The first week’s training should give you a much clearer picture of your team. You’ve seen the players together, introduced the basic systems, watched them perform all the skills, and seen how they respond when play becomes less predictable. Now it’s time to decide what to do with that information.
For many teams, the first week is all the real prep time you get before school starts and/or matches, begin. Others have a more extended preseason. Either way, you want to take what you learned from the first week and use that to set priorities for what comes next.
Naturally, the first few practices tend to reveal more problems than you can address at once. Serve receive may be inconsistent. Transition could be disorganized. Players may not understand their defensive responsibilities. Your setters and hitters might not yet connect well. Communication may disappear as soon as the rally becomes difficult.
The temptation is to make a list of everything that needs improvement and start working through it. That usually isn’t the best way to go about things.
The important question isn’t: What does this team need to improve?
It’s: What’s currently limiting this team the most?
That question helps turn first-week observations into useful training priorities – and from there into a roadmap for progress.
Start with what’s disrupting play
The biggest limitation isn’t always the weakest individual skill.
A team may have several players with inconsistent attacking technique, for example, but that doesn’t necessarily make attacking the first priority. If the team cannot control enough first contacts to create attack opportunities, serve receive may be the more important problem.
Likewise, a team may need better serving, but serving practice alone will not solve a defensive system that regularly leaves large areas of the court uncovered.
Look first for the problems that repeatedly disrupt the team’s ability to play. Or from another perspective, where are they losing points and/or failing to score them?
Some common examples include:
- Serve receive breaks down, so the team can’t organize an attack.
- The setter has few options because players transition too slowly.
- Defenders don’t understand seam responsibilities or who has short balls.
- Players execute well in controlled activities, but struggle to during live play.
- First contact is good, but that doesn’t convert into points.
- Communication drops off when the rally becomes unpredictable.
- One mistake regularly turns into multiple ones because the group does not reset effectively.
These aren’t isolated errors. They’re patterns that affect what happens throughout the rally. Your top priority should be to address those patterns.
Distinguish symptoms from underlying problems
Be aware that what you first notice may not be the actual problem. It might just be a symptom of something else.
Suppose your outside hitters are frequently attacking from poor positions. It would be easy to conclude they need more hitting work. But why are they in poor positions?
Perhaps the pass is regularly too tight to the net. Maybe the setter is delivering inconsistent locations. The hitters may be late getting off the net in transition. They might not understand when to remain available for an out-of-system ball.
The unsuccessful attack is the visible outcome, but the training priority sits earlier in the sequence.
Before selecting a priority, ask:
- What happened?
- What happened immediately before it?
- Is this primarily a technical, tactical, organizational, or decision-making problem?
- Does the same pattern appear in different situations?
- What change would have the greatest effect on the rest of the team’s play?
This helps prevent you from spending valuable time treating symptoms rather than the disease.
Identify one or two primary constraints
You will probably identify several legitimate needs. That doesn’t mean they should all receive equal attention. You’ll want to focus on just the top one or two constraints to your team’s performance.
To be clear, a constraint is something that significantly limits what the team can currently do. It might be:
- The ability to control serve receive
- The ability to create a hittable second contact
- The organization of transition offense
- The relationship between the block and back-court defense
- The ability to manage out-of-system play
- The ability to serve with useful pressure
- The ability to sustain organized play after the first exchange
The exact priorities depend on the team. A young team struggling to maintain rallies will have different needs from an experienced team preparing for stronger competition.
The key is to be selective. If everything’s a priority, nothing really is.
Account for the competition schedule
Once matches begin, training priorities can’t be separated completely from schedule demands.
You may have identified an important long-term issue, but an immediate opponent could expose a different weakness. You may also have less training time because of school schedules, travel, recovery needs, and/or match preparation.
That doesn’t mean allowing the next opponent to dictate everything you do, though. It means balancing three things:
- The team’s most important current constraints
- The demands of the next competition
- The amount of training time actually available
A useful priority should help the team now without becoming so opponent-specific that it offers little longer-term value. For example, improving out-of-system organization may help against the next opponent, but it also addresses a broader weakness that will matter throughout the season. Spending most of a practice rehearsing a highly specific tactical response may have less lasting value.
Consider both importance and trainability
The most important long-term problem isn’t always the best training focus right now. Some stuff can improve relatively quickly through better organization and clarity. Others require a longer period of technical development.
For example, clarifying serve-receive seam responsibility may produce an immediate improvement. Significantly changing a player’s passing technique is likely to take much longer. That doesn’t mean you ignore the technical issue. It simply means you distinguish between:
- What can improve the team relatively quickly
- What requires continuing development
- What must be managed through the way the team plays
This distinction helps you build a practical training plan. You may decide to clarify the team’s serve-receive structure now, give individual passers technical feedback over time, and adjust formations to reduce exposure in certain rotations.
All three actions address the same general problem, but they operate on different timelines.
Turn priorities into observable behaviors
“Improve defense” is not a useful practice priority. Neither is “communicate better” or “be more consistent.” Those statements are too broad to guide practice design or feedback. Translate each priority into something you can observe.
Instead of improve transition offense, you might focus on:
- Front-row hitters getting off the net immediately after their defensive responsibility
- The setter recognizing the situation and moving toward the target area earlier
- Non-setters knowing who takes the second ball
- Attackers remaining available when the team is out of system
Instead of communicate better, you might focus on:
- Passers identifying seam responsibility before the serve
- Blockers calling the defensive scheme
- The setter communicating out-of-system responsibility
- Players giving useful information rather than simply making noise
Observable behaviors make it easier to design activities, provide feedback, and recognize progress.
Design practices that repeatedly expose the priority
Once you know the behavior you want, create practice situations in which it occurs frequently.
If transition organization is the priority, a serving-and-passing drill that ends after the first attack will not provide enough relevant repetitions. You need activities that continue through the defensive and transition phases.
If seam responsibility is the priority, players need to receive serves that force actual seam decisions. Predictable serves directly to individual passers won’t reveal or develop the behavior you care about.
You can increase exposure through:
- Carefully selected starting situations
- Small-sided games
- Constraints
- Wash scoring
- Bonus points for priority behaviors
- Repeated rotations or matchups
- Short 6v6 segments with a clear observation focus
The objective is not to create an elaborate drill. It’s to produce enough representative repetitions for players to recognize, execute, and adjust the desired behavior.
See The Perfect Drill for more information on how you can create and/or adapt drills to serve your specific purpose.
Keep the rest of the game present
A clear priority does not mean removing everything else from practice. Volleyball actions are connected. Serve receive leads into setting and attacking. Defense leads into transition. Serving affects the opponent’s options and your own defensive organization.
You can emphasize one part of the game while preserving those relationships.
For example, a serve receive priority is easily trained through a game that begins with a serve, rewards a defined quality of first contact, and then continues through the rally. The scoring highlights the priority, but the players still have to play volleyball.
This is generally more useful than spending long periods on an isolated activity, hoping the improvement transfers later.
Use matches as another source of evidence
Once competition begins, matches give you information that practice cannot fully reproduce. They show which behaviors hold up under pressure, which problems become more significant against an opponent, and whether players can make adjustments without repeated coach intervention.
The mistake is to react too strongly to every result. One poor match doesn’t necessarily mean the entire training plan was wrong. Similarly, a good result doesn’t mean the underlying problems are gone. Look for repeated patterns across practice and competition.
Ask:
- Did the same breakdown appear that we’d already identified?
- Did the problem occur in particular rotations or situations?
- Did players recognize and adjust to it?
- Was the issue technical, tactical, organizational, or emotional?
- Does it remain the most important constraint?
- Has another problem become more significant?
Matches should refine your priorities, not replace them with a new list after every performance.
Reassess rather than simply continue
A training priority shouldn’t remain in place just because it was written into the plan. Continue observing what happens.
Ask:
- Is the original problem appearing less frequently?
- Are players executing the desired behavior more consistently?
- Does the improvement remain present during competitive play?
- Has another constraint become more important?
- Are we seeing a technical limitation that requires a different approach?
- Is the team improving, or merely succeeding because the activity has become predictable?
Priorities should evolve as the team does. The purpose of the first week was to create direction. The purpose of this next phase is to test and refine that direction.
A simple priority-setting process
After the first week, I’d work through the following questions:
- Where does our play most consistently break down?
- What appears to cause those breakdowns?
- Which 1-2 constraints most strongly limit the team?
- What does the upcoming schedule require us to address?
- What observable behaviors would improve those areas?
- What practice situations will repeatedly expose those behaviors?
- What evidence will tell us whether the priority is changing?
That gives you a working plan without pretending you already know everything about the team. Training plans should get more specific as you learn more. They shouldn’t become more rigid.
The goal isn’t to create a complete list of everything the team has to improve on. It’s to identify the work that will make the greatest difference now, and use what happens in training and competition to decide what comes next.
If you’re still preparing your opening practices, start with How to Plan the First Week of Volleyball Preseason.
For more practice-design resources, visit the Practice Planning and Warm-ups guide.