Volleyball Try-Out Drill Ideas [ARTICLE]

Volleyball Try-Out Drill Ideas

By: John Forman

Running volleyball try-outs is obviously about assessing players. Oftentimes, however, it’s also a question of managing a large number of players. If you don’t have to manage a lot of players you can run virtually a regular training session which incorporates drills that cover all of the key things you want to look at in rating the available players. As such, I’m going to focus here on being able to do assessments as efficiently as possible. I’ll do that by providing ideas for drills and games that could be used to look at all the major skills.

Warm-up
As I discussed in Are your warm-ups wasting valuable time?, warm-ups tend to be quite badly handled. This can be especially true in a try-out situation where you want to get into assessment as quickly as possible. Warm-ups should be considered part of that process, not something which simply prepares players for it. I favor going right into basic ball-handling drills, especially ones with a movement element. Even simple pepper drills are quite useful here.

Serving
Chances are this will be something you don’t want to spend all that much time addressing. Generally, we can fairly quickly judge the caliber of a player’s serving just by watching them do a couple of reps. To that end, just lining them up on either end of the court and having them serve back and forth like a pre-game warm-up may suffice. Doing this for a couple of minutes should allow you to give each player a watch.

If you want to narrow things down a bit you can take it a step further by introducing a goal. For example, depending on the level of play, you could set an objective of 10 serves in a row, or some number of serves to a given zone. I’d suggest having a time limit to keep a drill from running on too long. If you have the players who reach that objective step out of the drill, you’ll get a good idea of who are the strong vs. weak servers.

Passing
What you’re probably looking to judge here is which players are going to aggressive vs. passive, loud vs. quiet calling the ball, movement to the ball, and passing mechanics.A simple passing and follow shuttle (pass the ball and go to the end of the line on the other side) will give you an idea of simple ball-handling skill. You’ll want to see what players look like when receiving serve, though, to get a full assessment. A big deciding factor in how you set that up is the likely quality of the servers you’ll have. If the players won’t be able to serve consistently, then you’ll need to either do coach-initiated serves or using tossed/thrown balls in place of serves, perhaps using something like passing triplets. If the players can serve, then probably the best way to get as many players on the court as you can is to run a 2-sided serving-passing drill.

Setting
You can probably get at least a basic idea of someone’s setting ability by watching them pepper or go through a setting shuttle such as the one mentioned for passing above. To assess a player for a setting role, however, you’ll need to see them actually set to hitters, and also see how they move on the court. Setting to a hitting line is a simple solution to the former, and adding the requirement that the set come off a pass would add in the element of seeing the setter move around. You’ll want to put the setter candidate(s) in a game-like situation to finish the assessment, though.

Hitting
A look at players in pepper will give you an idea of where a player is at in terms of armswing mechanics and ability to control an attack. Simple hitting lines will provide an assessment opportunity for looking at hitters in terms of approach, timing, jump, swing mechanics, and the like. If you don’t have a consistent setter on-hand you may need to have the hitting done off a toss. To go beyond basics, though, you need to put hitters in game-like situations to see how they handle the variability and how they actually attack the defense.

Blocking
In many cases a quick look at the relative heights of your players will give you a good idea of blocking ability. Going beyond that, however, you’ll want to look at a prospective blocker’s footwork, quickness along the net, and ability to properly position and time their block. The footwork and speed side of things can be seen through simple blocking movement work at the net. The rest of it requires facing a hitter, though. That can be accomplished putting blockers up against a hitting line, perhaps requiring some additional initial movement (like MB closing to the pin blocker). Things like recognition, anticipation, and the other mental parts of blocking will only come by watching players in game-play situations.

Defense
You can probably get a significant sense of a player’s defensive abilities and mentality by watching them in game-like situations. That will show you who is aggressive and who is passive. It may also give you an idea of who is a lateral type defender (good for middle backs in most systems) and who is good at moving forward (good for wing defenders in many systems), as well as which players are able to read situations and hitters. If you want to specifically assess dig control you can put players through a coach-on-X type of drill where the coach hits balls at a group of players. This tends to be better for smaller groups, however, or situations where there are multiple coaches with room to spread out into different groups. Having players dig against hitting lines tends not to be very useful because it’s usually not very realistic.

Game-Play
As noted, there are some things you’ll want to assess which are best done in game situations. A good way to do this in a situation which moves players quickly through is something like winners. For a large group, you could split the court down the middle and run two sets of winners-3s on the same court. That gets 12 players on the court in a situation where they are likely to get more contacts than if they were playing 6 v 6. If you have a smaller group, a winners variation where you use backrow attacks only lets you see players having to cover more area, but in a situation where the attacks are less potent, leading to generally longer rallies than if the hitters were attacking on the net.

If you want to run 6 v 6 and have a large group, you can do a winners type of game whereby you play a game to some small number of points (like 3 or 5). You could also do a wave variation in which you rotate 3-player lines through each few points either from one end or from both ends.

Setting Priorities
In the end, what you pick to run as try-out drills must be based on your selection priorities, just as you would use training priorities to develop a practice plan. If you’re looking to pick 12 players from a group it is different than if you’ve already got 8 returners and just want to pick players who fill some needs, and it’s different picking varsity vs. junior varsity. So start your try-out planning process by thinking about the sorts of things you need to identify and assess, and work from there.