PAC-12 Coach Gives Tips for Club Volleyball Success

This is a guest blog from Coach Christy Naughton, a coach for Club One in the east Valley.

It’s not very often we have the opportunity to pick the brain of a PAC-12 volleyball coach, but Arizona State University’s Jason Watson doesn't want that to be the case. In a collaborative effort to foster discussion and idea sharing, Watson recently spent about two hours with a small group of coaches from Club One, formerly Barcelona AZ.

“If you want to win, there are three battles. You must serve, you must receive and you must play left side,” said Watson who recommends club coaches incorporate these skills into a substantial amount of their practice. With limited court time during the club season, as few as four hours per week, game-like situations are key to a successful practice in the short term and a successful season in the long term.

While basic skills like serving and passing shouldn't be neglected, Watson is confident that club coaches don’t need more then five or six good drills in they’re repertoire. “From there you can create so many variations,” said Watson. “You should want your kids to get good at them.”

Forcing the team to work as a whole to accomplish the goal, or perhaps even fail, is the basis of any sport and even relates to the “Part vs. Whole Learning” argument that exists in education, music and even athletics.

“Athletes have a limited ability to process information,” said Watson. “It’s important to keep them in the ‘part’ until they kinda get it, then bring it back together.” Volleyball coaches face this dilemma at every practice and during every tournament, whether they know it or not. The decision to stop an entire drill, the “whole,” to focus on the individual, or the “part,” is made all the time.

So how can coaches be confident that they’re not spending too much time on one and not enough of the other? “We need to coach at the pace of the learner, not the pace of the coach,” said Watson who recommends planning practices at least one week at a time. Preparation is important to the athletes in order to provide consistency. While anything can happen during a practice to shed light on another skill that needs focus and distract from the original goal, having a set plan can keep coaches and athletes on track.

One struggle that coaches face is planning an appropriate amount of time for skills and drills. “In the sport, each point scoring opportunity last about 30-45 seconds,” said Watson who recommends using that as a frame of reference to build your own drills and adjust from there based on age and skill level as the season progresses.

Watson, who shares a quote at the beginning of his ASU practices to help the team focus in, appropriately referred to this quote that day: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”