Below are techniques that you will learn following our training system.
Serving
- Posture
- Right-handed servers = left foot slightly in front of the right
- Left-handed servers = right foot slightly in front of left
- Toes pointed towards the target
Serve Receive/Passing
- Footwork
- Ability to shuffle behind the ball, drop step and t-stop
- Don’t let the platform drop between legs when moving
- Players should not be taking crossover steps when passing a serve receive ball or a free ball
Setting
- Footwork
- Understand footwork to the target position
- Able to do left, right, set footwork, and 4-step footwork to set a pass 10 feet off of the net using left, right, left, and right footwork
- Able to get hips around the ball and square to the target
- Receive ball over the top of the forehead (ball should hit your forehead if it were to slip through hands)
- Semi-circle footwork- every setter should be able to do proper footwork to a ball in front of the target, off the net, and behind the target
Attacking
- Footwork and Posture
- FEET TO THE BALL
- Able to make correct 3-step approach (1st step = drive step and 2nd/3rd step = plant step)
- Shoulders forward
- Understand arms forward on first step and back on plant step
- Use arms to explode off the ground
- Understand how to jump straight up
- Floating is minimal
- Able to do proper block transition footwork
- step, cross, hop footwork
- Able to do proper base to read the defense to transition footwork
- step, cross hop footwork
- Able to do proper serve to receive to transition footwork
- turn, run, slant to get all the way outside (even with the 10ft. line)
- Hand Contact
- Spend quality time perfecting the hand contact. Teach the stiff, wide hand, shaped like the ball.
- Understand how to apply topspin to the ball by snapping the wrist. Creating spin is the number one thing to learn as a young player
- Understand to contact the ball with the arm fully extended
Defense
- Footwork
- Step, cross hop for the base to read
- Shuffle through a defensive ball
- Take a big first step to the ball by pushing off the opposite leg
- Step to the ball and then push off FRONT let to increase defensive range
- Introduce floor moves and how to execute them (STAYING OFF YOUR KNEE), such as run and roll, run and slide, side layout, barrel roll.
- Posture
- Bending at the knees not the waist
- Bending at the ankles
- Weight forward
- Head and shoulders forward (lead with the head)
- Hands neutral to be able to play balls with a platform or hands
- Positioning
- Understanding base to read and moving to the dig position for one of these systems
- perimeter
- rotation
Blocking
- Footwork
- feet shoulder-width apart, legs loaded
- space between you and net
- step, cross, hop for middle blocking footwork
- Hand Shape
- fingers spread apart
- thumbs pointed towards the ceiling
- understand going over the net not straight up
- Set-Up & Timing
- pin blocker set the block
- hitter’s hitting shoulder should slice the pin blocker in half
- the athlete jumps when their attacking arm starts to go forward
- understand if the setter is in the front row or back row and who your hitter is
- only single blocking the middles at this age
- Vision
- introduce on, off, over eye work