{"id":5683,"date":"2014-09-22T09:00:48","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T08:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coachingvb.com\/?p=5683"},"modified":"2014-09-22T09:00:48","modified_gmt":"2014-09-22T08:00:48","slug":"and-then-it-all-went-sideways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/2014\/09\/22\/and-then-it-all-went-sideways\/","title":{"rendered":"And then it all went sideways!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Once upon a time<\/a> I mentioned a challenge I had in running a pair of tryouts<\/a> for the Exeter university teams I coached. Specifically, I had to plan something despite not knowing how many players I would have, or how many helpers. I had only an hour allocated for each gender. That’s inclusive of introduction and warm-up (and any lingering registration stuff). So basically, I needed a flexible warm-up activity that could account for players trickling in from getting registered. Then I had to have about 40 minutes worth of primary drills\/games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A real coach’s dream situation, eh?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I basically took a end-to-beginning approach in my planning. I wanted to end with some kind of play. Given my expectation of large numbers and the small amount of time, 6 v 6 was out. I needed something that could reasonably accommodate player counts in the 20s on a single court. I decided to go with two half-court Speedball<\/a> games going side-by-side. Depending on the numbers, I could have both mini courts be doubles, both be triples, or one for each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since I had access to the bigger sports hall, I really wanted to see serving and passing. For that I picked the 2-sided serving & passing drill<\/a>. It’s one that allows for some flexibility in numbers involved. That said, however, you probably don’t want more than about 14 in the drill (6 passers, 2 targets, 6 servers). That meant I needed to have something on the side for excess players and to thereby have a rotation through the drill. That would have to be something like a pepper or defensive drill which could be done without the net in a fairly confined area. I decided that if I had helpers of a reasonable caliber I would have a defense station, but otherwise go with group pepper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, if players were serving – and then later hitting – I needed to make sure their shoulders were sufficiently warm. To accomplish that, I decided to split the group in half. One would do a partner serving warm-up on the net, the other would do partner pepper off the court. After a certain amount of time (probably 5 minutes max) I would have them flip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That leaves the initial warm-up. My plan was to have the returners lead the group in dynamic warm-up after the introduction. By that point we should have most people, if not all, through the registration process and ready to go. Plus, it would give me a chance to see who takes it seriously and who just goes through the motions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the basic plan going in. Here’s the reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The women<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

I ended up with what must have been close to 50 women’s trialists!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That mandated a rapid change of approach. We had to make on-the-fly cuts, which I wouldn’t otherwise do. Fortunately, we had more gym space than we’d though, so rather than saying to a player “Sorry, you’re out” we could simply move them over to the other side of the curtain where they could continue working with some of the helpers who were on-hand. Yes, those players probably figured out pretty quickly what the situation was, but it was a bit more gentle than having to just ask them to leave the gym outright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We ran four-person pepper<\/a> after doing a dynamic warm-up. That was when we started culling the more obvious No’s. I then had them doing some serving – kind of like a pre-match warm-up thing. Definitely not ideal given the numbers we still had, but it was an easy way to identify more players just not up to the required standard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily, having the extra gym space availed us of a second court. Because of a curtain situation it wasn’t full-sized, but we managed. I split the group in half and sent one set of players over there to hit, keeping the other to do serving and passing, swapping the groups at a certain point. We were able to get down to 27 players left in the mix for the last 20 minutes, during which I had them play Speedball, more or less as outlined above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The men<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Things were much more reasonable for the men. We only had 20 of them to manage, which was just a little more than we had last season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because they had largely been peppering and stuff on the other side of the curtain before getting going, after doing a dynamic warm-up I had them go straight into doing some serving. As with the women, I also had them doing serving and passing, and finished with Speedball. Because I had a bit of extra time, though, I also had them run through hitting lines going through 4 and 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outcomes<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

I met with the leadership after the men’s try-out to discuss who would be invited back for this week’s try-out continuation. On the women’s side we cut the list from that 27 still involved at the end down to 17. On the men’s side we ended up with 15.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving forward<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

The week after that initial tryout we had sessions on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. They were a combination of a continuation of the try-outs and the start of training for that year’s teams. The anticipation was we might see a handful of additional players turn up who either didn’t know about the trials, weren’t on campus yet, had a conflict, or whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was personally looking forward to being able to really take a close look at the new players that week after the initial view. Especially with the women, it was almost impossible to do that during the tryout. As I told someone that evening, I was so focused on who we should cut that I didn’t have the opportunity to really look at the Yes and Maybe players to see what they had to offer. Now I could do that and start to think in terms of team composition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In which I develop a volleyball try-out plan which seems reasonable but is totally overwhelmed by the number of players who show up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,20],"tags":[483,484,485],"class_list":["post-5683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coaching-volleyball-stories","category-volleyball-practice-planning","tag-volleyball-trials","tag-volleyball-try-out","tag-volleyball-try-outs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}