So finally at long wait we had our first official practice of the year!!!
I had been in Florida all weekend and my flight home today that was supposed to get into Detroit at 12:30 didn’t get in until 3:00…that made for some hectic driving to Perrysburg for our first go around. The nice part was that I got to go over practice plans and potential rotation projections in the airport for about 2 hours!
Tonight was mainly ball control work as most of this week will be. We focused a great deal on basic passing breaking it down in all of the details we want them to be focusing on. Both Coach Dave and I are big believers in centerline passing, a form of midline passing that focus on getting hips behind every ball. We constantly harpped on using hips and shoulders rather than platform movement to pass the ball. Drill wise we did 50’s, perfects, around the horn, acceleration, and firestep. If you’d like more info on these drills feel free to drop me a line!
After about 45 mins of ball control we gave the grisl some time to work on serving. I’m a big beleive that serving drills are vastly over rated. The main reason for this is that almost every serving drill is based entirely on zone serving. While zone serving is important, the way zone drills are scored does not reward palyers for the toughness of the serve. When we do serving work, I want my girls to feel like they can try something new. How else are they going to learn to serve tougher if every practice drill penalizes for misses?
we speant a little bit of time running our favorite dril, clock serve receive. We had moments of excellence, but still a lot of miscommunication and passers unsure of themselves. Once we learn our responsibilities and how to play next to each other, we have the potential to be a very good serve receive team.
Fianlly we ended with competiton. We ran our favorite Notre Dame game today. It deosn’t have a name yet!!! It involves getting 10 opportunities in serve receive in each rotation and having to score a certain number of points in those 10 opportunities with a first ball kill resulting in 2 points. Again we had moments of brilliance, but saw A LOT to work on.
Overall I was very happy with todays session. It’s a good base upon which to build and the girls worked hard and were in good spirits. Coach Dave and I both agreed that we have great athletes on this team as demonstrated in how fast they are able to correct and adjust when we give them instructions and cues. Maryellen truly did a wonderful job as our girls are in great volleyball shape. Coach Dave was amazed at how strong they are for 14 year olds.
We are excited to continue, especially when we get to the point where the girls know the drills and what we are looking for. At that point the intensity rises as we don’t have to pause to instruct so much. I can’t wait to push them…I know they can handle it 
Viva!
Tags: Session Notes, Sessions, toledo, Toledo Revolution, Toledo Revolution Volleyball, TR Volleyball, Training, Volleyball
Tags: Session Notes, Sessions, toledo, Toledo Revolution, Toledo Revolution Volleyball, TR Volleyball, Training, Volleyball