I’ve been heavy on the coaching clinics lately, and a common question has been popping up:
“What’s your favorite drill?”
I don’t have one.
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I’m not completely sure if that’s true or not, but I think it is.
My favorite drill is more a thought process inspired by our wonderful friends in that land of ecological dynamics (eco-D, if you’re cool enough) as well as our good friend, the Constraints Led Approach (CLA).
I’m going to try and keep that paragraph as jargon-y as I ever get. I have no desire to be a scientific Substack spending all day gathering footnotes.
So What Is My Favorite Drill?
What’s my favorite volleyball drill?
I don’t know, how about volleyball?
And now that the eye rolls are over, let’s dive into the process to create an actual drill…
PLAYING VOLLEYBALL IS THE BEST DRILL FOR PLAYING VOLLEYBALL.
Can we just agree on this?
“Yeah, but…” “But, what about…?”
Volleyball is the best drill for volleyball.
The War Metaphor
I give a military (of which I have no experience and have never served) analogy often.
If I told you you were going to war in two weeks. Maybe a place like Afghanistan or Iraq, where our armed forces have had to fight (forgive me for speaking out of my depth. What’s important here is the extreme nature of the environment.)
And yes, you only had two weeks to be ready. In all likelihood, you’re feeling a little, uh, panicked.
And we begin by shooting.
Makes sense, right?
But we’re going to start really slow. So it can look and feel perfect.
So yes, you’re going into all-out combat in two weeks, but right now, we’re going to take our sweet time. Make sure your aim is perfect.
We’ll have a standing bullseye, not moving, we’ll keep it stationary for you, so you can really get your bearings. Build on success and all that…
Then, and only when you’re ready, we’ll fire a shot. Remember, we want it to be perfect.
And we’ll spend days on that. Perfect perfect perfect. Bullseyes exploding everywhere.
Then, we ship you off to war. A perfect bullseye shooter under perfect conditions with inanimate targets set right in front of you.
How are you feeling about your chances? Me neither…
THIS IS OFTEN HOW WE PRACTICE.
This is not me taking a shot at volleyball, or volleyball coaching, or anything like that. If anything, I think volleyball is one of the leaders of breaking out of this. Still way behind soccer, though.
Football and basketball (I can only speak anecdotally here), are generally gross offenders.
The Game Is Not Perfect
We don’t play under perfect conditions. We don’t play where we get to take all the time in the world. We don’t play where all the decisions are made for us. We don’t even play trying to be perfect. We don’t. Ever.
We play (intrinsic motivators aside) to score the point, the goal, the touchdown, the move, etc.
So…
The best way to practice playing volleyball is to play volleyball.
OK, Now to Your Concerns
And there are some very valid ones.
There are about 15,000 situations that can happen when 6 players on one side play another 6 on the other side. If we’re just playing straight 6v6 volleyball games all the time, we won’t get to each of these 15,000 situations often enough.
We need reps. Lots of reps.
6v6 volleyball is the best drill for 6v6 volleyball, but it limits the number of times we can attend to each of these situations. We could go hours until the opportunity we need occurs for us.
Valid concern.
So, Let’s Create a Drill
TARGET THE MOST IMPORTANT OF THE 15,000 THINGS THAT CAN HAPPEN.
What’s the situation, specifically? Strip it all the way down to its barest essence.
Where’s the ball coming from?
What’s the move our player needs to make?
How would they want to respond?
Strip it all the way down.
Example:
Let’s say our left back defender needs to make a better digging move when the left side attacker hits at them (a cross court swing).
So the barest element would be…
One left back defender
One coach, on the same side of the net, standing where the left side attacker would hit at them
One ball
Ok, we have the player we’re focusing on, and the situation they need to respond to.
Just One Problem
This drill… sucks.
There’s no read. In fact, there’s the opposite of a read. The coach isn’t even on the other side of the net. There’s no decision-making. The player doesn’t just know what’s going to happen. They KNOW what’s going to happen.
Is this anywhere remotely similar to how they feel in a game? When they’re messing up said-movement?
Emotions matter in our practice drills. A lot.
Why? Because they affect our read.
Don’t believe me? Try doing something, anything, when you’re really scared or anxious. Now do the exact same thing in a state of calm.
And the read (or lack of read) affects the quality of movement. And the quality of movement affects our chances to win or lose the moment.
We can’t control emotions, but we can create conditions that are more likely to generate the emotions we will feel in a match.
And that matters quite a bit.
Go back to our shooter. Calmly firing at a stationary bullseye while their instructor smiled approvingly. Then go straight to combat… I’m seeing the beginnings of an intense emotional breakdown.
But we do have a beginning, so…
Let’s Build From Here
From this moment forward, we’re going to increasingly like our crummy drill more and more.
Let’s say, for-some-reason-I’m-probably-not-going-to-like-if-you-tell-me, you absolutely have to stay on the same side of the net as your left-side digger.
Can you at least vary the height of the tosses before you swing?
Can you add in some roll shots, some hard driven balls?
Create a Crystal Clear Focus
“I’m going to change the height of my toss, and hit different ways at you, but when you see ‘x’ happening, show me how you’d want to respond…”
Player dutifully shows Coach how they’d like to respond.
“Ok, so when you see ‘x’ happen, let’s see how close you can get to making the move you just showed me.”
Now We’re At a Place Where…
The engagement is great.
The drill still…
Yes. It still sucks.
It’s much better than when we started. The engagement is high, the focus is clear, the coach and player are working together. It’s even, dare we say… fun?
Not something I’m always known for…
But it’s still nowhere close to playing volleyball.
We need the read and decision-making to be as similar as possible.
So we…
Ramp Up the Visual Stimulus
I just got a little jargon-y again, but the noise…the noise of what makes this seemingly simple skill feel so hard.
All the extra players. All the sound coming from everywhere. The fears of messing up, getting pulled, losing, and all the uncertainty trying to guess what our opponent is going to do…
Noise affects signal. And the signal is… The thing that matters. In this case, the way our opponent chooses to attack the ball.
We can’t predict it with absolute certainty, but the good news is we don’t have to.
We just need:
To be in a balanced position (the ability to move where I want, when I want)
Have our eyes in the right place (the hitter’s torso and their relationship to the ball. (Tip: DON’T MICROMANAGE A PLAYER’S EYES)
Develop a movement, or tool we respond with, that predicts a high likelihood of success
And… lots and lots of opportunities to respond
So We Ramp Up the Stimulus
Can we get the coach to the other side of the net?
Can we jump and swing over the net? Can someone else?
Can we add a setter to set the hitter (who hits the ball over the net)?
Can we tell the hitter (without telling the defender) to do “x” somewhere between 1 out of 3, or 1 out of 4 times?
THIS DRILL DOES NOT SUCK ANYMORE
.
We’re achieving a high level of transfer now, and we can create more, but we now have…
The exact thing that will happen (a left-side hitter attacking a left-back defender on the other side of the net)
A clear focus for our defender (“Make ‘x’ move when ‘x’ situation occurs”)
A prompt (constraint) for our hitter to do ‘x’ situation 1 out of 3, or 1 out of 4 times, which demands the necessity for a read (just like a game)
Escalate Until...
You can add all sorts of visual cues at the pace of the learner from this point. But we’re achieving a high level of transfer already now.
We can add more players on either side of the net, make it more and more game-like, but the question “when to stop” is answered by…
When the opportunities to respond (or lack thereof) our player is getting are becoming too infrequent
The dilution of focus is too high from adding so much pesky noise to the drill
Once the drill is introducing a level of noise beyond the player’s current ability to process (key word “current” not forever) we will find ourselves in the midst of doing an entirely different drill.
Moving on. We’re almost there. One last question to answer…
CAN WE SCORE IT?
Is there a fun, accurate way to score it that reflects the game?
A simple way is to calculate how many times the way we’re introducing the ball would occur, and what % of success a good player would have in this situation.
Is it 50%? Ok then…
Player A attacks 10 times. If Player B digs 5 of them, she wins.
We Call Our Creation…
A small-sided game.
Other examples:
In volleyball - playing 2v2
In soccer - futsal (soccer is doing a phenomenal job with small-guided games and youth development)
In basketball - playing 3v3
In football - 7v7 passing leagues (kind of. Taking the physical contact out of a game that requires tackling eliminates a huge amount of transfer)
In jiu-jitsu - starting the roll from a certain position instead of just facing each other
And There You Have It
My favorite drill…
Since our college season is about to begin, I’m going to spend more of these posts drilling into coaching issues I’m wrestling with. But I’m always aiming to create takeaways across domains. If these posts help you, please pass them on and consider subscribing below. And if you have a killer small-sided game you love, please pay it forward in the comments.
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Your clarity, your humility, and your refusal to reduce the complexity of learning into clean lines and sterile drills felt so right to me. I’ve been championing the ecological approach for almost 15 years, often from the margins, often having to explain it over and over to skeptical eyes. Reading this felt like oxygen.
There’s something deeply affirming about seeing a coach with your experience and platform speak this truth so plainly. Playing the game, in all its messy, emotional, chaotic brilliance, really is the best way to learn the game.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for showing that representative learning, emotional context, and variability aren’t fringe ideas or academic distractions. They are real coaching tools, and they work when we’re willing to trust the process.
I’ll be sharing this with the young coaches I mentor and the seasoned ones who are still curious enough to grow. And I’ll be re-reading it myself whenever I need a reminder that this strange, beautiful, ecological path I chose is not so lonely after all.
when i am designing practice i try to remember this quote from Thoreau, "The question is not what you look at but what do you see." am i allowing our players chances to "see" the ball crossing the net, leaving a setters hands, etc. am i creating a context that mimics what they are going to see when the "lights" come on? i love the idea of contextual interference and teaching within that environment. as per the usual, good thought provoking stuff.
Tom, this was beautiful.
Your clarity, your humility, and your refusal to reduce the complexity of learning into clean lines and sterile drills felt so right to me. I’ve been championing the ecological approach for almost 15 years, often from the margins, often having to explain it over and over to skeptical eyes. Reading this felt like oxygen.
There’s something deeply affirming about seeing a coach with your experience and platform speak this truth so plainly. Playing the game, in all its messy, emotional, chaotic brilliance, really is the best way to learn the game.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for showing that representative learning, emotional context, and variability aren’t fringe ideas or academic distractions. They are real coaching tools, and they work when we’re willing to trust the process.
I’ll be sharing this with the young coaches I mentor and the seasoned ones who are still curious enough to grow. And I’ll be re-reading it myself whenever I need a reminder that this strange, beautiful, ecological path I chose is not so lonely after all.
Grateful for your voice.
when i am designing practice i try to remember this quote from Thoreau, "The question is not what you look at but what do you see." am i allowing our players chances to "see" the ball crossing the net, leaving a setters hands, etc. am i creating a context that mimics what they are going to see when the "lights" come on? i love the idea of contextual interference and teaching within that environment. as per the usual, good thought provoking stuff.