I was watching a 7th grade volleyball game last week. Both teams used a serve receive where the left back and right back players are about 20' off the net, but the middle back player is about 4' from the baseline. The girls on the other team could barely serve the ball to the baseline, so they kept getting ace after ace whenever the ball was served to the middle of the court. I thought the coach would make an adjustment, but she insisted with sticking to her old-school serve receive. The coach should have plotted where the serves were hit and the outcome. Had she done this, she would have noticed a disturbing pattern.
The fact is, most serves can be received with all three back row players standing around the 22' line...in a straight line. The overhand receive makes those deep serve-receive positions obsolete. The same is true for defense. Most kills occur in the middle of the court, not the perimeter. So, why is there so much effort defending the perimeter of the court. Plot the hits and kills in your next match and you will see where to play defense. Remember, coach smart, not coach tradition.
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The best defense depends on the level of competition you are playing. Most 14's teams (and younger) don't hit with consistency. This means your team will get a lot of free balls and hits toward the back left corner of your defense.
For one tournament, where my 14's team played in a U15's division, I had my parents chart where every ball was hit when it was hit over the net. This was for all teams in the division. We divided the court by drawing a tic-tac-toe pattern on the court (9 equal spaces that are 10' by 10') and plotted every hit. 24% of all the hits were to the center square. My team played the traditional middle back, perimeter defense. The girls had trouble reading the short hits and they often fell for kills. As a result, we switched to a middle up defense. This resulted in very few tips or short hits ever falling for kills. We used the middle back defense only for big-hitting teams. Play the percentages. Learn what happens most in the games your team plays, then adjust your defense accordingly. What works for an 18's team will not necessarily work for a 14's team, nor a 12's team. |
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September 2020
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