Ouch

The past two weekends have been filled with stress. Not gonna lie.

We started up some clinics at the club working primarily on skill fade and getting rid of horrible habits whilst "instill[ing] the foundation for future performance excellence". Very tall order considering we had four hours and 50 plus girls with four coaches. Oh, and we were dealing with 12, 13, and 14 year old girls.

Most of the faces I recognized with a bunch of new girls which is promising for them and their teams. We drew a crowd from Johnston, Urbandale, Ankeny, Waukee, Clive, and a couple of girls from Nebraska (at least that's what their shirts said). The first half hour to forty five minutes consisted of only block drills which are mind numbingly boring. Not only for the coaches, but also for the players.

- A block drill is something that everybody knows. You have a partner. The partner tosses you the ball. You pass the ball back to your partner.... Drills of that nature.

However, block drills do have their place in the scheme of things. Foundations, you have to start from foundations. Ex. "This is a passing platform. When you are in the ready position your hands meet, elbows are locked, thumbs are pointing down. When I say go, the passer will start in the ready position, your partner will overhand toss a ball to you. You will forearm pass the ball to the target who will bounce a ball to the tosser. Do 8 then switch. Tosser becomes passer passer becomes target target becomes tosser. Spread out throughout the gym, but you cannot toss over a net. Go." From that foundation you can start branching out to overhead passes, out of core passing, downball defense, short defense...all sorts of things. This does not change however that you have downtime, you have players not getting reps, and the players - who have an attention span worse than a puppy at a circus- get bored.

Block drills do have a huge point in their favor from the coach's perspective. Coaches can correct, modify, encourage, and focus on the skill set being practiced. The draw back is that most coaches, - myself, one of my mentors in the club, my former coaches from any sport- will stop the player to do any of the above. Worst thing possible is taking the player out of the drill. It slows the drill down, they lose focus which was hard to get in the first place, the other players involved in the drill become even more bored, it singles the player out to the other players...the list can go on. If coaches are attempting to modify mid drill nothing will be accomplished, but if they don't incorrect habits form. It is a very very thin line to walk.

After we got through passing and attacking block drills we started going to random drills.

- Random drills are not improvised drills, instead they are spontaneous drills. Game-like drills. Forcing the players to read the situation, know what they are supposed to do, and above all adapt. C says that any sport is a micro-cosym of life. If you mess up you have less than three seconds to put it behind you and get your head back in the game. Maybe that's why successfully athletes have good coping skills...I like to think so. Make the drills life-like. Keep score, have a player enter a ball into play over the net, transition, rotate, switch, cover...any of those brought into a drill will make it a quicker drill which means more reps for the players, they bring in conditioning, reading, court awareness...all sorts of goodies.

There is a huge drawback to random drills. At least from my perspective which is still in it's infancy: Skill loss. As players tire from a long practice or the fact that they're young, they lose focus. With that loss of focus brings about a whole new problem. All that time that you spent doing the block drills was wasted. Those incorrect techniques come slamming back into the player's mind. From there it is a direct line to the muscles which don't care if the ball wasn't passed properly. The ball was passed.

- Let me make a point here. Muscles do NOT have brain cells. Therefore muscles canNOT have muscle memory. Impossible. Your brain fries neural networks, a certain way of firing synapses and nerves to make your muscles move. Those become ingrained with time and repetition. Your brain has the ability for motor-memory. Your muscles do not.

Another drawback to random drills is that the coach has to have a very good eye. What I mean by that is that the coach needs to know the skills forwards backwards sideways and if possible barrel-rolled. That way you can spot the discrepancy. And know all the player's names. At the clinics, during block drills I could come up with the name quick enough. During random drills I started shouting shirt colors. K and I were working on movement on the court - switching out if you messed up, or if you were standing still not doing anything - with the 12 and 13 year olds (the majority of whom he had in club or on his school team so he had the names down cold.) C came in hearing me bark out shirt colors and K translating. I thought he was gonna die laughing so hard.

Anyway. My focus for the upcoming season is tricky. With two teams I have to have different goals. The 13's I'm going to try to focus on staying outside my comfort zone, or make a new comfort zone, by using random drills after dynamic warm ups. With the 15's my personal goal is to bring fun, and a love of the game and instill that in the girls. Going into sophomore year the competition for spots gets tougher and if they don't have fun and love the sport they won't try as hard to get a spot. The secondary goal with both teams is to bring warm-up games to the forefront. A team gets the court for themselves for 2-5 minutes - depending on the tournament and what match- Why do we as volleyball coaches think that time must be spent on hitting lines? That isn't game-like; when does a setter get a perfect pass for a perfect set to a hitter standing around waiting. Nobody warms up in that situation. Warm-ups are to prepare the players for the game ahead; physically and mentally. Why not use a game for that? Short-court, ladders, north-south, fish on, back attack, four on four, kill the setter... There are options here!

I'm working on a paper for the club. Not because it was assigned but because I feel that there are issues for new coaches that need to be addressed. Maybe a glossary and an atlas would be better suited but I don't draw well. The benefit our club has over some others is that we utilize current college players. They bring a great understanding to the game, but most have never coached before. Most other clubs in the area have coaches that are very far removed from the sport other than playing sand court in the summer as a way to relive the glory days. I'm not saying one is right and the other wrong, but...with the youth of our coaching staff comes a...I don't actually know the proper word for it. A timidness I suppose. Sure we know drills, we know the sport inside and out. But we haven't developed the eye for knowing what all 12 people are doing in that 900 square feet all at the same time. I don't think that is something that can be taught or learned or cultivated. I also don't think that you're either born with that ability or you aren't. I lean more towards the side that says young coaches need to immerse themselves even more fully into the sport. Watch tape, go to conferences, go to seminars, pick other coach's brains, talk to your players, talk to other players from other teams, read, but most of all...practice which equates to try. The worst that can happen is you fail. So what?

You can't win them all.

-Buck