with Jodi Schramm,
founder of Premier Volleyball Academy; 18-Onituka Head Coach;
2016 PrepVolleyballl.com Club Coach of the Year nominee;
has led her teams to four AAU/USA Indoor and Beach National Championships and 36 AAU/USA Indoor and Beach top 5 National Championship finishes.
The more your team can practice game-like conditions and making decisions under pressure, the better prepared they will be to cope with the stresses of real competition. Successful teams have the ability to anticipate offensive and defensive transitions while under game conditions to make the best decisions available.
Adding a time clock to your training can add a level of pressure and accountability to replicate the feelings teams have in match situations. In this video, Jodi Schramm shows you how using time as a tool in practice can help give your team the ability to execute technical skills and demonstrate tactical thinking under pressure, even while fatigued, and ultimately perform in a consistent manner.
While it's important to work on skills and drills to develop players in practice, it's hard to recreate the feeling of being in an actual game. Coach Schramm has come up with great suggestions to help create a game-like feel in the gym by adding time clocks into practice and incorporating them into every drill. She explains a drill, tells each player their goal, then gives them a certain time frame to get it done. All drills are five minutes or less and allow your team to repeat them to try to beat previous scores.
Schramm shows five drills and explains how she times and scores them. She highlights the Free Ball Frenzy drill as her team's favorite drill. It's a 6-on-6 drill focusing on first ball side out. The receiving team must side out on the first ball by killing it anywhere on the court except zone 6. They must earn six kills before the time runs out.
Adding time clocks and scoring to each drill has saved Schramm's teams between 15 and 20 minutes per practice. She's found players get more done and waste less time in between drills using this method. Schramm even goes into the gym an hour before practice to start the countdown to practice and times every water break for 1 minute. This way, every player knows when everything will start and how long each segment will go. This focus on efficiency can lead to more intense practices.
Coach Schramm gives you some great ideas to use with your current drills to create a game-like atmosphere in your practice. She knows coaches are "taxed with the task of having to come up with game-like competitive drills" and she shares her expertise of how she has gotten that done with her own team.
Produced at the 2016 AVCA Annual Convention in Columbus, OH.
52 minutes. 2017.