnswerGood afternoon Courtney!
Welcome to www.allexperts.com. It's great to hear from you.
Your situation is definitely challenging. I get emails occasionally from people in just your situation. Below is what I tell them.
I hope you have some time to visit us at www.coachhouser.com. I think you'll really like all the smiling faces.
After you read the article below, you may want to investigate the "I Can't Wait" Drill Collection and two huge ebooks. You will see the links at the top of my website.
If we can ever do anything for you, please contact me anytime at
[email protected]
Coach Houser
p.s. When you say "what rotation," what exactly do you mean? What offense? What defense? Who serves first, second, etc.? Should you be in S/OH/MB order, or S/MB/OH order?
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Putting Together A Sound Club Practice
December 7, 2007
Hi Coach Houser:
I am using your drills collection for my 14u team and I have a question that I hope you can help with. Do you have a practice plan schedule that you can offer me for our first club practice? I have put some together, but I would like to read what you would do.
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A few questions:
* How long will your first practices last?
* How skilled are these girls? Did they have good coaching at the middle school level? If they had a team, was it competitive or was it bump-and-giggle? Are some of your players greenie rookies?
All of this makes a huge difference!
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Coach Houser:
The practices are 2 hours. All but 2 of the 10 have played club ball at the silver level. Seven of them are very skilled players and the other 3 are reaching for that goal. There are no rookies on the team and most have had pretty good coaches, so they just need to learn to compete at the open level. Five were members of our top 13抯 team last year, so the chemistry will be built around that!
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OK, now that I know more about your team, here are some ideas for your first few practices.
1) Emphasize early & still platforms. If your players fly, pray, poke, scoop or swing, that has to be addressed. One thing I tell my younger players is, 揟he best passers you ever see are the most still from the waste up.? Whether your players fix their passing issues is determined by her attitude, work ethic and how much you continue to remind her. Yes, for most players, as soon as the coach isn抰 揵othering?them any longer, they revert back to what抯 been working adequately for them.
2) Pass balls either "at your thighs or with your hands," unless there's an emergency. No, we cannot allow our girls to pass balls at their hip or on their shoulder unless it抯 their only option.
3) We must require players to have as simple a serve as possible. The more complicated the serve, the more inaccurate it'll be. What I抦 saying is, show your girls how to toss lower, how to limit their footwork, etc. Do not allow them to follow through with a cross-the-body motion. Say to your players, "We don't serve for aces. We serve to try to create a bad pass. So after we can serve in the court, then we learn to serve to locations."
4) Do the players on your team know a correct three step approach? I do a drill I call "Short Toss," where I stand at the net with a ball, the girls come to me doing their spike approach, and after they jump I toss a ball, and they hit it. I have my eyes glued to their spike approach and if it抯 not done properly, I tell them what抯 wrong and how to fix it. If it continues to be an issue, she moves out of the drill to work with an assistant coach or older player. On Wednesday night I did send one girl off the court to do 10 spike approaches.
5) Serve Receive. I抦 just in love with the 揅oach Tanis?drill from the Drill Collection that you bought. (If a Gold Member would like a copy of 揅oach Tanis,?please email me and I抣l send it to you.) We抳e had four practices and I抳e used a variation of the drill in each practice. The 3rd and 4th times, my assistant has kept serve receive stats to motivate our passers. At the practice after keeping stats, I show the girls two sets of stats: the passing stats from the previous practice and the total passing stats for the season. They don抰 know it yet, but when we have our first scrimmage, the top five passers will be our serve receivers for that day. That抣l motivate them!! I haven't yet put a setter in the drill, but I will this weekend. The Coach Tanis Drill does so many good things for the team!
6) I end every practice with some sort of sixes drill. Last night we played 15 minutes of "You will receive a point each time I see the correct defense.? I don't care where the ball lands/goes. So I hollered "point" when the 6 girls on my side were all in proper defensive position; and, my assistant hollered "point!" when her 6 girls were all in the proper position. The next time we play this game, we'll give points each time the coach sees a three step spike approach. You see, at this point in the season I don抰 care who wins the rally, because if we take care of the some little things each night at practice, the scoreboard will take care of itself. The next time we play 6抯, we抣l give points for covering the hitter.
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Coach Houser:
I have been looking over your drills some more. I抳e noticed that most of the serve drills and a lot of drills sound like they are for teams with 12 players for 6 on 6. How would you suggest making them, the drills competitive for like 6 on 3 or 6 on 4 play. Or do you think I should break it down to 5 on 5? I just want to try to keep players in their correct position, but that might be tough with some of the drills I see!
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When I don't have 12 girls, there are several good options.
Option #1) If we only have 10 players, we play 5 on 5 and leave a position open. The open spot is almost always a front row player. So there's no MB? So? It makes my outside blockers think more, and my defense work harder. So there's no OH? So? The setter has to learn to set back row or set back row on a out-of-system pass.
Option #2) I invite older girls or coaches or adult women to fill in the holes. Last night at my 15抯 practice I had two high school seniors. On Sunday I will have 3 high school seniors. I don't care if they hit harder! I don't care if they block better. That's fine! For your 14抯 team, high school sophomores or juniors may be the appropriate players. However, it is very seldom helpful to put a 6??boy or man on the court who can bloody your girls' noses. You're endangering your players, it抯 not realistic, and most importantly, it抯 not good for your team.
Option #3) Be creative. You can run a 6 vs. 4 drill where a coach plays the 2 open spots on the 4抯 team. No, the coach isn抰 actually playing! It抯 just that anytime the 6抯 team hits a ball into either vacant area, the coach simulates the ball was dug by tossing a ball, and thus the rally continues. Whether the toss is perfect or poor is the coach抯 discretion. In other words, if the 6抯 team wants to win a rally, they have hit it to somewhere else except those open spots.
Note: I only play 4 on 4 or 3 on 3 for fun/ballcontrol/conditioning. I want my players to play 6's until their tongue is waggling out.
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Readers:
This is Coach Houser now. When I wrote this back in December of 2008. I finished the response to the coach this way: "My team has 17 more practices until our first tournament in Richmond. We抣l be playing in the 15抯 Open division of the Monument City Classic facing most of the best 15抯 teams from Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. We plan on being a 搘ell oiled machine?by that point. No, I don抰 see us finishing at the top because we抮e not big enough and I don抰 have beastly hitters. However, I expect our defense to be disciplined, I expect my serve receive and setters to not make mental blunders. How? Because we抮e training them out of it right now."
