Coaches can consider selecting fewer drills throughout the season and then learn how to sequence those drills appropriately to train specific concepts or facets of the game. A typical two-hour practice can only consist of four to six drills.

Here are some reasons why less drills can often be more beneficial to your practice:
  1. Reduces the topics or information you try to cover in a practice. Remember the primacy recency effect. It’s better to have a centralized focus throughout the practice, it has a higher retention.
  2. The amount of time it takes to reorganize and explain a drill. How often have you spent more than 20 minutes in a practice, just trying to get the drill right? Are we trying to be good at running drills or playing functional volleyball?
  3. Fewer drills allows the coach to focus on providing fundamental feedback to the athlete, not the drill design.

The success of the team does not rely on running the correct drills to solve your biggest problems, it relies on the feedback of the coaches and response of your athletes. Instead of focusing on more drills try to vary the feedback you give, who you give it to, and where you give it from.

Drill Design

Below are a few things to consider when it comes to designing and varying a drill. Keep in mind the goal of variation is to place an emphasis on something, simulate a specific situation, or increase repetitions.

Scoring
Scoring drills is a useful tool for a lot of reasons. One advantage of scoring, is to keep drills competitive. Coaches should minimize running for lack of discipline, but running to put something on the line is a good way to keep things competitive.

Scoring drills is also a good tool when it comes to measuring progress. Record scores and post them after practice. That will serve as a good baseline the next time you do that drill.

Finally, scoring can be used to reward on a specific skill or behavior. For example, we may award 2 points for running the middle attacker and 1 point for any other earned point.

Ball Entry
Varying ball entry can have a large impact on the difficulty and functionality of a drill. Focus on what level of difficulty you want the first contact to experience. If your team is focusing on getting the first ball to the middle or defending a team that is in-system, a free ball may make the most sense. If you want to put pressure on the first contact, a down ball may be more appropriate.

Regardless of the ball entry you choose, make sure it’s appropriate for the output of the drill. At the older age groups, it’s encouraged to have players participate in the ball entry process. It keeps players engaged and frees up coaches to help run drills.

Feedback
Feedback is the single biggest difference between great coaches and problem managers. When giving feedback, there are a few things that are helpful.
Be specific and focused on your feedback. Talk to players about correcting a theme or single problem. This will help keep the player focused on making change to a specific task. Coaches who provide too much feedback overload the athlete, or the athlete becomes overwhelmed with the idea of fixing everything.

Another useful practice when giving feedback is to divide the feedback up amongst your coaches. Have one coach focus on the attackers, while the other coach is working on setting. Each position group feels like they are getting individual attention.

Work towards players that are invested in solving their own problems. Ask them why they did something. It pushes accountability. If we can be held accountable for our mistakes, then we can be celebrated for our successes.

Don’t forget to provide praise when an athlete makes a good change. This is some of the most powerful feedback a coach can give to an athlete.

Goals
What is the goal of the drill? Coaches need to design drills with this single idea in mind. What do I hope to accomplish by running this drill? If I’m not accomplishing my goal, how can I make modifications to make sure we accomplish the focus of the drill.
Setting goals as a performance standard is also a useful tool. In the drill, Exchange, we set a goal of beating our previous record. Any time we do that drill in practice, we know exactly what the previous number was.

Pressure Opportunities
The greatest pressure any athlete or coach will face is failure. We must create an environment where vulnerability is accepted and embraced. Giving our athletes pressure opportunities in practice is important, not because we want to test them, but we want to prepare them. The best teams excel in the big moments and playing loose is a defining characteristic.

We can create these opportunities in a variety of ways. Below are just a few ideas to create the pressure opportunities in practice.

These are bonus points that can be added on to any drill or incorporated.

Three chances for 3 In-A-Row
In this format, the team that won the rotation gets three chances to win three rallies in a row. The first rally starts with a serve and the next two start with free balls (or whatever next balls you’d like). If they lose any of the rallies along the way (either the served ball, or the first next ball, or the second next ball) that is one chance down, with two to go. If the team wins three in a row at any point during the three chances, they secure the bonus point.

Warrior
In this format the team that won the rotation gets to designate a warrior- the player that must be set when they receive serve. The warrior raises their hand prior to the serve, so everyone knows where the ball is being set. The team receives serve, and the warrior must be the attacker. It is possible to require teams to rotate through warriors so that you can’t use the same person twice, or you can assign the warrior by position (for example, whoever is the front row outside attacker must take the swing). If the pass is so bad that the warrior doesn’t get set, that counts as a loss. You can also play so that they must kill the first set or play so that they just must swing at the first set and let the rally play out. In the latter case, winning the rally counts as a win.

Servers vs. Passers
In this format, the team that won the rotation gets to choose whether they want their server to serve against the other team’s passers, or have their passers received the other team’s serve. The objective is for a perfect pass- if the passers pass perfect, they win, otherwise the server wins.

Increasing Reps
Opportunities to correct behavior (next to good feedback) is an important factor in skill acquisition. There is a balance between educating the athlete through explicit learning and guiding them towards implicit learning. Elite athletes become implicit learners because they can struggle through the acquisition process.

There are several things we can do to increase our athletes’ opportunities to respond. Below are a few good practices.

Limit Talking
When players are first learning, they need instruction. Once they understand how to do it, they need to learn how to do it. This only comes with increased reps. When you’re talking, you’re taking away contacts.

Kill a Drill
There are times when we want a rally to terminate naturally (play it out) and there are other times when killing a drill off early reduces the white noise. If the focus of the drill is blocking schemes and defending an in-system attack, the defending team doesn’t need to attack in transition.

Reduce the number of drills in practice
When we have many drills in practice, that requires each drill to be explained and set up. This wastes valuable time. Reduce the number of drills you use

There is a pandemic of coaches wanting a library of drills. Instead of modifying a familiar drill, coaches search for a novel drill to solve one problem. These often end in frustration as you try to teach your players a new drill that you may use one more time the rest of the season.

Instead, make modifications to a familiar drill. This will reduce the amount of time it takes to explain how the drill functions.

Played by rotation
It’s beneficial to play wash drills and games by rotation, rather than rotating as you would naturally in a game. There are several benefits to playing games this way. When playing by rotation, we like to rotate in the following order: 3, 6, 4, 1, 5, 2 or 2, 5, 1, 4, 6, 3. This order allows our middles to alternate on and off the court, as it is the most physically demanding of the positions. Some additional benefits are outlined below:

Retention
When learning the different rotations, we don’t want our athletes memorizing who they are next to. Instead, we want them to understand where the positions fall in the rotation. This will help you adjust in games without “practicing” the line up the night before.

Data Collection
When working on things by rotation, you will learn about your strengths and weaknesses. This can be done through data collection or by general observation. When a problem presents itself consistently in each rotation, it becomes a predictable problem. The best teams and coaches know their weak rotations before playing in a match.

Here are more resources to efficiently run a volleyball practice

View volleyball drills by skill and concept.

About the Author

This resource was provided by Travis Fuller, Club Director at The Academy Volleyball Club (Indianapolis, IN), a member of the Junior Volleyball Association, a nonprofit with nearly 1,700 clubs that is focused on improving the junior volleyball experience for volleyball directors, coaches, players and fans.