Teaching Rotations to New Volleyball Players

Volleyball is a strange sport. In every other sport, trying to play it the right way is rewarded immediately. It’s not really possible in other sports to win while doing things the wrong way. But in volleyball, you can win right away by just thwanking a serve back over the net rather than using actual blocking and hitting skills…because players haven’t learned enough yet to deal with those freeballs.

Coaches of older athletes don’t really ever think about this. They make the assumption that freeballs will get passed, that the players have an intrinsic knowledge of rotations, defensive systems, etc…assumptions that don’t quite work for people coaching novices.

Since I spent eighteen years coaching college, it’s something I didn’t really have to do deal with much–not since I coached Jr High and High School previously. That’s a lot of time. I’m a much different coach now, too.

In the old days (feel free to nod along as you read by the way…), I’d hand out a sheet of paper with where players go in all six rotations. We’d talk about it with a chalkboard, then we’d sit with coins (two pennies, two nickels, two dimes) or labeled paper cups and we’d move them around on a desk or tabletop. At that point, we’d go into the gym and get to work–but inevitably, half the kids (at least) would have massive confusion and not understand–and then my frustration level would climb and…now I see we wasted so much time working harder–but not smarter.

Now I’m coaching HS in the Fall and JH in the winter (IHSA and IESA respectively). With the HS athletes, we walked through the issue quickly–relying on the athletes who picked it up quickly to help the others. This got us through the season–but it worked primarily because we had some people who understood so that we could effectively “peer-tutor” the situation.

But now it is Jr High season and none of the kids knew how rotating works–sadly including the kids who played a year ago. Peer-tutoring is out the window for the moment. So…

That’s why I wrote this blog. I found a system that works pretty well with the young, inexperienced players…and that they can learn it in big groups (we have 26 7th graders and 22 8th graders…two courts, one experienced coach, one coach who is just starting his second year of coaching).

I limited the terms they need to know, starting with knowing whether your team is serving or not. If not, that’s called serve-receive. (If you’re coaching, you know this–I’m trying to show how I presented it…since inevitably someone reading this will go pedantic on things). Binary for the kids: serve OR serve-receive. Easy to determine.

Next–the rotation.

I described this like a six-slice pizza–that there are always three pieces on each half of the pizza…so we always have three front row, three back row. The most important thing–since we always have two left, two middle, two right–you can count three people and know that person plays your same position. You get the idea…

For when we get the serve, they are to do the following:

1. Stand in your rotation.

2. Rotate clockwise one spot.

3. Check that you are three people away from the other person who plays your position.

When we lose the serve, we do the following–while we have players say ‘serve-receive’ so we know we’re doing this procedure.

1. Stand in your rotation.

2. Whoever is the setter now moves as close as possible to where the setter plays a ball from.

3. Once the setter has moved, other players now look to see how they can make a “W” serve-receive pattern with the fewest players having to move away from their rotation spot.(Once they understood with a W…then the understood how to make a cup…and then a 3-person S/R)

The last instruction given was that once the ball goes over the net, you have to switch from your rotation to your position–so if you are a middle but your rotation is at left front, you would move from the left to the middle.

That’s it. At that point, they started playing. Within 30 minutes, we were playing with minimal coach prompting–the coach comments were then for a few players who still didn’t get it–but mostly a reminder that they needed to switch…they focused so much on their ‘rotation’ and then because they were excited to be playing ‘real’ volleyball, that they’d forget to switch…which was hilarious because they would then grab their head, cover their mouth with a hand, and scramble to move to where they were supposed to be. Hah!

But mostly, I was really happy that we’d gone from no understanding of how to rotate or what an overlap was to playing only 30 minutes later–and that once we started playing, we didn’t have any overlaps. We built on this and as our skills improved, we’ve worked on 4-person serve-receive, 3-person Serve-receive, and the various offensive systems (4-2, 6-2, and 5-1).

Summary:

When serving: Rotation->rotate->switch to position when the serve is contacted.

Serve-receive: Rotation->setter moves close to the target spot->everyone else makes a W. Switch when we’ve hit the ball over the net.

Less words, more play. A win for everyone.