THOUGHTS FROM COACH Kim TENNAL
YOU BECOME A BETTER COACH WITH MORE EFFICIENT PRACTICES
Recently I reconnected with one of my players from over 40 years ago. She is now a grandmother who is raising her granddaughter. I ran into her at a club volleyball tournament several weeks ago. It is so great to run into “kids” that you coached that many years ago and they still remember what you taught them. It was fun hearing about the skills she remembered and that she still knew how I taught them. Her granddaughter is just learning the game of volleyball but really loves the game. My player was very disappointed in her granddaughter’s coaches, she didn’t feel like they were teaching the girls HOW to play the ball and what to do. She was even more disappointed when she overheard these coaches who tell their team “We may as well just go home if you’re all gonna play like crap! This is not how volleyball is played. Every single one of you just suck….”
WOW when I heard that it just broke my heart. These are young ladies, I’m sure they are doing the best that they can. If they don’t know what to do or how to do it, they very simply don’t know what to do. If my players didn’t do well then I figured it had something to do with the way that I ran practice. What could I change that would change what they were doing? What specifically can’t they do? Then we would find a drill that addressed that skill and worked on it daily until they could do it. You have to break the game down and see what it is that is missing in your instruction. Most of us coach kids that need to be taught what to do. They will learn it if you teach it. Then drill it until they get better. Please try to look for what they do right and praise that! Please don’t tell kids “they suck.” Use coaching cues to remind them how to do it correctly and what to do.
sERVE RECEIVE
For example, if they are not serve receiving well then up the number of serve receive drills that you do. You cannot master every skill in one practice. Generally it takes repetition, repetition, repetition! Serve receive is one of the most important skills necessary to be successful, so we usually did at least 4 serve receive drills daily. Sometimes we did more when we needed to. However, all the drills were different and no more than TEN MINUTES for each drill. Get as many touches on the ball as possible in the shortest amount of time. As I write more about how we set up drills you will come to understand how we got more touches than any other team around.
Many of the drills that we used we developed because of something that happened in a game. If we weren’t able to play a certain ball then we worked on that. It might be a two minute drill done daily or every other day until we were able to do the skill. Then don’t completely forget about that drill as the season goes on. Throw it in your plans every once in a while.
Some drills are your bread and butter drills that have to be done daily. You can’t just work on a skill at the first part of the season and expect them to keep that skill if you don’t reinforce it often.
EMERGENCY MOVES IN VOLLEYBALL
One of the things that our teams were better at than other teams were keeping the ball in play. We just didn’t let it hit the floor very often. We worked a lot on the “emergency moves” that are needed in volleyball. Not every ball goes exactly where it is supposed to, especially with young players, in fact most of them don’t go where there were supposed to go. Knowing what to do with the unexpected ball will win LOTS of ball games. To be great at these moves you do have to PRACTICE them!!
I miss coaching, I loved coaching! I’m too old to do it now but hopefully I can help someone out there to become a better coach with our webpage.
Coach T signing off for now!
