Volleyball Toolbox

Your Guide to Evaluating Your Volleyball Team

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Social media, pro­fes­sion­al development and assessments are all key to your team and club. Here’s the complete guide to mastering each.

This summer probably looks different than last. No trips to nationals, smaller sand volleyball tournaments, limited camp schedules and more free time. Use the next few months to your advantage and tackle things you might not have time for during a normal season.

Assess Your Culture

The past few months didn’t exactly go as planned, so it’s important to check in on your team values, beliefs and culture to make sure everything’s set up for next season. Here are three ways to do just that:

1. Send a survey. Have your players and coaches take a short, anonymous survey about their experience on the team. Ask open-ended questions like, “Do you feel like your contributions are valued?” and “What could the team do better to show appreciation for you as an individual?” This will help you gauge how your team’s culture is being perceived.

2. Reflect on last season. Were there times you saw someone truly live your team values? What about a time when someone failed to live up to them? Coming up with these instances will help you identify areas of strength and room for improvement.

3. Look at retention. One of the biggest indicators of a healthy team is its ability to retain athletes. Do players come back to play after their first year? If you don’t see a lot of returns, it could be a red flag that there’s something to fix in your team culture.

Evaluate Your Players

Volleyball is a team sport, but players still need to perform individually. You need hitters that make smart choices at the net, setters that spread the ball well, and defensive specialists who nail passes when it’s 23-all. But you also need players with intangible qualities—positive attitudes, good work ethic, body language, etc. So take a deep dive into each of your players’ performance. Then schedule one-on-one virtual meetings to go over it.

Here are a few templates that hit on all the important qualities:

Stat Your Film

While we’re on the topic of team evaluation, stats are a great way to objectively see how your team is performing. After all, numbers don’t lie. So if stats and reports aren’t already part of your review process, use this extra time to incorporate them.

It’s easy to add tags to matches already on Hudl. More of a visual learner? Check out this step-by-step video to see how it’s done. Or if you have Hudl Assist, double-check all your matches have been sent to our analysts (and send them if they haven’t).

Once your matches are tagged, dig into your team’s performance using Hudl’s comprehensive reports. See basic and advanced stats like blocks, kills and pass quality rating in the stats report, or look at how your team’s hitting percentage tracks over time in the trends report. And you’ll definitely want to use the attack tendencies report to discover your players’ hitting strengths.

Step Up Your Game

It’s not all about the athletes. Use this time to focus on yourself as a coach so you can show up for your team.

To network and connect with fellow coaches, check out these platforms.

Whether you’re looking for drill ideas, summer workouts or professional development courses, we have you covered.

  • The Digital Coaching Center has presentations and advice from thought leaders in the sports community.
  • Hudl Academy is full of self-guided courses to help you master Hudl at your own pace.
  • Learning platform edX gives you access to 140 free classes from Harvard, covering everything from probability and statistics to persuasive writing and public speaking.

Market Your Club

Success in the club circuit is defined by identifying, recruiting and developing talented players, which in turn attracts more skilled athletes to your team. To keep your club top-of-mind for players during tryouts, use these marketing tactics. (Don’t worry, you don’t need a business degree to implement them.)

The most important (and free) investment you can make? Meeting players where they are. That means using social media. Try posting player highlights, club events, travel opportunities and team accomplishments to your club’s social media accounts to attract new talent.

Player assessments, marketing and professional development might seem like a lot of work, but you’ll be glad you took the time to get your house in order once you’re back in the game. For more team evaluation ideas and resources, check out the Remote Coaching Guide.


The Formula for High Performance Team Building

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THE FORMULA FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAM BUILDING

Dr. Cory Dobbs
The Academy for Sport Leadership

“Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will care.” -Your Student-Athlete

Here’s a simple formula that should provide you a clear way to grasp high performance in the area of team leadership. High involvement plus high commitment equals high performance.

So, what does all this mean for you? Well, high involvement means you need to nurture the involvement of every team member. Did you get that—every team member. Each and every team member needs to engage with the leadership development process by bringing a high level of energy and focus. Only when you have high involvement can you entertain the idea of high commitment. Simply put, if you don’t have high involvement you can’t have high commitment, and if you don’t have high commitment you’ll never see high performance.

If you select only a few team captains you’ve willingly and knowingly chosen low involvement. Those student-athletes not selected to develop as leaders will not care much about the process of leadership development of their peers. They’ll clearly say by actions and non-actions, “Why bother, there’s nothing in it for me.” You’ve chosen not to get them directly involved and commitment comes from being involved.

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download your FREE exclusive ebook from Dr. Cory Dobbs


Those student-athletes you’ve chosen as team leaders might show high commitment to leadership and leadership development. Why not, it benefits them. But you are still left with the reality that you don’t—and logically can’t have—high involvement with only a few chosen participants. Thus, you’ll never achieve high commitment nor high performance.

However, if you choose to involve everyone on the team—a leader in every locker—you have a chance to attain high commitment. By placing leadership practice and opportunities in the hands of every team member, you involve everyone. And depending on the quality of programmatic development you have a chance at achieving high commitment. Ahhh, once you get high commitment it is very likely you’ll get high performance.

This isn’t some mystical process. By deploying a leader in every locker approach your players are highly involved with an opportunity to become highly committed. Your challenge is to get them to willingly invest their minds and heart into the team leadership development process, building skills and competencies that lead to high performance. So, to wrap up this leadership bite here’s the formula once again: High Involvement + High Commitment = High Performance.


External Team Communication

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Pat Fox – Head Football Coach, Pontiac Notre Dame Prep (MI)
Coach Fox is a football coach. We believe that his message is applicable to all programs and all sports.
The following content is provided by Glazier Drive


Internal Team Communication

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The following content is provided by Glazier Drive

Coach Adam Mathieson is a football coach and athletic director. We believe that his message is applicable to all programs and all sports.


Socially Distanced Development for Volleyball Players

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By Tiegan Kirkwold

From the Hudl Blog

No prac­tice? No prob­lem. Here’s how play­ers can improve on their own.

All coach­es aim to bring out the best in their ath­letes. But it can be tough to ensure play­ers are mak­ing strides in their devel­op­ment from behind a com­put­er screen. So we com­piled some of our favorite resources for mak­ing progress from a distance.

Mental Training

The only way to improve your serve, swing, set (insert any vol­ley­ball skill here) is through com­mit­ment, hard work and patience. The same goes for the brain. The most suc­cess­ful play­ers choose a pos­i­tive atti­tude, main­tain a high lev­el of self-moti­va­tion, set high, real­is­tic goals, use pos­i­tive self-talk, and deal effec­tive­ly with peo­ple. But these skills don’t hap­pen overnight and they don’t always come naturally. 

Encourage your play­ers to put in the men­tal work now, so they can shine tech­ni­cal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly when they’re on the court again. 

Strength Workouts

Staying active dur­ing this time will make the first prac­tice back a lit­tle eas­i­er, but it’s also cru­cial for injury pre­ven­tion. The good news is there are a ton of at-home strength and con­di­tion­ing work­outs on YouTube—send your favorites to play­ers to keep them moving.

You can also find ideas on Twitter and Instagram, from core work and weight train­ing to pre­hab cir­cuits designed specif­i­cal­ly for vol­ley­ball play­ers who are hard on their shoul­ders. Or cre­ate your own work­outs, record and upload them to Hudl, and have play­ers mes­sage you when they’ve com­plet­ed them.

Skill Development

Playing vol­ley­ball is kind of like rid­ing a bike — it’s hard to for­get once you know it. But that doesn’t mean you want play­ers to go months with­out touch­ing a ball. So we round­ed up some of our favorite drills they can do at home. The best part? For most of these, all they need is a wall and a ball.

Officiating

You know how it goes. The first tour­na­ment is around the cor­ner and you’re scram­bling to train your play­ers on how to keep score, track the libero and be the down ref­er­ee. Use this down­time to get your team trained up so it’s smooth sail­ing once match­es start. 

Not sure how to get start­ed? Here are some ideas:

  • Set up a time for your team to watch a train­ing video.
  • Contact a local offi­cial and see if they’ll run a vir­tu­al train­ing ses­sion with your ath­letes and coaches.
  • When you can, host an intra-club scrim­mage so your play­ers can prac­tice in a low-pres­sure environment.

Recruiting

Now’s also the per­fect time for ath­letes to own their recruit­ing process. Encourage them to do research on col­leges, nar­row down their list of schools, reach out to coach­es they’re inter­est­ed in, and com­pile their best moments into a high­light reel.

We recent­ly sat down with a few col­le­giate coach­es to pick their brains about recruit­ing, high­lights and get­ting noticed. They all had great insights for both coach­es and ath­letes, so be sure to share these with your team.

Hudl Homework

If you’ve already nailed the at-home work­outs and drills, switch your focus to video review on Hudl and have your play­ers study their craft. Ask them to watch video of pre­vi­ous match­es and cre­ate a playlist of their top five and bot­tom five plays. They can add com­ments and draw­ings explain­ing why it was a high or low moment. You can dis­cuss these in a one-on-one call and devel­op a plan to address their bot­tom five as prepa­ra­tion for next season.

There are so many ways play­ers can keep improv­ing off the court — whether they focus on pre­hab, learn­ing a new skill or plan­ning their future. For more play­er devel­op­ment ideas and resources, check out our Remote Coaching Guide.