When I started coaching, I planned practice by collecting drills. I’d find a few I liked, put them in an order that seemed reasonable, and hope it all came together. It didn’t, and for a long time, I couldn’t say why.
More drills wouldn’t have fixed it. What I was missing was a way to decide what my team needed, then build the session around that decision. Here’s the framework I use now, and it works the same whether you’re coaching 12s or 18s.
Three-step practice planning loop: decide the focus, build the session, check it stuck, with the cycle running through your next match.
Step one: Let the game decide your focus
Every rally begins with a serve and a first contact, and that first touch gates everything after it. When the pass is bad, the set becomes a scramble and the attack is out of system. The quality of every contact downstream of the bad pass drops. Ball control is non-negotiable. It’s the base the rest of the game is built on, and it takes a ton of reps to get good at.
Offense is the most over-practiced skill at any age level. Think about how often each action happens in a match. Every point starts with a serve and a pass.
So I start there. I aim for serve and receive to be about half of our practice on the court. That doesn’t mean half your time is spent serving and passing in isolation. It means that of the drills you have going, about half should involve a serving or passing contact. As an example, a split-court doubles tournament with five-minute games gets you tons of serve and pass, and it’s a lot of fun.
Then adjust for your level. Younger and less experienced teams need even more ball control and more out-of-system reps because that’s what their matches look like. More advanced teams can add defensive and offensive systems, though it’s still mostly first contact.
Here’s the real principle: Match your practice to what actually happens in your games, not what you think should happen.
Step two: Build the session so the focus escalates
Once you have a focus, structure practice so each phase pushes further into it. Think of a meal at a nice restaurant. They aren’t bringing you a steak the second you sit down, and they aren’t rushing you out before you’ve had dessert. Each course sets up the next. Practice is the same way.
- Warm-up. Use the ball for maximum touches and movement, getting into volleyball motion as fast as possible. This isn’t college volleyball, and we don’t have six hours in the gym every day, so I don’t like to waste any of it.
- Focus block. One, maybe two areas, taught through drills that layer into each other. If passing is the focus: a footwork passing drill, then platform work, then reps off player serves.
- Competition. Don’t just scrimmage. Build a game that scores your focus. If passing is the focus, make perfect passes worth two points so the team is chasing the exact thing you just practiced.
- Cool-down. Short and used for review.
The third phase is where most practice plans lose the plot. Don’t use a generic scrimmage at the end that undoes everything you just worked on. Focus on the skills you trained earlier.
Practice phases building on each other: warm-up adds touches and movement, the focus block adds the focus in isolation, competition adds game pressure.
Step three: Check whether it stuck
At the end, I like to ask the team what the focus was. If they can’t tell you, it didn’t stick, and that tells you where to start next practice. If they can, you can talk through the details and what everyone took from it.
The part that doesn’t change
Your focus will change week to week, but the method doesn’t. Watch what your matches demand, pick one thing, build every phase around it, and make sure your athletes can name it on the way out.
If you want an easier way to find and organize your drills and plan practice, check out SoloCoach, a volleyball practice planning app I built. It keeps all your drills in one place, and you build each practice by dragging and dropping your favorite drills into your plan.
About the Author
This article is from Kai Mashima, a club and high school volleyball coach with over a decade of experience. He created SoloCoach and is the CEO of SoloStats/Rotate123. You can find more of his coaching content at @thatcoachkai.
