The Week

CEV SCA U18W Championships, here we come!

This is it, the week these girls have prepped for like crazy since the start of the year and we fly out to Malta on Wednesday. We’ve had our week with Manù Benelli¹, where we had some brilliant technical tune-ups and a lot of time for the team to bond, we had a great training on some last minute stuff on Saturday with a few players who missed the trip, and we get our last addition to the squad from the USA at the airport on Wednesday

We appreciate any and all support, of course, anything to help bring down the cost of these trips for our players, as, in Ireland, our national team players have to pay their own way a lot of the time, so if you can find it in your heart (*soaring music here…*), we’d love the support: https://gofund.me/c2321e44

Last Training

Our last training we worked a lot on our setter mobility and the setter-middle connection, with drills like this court coverage setting drill:

And we worked through some 6-on drills like these

Serve and Pass Battle - 12:10 - 12:40 (might flip serve and pass battle and defense)

• Put <player, player, player> basically everybody, all into rotation passing (stat passing)

• Middles taking turns rotating through middle role

• Both setters in action

• Stat passing

Defenders vs Hitters (or Coach) Read Drill - 12:45 - 1:20pm

Work on positioning and cover on defense, with middles playing left back as well as middle front, liberos also getting reps in left back

Statting Passing

You know me (well, if you knew me, if you don’t), you’d know anytime I consider statting anything I’m not going to just write it down on paper, I’ll write a whole new app for it to make it easy to crunch the numbers later.

I want to have an idea of how our passers are doing. We talked a lot with them these past few weeks about how difficult a skill it is and how difficult it is to keep your head up. None of the other skills have the notion of a “perfect” anything. A kill is a kill, if you get it by crushing the ball or if you shank the ball off your knee and it drops on the other side for a point, they look the same on the scoresheet. There’s no perfect assist or perfect block… but we have perfect passes.

So I kept stats (I actually did just use pen and paper this time) on the passing in a few key drills, and recorded others where I wanted to be available to give more direct feedback without the distraction of the paper and stats, with the goal of having an idea of who handles the pressure well enough. Last year in Malta we got out in the bright lights, big court with a very young team (most of them U16), and it was shell shock from the word ‘go.’ Without a decent pass our setters’ legs fell off, and, well, it all goes downhill from there, really. So we have some more contingencies, this year. And by taking stats and looking them over for our players throughout the year we’ve been able to have a good idea of who might be good to pop into a situation… and let them know ahead of time that we’ve tracked that, so they know we’re thinking of using them.

Volleyball Stats 9000 Update - 1.5!

For those who use Volleyball Stats 9000, you might have noticed an update.

After Malta, I’ll write up a little feature on the new features, bug fixes, and talk about the direction for it, in the future. But if you updated, I would check out the settings wheel at the bottom of your tracked matches list, for sure.

Wish us luck, in the meantime!

1.

Incidentally, vote for her in the hall of fame fan vote here: https://www.volleyhall.org/ivhf-fan-vote.html