Training with VolleySensei

05/11/2022

Drills make you better...at doing drills.

02/20/2022

A problem with many studies about volleyball is that they are really studying volleyball *players* and not necessarily the sport itself. Good cohort design selects for consistency in population composition, and thus assumes homogeny in the volleyball player population. An assumption worth challenging.

07/29/2021

Two cases in the Tokyo Olympics. Says a lot about our systemic bias.

Simone Biles, currently the most decorated American gymnast, withdrew from team finals in the Tokyo Olympic Games citing her mental health, earning ire from pundits all over the internet. Granted, …

06/24/2021

http://volleysensei.com/coaching-juniors-in-the-time-of-covid-19

On 15 May 2021, a fiasco erupted at a juniors volleyball tournament in Colorado. One of the coaches, Dixie Lawless, happens to be a breastfeeding mother, and was barred from entering the facility. …

03/14/2021

What makes something fundamental in volleyball?

Leave a bunch of naive kids with a volleyball and a court, and usually a game emerges. Methods will be different – usually they’ll resort to catching and throwing the ball, and the team compo…

01/12/2021

http://volleysensei.com/being-fair

The events of 6 January 2021 at the US Capitol in Washington DC, when domestic terrorists laid siege to what should be a routine political process, were horrendous and disquieting, and one of the t…

11/28/2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET4fuIEqBoc

The women’s game in these series is more informative - very little commentator overhead, pretty good cinematography of complete rallies. Of note: how wasteful the 3 person receive is, how ineffective verbalization is, how long Sarah Sponcil holds the ball on hand sets, how entrained the players are to net play

World Champion 4 vs 4 Beach Volleyball Team Geena Urango, Emily Hartong, Kelly Reeves, Karissa Cook & Allie Wheeler take on Team California Kelly Claes, Sara...

09/01/2020

http://volleysensei.com/on-passing-the-ball

Coaching volleyball is often predicated on the idea that the different strategic touches on the ball (“passing”, “setting”, “attacking”) are modular skills that can be independently practiced that …

11/29/2019

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5b9Dyflhul/

Most people start kids on volleyball with an exercise like this as a measure of their ability to play. Except it just introduces poor reflexes: this activity will almost never happen in the real game, and it does not include the important aspect of controlling the ball over the net. If we can only stop this, then we won’t have to break the habit to get players to improve.

08/13/2019

Drills aren’t the solution. Compartmentalizing skills aren’t to the benefit of the student, they’re to benefit the coaching industry.

07/22/2019

http://volleysensei.com/drills-skills-and-goodhearts-law

How you measure success matters.

Almost every volleyball clinic or training program divides learning into modularized skills. Drills that purport to teach and reinforce specific aspects of the game are in abundance on the internet…

07/18/2019

http://volleysensei.com/the-simplest-training-plan

Going through different learning theories, the simplest training plan for beach volleyball is having experienced athletes play with a relative novice against a range of teams. Rather than following…