Updated and corrected…I had a typo on the email address so if you tried to email us about the event and it got returned, please try again! 

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

Well here it is, We’ve gotten enough interest that we will be having a 15’s team at TR this year!  Tryouts for this team will be held at Notre Dame Academy from 5:00 – 8:00 this Sunday November 15th.  The cost of the tryout is $20 and every player will be given an evaluation regradless of if they make the team or not.  Please help us spread the word!!!

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!

A lot of you have been asking a lot of questions about the scheudle and how various parts work so I thought this might help give everyone a better picture of how it all fits together.  This is not a set scheudle but it is pretty representative of what a season with TR will entail and roughly what it will cost. 

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.

We will be hosting tryouts for 13’s & 14’s at Notre Dame from 2:00 – 4:30 on SATURDAY November 7th.  Please arrive at 1:30 so we can get paperwork done!  We will be charging $20 for the tryout and evaluation.  Team offers will be emailed by noon on Sunday the 8th.  We are looking at 1-3 teams depending on the number of athletes that show up.

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!!!

Greetings Everyone!

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!

Toledo Revolution will be host organizational meetings on Sunday October 18th and Sunday October 25th at 7:00 in the gym at Notre Dame Academy.  At this time we have not determined how many teams or at what age groups we will have teams.  There is a lot of interest being expressed but we must first determine how much interest there is at each age level.  We are open to anyand all ideas from just being a training organization, to fielding teams in each age group.  What we won’t do is just offer a bunch of teams and throw them together with inexperienced coaches to make some money.  If we have enough elite level players that want to train under our system, we will put them with a high quality coach and work with the families to produce a schedule that fits the philosophy and goals of TR.

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!

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!

Howdy Y’all!

Thanks to those who made a point to mention that they missed the updates.  Some even wondered in public chat forums!  It’s good to feel like people are paying attention.  These girls deserve it!  There just wasn’t much to write about unless you want details of the workouts…those might be trade secrets for Maryellen though

Well, the conditioning part of our training ends with a final workout on Saturday.  Maryellen has done a fantastic job of working with these girls in a way that’s targeted, fun, and most of all, athleticly beneficial!  You can actually see a major difference in the way that they move, their balance, their strength, and even in their posture.  I can’t wait to get them in the gym on Monday to start the long task of directing that athletic ability into proper techniques.  Don’t worry, just becasue we are moving out of the conditioing period into the technique training period doesn’t mean we forget about conditioning.  We will be doing warm up workouts everyday before practice and a cool down stretch and core work session at the end of each day.

On a team chemistry note, the girls have really turned the corner in this area.  I had mentioned a few times how quiet they were in workouts and at open gyms.  Well I can assure you that it’s not an issue anymore.  After working out together for so long and a couple of team sleepovers…I can’t get them to shut up!   Now we need to see if that energy translates to the court.

There have been many questions about our playing schedule and the actions taken by other clubs and the OVR against us.  I wasn’t going to comment on the controversy as I thought just falling on the sword and moving forward would be the best thing.  However I’m finding out that in our culture, silence is judged as guilt and leaves all kinds of room for speculation.   I am still undecided as to weather I should issue a public statement about what we feel was a major injustice or just hold my peace and let people say what they will.  Rest assured, we have a very competitve schedule of 6 tournaments and none of the controversy has effected our girls in the least. 

Thank you to Blackswamp, CVC, Mavrick, and all the others who have remained friends, offered their support, and took the time to hear the whole story.   Also a huge thanks to Scott Monroe at Oiler Attack for all of his support.  We’re proud to be under the Oiler Umbrella! 

Finally several people have asked if I am planning to blog after every practice.  The answer is, I’ll try!  I can’t guarantee that it will happen EVERY night, but I really like the idea of putting out there what we are doing and how we are doing it.  Several parents and coaches have commented on how much they like it so I’ll try to do it as much as i can.  Maybe I can even get Coach Dave to write a blog or two, after all he’s already on facebook!

As always, please feel free to leave a comment or ask a question.  See you all next week….

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!