C A P I I C L I P B O A R D
Practice design: Increasing contacts per hour
By Margo Linton Jones Beantown Volleyball Club head coach
S
ince attending a CAP I clinic, I started thinking about contacts per hour – how to increase the contacts per hour and how important it is. For this paper, I decided to take the opportunity to research the differences between how many contacts per hour that some popular drills facilitate. I was particularly interested in serving and passing, but also tracked hitting, setting and “other” touches, which included freeball passes, freeballs sent over and occasionally a touch on a scramble play that did not fi t into any other categories. I used a friend’s 17s club team to do my research. The level of play was average. This team is not nationally competi- tive. I attended and fi lmed one practice where I ran each of the drills I wanted to test. There were 14 players at this practice. After the practice I reviewed the fi lm to tally up the number of each type of contact. The drills I tested were Queen of the Court, Speedball, a Modifi ed Butterfl y, two versions of hitting lines and a simple 6 vs. 6 freeball drill. I chose these drills because they are fairly simple, and in my experience, are commonly used with variations.
DRILL DESCRIPTIONS: Queen of the Court: I used two perma- nent setters on each side, then an additional three players on the court on each side. I also used standard rules: if you win, you stay on or go to the “queen” side; lose, and you are off. Speedball: Again, I used two permanent setters on each side, and then there were two teams of three on each side of the court. One team on each side plays at a time. The teams off (one team per side) have a ball ready to serve if their side loses the rally. The losing team goes off, and then the waiting team on that side serves and comes on right away. The drill is inspired by Queen of the Court, but designed to be even faster. Modifi ed Butterfl y: This drill is strictly to work on serving and serve-receive passing. One side is serving to the other side of three passers and a target. After a player passes, she
becomes the target, and the target catches the ball and goes to the serving side. After players serve, they go to a line to fi ll in for the passers. 6 vs. 6: I had six players on each side of the court and a coach on each side to initiate freeballs. After each rally, the winning side got the next freeball. We kept score by count- ing each rally as one point. I chose this drill because it is simple and can be modifi ed in many ways.
CONTACT TYPE DESCRIPTIONS • Passes: Serve-receive passes only • Serves: Players serving the ball • Hits: Players hitting a ball over the net using an approach, jump and swing • Sets: Player setting the ball to a hitter • Digs: Player digging the ball from an
attack • Other touches: This included passing a freeball, sending a freeball to the other team or the second or third hit on a scramble play
ANALYSIS:
The results from my experiment were not quite what I expected. The results show that each drill does have an advantage over the other drills in a particular area. For example, even the Modifi ed Butterfl y, which had by far
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the least amount of total con- tacts per player, had the highest serves and passes per hour. I had thought that the serving and passing numbers might be com- parable to Speedball or Queen of the Court but they were signifi cantly higher. Therefore, that would be a good drill if you strictly wanted to work on serv- ing and passing. Hitting lines on two sides had the most contacts per hour of any drill, although only two skills were performed- - setting and hitting--and most players only got hitting reps. The Modifi ed Butterfl y and both variations of the hitting lines are arguably the least game-like, since there is no exchange back and forth over the net, which is an important consideration. I was surprised to see that Speedball had a few less contacts per hour than Queen of the Court. I had expected the opposite. One potential reason
for that could be that the team I was working with does at least a few minutes of Queen of the Court during every practice, and most of the girls had never played Speedball. Their un- familiarity with Speedball could have slowed down the drill a little bit, although they did get the hang of it pretty quickly.
Another interesting thing with those two drills was that in Queen of the Court the group missed tons of serves. As you can see from the table, in Queen of the Court they had 23 serves, but only 14 passes per player per hour, due mostly to missed serves and some aces that were not touched by a passer. In general, the numbers show that for this group, Queen of the Court was played with fewer quality reps than Speedball. Even though there were a few more contacts per hour, there were more missed serves, sets that were not able to be hit and “other” touches.
For the hitting lines, it was interesting to see that using only one side with three lines was only about 10 less hits per hour than lines on each side, but way more than half the hits per hour. For the two sides, I had the players toss to the setters themselves. For the three lines, I had a coach tossing to the setter. This is probably what caused the three lines to go
PHOTO: USAV
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