Volleyball practice can be a very challenging time for a volleyball coach. Especially if the coach has never been a coach before. This section of the website will focus on practice plans and volleyball drills a coach can use.
However, knowing how to run a practice is only part of this. You also need to know how to teach the players to enjoy the game. Teaching people your passion for the sport is the other main responsibility of a coach. This is even more true if you are going to be coaching a youth team. They need to have that passion instilled in them at an early age so that they will continue to play this great sport.
So, let’s get into practice plans and how to structure a practice.
Volleyball Practice Plans
A great practice for volleyball would consist of several different components. It would consist of:
- Proper Warm Up
- Stretch
- Fundamentals
- Drills
- Conditioning
Depending on the needs of your team, you can interchange these pieces as needed. If you are finding that your team needs to work on passing skills, then you may spend the majority of practice time working with your team doing various passing drills and coaching them one-on-one as needed.
As you focus on the fundamentals, you want to spend plenty of time on passing, setting, hitting, blocking, serving, and defense. These are the core fundamentals that every team must do well in order to be competitive.
In order for your practice to be optimized, you need to have a practice schedule. These ideas will give you tips on how to customize the practice to the needs of your team.
If you need to get some different ideas on how a practice would be structured, check out our practice plans for volleyball.
Making Practice Fun
This is the part that is usually neglected and the team can suffer as a result. If a coach can make the game fun for the team while still maintaining discipline, the team will perform better. The reason that they will perform better is because they want to and not because they have to. Players will always perform better when it is their choice.
So, how do you make practices fun and teach people to love volleyball? The best way I know how is to have fun with the team. Challenge the team to a contest. Who can pass the ball better? Who can get the most serves in? When coaches get involved with the team, the team will give respect and develop a love for the game. Many players do not care how much you know; they only want to know how much you care.
The other thing is to teach the fundamentals. When players know the fundamentals, they will perform better. As their skills increase, naturally their love of the game will increase as well.
Need some ideas for volleyball fun? These drills will change things up at practice when needed.
I hope this information will be valuable to a new coach and help them set up great a great volleyball practice.
