This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log.
Not my best training session in the context of where we are in the training. I was down a few players for various reason, so wasn’t able to quite do the team training stuff I’d have normally done. Instead I had the team working on a few other things.
After dynamic warm-up they did the Touch & Go game. I followed that up with 3 and 4-person over-the-net pepper and then had them do some serving. From there I moved them to the hard drill. I set the target at 5, but they weren’t able to achieve that. There were some good rallies and some nice hits, but the mix of players didn’t make for a group who was going to handle things as well as if we’d had a couple others. I eventually shifted things on the net in the form of cooperative cross-court hitting. The result was similar. After a bit more serving, I finished training with a round of 3-serve mini games.
Those two cooperative drills are ones I decided to do based on the number of players I had and how they can work on multiple aspects of play – hitting, defense, playing intelligently, etc. They are good drills from that perspective, but in this situation where I want to be building the players up for Final 8s and I didn’t have the group which was going to have the best chance of success they were probably not the best choice. That puts a premium on doing trainings next week that have a much more positive vibe to them.
