Volleyball Skill - Steps For Improvement

One question frequently asked by coaches and players is how they can quickly improve their volleyball skill. That was my motivation for this page of my website. I wanted to offer critical advice for improving their skills above their competition.

Improving Your Volleyball Skills

First of all, you have to increase the intensity of your practices. One of the biggest reasons that I see teams under-perform is that they do not make their practices the same intensity as they would a game. What is the result?

Usually, you see a lot of service errors because they are not accustomed to serving under pressure. You see the same problem with hitting errors. It is much more difficult to make the play when your team MUST have a point.

So, how do you increase the intensity of your practice? The responsibility is on both the players and the coaches. It starts with the coaches because most teams will not be self-disciplined enough to bring the intensity. So, the coaches must teach the players how to achieve higher goals and expectations. They must create pressure situations in practice where the team that scores the point doesn’t have to do some of the conditioning exercises.

The players have the responsibility to realize that the way they practice is the way they are going to play. When you play sloppy at practice, it carries over to the matches. Bring your best enthusiasm and energy to practice each day. Over time, this improves your volleyball skill because you will be prepared for the match.

The second thing that you can do is to use the right techniques. Volleyball is a technique driven sport. When you use proper technique, everything runs better.

Practices should focus on the fundamental volleyball skills instead of the flashy plays. I would rather have a fundamentally sound offense and defense instead of one player that is trying to be a show-off and during things differently.

Your players should repeat (over and over) drills that improve their passing, setting, serving, and hitting. It is also a good idea to have assistant coaches that can keep statistics of practices. Why? It all helps create that environment that the practice is just like the game.

There is a saying that says, “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of acceleration improves.”

You must communicate these statistics to your players so that they have a baseline to measure their performance. When you have these statistics and you play your players based on their performance, the team operates at a much higher level.

Creating volleyball skill that improves is not difficult. It just requires focus in the right areas. I hope these ideas will help your team achieve more.