It took a few years before I realized the volleyball drills book I purchased after I accepted the assistant coaching position was not helping my players get any better. I ran different drills from the book every night at practice. Serving drills. Passing drills. Hitting drills. We did them all.
The only thing I’m sure of is that running those drills made it look like I knew what I was doing. As for the players getting any better, miserable failure.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, my teams became expert drill runners. No one better. No way. We could run the hell out of a butterfly drill. Everyone knew what to do when a ball was shanked into the bleachers. If there was a state tournament for running drills efficiently, we would have been down in Indianapolis drilling for a state championship.
It took me a couple of seasons to understand that these drills were doing most of the players absolutely no good. As I said, they were getting better at performing the drills, but that was it. It was like an English teacher telling his students to write a five-paragraph essay. Most of the kids were taught to count to five. However, writing a well constructed paragraph was ... well, as I said, they could count to five.
Drills are just tools. Used incorrectly they can cause long term damage. And I was causing a bit of damage.
With this in mind, I started handling practice like a classroom. I took an outcome-based-education approach. Everyone would learn the foundational fundamentals of striking a volleyball before we would run any “advanced” hitting drill. We are talking hand positions, ball position, footwork, body position, etc. We would cover it all. Everything I did at practice would have a purpose.
My players would learn volleyball skills.
I followed the same philosophy with every skill. Don’t get the idea that winning matches wasn’t my end goal. I knew that skilled players led to successful teams.
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