With my usual schedule thrown out of whack due to a unique professional opportunity, I’ve been missing a whole bunch of volleyball commitments. thankfully some reliable ex-players are taking up the slack. Chris McHugh is kindly taking my Reserve Women for two games and in those weeks they lost one game 3-1 with only 5 players after an injury, and 2-3 (17-19) after about 4 match points.
One of the few volleyball luxuries I still have is my availability to coach my younger teams. I managed to help out with my Willunga girls at the finals of yr 10 knockout on friday. They met a formidable Brighton team that had 4 girls on my reserves team + Emma McEwen. Brighton ended up going down to Heathfield in both the boys and girls comps.
I still get to go to Junior league training and games. One f the things i’m astounded by is how malleable players can be in changing their technique when still young. One of the curious things I’ve been trying is a “different” setting technique i picked up from Michael Brookens when he was in adelaide for WAVL. Ive tried it on about 4 players with pretty immediate results (although it’s not working as i’d like it to in game situations). it’s a bit different from the traditional skill model with i still believe only really uses 3 fingertips on each hand. Michael suggested I check out Bond Shymansky’s DVDs. I bought about 6 of them and a couple of them are great (at least one of them is average) and i have been trying out a lot of the stuff in them.
I also like the spiking skill model of taking off perpendicular to the net. Especially for middles who under this approach use a limited arm swing action. taking a look at the FIVB tech videos of womens matches, it seems a lot of teams have middles that approach and swing like this as well as middles who hit like outsides.
Who knows what’s right. No doubt the kids will go back to their school programmes and get told off. So i’ve told them it’s some experimental stuff that isn’t exactly “conventional wisdom”. I think it’s always worth showing players different ways of doing things and explaining the context so they can make up their own minds. If anything, this kind of experimentation is a lot of fun.
June 30, 2009 at 11:34 am |
3 fingers on each hand to set?!
People still do that?
July 1, 2009 at 2:55 am |
Yeah, i think some still do. And i think with the traditional setting action, the pinky finger and one next to it don’t touch the ball as much.
July 1, 2009 at 3:00 am |
oh, admittedly, the “thumb-index-middle-with-other-fingers-folded” setting action is prob more in the realm of outdated PE instruction. I like it’s quaintness whenever i see it cos out there somewhere is an isolated volleyball evangelist teaching PE volleyball.