Well it’s pretty late and I’ve been working non stop since 9:15 this morning.  The only break I took was for practice!

Practice today got off on a bit of a sour note for me as I quickly am discovering that our facility isn’t used to having a regular volleyball practice schedule.  Minor details, but annoying ones.  the facility really does fit our needs very well, we just need to work out the kinks.  I may call for some help over the weekend to head over there and do some court and equipment maintainence.  Could be a fun team builder

As for practice, it was more ups and downs with more ups than downs.  We did a lot of new things tonight including free ball drills in which we actually work on the seemingly simple skill of placing the ball where we want it if we have to give the other team a free ball.  We also worked on out of system back row attacks for a while.  This a big part of how we play.  We hate giving up easy free balls.  At this level I know it will result in more mistakes than are normal, but I want to develop aggressive palyers!

After some hitting and quite a few ball control drills including some dive and rolls drills, we set up six on the court and popped in free balls rapid fire and let them play it out.  Many flashes of brilliance during this.  Our DS’s really are doing a great job!

After some serve work including jumpers we did some ab stations, stretched out and called it a night.  Another practice in the books, see you tomorrow!

Viva!

Tonight’s blog comes courtesy of our Trainer, Maryellen Jordan.  I had no idea she was going to do this, but it was a very plesant surprise when I opened up my email tonight.  Here is what she wrote;

To the parents of Toledo Revolution,

I just wanted to let you know what a privilege it was to train your girls! They are all great girls and I enjoyed my time with them.

I am honored that Scott trusted me enough to bring me on board of Toledo Revolution. 

I have the utmost respect of Scott’s ability as a coach. He has taught me much doing this time.

The training program that was designed for your girls was to develop a solid foundation of strength. Building a solid foundation of strength is critical for every female athlete competing in any sports that require strength and power.

My training philosophy is to expose youth athletes to a level of training which is appropriate for their age and ability.  Because the girls came into the gym and gave 100% they mastered the proper form and execution of several important exercises therefore helping themselves prevent injuries.

That is to be applauded J

The girls should realize that this added strength will be of great benefit to their performance on the court and they should have great confidence in it!

My ultimate goal was to provide a positive, enjoyable learning experience so that they may be hooked on exercise for life!

We had some “challenge” contests at the end of some of our trainings and I have decided to give All the girls a Positively Fit T-shirt. They are all winners!  (T-shirts on order- Do you blame me for wanting them as walking billboards!!)

Thanks again for the fun and rewarding experience.

Good Luck and go have fun!

Maryellen

Thanks for the note Maryellen.  Astheir coach i can’t tell you how nice it is to work with players who are properly conditioned.  They sure don’t look like 14 year old athletes. 

As for practice tonight, it was very productive again.  We did quite a bit more hitting tonight and some players made some real break throughs.  Surprisingly one of the keys was simply telling them to open up their hands bigger with making contact!

We ran some cooperative ball control drills and frankly we sturggled with them.  The silver lining was that it gave us an excellent opportunity to have a “conversation” about heart, focus, leadership, and teamwork.  The “conversation” being one sided with me laying down the law a bit and them running sprints .  I’m pretty sure they all still like me though and I got some pretty good nonverbal feedback that told me they got the point!

We also got to seperate out the setters and do some work with them while coach Dave showed off his athletic ability challenging the other players with a ball control digging game called coach on three.

Finally we ended with four on four back row only games to 7 with the loser having to do a consequence.  They played extremely well during these games.  Enough so that I got the bad taste out of my mouth from the poor performance during the cooperative ball control drills. 

Overall it was a solid practice with lots of improvement going on.  Things are moving so fast for some of our less experienced players, they are really getting a crash course and hadling it beautifully!

Coach Dave can’t make it tomorrow, so I’ll be on my own…

Viva!

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!

Well the first stage of our official training began this week and the girls are feeling it!  Every player has at least one workout in with Maryellen and here is her assesment and explanation of what they are doing right now;

At this time, they are learning the movement prep and warm-up exercises along with focusing on developing the mastery of specific exercises techniques and including multi-dimensional exercise.   I am having the girls do some exercise that will help correct some of the postural deficiencies and to increase flexibility. Most of these exercises are related to the assessments we did with the  girls.

Most of girls are using their own body weight as resistance at this time. Eventually they will be loaded up but not until they conquer the mechanics of the particular lift and learn the movement pattern. And believe me this will be sooner then anticipated!  I know some of them are sore, but…. sore in all the right places!

Well we decided to play with a couple of defensive systems sunday night as we had the luxuary of having an all state high school outside there to hit against us.  We went over the bare bones basics of both rotation and perimeter defense against the outside attack.  My goal for the year is for us to be so comfortable with each system that we will be able to switch defenses on the fly.

Workouts start this Saturday with Maryellen!  I’m pumped!!!  Keep an eye out for the parents clinic sometime after the holidays!

Well last night we had our first real training session.  We had planned it as an optional open gym, but with everyone there I figured we might as well do some training!

This early on we are trying to establish some basic motor skills that are needed to be able to teach certain techniques in the detailed way that we want them performed.  We went over how to cover the same distance of court in several different ways and several different numbers of steps.  We also speant a great deal of time with hip direction in regards to passing.  Lots of catch and freeze and catch and flip toss was used to work on hip orientation.  We are strong believers in hips initially face where the ball is coming from, then in flight are redirected to our target.  We also worked on body placement for arm swings.  Way too often coaches and players focus so much on the arm swing when truly 90% of the issue is getting you body in the right place to perform the arm swing. 

Overall, I thought it was a very successful practice in that we speant a great deal of time and effort on the building blocks of skills.  Movement patterns, hip orientation, hand to ball contact, and body positioning for the arm swing.  It wasn’t overly intense…..that comes later

I can’t tell you how excited I am to continue working with these girls.  Next Sunday is out becasue I have my NDA Volleyball Banquet, but the following Sunday is looking pretty good!  Check back for more updates!