Is Blocking in Volleyball Defensive or Offensive? Why Your Answer Matters

Is Blocking a Defensive or Offensive Action?

While completing my Level 2 Volleyball Coaching course in 2013, tutor Luke Thomas posed a question that still sticks with me: Is blocking a defensive or offensive action?

At first, the answer seems obvious — blocking must be a defensive action. However, Luke made a simple but compelling case for the opposite. In this post, I’ll explore both perspectives and share why I believe the side you choose should directly shape how you coach blocking and evaluate its effectiveness.

First Line of Defence

I would say nearly everybody would agree that blocking is part of defence. Every volleyball coaching manual, training course, and website talks about blocking as a defensive skill. It’s described as the first line of defence, not the first line of offence.

In fact, we pair the two concepts as block-defence. We talk about strategies like “block line and defend cross” or “block cross and defend line.” These are coordinated systems linking front-row blockers with back-row defenders, working together to stop or channel the opponent’s attack to your best defenders. There’s no such thing as a “block-offence” strategy — and I honestly wouldn’t know what one would even look like.

But it Scores Points

And yet, there’s a simple truth we often overlook: blocking scores points. It’s a point-winning play when a blocker shuts down a hitter with a stuff block. It scores the same as an ace or a spike. By that definition, blocking functions as an offensive action.

More importantly, we measure blocking performance in offensive terms: block kills and block errors. We don’t track how well a player blocks line or cross. This is contrary to how we coach blocking strategies.

Misalignment Between Strategy and Measurement

So, is blocking a defensive or offensive action? The honest answer is it’s probably both. However, we can’t just leave it there as a philosophical point. I believe you need to choose a side, because your answer should guide both your blocking strategies and how you measure performance.

For instance, if you treat blocking as a defensive skill, then coaching strategies like “block line” or “block cross” make sense. You’re trying to limit the opponent’s options or channel the ball to your strongest diggers. But if that’s the case, we should also measure performance based on how effectively blockers take away angles or steer the attack, not by block kills and errors. It’s because you could have the best player in the world at blocking line and steering the attack cross-court to the libero, but their blocking stats won’t reflect that.

If you treat blocking as an offensive skill, then it makes perfect sense to measure it in terms of block kills and errors. But this also means your strategy should shift towards blocking the ball directly for block kills, not just channelling it to the defence. And yet, in my experience, this “block-the-ball” strategy is rarely coached or emphasised.

My Stance

I am a Performance Analyst, so I am a volleyball stats guy. If blocking is measured in terms of scoring points, then it makes sense that I should coach blocking as an offensive action. Also, efficiently scoring points is critical to winning volleyball matches (watch the video below), so I want to know how effective we are at scoring points via the block. On the flip side, if I wanted to coach blocking as a defensive action, I wouldn’t know a good way to measure blocking performance on those terms, e.g. how well did they block line or block cross?

So when I coach blocking, I coach blocking the ball. I want my players focused on getting block kills, not simply taking away zones. I want them to get as many block kills as they can. For the rest of our defensive system, I coach a perimeter defence. My diggers adjust based on where the blockers are and where they anticipate the attack going. I tend to like defenders to stay in Zone 6 (middle-middle), since most attacks land there. See the image below to see how I coach block-defence.

My current block-defence strategy, 2025

Final Thoughts

The reason this question has stayed with me over the years is that I still see a disconnect between how blocking is coached and how it’s measured. Every time I hear coaches talk about blocking, it’s usually in terms of blocking line or blocking cross. It then reminds me that we don’t measure blocking performance on those terms. I think more coaches should reconsider whether their blocking strategy aligns with how the block is measured.