English Language and Residential options

How does a summer volleyball camp sound where you train with other volleyball players from around the world, receive five days of top quality coaching and stay in one of England’s oldest universities.

We offer Residential and Language programmes that wrap-around some of our existing summer camps. With Volleyball at the core of these activities both the programmes are based at the historic Royal Holloway University in Surrey on a Full Board basis. In addition to the volleyball training we include a range of evening social activities in the price which can include:-

• Trip to historic Windsor.
• 10 Pin Bowling.
• Treasure hunt.
• Cinema trip.
• Friendly matches against local teams.

The Residential athletes will arrive on the Sunday before the camp and depart on the Saturday after the camp, we can provide escorted transfers from London Heathrow and Gatwick airports or the London Eurostar terminal. Dinner on the day of arrival and Breakfast on the day of departure are included.

LANGUAGE CAMP

Our Language Campers arrive on the preceding Thursday and leave on the Tuesday after the camp for a twelve day stay with us and an immersive language experience

We have found over the years that parents wanted their children to gain confidence in their use of English rather than sitting in a class room; what the athletes wanted was to get out of the classroom and into places where they could interact with others – including their peers – in the English language.

Our Language Camp add-on achieves both of these things in an immersive environment during social or cultural outings, supported by one-to-one tutoring assistance.  If required, the tutors can also provide assistance to students who would like advance preparation before or after training hours.

By bringing conversational skills into surroundings in which English is the lingua franca for all athletes, tutors, coaches, restaurant staff, museum guides, street vendors, bus drivers and all situations of everyday life the athlete is encouraged and guided to practice their English language skills both on and off the court.

Students will receive:

* Access to a registered language tutor for 12 days.
* Group sessions with the tutor, as well as language support on arranged outings and activities and at volleyball training sessions.
* English language course materials.

A Typical day at Camp.

We take pride that all of our camps are different, which is one of the reasons that we get campers returning year after year, for our residential campers the daily schedule will be something like this.

Unlike some other camps which run to a strict formula we don’t prescribe a fixed syllabus where for example, Monday morning is passing, Monday afternoon is setting, Tuesday is serving and so on. We work with a variety of coaches from the UK, Europe and beyond with different experience and backgrounds and they bring with them some fantastic ideas which we are always keen to embrace. We will often have a theme for the camp, one year it was Thinking Correctly Under Pressure (TCUP) where we focused on decision making in game situations, another time it was all about the different forms of transition and the “BattleGrounds” where matches are won and lost.

Another reason that all our camps are different is that all our campers are different, even those that return will have developed since we last saw them, each group will have unique development needs to address. This is the reason that we look to obtain as much information about campers before the start of camp. Even having done that we will spend time on the first day assessing the athletes and it is common for our coaches to refine their session plans throughout the week depending on the groups needs.

With the Elite and Emerging Elite camps the drills will tend to be more based on combinations of skills, such as service reception and the making the transition to attack as well as plenty of game based activities.That’s not to say that we neglect individual coaching on technique, just that no matter how good a player is in a closed skill drill, unless they can combine those skills and read the cues in game situations the development of their overall potential will be limited.

We always have at least 2 and often 3 courts available to us so we have flexibility in how we divide the groups up throughout the week. For example it will be split by gender for attacking and blocking work at the net, but can also be based on players position so that we can work with setters on their own for example or grouping players by ability.

The structure of the day will start with a warm up activity, then some small group drills before getting into the main body of the session usually building up to some game type play putting into practice what has been learnt and finishing with a cool down and stretch before a break for lunch. Residential campers will have a packed lunch included, non residential campers will need to bring their own lunch.

The coach may have some off court activity planned over the lunch break which is usually 30 to 45 minutes long. This might be journaling the day’s activities, or may be showing a video to highlight the points they are coaching.

In the afternoon there will again be a warm up similar to the morning before the afternoons session which again will finish with some game based activity, a final cool down and stretch while the coach will go over the key points of the day.

A significant part of the afternoon on the last day is usually given over to some form of mini tournament.