Advanced

All the hours of training at the VbDC intermediate level will have taught an athlete the ball control they need to be an effective member of a team. But they may not have had much time to apply it to game simulation drills – what Volleyball Development Camps terms “performance” training.

Almost all the training at the advanced level revolves around linked action: one player starting the process of moving the ball to a teammate and that person moving it to a third teammate, each in a specific ball handling action – the dig-set-spike process of a typical volleyball rally.

The process has to be deconstructed and each step refined, but usually with at least two or three of the steps linked in one exercise: the pass to the setter, the set to the attacker, and the hit. It’s not all offense; defending an attack on the back row or at the net calls for just as much linked training. Only the serve remains as individual ball-handling training… but that skill has to include delivery of the ball in a mixture of power, flight control and accuracy.