Z-Health and Volleyball

Yesterday, in place of the normal conditioning I do with the girls before practice, we focused exclusively on z-health drills. The exercises that seemed to help the most were lateral ankle tilts, vision and balance work. They gained flexibility in the toe touch, side twist and both improved their vision.

At the beginning of practice the team does a two minute drill warm-up drill. The drill consists 15 seconds each of running in place with high knees, passing jacks, attack squats, side to side shuffle in ready position, push-ups, tuck crunches, mountain climbers, and squat thrusts. Passing jacks and attack squats are two movements I created to replicate volleyball movements and inserted in the line-up. This time they did their two minute drill with their eyes closed. The idea for this came directly from z-health. The goal was to work their balance and body awareness.

After this, they began a basic serve receive passing drill with the servers at the 10' line. The result was my kids suddenly turned into passing machines. They were much more fluid moving to the ball and the first 5 passes were nails right to target. As the servers moved back and the serves started coming harder, they did start to tense up again and shank more passes. Next practice we'll continue to do the two-minute drill with eyes closed, as well as more serving from the short to medium ranges to increase their comfort level.

There's a serving drill where they partner up and start at the 10' line. Every time they successfully serve the ball right to their partner, they get to take a step back until they're at the endline. Perhaps something similar could work for serve receive; for every successful pass to target, the server takes a step back. For every pass that's up and playable but not to target, the server stays put. And for every unplayable pass the server takes a step up. This way there will be visual positive feedback for every good pass. This should also cause the kids to feel good about pushing the server farther back in the court and look forward to passing the deeper more aggressive serves.

I'd like to do a lot more work individually with the kids in particular on balance and vision. This is where having a great assistant/co-coach comes into play. I have the utmost confidence in the other coach to put together a solid practice plan and effectively run a practice. This should allow me to take the kids aside one by one and work with them. There's a few kids that have had repeated struggles learning some skills. It'll be interesting to see if the z-health exercises can help to give them the breakthroughs they need.