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Be More Aggressive Yet Make Fewer Mistakes

April 20, 2017 by

The following post is courtesy of Coach Tom Houser.  

Coach Houser is a regular contributor to the Volleyball Toolbox. He is currently sixth all-time in career coaching victories in Virginia with a career record of 267-47. He has been coaching travel volleyball since 1991, and his teams have qualified for Jr Nationals 4 of the past 11 years. He is the owner of STAR Volleyball Services LLC which conducts numerous clinics around the country.  Click the link CoachHouser.com to gain access to more valuable coaching tools. You can also contact Coach Houser at [email protected]

In this post Coach Houser is replying to  a question from another coach.  The following is his response to a question everyone would like an answer to.

Coach Houser:

Every time I see your team play, I don’t understand how your kids are more aggressive than your opponents, yet make fewer errors.  That’s not normal.  Can you share some of your thoughts?  

I assure you that it hasn’t always been this way.  Helping my players learn simple and effective skills took watching the game for tens of thousands of hours over three decades.  Until I was about 45, I still had holes in my coaching ability.  My teachings were like swiss cheese as I tried help my athletes remove all the inefficiencies and complications in their skills.  I was “holy” because:

(a) I was young.  Can’t fix that.  I also was never an assistant coach, so I didn’t have a season with a mentor;

(b) the books and videos were only slightly helpful because they were written by Olympic coaches and top level D1 college coaches; so, the drills were nearly useless for my factory town athletes, and;

(c) the older coaches whom I watched closely were using the old phrases that I’d heard all my life, but was discovering were practically useless in fixing players’ issues: “get low,” or “snap,” or “move your feet,” or “call the ball”.   Sound familiar?   

Intently watching and studying the game from the bleachers, the sidelines, etc. allowed me to determine what works for the typical volleyball teen athletes and what doesn’t, what’s easy to learn and what’s difficult to learn, what hit/serve/set is effective and what’s not.

Furthermore, the coaches I observed were almost never identifying the root cause of players’ issues and/or the advice they gave the athletes almost never addressed the issue.  Now I know why they said the phrases they said.  They didn’t know what else to say.  I’ve been there!

You say we’re aggressive:  We have to be.  How will we beat a good team without being aggressive?  
Then you say we make less errors.  Do you mean:

  1. a) errors that are bonehead?  I hope we make fewer of those, because we sure do practice on getting rid of them.  Or you may mean;
  2. b) fewer poor passes, fewer poor hits, fewer poor sets and fewer poor serves than most teams?  This is definitely because I teach my players to ditch the complications they’ve developed in the execution of their skills, and we concentrate on making those skills as simple to perform as possible; thus, they can be mastered quicker; thus, errors are diminished.

So actually, we aren’t overachieving.  We are maximizing our abilities because we are executing our skills as efficiently, easily and correctly as is possible.  

I thought about creating some drills for you that encourage aggression.  But all the drills that you currently use can be Aggression Drills (ADs).  All you have to do is ask your players to perform the drill WITHOUT punishment/consequences/eye-rolls for making a mistake performing the skill.  

  1. Do you want your players to tip better?  More aggressively?  Then you announce “The first team to get x kills by tip by z different players wins the drill.”  
  2. Do you want your players to learn to 2-ball opponents?  Then announce, “The first team to get x kills 2-balling by z different players wins the drill.”  
  3. Do you want your players to HIT into the 1 and/or 5 zones? Then announce, “The first team to get x kills in the 1 zone and z kills in the 5 zone wins.  No girl can get more than y kills.”  

    Each drill can be initiated by a serve, a free ball from a coach/player, a down ball from a coach, etc.  

This is how I get my teams to do anything I want.  In 2013, my 16s team had 2 new MB’s.  We’d been practicing a month, and the lack of sets was making my MB’s impatient.  Sure, I could have said, “Setters:  SET MIDDLE,” but I chose the following.  At practice after practice I would announce something like, “3 points for a kill by your MB.  1 point for any other kill.  First team to 15 wins.”  Aggressive?  HECK YEAH!  

Warning:  Your players will make mistakes.  But if you want your tennis player to hit a passing shot with their backhand during a match, then the player must be allowed to make mistakes at practice.  Yes, in both practice AND in matches.  No doubt.  If you want your basketball player to shoot 3s in games, then the player must be allowed to make mistakes at practice.  And she will make mistakes in games.  Promise.   

Finally:  I said “snap” above was nearly useless?  I heard some gasps.  Coaches:  there are probably 10 different reasons why a volleyball girl’s hit goes out beyond the end line.  Nine of those have nothing do with snapping.  Yet, I hear that from coaches, parents and/or players at every match I attend.  

About once a year, a parent beside me will say, “How is my daughter not snapping?  She’s been told to snap by her coaches for 5 years! Why can’t she fix it?”  I’ll answer, “The error had nothing to do with snap.  The fact that her hit had nice topspin is proof that the problem is something else,” and I proceed to tell the parent what the real reason was.   

Coaches:  You can’t wave a magic wand over yourself and get those 20,000 hours and three decades.  But you can watch, study, ask, and learn what helps athletes achieve.  Meanwhile, try to ditch the “you have to want it!!” and try to learn how to help your athletes reach their potential.  It’s really hard; but, it’s very much worth it!


Filed Under: Practice Planning, Professional Development

Planning Dynamic Practices

March 26, 2017 by

This article was provided by Coaches Network

When volleyball players at St. James Academy in Lenexa, Kan., walk into practice, they know they’d better have their game faces on. That’s because Head Coach Nancy Dorsey specializes in creating practices that are as demanding, intense, and competitive as matches. And that strategy has clearly paid off—Dorsey’s teams have won seven state titles in the past nine years and she was named the 2015 American Volleyball Coaches Association National High School Coach of the Year.

The first element to planning a dynamic practice, she explains, is to pick up the pace. “I want to see players in constant motion,” says Dorsey, a former outside hitter for the University of Kansas who has been at St. James since it opened in 2005. “This has an added benefit—almost all of our conditioning happens inside our drills.”

One way Dorsey creates a fast pace is by adding a time component to activities. “Instead of doing a drill until we reach a certain number of kills, I tell them they need to get a certain number of kills within a specific length of time,” she says. “Otherwise, we do it again.”

Next, she reshapes drills to make them match the energy of competition. “The idea is to take something you already do to train a certain skill and add a game-like element to it,” Dorsey says. “That increases both the pace and the intensity.

“I always explain why we’re doing what we’re doing, which is important for gaining the players’ trust,” she adds. “Especially when I have newer players, I spend a lot of time explaining why I am asking them for this level of intensity.”

One example of an energized drill is the Five-Minute Pass, in which players are continuously running, passing, and serving for five minutes. “As a result, when we are playing the sixth match of a tournament,” she says, “the players have already experienced the challenges of getting their body to work with their brain when they are fatigued.”

A third component of St. James’ practices is attaching a goal to everything the players do. “Setting the right goal for each drill is key,” Dorsey says. “It has to be hard but attainable, and you have to be willing to change the goal if you realize you set it too high.

One thing you won’t see, however, during the team’s practices, is traditional scrimmaging. “Playing against the same people every day in practice becomes very predictable,” Dorsey says. “It’s hard to build intensity with that.”

Instead, she uses drills that create more intense scrimmage situations, often by changing the scoring method. One of her favorites is Dig or Die. “We play to seven, and if the ball hits the floor, that team loses all its points,” she says. “The intensity is incredible, compared to just going six on six and running through a rotation. The idea that they can lose all their points puts an emphasis on defensive urgency.”

Dorsey believes that planning dynamic practices also requires constant assessment and modification. “In the first week of this season, I adjusted five of the drills that we normally do,” she says. “My team this year is pretty small and we don’t have a lot of powerful hitters, so I reworked some drills to address that.”

Practice time at St. James is not only dynamic and effective, it is also fun, which Dorsey says may be the most important element of all. “There is no question that my players think practices are hard. But what I hear most often from them is that doing it this way makes it fun,” she says. “If players aren’t having fun, they aren’t getting better. Unless they love what we’re doing, they are not going to improve.”


Filed Under: Practice Planning

Practice Planning: Creating Discomfort

January 31, 2017 by

By  Dawn Redd-Kelly

When I asked Sam Shweisky, the head men’s volleyball coach at Princeton University, how he prepared his team to handle challenges or being put in uncomfortable situations, I liked his answer about “realistic discomfort”.  Sometimes I’ll talk to a coach and it seems like their main goal is to put their team through some sort of boot camp or make practice about perseverance rather than gaining knowledge.  Of course, I’m not saying we shouldn’t appropriately condition our teams or that we shouldn’t figuratively kicks their butts in practice…but it should be applicable to our sport.  The amount of volleyball coaches I hear about who still have their teams running a timed mile astounds me!  Anaerobic sports need short, fast, all-out bursts…not long, slow, managed cardio.

Anyhoo, I digress.

As Shweisky talked about realistic discomfort, I found myself trying to figure out which ideas would be applicable to my team and if I could make these things happen in my gym.

Creating realistic discomfort

  1. Practice in jerseys.  The fact is, game day messes with some of our player’s heads.  Most times, we hope, it’s good.  They get super amped up and are on edge (in a good way) all day until game time.  On the less positive end, some of our players may get very nervous to the point of not feeling well.  Either way, letting them have the opportunity to learn how to manage those feelings is a great idea and one I hadn’t thought of.
  2. Turn the scoreboard on.  The power of the scoreboard is amazing!  It instantly ramps up the competitiveness of your gym and I’d highly recommend putting some form of visual pressure on your team.  It’s what they have to deal with in real games and they’ve got to be comfortable having those numbers up there.
  3. Set the “game day” court up.  There’s nothing like walking into the gym and seeing it all set up for game day…it’s one of the things that makes game day special.  Again, another things I hadn’t thought about doing with my team that I will now do: make sure we practice with everything set up the way it will be for games.  Hopefully this will help them learn to manage the butterflies that come along with competition.

Not so fun realistic discomfort

These aren’t from Sam, but from me, but I think still pretty good!

  1. Pull your best player from a drill.  What happens if your best player gets hurt?  Or their grandma dies and they’ve got to miss a game?  Do you have a plan of action?  We owe it to our teams to have put them in situations where that player wasn’t on the court/field/ice and the team still thrived.
  2. Unbalanced scoring.  I’m sure most of you do this already, but create an unfair situation and make your team dig their way out.  Not only will they learn that it’s possible, they’ll learn to never give up.
  3. Stack teams.  Make one team very strong, like “why are we even practicing like this?” strong.  There are many ways to address the unbalance in skill level: scoring, you could put your best player on the worst team and force them to step up and lead the weaker team, the stronger team could have parameters on their scoring.
  4. Unfair reffing.  In the heat of competition, the team will look at the coaches and disagree with one another heartily.  Sometimes I tell them that the officials of a game are just people and they make mistakes too.  Practicing dealing with bad calls, in my opinion, is essential.  Worrying about reffing takes our player’s attention away from where it should be and we’ve got to help them manage their emotions.

While these suggestions came pretty close to the X’s and O’s line, I think they hit home the idea that sport is a mental, as well as, physical venture.  These ideas will help you to develop your athlete’s mental games alongside their skills.  Good luck!


Filed Under: Drills, Practice Planning

Practice Planning with Coaches Dunning and Liskevych

July 6, 2016 by

Successful coaches have certain attributes in common. It really doesn’t matter whether they are volleyball, soccer or basketball coaches, if they are successful you can bet that they spend a considerable amount of planning, evaluating and modifying their practice plans. Successful coaches love to plan practices and are quite proud of their practices. If you ask them, they will generally say that effective practice planning is one of the most important factors in their teams success.

In the video clip below from The Art of Volleyball Coaching, Stanford Womens Head Coach John Dunning shares his thoughts on some key components of successful practice planning.

There is sound with this video, so please make sure that your sound is on. The video is a You Tube video, so you will need to be able to access that site.

Press the play arrow for the video to start.

Volleyball Practice Planning

Coach Dunning believes that first coaches must figure out who they are. One they understand who they are as a coach, they need to figure out how that applies to their practices and finally how that is going to help their team be successful.

In building his practice plans he considers three factors:
1. What do the players want from practice
2. What do the assistant coaches want form practice
3. What should go into practice that will help the team to be really good, based on who you are and what you as the head coach can bring to practice.

Coach Dunning emphasis the importance of team dynamics and incorporating team building activities into your practice plans.

Coach also discusses two other concepts he feels strongly contribute to successful practices. He believes that players want to be held accountable and believes that many coaches, himself include fail to do this because we simply aren’t clear enough about or expectations. His solution to solving lack of clarity is found in what he class Drill Framing.

He also states that it is critical to pay close attention to and actually track your positive to negative comments ratio. He believes that if you do not track this you will be more negative than positive. The result of which is a reduction in player confidence and a negative climate with in the team, which in turn affects how much the players are interested in doing what you are doing in practice.


Filed Under: Practice Planning

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