Today was by far our best practice. The girls really worked hard, showed some impressive skill, and even showed a bit of energy and intensity in a competitive drill!
We started off with a 4 station warm up workout. The girls worked hard as always, another by product of 2 months of proper workouts. After the warm up work out, we did some arm swing warm up/hand to ball contact drills including one I call, “trick hits.” Trick hits involves the coach tossing so that the girls have to swing at balls from strange angles moving quickly to get into position to put a good swing on the ball. It’s a great hand-eye, hand to ball contact drill, not to mention it’s pretty fun!
After that I took half of the girls and worked on arm swings from our brand new steel jump box while Coach Dave worked the other half through run through passing. Run through passing focuses on proper movement to the ball, proper angles to the ball, and hip orientation. The arm swing work off the box allows us to focus on the small details of the arm swing including hip rotation, hand placement on the ball, and ab contraction upon contact.
From there we picked up with another favorite team drill called Clock serve receive. Today we put a score on it and a time limit to reach that score. While we failed in the first attempt, we beat it the next two times. Perhaps most importantly as the clock drew down, the girls talked more, got more into it, and encouraged each other more. That’s exactly the reaction to pressure we are looking for.
Finally we ended by throwing a lineup on the court and going through several serve receive points in each rotation. There were flashes of brilliance and moments that reminded us how young we are and how little we’ve practiced 
We’ll try a bunch of lineups over the course of the next several weeks. We have so many girls with multiple talents that we have a ton of flexibility with what we can do!
I’m pumped after the first week. They are improving so fast that if this keeps up we might be a pretty competitve team. I remain realistic about our chances of success early on if success is measured by wins. We just need to continue to remember that our true goal is simple; have fun and get better! I know we’re doing that right now!!!
Viva!
Tags: Practice, Practices, Session Notes, Session Updates, Sessions, toledo, Toledo Revolution, Toledo Revolution Volleyball, Toledo Volleyball, TR Volleyball
Tags: Practice, Practices, Session Notes, Session Updates, Sessions, toledo, Toledo Revolution, Toledo Revolution Volleyball, Toledo Volleyball, TR Volleyball