Volleyball Drills - 5 Tips To Designing Better Drills For Practice

1. Design Volleyball Drills for Appropriate Time of Season

Coaches should create an outline for their practices before the volleyball season starts. It’s important to have created a practice plan several months before the season that has guidelines for what the team needs to accomplish.

These guidelines include everything from conditioning to skills and drills. As the off-season, pre-season, and in-season are going on, details of what exactly to be doing in practices should be determined.

The volleyball coach should make an effort to plan each practice or each practice week considering what needs to be improved upon the specific time of season. This is called periodization.

A team should be taken through different volleyball drills for conditioning in pre-season than in-season. In pre-season, coaches should design volleyball conditioning drills that train power endurance and prepare volleyball players for the upcoming season.

When in-season, you want your volleyball players well rested and playing their best. Conditioning for in-season should be more focused on peak volleyball performance and less on building endurance.

2. Design Volleyball Drills for Appropriate Time of Practice

What and when you do volleyball drills in practice is important for having a successful practice. Technical skill volleyball drills, or individual player volleyball drills are usually best done near the beginning of practice. Team volleyball drills or fun volleyball drills should be done near the end of practice.

Technical volleyball drills are drills that need players to focus for perfect skill execution.

When performing technical volleyball drills, it’s common to rotate players quickly during the volleyball drills. For example, when doing volleyball drills where players are trying to execute a perfect forearm pass using perfect passing form, players can rotate quickly and only have to focus on skill execution at a time.

With technical volleyball drills, each repetition is important. Players shouldn’t be forced to pass so many balls in a series that will make it harder to focus.

3. Keep Players Active During Volleyball Drills

Limit each players part in each volleyball drill to just 1-3 minutes because any longer than that players will start losing focus. Volleyball drills that involve players rotating quickly are good because they can get a break in focusing on the task then come back and do the same thing several times again after each rotation during the volleyball drill. So they are able to get repetition without having to work several minutes at once repeating the same thing. This is really important in executing technical volleyball drills.

Also, volleyball drills should be designed that keep players actively participating in the volleyball drill. You don’t want to run volleyball drills where many players are standing around watching. The more players are able to stay involved in the volleyball drills, the more they will stay focused and improve.

4. Design Volleyball Drills Specific to Player's Playing Level

Not all volleyball drills are for everyone. Coaches shouldn’t design volleyball drills that are so advanced that players won’t get anything out of doing them. Also, players shouldn’t be doing volleyball drills that they’ve already mastered.

Coaches should look at individual players and determine what the weakest link is. For example, if a player’s weakest skill is passing, they need to spend time working on passing.

On the other hand, if a player’s strongest skill is hitting, they shouldn’t be working on hitting all the time. Often, what skills player’s like to work on are ones they are already really good at doing.

5. Be Aware of What Current Events are Affecting Your Volleyball Team

A volleyball player’s mood, stress level, and lifestyle have a major impact on their volleyball playing ability.

Volleyball drills should be design with current events in mind.

For example, if a team just experienced a long weekend from an emotionally draining tournament, volleyball drills for the next practice should be adjusted accordingly.

Also, day to day events such as exams and other events that cause stress in school should be considered when designing volleyball drills. Volleyball drills for practice often need to be adjusted on the fly because of such a busy lifestyle.

Many teenagers have very busy lives and are often stressed. Players may sometimes show up to practice and what you as a coach had planned just aren’t going to work that day. Coaches need to pay attention to how players are feeling and adjust practices accordingly.