Does your team tend to get off to a slow start?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know I’ve had teams do that. During the 2012-13 season I coached a women’s team in Division I of the English NVL<\/a>. It seemed like every set we struggled at the beginning for some reason. You can get away with that when you’re clearly the stronger team. It can really put you in a bind against more competitive teams, though. I decided to try to do something about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in the olden days, when it was sideout scoring and matches were played to 15 points, coaches sometimes encouraged their teams to break games (we didn’t call them “sets” then) into segments. Each segment was 5 points. Some coaches went so far as to have different approaches or focal points for each of those segments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, the NVL incorporated a technical timeout when the first team reached 8 points, and again when at 16. Essentially, they chopped each set into three segments, just as coaches did with the 5-point ones before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea of segmenting a set is something that came up in my Volleyball Coaching Wizards interview with Mike Lingenfelter<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBreaking the game up<\/h6>\n\n\n\n