Tips from 60 Years of Teaching Serve Receive from the AVCA Convention 2025

(upbeat music) - Good morning and welcome to the volleyball. Presented by the Art of Coaching volleyball. Today we have a special episode. As you can see, Todd is not gonna see, but you'll be seeing a lot of folk of us today. Say we're sharing our presentation from the A/B/C/A convention in Kansas City a few weeks ago. It was so fun. We shared how to pass. Better, basically how to teach passing better. And once again, thanks a lot to our sponsors, Huddled and you can check them out at huddled.com. And thank you so much to our other sponsors, Art of Coaching volleyball, who is absolutely wonderful. I have a continuously supporting volleyball in coaches and it's a great resource. So once again, thanks to them, check us out. Love, leave us some comments and send us an email at the volleyball. - Thank you, C.A. Welcome to the 25th green from six years and we can tip to serve the team. Before we get in, I just have a few housekeeping notes. Your feedback is very important for us. So please take a moment after this session to provide feedback on the convention app. To do so, go to the app, select this session and click the section and feedback. If you have any questions about the process, please let me know. The session is being video recorded and the recordings will be available to members on the AECA website in the frame. As a reminder, all NCAA manifest tickets were delivered digitally. Please remember that fact facts are not allowed in the team open summer. I now have a pleasure for introducing today's speaker, Davis Ransom and Pogmatic. - Thank you, I mean, well, thank you. - Good morning and welcome to the volleyball. Thank you all for being here. We're thrilled to be with you guys. We're gonna be talking a little bit about some of the things we've learned through our experience and serve, receive over the course of our lengthy volleyball coaching careers. - And let's start with maybe a little bit of the why are we talking about serve, receive? And I would say when Davis and I get together every week or two and talk about our teams and how they're doing in tournaments invariably, we talk about, well, we were doing great until this one server went crazy on us and then we weren't doing so great. So we're always, I think serve receive is one of those things we're always trying to get a little better because it has such a huge impact. So we put our heads together with this one. We're gonna alternate going back and forth with some little tips and a bunch of it. I'm sure some of the things you've heard, our goal is that maybe you can grab a nugget or two and take that into your gym and get your kids a little better. So with that, we'll get rolling. I think Davis, you're gonna start us off. - Yes, the first idea is that server cues are the money. Okay, if you can see it, you can hit it. Okay, so the big thing there is, especially with younger players, figuring out where to position themselves to pass is obviously one of the most difficult challenges. So can we apply some of that learning in what we're training and there's two really great ideas that can help with that. And the first is this or that, figuring out if the service short or deep and pairing those two when you serve reps at them is a great way to help them identify more effectively where that serves gonna be, right? So I would, instead of just serving deep, deep, deep at them, I would go, this one's gonna be short, this one's gonna be deep. That has tons of value in terms of them being able to predict where the server's gonna go and then obviously position their body to pass. The other idea, especially for younger players, is show and tell. So I'm gonna serve short and I'm going to show it and make it kind of obvious and then I'm gonna say it and then I'm gonna serve short. So it gives them lead time for processing that that server's gonna end up short but then what they do is they end up pairing what I look like when I'm serving short with what other servers look like when they serve short and they can start realizing those things a little bit sooner. So the server cues are the money. The only other thing I'd say about that is like, at the highest level getting good contacts means trying to be comfortable when you're passing and the more time you have to be there and get comfortable with the better. So if I'm using the analogy of a baseball hitter, they want to know what's coming early. So they can hit the fastball, if they know it's coming, they can hit the curve, if they know it's coming. We wanna know what's coming and a lot of times we'll focus on tracking the flight of the ball but the server will give away where they're gonna serve eventually and if we can pick up on that cue, we can be ahead of the serve. So that's our first one. - Some of them are even when you talk about those cues, some of them are almost deadly obvious, right? The server looks to the coach and then gets a signal and then turns and faces this way. Now we have a cue there. We don't want our, if that server's facing five, we don't want one to move right to her area one sideline. We go, wait a minute, should we have an idea where the ball's going? And you can go, well, hey, there's players who look away, sir, I haven't seen too many that are good at it. There might be one or two out there, but not a lot. All right, number two, take every opportunity to work on passing vision, use the four quadrants for serve identification. So I like to make it kind of specific. Okay, is it high or low first? So we have high and fast, high and slow and then we go low and fast, low and slow. So I'm working with 10 year olds right now. Okay, is it high or low? Pretty simple, would serve higher load. You have more time or less time and we're gonna give them some specific things to do when you have more time and we're gonna make some other decisions when you have less time. And then we look at maybe, when we look at cues, we look at, is that a server? When we look at server history, is she a server that always serves high and deep, right? You see that best server that goes back there on the other team, maybe hits a couple high hard ones and the first one goes in for an ace. Let's, we let it drop. The next two hit our players, but they're going out 'cause our players are reaching for them. So do we know we have a high hard server and that hey, if this falls over your shoulder, it's gonna be out. And can we prep our serve receivers before that? Love it, love it. So number three is kind of simple, obvious, but I think it makes a lot of sense, especially with younger teams, past to the middle of the court. And the main reason for there is just the margin, right? I think a lot of teams still pass over to the right side of the court and that's, I mean, there's advantages in that. But if I miss by a little bit, it's off to the far right side of the court and it's just difficult, right? So the simple, obvious one is just have them pass straight ahead. But I think I see benefit in this with older teams too, though, because if you pass in front, a lot of times you'll loosen up that left front blocker and create someone on ones. So I'm just a big proponent of, can we pass to the middle of the court? And then there's some advantages in terms of you, you don't have to do as much tilting, stuff like that. So just can you be, that doesn't mean this center necessarily needs to be standing there to be the target. But can we try to pass to that middle portion of the court? It seems obvious, but with younger teams, a lot of times we're asking for a little bit more precision. And it's just not there. So can we put that ball to the middle? And then when it's off by a little bit, we'll still be in a good spot. - Change the trouble target. And this gets into this idea of decision making. Are you in trouble and how are you to find trouble? So trouble is balance. So we're out of balance, things aren't looking good. And once again, once things aren't looking good, it's not for me, especially with the young team, it's not passing anymore. It's ace prevention. Because we're just trying to save the point. If they die for a ball and it goes over on one, is that a good thing? Yes, it's a great thing. We just saved the point. And we'll take our chances at the low levels, playing defense and transitioning and doing that. But if the other team can serve and smoke a cigarette and they don't have to do anything because they're hitting aces, then we're not really playing volleyball. So I try to celebrate those ideas or those times when servers lay out and just take a ball that looks like it's going to be an ace. The bottom drops out of it and they dive. And it goes over and we keep playing. We go, hey, that just saved us a point on the scoreboard. So getting that trouble target high to 10 feet where it's more of a dig. And, hey, if it doesn't get to the center, it doesn't get to the center right now. But once again, we don't want to try to, I see a lot of our passers get in trouble and they're trying to zip balls to target when they're off balanced. And then they're overpassing low overpasses that the other medals are just dropping for points. Or the ball skimming off their platform and going behind them sideways into the wall. Can we be, hey, we're in trouble. Everything changes. Can we not get ace? And, to me, the tough part about this is sometimes their mentality. Like you were mentioning, they want to pass perfect. And perfect, in this case, would be, let's not get ace. Let's not give them something easy. And so we're going to change the target. So we have a bigger margin so that they can achieve that. I think all the times, especially on like that, serve that way you're saying drops the bottom off. We're going to try to still pass to the normal target. And then because it's so stressful, our margins get bigger. Our margins for air are getting bigger. So can we move that target away from the net, move it to the middle of court? I love this point. OK, Dustin Watten. I know you're here just kidding. He's the guy that's big on the split step. And again, I'm not dissing the split step. But I hear-- Why don't you give it a try? I don't know if everybody-- I know you're the king of the split step, Dave. You love the split step. I mean, you don't talk any about the split. So the split step is just where they're kind of like-- you're going to lift both feet off the ground and split their feet and tap on the ground. OK, so it's a way of going faster. See tennis players do this and all this stuff. And it's great. But to me, it's more of an advanced skill when the ball's moving super fast. And my point here is that you get a lot more time through reading than the split step. OK, the split step will get you fractions of a second. And it's good if you can do it. But there's challenges to it. But my thing is reading is never going to fail you. That doesn't mean you're going to read wrong. You're not going to read wrong sometimes. But it just means that the value in picking up those serve or cues, picking up the flight of the ball is so much more valuable than being a few fractions of a second quicker. And how do I know this? Well, because I'm so old and I can just walk over to where these serves are going and get there. Because I know where the ball is going. Right? And a lot of times the players are still beat to this spot. So it's like, I just have experience, A. But also, I've identified those types of serves a lot. So it's like, it's not a speed issue most of the time with young players. It's a recognition issue. We're always like, hurry up, hurry up. You don't get there quicker. And that's obviously better because we want them to be comfortable. But the most time is going to be what is going to happen in that predictive stage. So can we get ahead of it by recognizing the serve or cues, recognizing the flight of the ball? And drawing our athletes attention to that, because a lot of times they'll see it and they'll get reps. But then the noticing is going over their heads. So did you notice that they were at the bottom of the ball? Did you notice? And that's where I think the coach's time can be really well spent. What did that server look like on contact? And can we notice before she does it? And that way we can be ahead of the flight of the ball. In the old days, we called the split step pre-hop. And the problem that I have is when I slow down and watch the video, and I watch our kids who are pre-hopping, a lot of times, or split stepping, or whatever you want to call it, a lot of times they're doing it too late. So I'm clicking the video. I'm going to click, click, click, click. And the ball is coming to the passer, and the passer's feet are up in the air. And so they're up in the air. They can't move anywhere because they took their little hop too late. So they're up in the air, and by the time they come down, it's actually, instead of speeding them up with this stretch reflex action that is the idea of that pre-hopper split step, it's actually slowing them down. And so I've had mixed success in playing around with the idea of a split step. I'm sure Dustin Martin could tell us how to do it, but we're not quite there yet, Davis, not yet. We have some ways to go. All right, moving on. To contact, value platform angle over being stopped, it's OK to move through. This is a big one for me. I think there's been a push to say, hey, outside of your body is fine. And I think, yeah, you can pass outside your body line and create a good angle. And there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, I'm probably an old school guy that says, hey, if you can get behind it, I've never seen a ball go through anybody to the back wall for an ace. I have seen balls skip off platforms when they're passing laterally for aces. And I'm a big fan of not getting aced. So I think that the one thing is players have this idea of this kind of one, two, three. I'm going to move, I'm going to put my platform out, and then I'm going to pass. And so they get into this routine. Move, platform out, pass. And so once their platform goes out, their feet stop. And what I want to try to do is get my passers to be comfortable moving with their platform out. And then can they move through it? And there'll be some passers that can be really good reaching up into this zone for this pass. But a lot of my passers aren't good in that area. And I would rather have them take a shuffle back and move through it and just create a better angle. And so I'm asking them to move and create a better angle. We play around with even having our passers start with their platform out. And you might say, that's crazy. But we've seen some college teams do that. And I play it around with it with some passers, and they go get some quieter, because they're used to all this kind of preparation with their arms and doing all this. And maybe just for experiment, try it with your passers. They say, hey, I want you to start with your platform, already gripped up. And if it comes high and you want to take it overhead, then do that. But the majority of all is going to be taking with your platform. See what happens when they do it. Just experiment a little bit with it. Because they get so into this move, they grip up pass that they never-- they're always stopping and reaching an off balance, because the ball's bloating a little bit. And if you haven't read a lot of serves, it makes it tough. All right, I love this idea. It's more of a metaphor. But treats receive like bunting a baseball. Bunting is obviously easier than hitting a home run, because my bat is not moving. My platform's not moving. I want to be the still thing, intercepting the moving thing. And a lot of times, with young athletes, they're swinging their arms too much. And so I love this idea of squaring out, trying to be a square as you can to the incoming ball in general, putting it out, like putting your bat out that's your platform, and just kind of laying it down. Right, when you bud, you kind of lay it down. And I love that idea for passing, because the younger players, as you all know, swing their arms too much. So can we put the bat out? Can we just lay it down? And that's that little cushion. And can we kind of treat it like bunting? I want to pass softly to the setter. I don't need any dingers right now. In serve receipt, in fact, the dingers would not be great. So let's make sure that we are just squaring out, putting the bat out there, and kind of cushioning the ball, and just kind of what I'm saying, lay it down. And to me, that will help them kind of bring their platform back towards them, versus kind of pushing the platform into the ball, which there's times to do that. But look, in general, when you're a coaching young players, can you just settle the serve down into a pass that's useful, into the somewhere, into the middle of the court? So this idea of having a quiet platform, if you can use the baseball analogy, I think it can be helpful. So along those lines, it's kind of interesting to think about-- I always am thinking, how am I-- how have I been screwing up teaching little kids how to pass? And when we think about this, if we toss super easy balls to beginning players all the time, that loop over the net to get them to learn how to pass, then they can swing their arms that super slow ball to get it high in the air. And it's fine, oh, that looks great. The problem, of course, is when we go to compete in the softball player that just learned how to play volleyball, goes back to serve from my opponent, and rips off 16 serves in a row, because the ball is coming super fast and low on that low net and that light ball. And my players are swinging, because I taught them, oh, here's an easy ball, pass it up in the air high. And so they're swinging their arms at these balls that are coming at them at 40 miles an hour on that low net with that light ball. And it's a garage sale. Stuff's going all over. I mean, stuff's moving all over the place. I don't know what's going on. So with that, should we be throwing lower trajectory balls at our beginners? So something to think about kind of experiment with. All right. This is my latest 22 degrees. I'm into this 22 degrees thing. And this kind of builds off the last thing we were saying. And that is, we have two angles when we pass. So we have the angle of deflection, which we call tilt, which looks like we deflect. So we deflect here, we deflect here. If we're deflecting here, that is our angle of deflection. We also have our angle of elevation, how high our hands are. Invariably with beginners, they have this very high angle of elevation. And I would say, this is 90 degrees, this angle. And then we go down to 45. And then we take half of that, and we're down to 22. I'm into 22. And that goes against a lot of what people are doing. And why am I doing this? I'm doing this because over the summer, I watched hours and hours of international volleyball. And the way that the best players in the world are passing tough serves, are with their hands down, making that bunting move like this. And because their timing is so good, they can get the ball high. If we-- we have time for a quick demo, Davis? Sure. OK, let's demo this. This is my favorite thing. All right. So it's an idea of timing where I could still be to do. I can do-- hey, I'm old man. Get here. Get here. Yeah, yeah, there we go. OK, so I can keep my hands down here. And still, one more. Still get that ball high in the air. And once again, this ball's coming slowly. When it comes faster with a serve, it's going to bounce higher. And so I watched a lot of the best passers. And what they're doing is getting this 22 degrees, because they have this-- well, I'm calling that a triangle. So I have the shape of this triangle. The higher my hands are, the less of my sweet spot that I am exposed into the serve, especially when it's coming low trajectory. It's also going to be an easy ball. Listen, if it comes like that, I don't care what happens on an easy serve. I'm wondering what's going on on Cubser when we're getting against. Yeah, am I preparing my players when they're young to not get against, or do I prepare them to pass with their hands high on their young? And then I spend all this time as they get older, trying to get them to win. I'll say one more thing about this. And that is, I think I'm just a tennis guy. Beginners prepare late. So if I'm playing tennis, and I'm hitting a ball, ball counts, I play it like that. I prepare late and play it early, and the ball goes over there. I hold it in and play early. Advanced tennis players prepare early, play the ball late. As a passer, I want to prepare early, prepare early, and then play the ball late. I'm going to let the ball come, ball to hands, not hands to ball. So play around with that. And then let me know what you think. I just watched, was it Tom Hogan yesterday? And did he see Tom Hogan's faster thing the other day? OK, he did a thing on passing. I thought it was pretty good. But he was saying, almost the exact opposite thing. We're some of this finished with these hands way high to keep his platform on the ball. So there are lots of different ways to do it. I did it. But I'm just telling you what my experience is doing right now. And that's my-- that will lose it. Play around with it, let me know what you think. And if you like talking about this, check out our volleyball. It's everywhere. We love talking about this stuff. And this what we talk about every pot. So it's awesome. Next, OK, this is where I get on my high horse. OK. Everyone can pass mostly. And I think a lot of times, especially young players, they think I can pass or I cannot. And I do believe that there are some physical advantages to passing the tough fist serves. Like you need some really strong hand-eye. But to me, I would separate service even to two parts-- the hard part and the easy part. And I want my kids to be failing at the hard part, not the easy part. The easy part is facing your dang platform to the target. OK, and that is something that everyone can do. Now, can everyone get it on your sweet spot? I don't think necessarily we're all equally capable of that. But in general, the ball's not moving that fast. So if you can get them with their angle to the target, they can mostly pass. And to that point, most of the servers-- the younger servers are getting better at serving floaters, but they're not always floating. And so I guess what I mean is if you don't have elite hand-eye, you won't be able to see some of the floating stuff. But because most of the time the ball is not floating, people with relatively medium hand-eye coordination, like tracking, can get the ball on their sweet spot still. So my big point here is, can you shine your light, your little platform light, to the part of the court that you need the ball to go to? And can you do that before, during, and after contact? I'm a gamer, a video gamer. And so in video games, they'll turn green or whatever. It turns some certain color when they satisfy the requirement. And I like this idea of you have to stay green with your platform facing target as long as possible. So shine your little light and stay green. And the idea is like, what happens a lot of times is they'll start off green, and then the ball will move, and then they'll peel their platform away, and then they will be red or whatever. The angry color, because you're going to shink. But the point is, if you can maintain that, most kids can be pretty good, passers most of the time. And then if you have the elite hand-eye, and you can see the float move and stuff like that, then you can become elite. But we gotta, as coaches, make sure that they're always facing a platform to target, and it's totally doable. Next one, shielding is a basic skill. If the ball is not on your midline, the shoulder should be uneven. So we try to use some vocabulary with this. One too far. So we want to teach a lot of players. You'll have them tilt, and they'll take their wrists, and you'll see their wrists do this. Or they'll take their arms, and their arms will kind of do that. Their wrists will be straight, but their arms are tilt-tank. And then we want them to be able to tilt with their hips. So if I'm not moving my shoulders, I'm just leaning and moving my leaning and moving my hips this way, my hips this way, and I'm still presenting this triangle and presenting this sweet spot to the ball. So for our beginning players, we'll play around with this, and we'll just toss them kind of low trajectory balls, and we'll put a target on the pins. And we'll say, take a ball on your left hip, you're tilting from your hips, lean away, and pass the ball to this pin. And then we'll toss the ball, now take the ball on your right hip, and pass it to the left pin. So, and once again, it's before, during, after. So they're here, they're here, with their hips, okay? So we keep it super stable because we're using the biggest muscle groups we can. Teaching young kids how to tilt, and angle their platform to target is, I see it as a basis skill, probably something that for me, I under-topped for many years because I was saying, get your butt behind the ball. Get your butt behind the ball. And now, I'm saying, hey, let's make sure we have that angle that's facing, is your angle facing where we want the ball to go. Because I still see, hey, the ball is here, it's fine. I'm fine getting behind the ball, but if that ball is off-center, what I don't want them doing, I don't want them, this is for me as we call swiveling. This is swiveling. This is tilting. So we want tilting, not swiveling, okay? So that's one of the little points we try to make. I love it, I love it. All right, next, okay, a secondary move. And this is, I think it's important at the youngest levels for sure, but then increasingly as it goes up, the levels, there is going to be many times when the ball quote unquote lies to them. Okay, they think it's going to be deep in it ends up short or think it's on the left hip and it'll be on the right hip. And many athletes are baffled, meaning like, oh, I thought it was here, and then it's not, and I'm done. And I love this idea of having a secondary move. It's a bailout move. So it's like, I'm going to be in my core. And then I'm going to, on the high move, on the high ball, the ball kind of gobbles me up, I'm going to go offline, or whatever tool they want to apply to that. But the idea is like, they have a secondary move locked and loaded ready to go. Okay, so the ball that drops, it's like, I'm not just going to track it and then it drops. I'm going to track it and then I'm going to have my knee down ready to go. So it's just the idea of the secondary move and it happens all the time because their judgment is poor. Right, so they need to have the secondary move. I find that all too often they have the first move. And if it's not in the, if the serve does it, you know, play to the first move, then they're done. I mean, it's like, it was a bad pass. So can they have that secondary move loaded? And I like what Todd said on the last one, like going out to the angle side, like trying to get to core, but then going out to the angle as their secondary move most of the time. It's easy. And I think that's actually why a lot of coaches are training, you know, the offline so much because it happens so often. And you need to get good at it. So that's, that's my point on that. All right. In the baseball analysis, this is Bear Grassles of Buddy Mine. He used to coach at Sonoma State up in Northern California. And now he's at the JC up there. I can't remember the name of the JC, but Bear's a master coach. He loves analogies. And we talk about that idea that I mentioned before about beginning players, prepare late, and actually go to play the ball early. And he says, hey, a lot of the time, if you're beginning players, they're swinging before the ball is over the plate. And so they get into this move where the ball is coming. And their butt goes backwards. You know the one I'm talking about. Their butt goes backwards and their hands go up. And they're, my buddy, JJ, Arizona State. Oh, yeah, we call that taking a crap. OK. So we tell our passers, quit taking a crap. OK. Keep your hips solid. You're not moving your hips backwards, but it's that idea of not being early and letting the ball come to you rather than going out and getting it. Because we think that especially when the ball starts moving fast and the ball starts floating a little bit, our passers start panicking. And when they start panicking, they get edgy and they're actually early rather than late. They can't just relax and let the ball come to them. So, and are they balanced at the end of the pass or are they sitting back and taking a crap? All right, overhand passing for young players. Is a source of debate. I think a lot of times recently we've said like try to take everything with your platform. And I obviously played men's volleyball. And in men's volleyball, they just take everything overhand. And so I think a lot of times the argument has been, well, the girls aren't strong enough. And I just don't think that's the case. I think maybe the trajectory of the serve has something to do with it, not taking it overhand because the ball tends to come a little flatter at them. I think this should be a staple of what you do. I do think that if you could probably get your platform, you might still prefer to get your platform. But I think this is as an out, as a bailout, it is absolutely essential that you have this in their bag. I see what I think to be a much more inefficient move happening when the balls ending up meeting them above their head. They want to do the full turn and play the ball offline. And again, that's probably another tool that they should have in their bag for serve receive. But I think it's so much easier to just overhand and tap it to the center. And I don't think it's a strength issue. I think getting their elbows in, getting their hands in the right place might be part of it. They don't want to be like this. But can you teach them, overhand, serve, receive, please? I think it's very easy. And when I was playing my college years, they just introduced the overhand receive rule. And they had guys standing up on a 12-foot line just taking it overhand. And they were hitting their jumpserv hard at it. I guess what I mean is it's not a strength issue. It maybe is a practice issue. They just need to practice a little bit more and get those elbows nice and tight and make sure it's the finger doing the work, not the thumb. But I think if you can teach them, overhand, serve, receive, it would be to your benefit, for sure. Well, I look at this too. It's just a physics thing, right, Davis? We're looking at physics. And I'm not a huge science guy. But if the ball is sailing over here and it's going to be in, am I going to be really good at getting my platform here and getting it angled at target? Or can I take some big paws and just jack the ball up in the air so I don't get aced? And once again, I guess my stuff is a precision passe. There should be the opposite of your passe. This is all about, don't get aced, don't get aced, right? And overhead is a way, can I use overhead? So I don't get aced because I haven't got any points back when we've been aced, yes. And one other thing is one thing that can help you guys get better with this is their last move being down to, meaning like I think the only time they get in trouble is when that ball kind of drops on them and they're in this lower position. So it's like can they track the ball to their head and then kind of spring up at the end and end up sort of going from down to those will be helpful. - I will say too that like anything, there are some players who might be really bad at this and there are some players who might be really good at it. And I think for you as a coach, experimenting and finding like, wait a minute, this is a great remedy for Sally. It's a horrible remedy for Mary, but let Sally do it. We were playing in a state match against the team from LA a couple of years ago. We discovered we had a scouting report going in, their libero was their worst passer and they were trying, they tried to hide her in the jersey. She was a great defender and a horrible passer. So we went after and we served her every ball and she was horrible for the first two sets. And then she said, okay, she's this kind of strong, kind of stocky kid. She moved up like he said to the 10-foot line, started taking her, she's jacking everything with her hands. And we lost in fight. So I tried not to remember that. But those are the nightmares I have of, I guess people can overhead pass. So training tips, number 14. Let out balls go out and practice this. Okay, how many times have you said, oh, that best server went back there, served three aces and then served a ball that was going 30 feet out, we played it and then she served another four balls and got points. So practicing that and practicing, hey, are your kids on the bench calling the ball if they're closest to the line? And can we help them do that? And can we, hey, maybe the first call is in and out, out. And we practice that and can we practice where you're a server, maybe you're the only one who can be really good at that in practice, that you're serving to start rallies and you're serving 50% of the balls five feet out. And can they get good at that? Moving back to the line and go, nope, that ball's out. You see the college players, they are so good now at knowing when the ball is out and they rarely get aced. And, you know, I'm more into having them move back first and then let it go. A lot of the college players are going out, that's out. They don't even, they don't even blink. They just turn and go out, don't move. But I think for the younger players, getting them to move and knowing when the ball is deep is important. Yeah, interesting. And we don't have anything, I think, in our-- Look at all my kids moving back. No, I think there are different systems for scenes. And I think a lot of that, especially the person next to you, if I'm one of those that, you know, I keep my seams the same no matter where the server comes from. And it's not what most people do. And we have our middles always going behind. We have our middle, the half step behind our wing passers, our left right back, so our middle back. Hopefully, our Libero a lot, if she's the best, she's always going into and taking the deep seam. If she's our best pass, we've had our Libero be our best passers, so we want her going into both those seams and taking that all the time. And if it's the Libero moving back, the person on that side would open up and hopefully call it. This idea of this gentleman had about having all his passers move and then call it. I see a lot of teams doing that. I think it's great. It depends how you train your athletes depending on their seam responsibilities. So I love that. I think it's great. When I see teams do that, I'm like, oh, wow. That coach teaches those kids how to move. I like it. That coach is doing a good job. Anything else about this? We have-- Oh, yeah. Did you get all these? Passing with distractions has been one of the main things that have helped my passers that I've done more of lately. So it's like a lot of times when we're doing our passing training, we're just putting one passer in there. We're teaching them how to pass. Then they're switching. And almost all the time now, I will have someone there to interfere, not really. They're not trying to interfere. But they will be interfering because a lot of times they'll have to go into the seam, make a decision, or whatever. And that process has gotten us so much better at a situation where they get aced a lot, where they're hesitant, going into the seam, where they think it's someone else's ball. That's probably 50% of how we get aced at the lower levels. Is some sort of miscommunication, hesitation, no go, something like that. And so this has helped me a lot. And it's just-- it is a little bit more distracting. It is distracting, but that's actually what you want, because that's going to be the similar distraction they have in the game and more. So I love this tip. All right, I'm going to throw one thing out there with that. And that is the idea of just that old butterfly right, where you have one passer out. What if you put two passers out in butterfly rather than one? Very simple, right? You just go, wait, instead of having one person out, we're going to always have two. And so now my passers have to make a decision. Who's ball is it? And now every time you're doing a little warm up butterfly drill, you are working on seam responsibilities and communication, because one of the toughest things, of course, is knowing, is that ball mine or not? And making that subtle change for us has been smart. I look at and go, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It took me only 25 years to figure that out. The idea of freeze to target to check balance, angle, sweet spot, have my young kids now. We're saying stuff like 1,000, 1,000, 2. And they got a freeze for as long as it takes them to say 1,000, 1,000, 2. They got to show I'm into, hey, show the triangle. Can you show the triangle that the triangle is facing the target? So, and once again, they can self-coach. Are they balanced when they're freezing? Are they leaning? Is there butt going backwards? Are they on one foot, rather than on both feet? Is there platform, symmetric? Is there a chocolate mess? What does it look like? Okay, this is one of my things I've been big on recently, and it's really been helpful. Like, I do a lot of lessons. And the tendency and the lesson is to want to go out there. You put the surf, it make them comfortable, so they can get the good result. And lately, I've been going away from that. I don't want you to be comfortable, but I don't care if you get the result. What I care is if you attend to the detail that we're focusing on, obviously, hopefully that will yield the results. But all too often, what I see is coaches making their players be comfortable, and that's not what you want. You want to deal with the hardest serves. If you can deal with the hardest serves, you can deal with the easiest serves. And so I want to have more challenging serves for our passers. So how do you get that in your practice? Well, you can move them around. You can move the serve around. Bring them closer, obviously, gives less time. Bring them further. You'll get more movement of the serve. So there's benefits to just moving where you're from. Serving from their right side is usually less comfortable passing balls on their right. We should do all these things, and we should make them uncomfortable and challenge them. But there's more that we love to talk about. We're sort of like eco-decoaches and constraints let approaches. One of the ones that I love is you're serving the normal ball for a 14-steam. And then you're serving a 12-ball in there. The same size ball, but it's going to float more, and it's going to be more difficult. And so can you challenge them in that way? The other one is an idea I stole from Beach, but can you put the wind at the server? Like, we have these huge fans in our gym, and we face it at the server, and they will serve into the wind, which as you guys know, if you're Beach players, that'll totally affect the flight of the ball. Make it way more challenging to track. And we want that challenge. We want them to go into the game and say, those serves were easy, because they've seen a lot of serves. And so to that point, there's a couple things that you can do that are that I found to be really helpful. The first is one-on-one. So it's like, I'm just trying to break you down as a passer and as a server. And so you're trying to win that. I think a lot of times it's more cooperative, and I don't want that. I want to be going after you. And so we'll play little server games. If you get a two or a three pass, you get a point. If I get an ace, I get a point. Or if I get a one or a zero, I get a point. And the younger kids can deal with that, and they like it. The challenge, and what I find is often too often, the challenge is not connected to the training. We want that challenge of, you could get ace right here. It'll be a powerful force when we're training. And I think a lot of times we're like, I don't want you to get ace. It's ugly. You're not going to feel good about your practice, because you've got ace to bunch. But let them feel bad about it, I guess, if they want, but they'll learn from it. And then you process that. Like here, you're getting better in this regard. And then can you match up your best passers with your best servers more often? And so it's like, I want my best servers to be serving at my best passers. And a lot of times they're the same person. So obviously that's not the case. But a lot of times we'll have our best passing group going against, and that's why a lot of times the coach will step in. But then they have too much control. So they can put it right where the player feels comfortable. So we want that variety. We want it. But then we also want them to still be able to attend to the thing that they're trying to get done, with quiet platform, with the body behind the ball or whatever. So my thing is, if they're getting aceed, just let them keep getting aceed if they can attend to the thing. If they can't, then maybe you need to take off some ball speed, put the ball in a little differently. But it's OK for them to struggle. Let's put some more challenging servers on them. You can also use the smaller ball or the bigger ball. Like, that's what we have for you. Bodden has a bunch of different balls now. They just have a 10 new ball. So the bodden guy, Richard said, hey, it takes the balls and it jumps. They've got a big ball. And if we talk about this idea of touch, right? Oh, that person, they have touch with their platform. And some kids have it, some kids don't. But like anything, whether it's jumping ability, whether it's serving, no matter how good a player is coming in, they can always improve a little more. So my question would be, well, how do we improve a passer's touch? Maybe having them pass different balls of different weights to the same target area might be, wait a minute. Oh, yeah, that's another-- you have this touch. And a lot of times, I think we find that beach players come in maybe and have more touch because they play maybe a beach ball. They come in and play an indoor ball. And they get that. John Mayer is a buddy of mine. I don't know if you know John is the beach coach at Loyola Marymount, was A-B-C-A coach of the year. You'll see his picture out there. I went to John's practice this year. And you would think going to a program like that, their second in the nation in Beach. I don't know what-- is anybody a beach coach here? What beach ball do they play with down the NCAA? Do you know? Yeah, I don't know which one it is if it's a McCos or whatever. Whatever they're playing on the beach, you would think when you go into a practice that they're going to play always with the ball that they play with in their big matches. And you go to John's practice and he's all, yeah, I got this when it came out for $3.99. And so his players, they have indoor balls, light balls, 12 balls, beach balls, their carts are filled with all these different balls. And their players are like, oh, it's a big point. They'll go and get that super light ball. But then they're putting their pressure on these players and they're getting this idea. They'll be through some balls out here, so you kind of see that. So that idea of ECOD, doing the whole thing and using some different equipment to make your players adjust. One more thing on this challenging serves thing. One of the challenges I see is when the younger players are getting beat up and sort of receive, they'll start to cry or be sad or whatever. And it's like, is your making your players cry? Well, no, not me. What do I-- like, in volleyball, they'll get bullied, right? And it's not one out. They'll have to stay in there and pass poorly if the team is good, right? They'll put it on you. And so I think they need to go through that. So like, if the server is successful, have that same server continue to serve the passer. That was their failing. And have them battle through it. There's so much benefit in that, I swear, because a lot of times the meltdown will start to happen. And then it will just continue, right? You're not going to feel good if you're getting beat up. But if they have experience getting beat up, they can feel it a little bit and know how to kind of get out of it. So the more challenging to serve the better, even if it doesn't feel good at first, they'll ultimately be the best for them. And then you'll get my tape. We call that, Davis. No, we call that? What's it? Two-person service. Yeah, yeah. When the server goes into the net, what does your passer look like? And so is there communication before the ball gets to the net? This is a nice way for us to do some self-checking. So is the passer still staying in the same spot? They started before the ball, went 30 feet from the server to the net. Did the server talk? Did the server-- I'm sorry, did the passer talk? Did the passer move? What does that look like? And we like the platform out by the time the ball hits the tape. Because, as I mentioned earlier, we like to be able to move with our platform out. And can they create that angle early? Platform presentation. Is it angle to target? And we'll see some passers. They haven't done a thing. Balls move 30 feet. And they're still smoking their cigarette. Wait for the ball to come over the net before they are going to do anything to prepare to pass the ball. So it's a nice, easy way to teach when they don't make an error. Sometimes it's hard to give players a feedback when they shank of all. Because like David said, they're in their own hands, and they don't really want to hear from you that. But this is a nice time. You just want a point. Now I can remind you, hey, your press a little late here. Can you get on a little earlier? Are you picking up cues early enough? All right. I'm very adamant about this one too. And I think it coaches want their players to be as good as they can, obviously. So a lot of times, they'll emphasize perfect form, perfect passing. And I really think that that overall can be detrimental to them. Because it's more of a-- we want to get a pretty good result every time kind of thing. That's the way I would approach it. A perfect leads to an all or nothing type of approach, where you might get a lot of threes, but you're also going to get a lot of zeros. And zeros are the worst. And threes, especially in youth, they don't help you that much. So if you pass a perfect pass compared to a two pass, a three pass compared to a two pass, what benefit do you get when you're running a high two and the block's not blocking? So my thing is, can we be a little bit more adaptable and moldable and have a tool for every situation to where we can not completely fail? We may not have a complete perfect pass right to two feet off the net in the middle of the portion of the court. But I think coaches emphasize that too much. So my recommendation is that it could be avoid all or nothing type rules. Like you have to be stopped. That's one of them. Or you have to be in court. Like those would be more like principles. If you can be stopped, do it. If you can get the ball in your core, do it. But otherwise, make sure you're adaptable and moldable. And I think that will really, really pay off. Because everyone's talking about the passing average, right? And the distance between two and three is less than the distance between two and zero. Two and zero is a mile. Two and three is a little short walk. Meaning we can get them to go from twos and threes. But a zero to a two, that's a huge impact on the game. So we like the idea of having precision with generous margins. So the idea of being there, yes, we've got to get it there. But this is the good area that we can work with. And we're not going to allow ourselves to pass out of that area and allow the learning to yield to the key concepts versus, I guess, narrowing it to such a fine spot that it's impossible. Like with the youth kids, they're never going to be-- I mean, not never. Hopefully they are sometimes. But in general, they're not stopped and balanced with perfect form. It's just not the case. Now, we're going to work towards that. But can they be flexible and adaptable enough to know what they have to do to get us a two pass, to not get used to keep the ball in the middle? And a lot of times, I think players are focused on their form so much that the intent goes out the window. We're trying to get our platform to the target and get the platform on our-- or get the ball on our platform and make it go there. But a lot of times, they're trying so perfect for perfect form that the intention isn't even there. So that's why I'm like, I'm not a core believer. I'm not an offline believer. I'm a platform to target believer, right? And that's kind of my approach on this here. It's like, when we try to train perfect form, there's a time and place for that. But in general, the game does not allow for that, especially with youngers. So can we have some flexibility with where they're doing it, while still maintaining the key principles, balance, platform to target, reading early, being comfortable? So yeah, that's my idea. All right. Last one, we'll go back to Charlie Brown. For those of you that don't know Charlie back in-- Southern California, Orange County, volleyball club. Charlie Brown, kind of a legendary coach. And you would see his teams come out. They'd be passing back and forth in paired passing, always on two feet, looking like they were passing a tough serve. And his thing that he taught me many years ago was, well, if I teach them to pass three ball passes, it's a lot easier than passing on two feet. And then they get into passing tough serves and a lot of them are off balance. So what if we make them balanced all the time? Are they going to be better in servicing? And Charlie's teams were legendary for killing you with ball control. And his kids had great ball control. So that, I think, wraps up our 20 tips. I want to show you a couple pictures of triangles with the hands down. So we like showing our players pictures. So you can see when we look at what is that angle there on this. These are the first two from left to right. These are the hands up. These happen to be passers on my high school team. So I talk about this, but I don't know how to teach it, obviously. So this is something that we've been working on. So we see it on the left in the middle. And then the girl on the right is actually the same girl as the girl on the left. That was our La Barra, this year. But we see her trying to make some changes with our hands down in that picture on the right. And then this is one of my favorite pictures. We'll end with this one. We have the triangle behind the ball of the person who is not passing it. And then we see this super high angle with no triangle with actually the girl that is passing it. So I want to see the triangle of number 20. And I don't want to see the high platform with no triangle of the mystery woman with her number covered. And with a couple more things. I do have a couple books up here. I would love it if people were interested in taking a look at it. So I'm not hauling a book's home. But I have a coach's book of lists. These are tips from 130 different coaches, lists of 10, from coaches, from Carts Caride, a Kirsten Bernthalboot, the John Mayer, Jamie Morrison, oh my goodness. I forgot Jamie was in here. But a bunch of coaches, I think it's a great reference book. You can use it for yourself. You can use it as a gift for coaches. And then I have another one that's actually for parents and players if you want to take a look at that. They'll be up here. We have a spike light that we've played around with. This was a little pandemic project. It's a beach ball and a cloth cover that you can play inside so you can toss that thing around and check that out. Anything else we have, Davis, besides checking out the volleyball? Yeah, check out the volleyball. Thanks to our sponsors, Huddle and Ball Time and the Art of Coaching volleyball. And if you want to check us out, please do. This is what we do. Every week, 30 minutes, we give tips to coaches. We talk volleyball. And yeah, check us out. We're everywhere on YouTube, Huddle. I mean, Spotify. Yeah, questions. We're not going to take questions because some people want to go and then you feel like I don't want to go when people are talking and whatever. If you have questions, come on up. We're happy to answer anything you have. Otherwise, thanks so much for coming. And safe travels and happy holidays. Great. [MUSIC PLAYING]