Video Tips and Drills

Setting – Partner Quicks: A fun setting drill to get setters lots of reps on quicks, isolating those wrists. Sometimes young setters struggle to control the short set as they want to do too much with it. The jump reps force them to separate the jump from the force of the set – very valuable concept!

Balance Pod Stability Passing:  Another quick habit forming drill to reinforce the idea of “keeping the body quiet” while passing. Too much movement is never a good thing and many players want to do too much beyond trusting their platform angle and a little push. Using the balance pods is both fun and useful for teaching!  If you are interested in the pods, they are available in the training aids store for $15 per pair; Click Here

Triangle Hip Passing: A quick habit forming drill that adds movement to the ideas of the hip/angle passing. There are several subtle iterations that you can do on this one that really teach the players how to line a ball up to create great angles with their platforms!

Knee Swings: The last of our arm swing series for a while – this one focuses on the “neutral elbow” draw back – even with shoulder. It also works on torso rotation and incorporating core into the swing.

Rapid Fire Swings: A fun and fast hand to ball contact drill that acts as both an arm warm up and reinforces the principles of our throwing program. I like the pace of this one and the ability to work on different kinds of hand to ball contact without the rigors of jumping.

Dot Swings: Another post throwing program arm swing drill that reinforces the principles of the throwing movements while adding hand to ball contact and works on contact points for shot of different depths!

Crow Hop Swings: After our throw work we always move into a hand to ball contact drill that reinforces the movements from the throwing program but translates it into a volleyball swing. We have several different drill for this and this is the first one!

Throwing Progression 5 & 6: Here are the last 2 throw movements we use in our velocity training. These 2 movements really teach full body coordination in a natural and athletic way. It’s so neat to see them “figure it out” as they go on these swing as it looks more and more athletic as their bodies learn how to work everything together!

Next week we’ll show some hand to ball contact drills that we do after our throws to translate the throw work into volleyball arm swings.

Throwing Progression 3 & 4: Here is the second video detailing our throwing program for adding velocity and shoulder stability. This one demos the 3rd and 4th throwing movements in the progression. Again, we normally use the weighted sand balls but are just using dodge balls in this video to protect the wall! Movements 5 and 6 will be posted soon and then actual hand to ball contact work work using the throws principles.

Throwing Progression 1 & 2: This week’s video is the first of several going through our throwing program. We developed this program upon consultation with some baseball people who have a great track record of velocity gains while lowering the incidents of shoulder injuries. We have really seen solid results in the athleticism of our throwing and it translates well to hitting harder with more stable shoulders.

One Arm Chair Passing: This week’s video is a simple chair passing drill that a lot of teams do to work on platform angles but we’ve added in a little one arm “trick” to reinforce driving the off shoulder down to create the platform angle rather than letting them turn the torso or pull across their body.

Quick Fire Setting: Our new video for the week is another setting video of a drill we call “Quick Fire Setting”. It’s a great way to get a whole bunch of reps in rapid succession. Great for warm up, habit building, or even for struggling setters to get their heads out of the way and reestablish their hands.

The Setter’s Square: This week’s drill video is one called “Setter’s Square” that I’ve been doing with setters for a long time. It’s a simple way to get a bunch of reps really working on finding the ball in space and centering it on the forehead while getting squared up from different types of pivots.

Feedback is such an important part of coaching and yet so few really understand the nuances in terms of frequency, style, tone, and structure within a situation. Here is a great primer by our friends at TrainUgly.com on some of the feedback ideas we use.