The weekend of September 14-15, 2024 Volleyball England hosted the UK Volleyball Teaching Symposium at its Nationwide Volleyball Centre. In attendance have been coaches from England, Eire, Northern Eire, and Scotland. The theme of the occasion was juniors efficiency teaching. Due to funding from the FIVB, we had Jim Stone as our lead presenter. Jim received a U19 World Championships gold medal teaching the USA ladies, so he suited properly the occasion’s focus.
There have been 4 off-court classes:
- An examination of sport and train medication in volleyball and the prevalence of various accidents in volleyball primarily based on current analysis run by the V.E. Chief Medical Officer.
- A dialogue of growing and sustaining confidence in gamers led by Alex Porter, the pinnacle coach of the College of Essex, which is likely one of the UK college efficiency packages (with a little bit of contribution from myself).
- A have a look at efficiency metrics and the way they relate to successful from the England Males’s Nationwide Staff analyst (he really did his personal “takeaways” publish right here).
- A State of the Recreation session run by Jim how the sport is being performed now, and the place it appears to be going.
All of the classes generated good conversations with insightful questions. The session on confidence, although, might simply have carried on for fairly a bit longer than it did. The primary thrust was that there’s are two varieties of confidence. The primary is self-confidence, which is common. As such, it’s topic to the affect of day-to-day occasions in a participant’s life.
The second is self-efficacy. That is area particular. In different phrases, it is going to be completely different for receiving serve vs. hitting vs. serving. That is closely influenced by the participant’s sense of competence and their prior expertise. What we see is a suggestions loop the place self-efficacy (confidence) permits the participant to take dangers to attempt to enhance, that enchancment results in elevated competency, which lifts self-efficacy, and so forth.
After all, we additionally had a bunch of on-court classes.
The primary of these was related to the have a look at volleyball accidents. An S&C coach from TASS with expertise working within the volleyball house (not a simple factor to search out within the UK) ran a session that featured actions to warm-up athletes up, assist them keep away from accidents, and usually enhance their bodily capabilities. This was all courtroom stuff. No dialogue of weight lifting or something like that.
The remaining classes have been all run by Jim. They went over:
- Early-Apply Actions (ball-handling and different warm-up kind workouts)
- Serve & Move
- Growing Tempo in Assault
- Integrating Entrance and Again Row Assault
- Out of System Offense
- Block & Protection
We had juniors gamers on-hand to be demonstrators for the on-court stuff. On Saturday it was a gaggle of ladies, whereas on Sunday we had boys. I invited gamers that I believed would most likely be pretty consultant of the extent of gamers the coaches in attendance could be working with. In different phrases, I didn’t need to simply usher in a bunch of faculty gamers so it could all be good and neat.
This method finally had pluses and minuses. I believe it went in response to plan on Day 2 with the boys as we had an honest stage of functionality all through. With the women, although, we have been missing within the setting place. We had a pair, however they have been inexperienced. That made Jim’s “tempo” session a problem. On the one hand, it was irritating that Jim couldn’t do what he most likely would have in any other case. Alternatively, nevertheless, attendees noticed Jim adapt to the circumstances in a state of affairs most likely fairly like what they’d face in their very own gyms.
One of many funnier components of that complete situation was that one in every of our England U19 gamers – a Center – really demonstrated some fascinating setting abilities. This had our nationwide staff coaches wanting on with mouths open (we might REALLY use extra top at setter) and asking her membership coach, who was there, why that is the primary we’ve ever seen that. His argument was that if he didn’t have her hit he wouldn’t have any offense. That does, although, beg the query of operating a 6-2.
The opposite factor that stood out was Jim’s focus on gamers’ focus of consideration.
After all there have been a variety of different takeaways. Primarily based on the feedback we collected on the finish, completely different individuals took a wide range of issues away from mainly each session. Precisely the kind of factor you hope for.
Total, the occasion went very properly. All of the suggestions we obtained throughout and after the Symposium was extraordinarily constructive. One of many coaches from Eire in attendance shared his ideas and takeaways in a publish on the Volleyball Eire Fb web page.
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