Volleyball Coaching Life-The Pit

The Pit Drill or the coach on X drill has long been a part of volleyball; indeed, every coach has their own version of the Pit Drill in their toolbox.  

This discussion is about why I like the drill and the elements of my thought process. I don’t pretend to be original with the way I run the drill, nor do I profess to be original with these thoughts. I hope people will find the discussion useful for their own purposes.

The Pit Drill elicits different reactions from players and coaches alike. Some players love it, while other players hate it. Many volleyball old timers recall the flickering archival footage of the Japanese national team training in the 1960s and 70s while doing the Pit drill. The stern coach is indiscriminately lobbing volleyballs all over the place and the helpless players are charging around the court throwing themselves at balls that are just out of reach. Here is an example of the drill being conducted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krbJ1MBYXTo&t=1599s  starting at 25:45. (Sorry, link is fixed now.)

Some people collectively cringe and recoil at the ferocity and the seeming heartlessness of the coach from the footage, while others marvel at the intensity of the players as they struggle through the difficult drill. Whatever the reaction, we all have our own impressions. Feeling about the Pit is rarely neutral.

There are players  who love this drill. Recently, one of the players that I had coached as a 14-year-old requested that I run the Pit with her just one last time as she had graduated from high school and was not going to be playing in college. A player that was a couple of years older, who was coaching for the club, said that she wanted in on the action. I did coach on two with them. It was wonderful for me because I got to work with them one more time; I had to control my emotions as I put them through the paces. They loved it because they were sweaty, out of breath,  but with big smiles on their faces.

I first experienced the pit as a player when I paid to take part in the old Gold Medal Players camps. This is long before GMS; Gold Medal Camps offered a variety of camps for both coaches and players. I attended a player’s camp in Dallas TX where we were put through two day of regular practice that was presided over by an experienced volleyball coach. Luckily for me, that coach in Dallas happened to be John Kessel; which is my initial foray into his wonderful and unique mind.  It was John who initiated me to the Pit as a fat, out of shape, middle-aged, and oblivious player. I loved it.  I was an amorphous puddle at the end of the drill, but I felt exhilarated because I realized that I had accomplished something exceptional: I had overcome much of my fears and doubts to survive The Pit. It was challenging and it made me react rather than overthink, a great habit to have as I tend to be overly analytical as a player. I thought my way through most challenges in my life,  which made me slower than I actually was,  which was very slow.

There are a few critical considerations that I observe before using  the Pit drill. Some ground rules.

·       I make sure that the players understand how to safely go to the ground after digging the ball.

·       I make sure that they know how to protect themselves as they go after balls that are hit at them.

·       Ground training is always the pre-requisite for the Pit.

·       I make sure that the team is providing positive feedback to those players who are in the Pit. Urging them on. It is important that the teammates are giving them their best support and the benefits of their experience, it is more meaningful coming from the teammates.

·       I make winning the drill a bit deal, a huge celebration, because it is a big deal, it should be a point of pride for each player to have beaten the drill.

·       I make sure that there are coaches who are on the sidelines cheering and giving them pointers, especially after they fail in their attempt. I usually end the attempt if I feel that they have very little left in the tank or that they are struggling too much. The coaches will greet the players as they come off the court, first to see how they are doing, and then giving them what they need to know to beat the drill.

·       I make sure that I try to make the drill relatively equal in difficulty for all the players, even though the drill is a coach-controlled drill, and I can tweak the difficulty of each touch, which I do. The players are very perspicacious, they will know when I ease up with them and they would question the unequal treatment.

·       I do however, make it much harder on those players who I know are good defenders and are all out ballers. They, and their teammates, also expect me to make it harder for them, because they take pride in being identified as such.

·       I build desirable difficulties into each iteration of the drill. Desirable difficulties are what drives learning, the idea is to create difficulties for the player to learn to overcome, which can then be used to scaffold their learning for the next level of development. The level of difficulty should consistently rise as they become more at ease with the drill. The goal is to never have the players completely comfortable and at ease.

The Pit is only one tool that I use to teach defense. I have learned that I should not use it as punishment, I don’t use it as a part of the regular rotation of drills in season. I do use it early in the season to try to establish a level of expectation for the team, but I will use it occasionally just as a refresher for the team, if their memory need to be refreshed.

The Pit Drill at its most basic consists of a coach with as many volleyballs as can be gathered, going against one or a group of players. To run the drill effectively and efficiently, a massive number of shaggers are needed to replenish the supply of volleyballs, with a couple of handers continuously feeding balls to the coach. The coach’s job is to toss, throw, and hit balls at the players so that they can dig the balls up to a pre-determined target until a goal is reached.

A defining feature of the Pit Drill is that it is coach-controlled. This feature means that the coach creates the environment, the pacing, the difficulty, the constraint imposed on the drill, as well as all the variables that affects how the player will respond. This is very powerful, and it also means that the coach must have a clear purpose in mind and set the variables necessary to achieve her goals for the players before conducting the drill.

The key is to define the end goal that we wish to achieve with this drill before we start doing this drill, and we need to understand what we need to do as the person running that drill.

The Pit is very effective in motivating the players to achieve successful results if the coach  adjusts the coach-controlled parameters that are inherent in the drill. This drill allows the players to make mistakes, so that they have the opportunity to learn how to improvise, adapt, and overcome.

I believe that doing the Pit is effective in:

·       Coaxing the beginning player to react to a ball that is hit a few steps away from them. The usual player reaction is to take a step towards the direction of the ball and immediately stopping because the players don’t believe they could get to that ball. The Pit gets them to overcome their mental block about playing the ball.

This is a primary goal. Beginners are beginners because not only do they not know the sport, they also do not know the range of their physical abilities. Sometimes it takes a psychological nudge to get them to understand how far they can go. Beginning players will  always underestimate their own range and capabilities.

·       Building confidence in players because with each successful touch the players will gain confidence in themselves.  As the self-confidence grows, the positive behavior becomes self-reinforcing, which eventually becomes a habit for the player. More importantly, the players  themselves unconsciously had removed that mental block.

·       Creating a sense of accomplishment in the player which comes from beating the Pit. It is an exhilaration that is addictive and makes the player want to achieve harder and more demanding goals.  Taking it easy on them will not accomplish the same thing.

·       Encouraging communications amongst the players in the coach on two variations; whether the communications occur verbally, which is what happens with beginners, or  tacitly as it happens with experienced players. Volleyball is a team sport, as such, it is important for players to learn how their teammates play and how they can play together; whether it is learning to cover the court,  creating layers of defense,  or learning to deal with the uncertain and random events that often happens in an actual game. Coach on two is a good start for teaching beginners to play together, as does all small-sided games because each player has to only learn how to read the other player, whereas the indoor game requires that the players learn to anticipate the thought process of five other people and be able to also anticipate how the group collectively reacts.

·       Teaching the  players how to read the opposition because the coach is on the same side of the court for the drill; usually the net acts as a opaque barrier for beginning players as they tend not to pay attention to the other side of the net. Starting with someone actively moving and hitting calls attention to a hitter so that they can get used to seeing the opponent.

There are many different options with the Pit Drill. Which ones the coach choose to use depends on the desired results the coach wishes for the players to accomplish.

The first decision to be made is the number of players who are in the Pit. It could be done as coach on one; or it could be done as a coach on two, I stay away from having more than two players at a time, because the challenge of teaching players to cover the 10m by 10m court is lost if there are too many players in the 100 square meter court and there are other, better drills to work on multiple player defenses

The second decision is the kind of scoring variations that needs to be used:

·       Timed drill where the players must stay in the Pit for a predetermined amount of time.

o   A variation on the timed drill is to add additional minutes or seconds if the players failed to touch a ball and let it drop or if they one armed the ball. I used to do this drill a lot, but it gets to be too much: physically for the players and mentally for the coaches to track the additional time.

·       Set number of balls dug without a time limit.

·       Set number of balls dug within a predetermined time limit.

·       Set number of balls dug out of a predetermine number of swings from the coach. For example, the player must get X perfect digs out of Y number of swings.

·       Touch 10 is a variation where the player had to touch 10 consecutive balls directed at them.  The count resets to zero very time a ball hits the ground without the player touching the ball.

·       Dig X number of non-consecutive balls up into a predetermined, more strictly defined target zone.  This is less demanding physically but more demanding technique wise. As the players get better, the scoring can change to consecutive digs.

·       For two players, there is the variation called Touch-touch, which involves one player digging and chasing and their partner setting the dug ball back at the coach. This works on their teamwork, developing volleyball IQ,  and communication — both verbal and non-verbal

The choice of the target is yet another decision.  The target definition can range from just touching a hit ball, digging the ball so that it is within the 10m by 10m square of the court, digging the ball to anywhere near the 3-meter line, or to within the tight circle around the passing target, i.e. the setter’s position. The size of the target needs to become progressively smaller as the players become more skilled, this is a part of the desirable difficulty paradigm.

One of the most important coach’s decisions is the pace the coach imposes on the drill. The coach can make the pace quite leisurely, allowing the players to get back to the starting position after every play on the ball before the next ball is initiated; or they can choose to keep a faster than game pace with rapid fire ball initiation, and everything in between. This is where the large amount of volleyballs, massive number of shaggers, and ball feeders are critical. Indeed, the coach can employ a broad spectrum of drill pace. It all depends on the coach’s read on her players, taking into account their level of experience, their competitiveness, and the amount of hesitancy that the players show. A good thing to remember is that the pace does not need to be consistent throughout a specific iteration of the drill, the coach can vary it to adjust to the player’s response and the coach’s read on whether the players are learning what they need to learn. Overspeeding the drill is one of my favorite variations to deploy, but sometimes too much overspeed can cause player frustration, but overspeeding keeps the players from going into paralysis by analysis, which is what we don’t want when playing defense.

The speed at which I run the drill is very much dependent upon the levels of the players, it is not defined by the chronological age of the players, because there are 12-year-olds that can flat out play defense like nobody's business.

All these decisions are coach determined; they are all levers for the coach to pull, levers that allows the coach to create opportunities to shape the player unconscious actions and reactions to stress, which will, hopefully, create the desired athletic responses.  

Since the Pit is a coach-controlled drill, the successful execution of the Pit directly depends on the coach’s ability to control each ball/ rep. The drill becomes a waste of effort and movement if the coach does not have enough control and accuracy in hitting  the ball.  Hitting accuracy is a critical skill that coaches must develop.

When I started to learn about volleyball coaching,  I thought one of the coaches I was learning from, my friend Santiago Restrepo, was amazingly accurate, much more accurate that I was or am now. He was so accurate that he can be deliberately specific about exactly where he wants to hit the ball with pinpoint accuracy.

Coaches should not  just go out on the court and whack balls indiscriminately, although sometimes it may seem that way.

The coach’s arm accuracy is critical to make this drill work. The drill should build up player confidence even as the player experiences initial failures. If the player is consistently dealing with balls that are impossibly out of their reach, or if they are spending all their Pit time avoiding mishits that are dangerous to their physical wellbeing, they will get frustrated and they will quit. The coach must be accurate enough to hit balls that are just out of the players reach yet close enough so that the player can still making a successful play for the ball. As the drill is repeated during training and as the player’s confidence grows, the balls need to be hit harder, faster, and further away from the player so that they learn to make increasingly assertive movements.

I learned to be more accurate with my swing through endless reps while running the drill with my teams, even though I never played the game at a high level. I have had to apologize for my mishits, a lot, to those players who were unfortunate to have me as coach early on in my coaching path.  My present teams are benefitting now because even though I have learned to be more accurate, I can’t swing as hard as I used to, which was not very hard at all. So I get scooped, a lot.

I don’t, however, expect to get as accurate as those who have played at a high level. I drop my elbow for a shorter and quicker stroke, which also gives me more accuracy. I am accurate in hitting balls into the players platforms and to either side of them from a reasonable distance.  I have also grown proficient at judging where each player believes their physical movements limits are, so that I am able to hit/throw balls just out of their reach. One does get smarter as one ages.

I am not accurate enough to confidently take full swings at a target above the player’s shoulders at close range. I usually throw or two hand push the balls at the players when I am close to the player to avoid accidentally pegging the player’s faces.  I try to get the players to play the ball with two hands with a moderately thrown ball or tip when I am very close to where they are and not take a full swing.  

Coaches develop a repertoire of tactics consisting of specific shot sequences that serves to give the players the desirable difficulties, to challenge their ability to cover the court and to sharpen their ability to read and react to anything. None of the listed tactics are original, most are tactics that have been around for a long time in volleyball; they are, however, tactics that I use all the time.  If one were to summarize the intent of these tactics, it would be to never fall into a rut, to always keep the defenders on edge, and to teach the players to always expect the unexpected, which is what makes defense so much fun to play. Here are some of my favorites:

·       Tip short to bring them in and then hit many balls rapid fire style to the player to challenge them or to make them move because they are staying in one position waiting for me to hit balls right at them. 

·       Lobbing a ball outside the confines of the court lines, forcing them to chase the ball down and playing the ball over their shoulders; then hit a ball into their platform as they turn around after the play. This gets the players to look for the ball after they have turned away from the middle of the court.

·       Going back the same shot after a player mistake, to give the player a chance to correct their mistake.

·       Tipping the ball short continuously for a long sequence if the player doesn’t go after the short balls the first time. Repeating until they get a short ball up.

·       Tossing balls to the adjacent court, giving the players an opportunity to chase down the ball that is clearly out. Sometimes one does not know whether the ball going out because the ball had been touched by a block or by another defender.

·       In coach on two, hitting the ball in the open court whenever the two players are not balancing the court, leaving a large part of their court open.

·       In coach on two, moving the ball from short to long and side to side so that the players are forced to communicate with their partner.

I hope that this is helpful for those who do run the Pit in their practices, I also hope that this essay has given you something to consider. I have learned a lot about the Pit throughout the years; more importantly, I have learned more about my players and myself as I continually adapt and adjust the way I run the drill. I suspect I will continue to do so.

That’s my story. For now.