Stay tuned for more info on tryouts and the coaching staff for 2011…VIVA!!!!

Highlights for the year included 14-1 knocking off a power MAVA 15’s team in Indy and both 14-1 and 14-2 making the gold round of the Dunes April Classic.  14-1 finished 3rd in both the Motor City Madness tourney and the Dunes April Classic, narrowly losing out to the eventual champs each time.  14-2 also had a nice showing going 7-1 but finishing only 5th due to some “interesting” formatting.  The 14-1 Team finished in the middle of the pack at nationals while 14-2 knocked out 4 wins in some very tough pools!  Between Michigan, Louisville, Indy, Dunes, and Orlando we saw some great competition and improved every time out.

I’m so pleased at some of the club development this year; 7 different coaches helped out with the two teams, girls headed to 7 different high schools played on our teams, and we proved again that the periodization format can and does work!  The girls all developed physically through the workouts with Maryellen in January and February, they all improved their skills during the training period, and we saw very little burnout and zero drama within the teams as was the case in year one.   

A big thank you goes out to all of the coaches, parents, and players for another great year at TR.  There are MAJOR plans for the 2011 season including teams in all age groups, adjustments to the training, and some fantastic new coaches coming on board.  Stay tuned!

Viva!!!!!

On April 10th TR will host an 8 team, single day tournament at Notre Dame Academy.  Any and all 14’s teams are welcome regardless of their OVR/USA/AAU/JVA affiliation.  We provide the insurance!  We’ll consider stong 13’s teams as well.  This will be a more relaxed tourney designed to be a chance to try out different lineups etc. while getting ready for bigger national type tourneys. 

If you are interested in entering a team, reffing this event, or just want more info, drop me a line at smattera@cfpohio.com

Thanks!

Email me for more detials

This team will follow the same training schedule as the smaple scheudle that was posted earlier on the site for the 14’s.  The tournament schedule will also be very similar!

Also that evening we will welcome any player who missed our 14’s tryouts last week.  We have a few spots left on our 14’s teams.

Please email me with questions!

Viva!

Sample Training Schedule

December 6^th, 13^th, 20^th, 27^th: Open Gyms (optional)

January 4^th – February 27^th: Conditioning At Positively Fit 2 nights per week, your choice which nights, plus full team workout Saturday mornings

March 1^st – May 6^th: Practice 4 days per week, Mondays off if it follows a tourney weekend.

May 10 – May 23^rd: Off Weeks

May 24^th – June 11^th: Nationals Prep Practice Schedule

Sample Tourney Schedule

March 13-14 Bluegrass Pre Qualifier – Louisville

March 20-21 Dunes March Madness – Michigan City, IN

April 10^th – Friendship Scrimmage – We Host in Toledo

April 16-18 JVA Youth Gala – Louisville

April 24-25 Michigan JVA Showcase – Grand Rapids, MI

May 8-9 Team Indiana Classic – Indy

June 5 or 12 – Pre National Scrimmage

June 16-19 – National Championship – Orlando, FL

***This Schedule is not set in stone.  It is meant to give potential families an idea of what they are committing to and what they will get for their fees.

The Fees for a 9 person team under a schedule like this will be around $1400 per player.  This includes coaching fees for a head coach and an assistant, coaches travel, facility rental, registeration, tournament entry fees, administrative fee, 2 jerseys, and a warm up top.  Every team will attend nationals, and there will be an extra fee at the end of the year for this.  The fee will be based on the tourney entry fee plus coaches travel expenses.  Figure around $200-$300 for the nationals fee.

Thank you to those who have made me aware the CYO Championships might go as late as 5:00 on Saturday.  What we will do is have a seperate tryout session at 6:00 for those young ladies who are in that Tourney (SJA, GESU, KATERI, BLESSED SACRAMENT) Sorry that it will be a terribly long day, but I figured you’d want your offer by Sunday!  Please email us if this won’t work.  I’d hate for someone to not be able to tryout becasue of scheduling conflicts. 

Announcement regarding the older age groups will come later this week! 

Hope to see you Saturday!!!

Due to the extremely large show of interest at 14’s we will conduct tryouts for at least one TR team in the 14’s age group.  Sunday the 8th is our target date but I’m still confirming the location.  Our tryout times will not conflict with TVC or Glass City!  Stay tuned for more details…

13’s is close to needing a tryout as well.  We need a few more families to make it worth while so if you are still interested and haven’t made contact yet, pelase do!

In 15’s-18’s we have several families interested.  We will do invitational teams in these age groups if there are enough quality players in these age groups. 

We will not be having teams under the age of 12 and early bird just isn’t going to fly…pun totally intended!  I strongly encourage those spring sport athletes to look at Glass City and TVC Early bird programs.  We’ll also run some clinics during that time that will be open to anyone and the conditioning with Maryellen Jordan is always available.  We’ll even help you find other players to join up with for the workouts!

Stay tuned for more detials.  I’ll post as they become available!

Viva!

Let it be known here that I, Scott Mattera, am suspended from the OVR.  I’m not ashamed of  this in any way.  I stand by our actions last year and truly believe that through this experience, some volleyball people in the area showed their true colors.  I have recieved nothing but support from around the state and even nationally from coaches who heard the entire story.  I’ll gladly put my reputation and track record up against anyone in the volleyball world, especially the OVR board.  

What this means for our club is that I am not allowed to participate in anything sanctioned by the OVR or USA volleyball.  As much as some other people in the area would like to, they can’t stop me from owning a company that trains kids in volleyball.  The JVA has teamed up with the AAU this year and they will have plenty of dates that our teams can play that aren’t USA/OVR sanctioned.  We went to JVA nationals last year rather than the USA nationals and the generaly feling was that the JVA event was BETTER than USA nationals.  We would also have the option of me having no involvement with teams that still want to participate in OVR events.  We’ve had offers from three clubs that would “umbrella” us as we did last year. 

All of these items and more will be discussed at the meetings, so please come check us out!  We had a great experience last year with every athlete getting 2 months of professional conditioning, 3 months of quality coaching, a very competitive scheudle and ZERO burnout for less than $1500. 

Finally, in addition to the meetings, if you know you are interested please drop me an email at ndavballcoach@hotmail.com.  It’s not a committment of any kind.  I’d just like to know asap how many are even considering TR.  The sooner I know the level of interest, the sooner I can make plans!

Thanks, Viva!

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!

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!