Volleyball Coaching Life-Teaching Combination Plays

I was working with some of our 18’s players this week and I decided that we would have some fun. I showed them some combination plays, nothing fancy: Tandems, X plays, front slides, pump 31, pump 1, and the thinking behind putting these combination plays together in coordination with the backrow attack.  

We had a blast; I had a blast teaching them and they seemed like they had a blast learning. We ran these plays off of coaches tosses to the setter and having the hitters running their routes, so we were not really preparing these plays for game play, although I secretly hoped that they would sneak it into their repertoire.

As I was driving home from practice, I thought about some of the other teams I had coached. We had always managed to sneak in combination plays as a treat for the players to run as a break from just persevering through the grind of a practice packed with all the things that we needed to do.

I thought about watching the ubiquity of the combination plays during my volleyball spectator experience. I saw a lot of it in the international game; I saw some of those plays in the college game; and I would see it executed by club teams every once in a while.

But I was disturbed by my lack of diligence in teaching combination plays and wondered why I had not been teaching them with my recent teams.

One reason that I realized was that I lost sight of the forest because of the trees, I was trying to fix the immediate and pressing issues with the teams and forgot that it is important to expose my team, at all ages, to the history of the game. The Japanese teams started using these tactics during the 1960’s and 1970’s and saw great successes with them, and in the process, revolutionized the game of volleyball. I had lost sight of the impact that this kind of playing around can affect the players, how they looked at the game and how they experienced it. They may never execute a combination play in a match, but having that knowledge certainly broadens their perspective.

We don’t see much of these plays now because the service game has changed, which has affected the effectiveness of the first touch, to the point that most teams are not running combination plays in serve receive, let alone in transition. The usual emergency outlet is to the pins or to the pipe hitter, high and slow sets, nothing which involves quick tempos. Coaches are also much more conservative in their approach as there are more at stake. I see this across the board in the club, high school, and college ranks.

A setter that not only have the skills to run the combinations in transitions but to also have the courage to do so is very rare. Even if you find one of those rare setters, they have usually been  limited by their coach dictated team strategies, so they play it safe.

I get it, going for a high-risk high-reward combination play ranks low in the team strategy. It is still too bad that we don’t do it more often. The four 18-year-old players I worked with were astounded by the possibilities, this was something that they had not experienced before, and it made that practice all the more enjoyable.

Note to self, make sure to teach the advanced stuff in addition to the usual stuff.

Note: Thanks to Kayla, Kelsie, Megan, and Sage for being excited about combination plays, and for reminding me how much it is to execute something like that.