Preparing for the Upcoming Season

Time to Begin - A month prior to the start of your preseason, you should finalize your plan.

Season is on the Horizon

Having a well-designed plan for the season will guide your decision-making and support your team’s success. Let’s start with conditioning and tryouts.

Fitness Plan - Preseason

In my previous blog post, I suggested providing your players with a summer workout plan. Depending on the culture of your program, your players may have followed this training plan - or they may have procrastinated (as you build a successful program, your players will buy into the benefits of physical preparation prior to the fall). For each player, another factor will be their involvement in other sports. Multi-sport athletes get pulled in a number of directions during the summer.

Multi-Sport Athletes

Every program typically has a number of multi-sport athletes. I found that the best approach was to be flexible with your summer schedule for these team members. If you acknowledge the stresses they face in the summer (by the demands placed on them by all of their coaches) and help them balance their summer schedule, they will appreciate your support and understanding. This attitude of support for the school and all of its athletic programs during the off season will reflect a positive aspect of your program’s culture.

To provide this balance I suggest you plan all summer activities well in advance and have a dialogue with the other head coaches that share your players. This allows all coaches to resolve any conflicts, find solutions, and provide the athlete with a plan. This removes the athlete from being in the middle between two programs and trying to make everyone happy.

Conditioning Camp

If your state association/school district allows camps prior to season, I would suggest a conditioning camp prior to tryouts. For my high school programs, we were allowed to hold a voluntary camp that did not include volleyball specific training. In order to support my players being in proper shape for the start of the season, our conditioning camp was held one week prior to the start of the season. The camp included sprint work, jump training, weights, and stamina building.

Obviously you will not get your team into “playing shape” in one week. However, this camp did allow us to set a physical foundation for the season along with providing a level of expectation in regards to how we train. The activities that were used in the conditioning camp were carried over into our first two weeks of preseason training. This provided a source of motivation to attend conditioning camp as the players that participated in the camp were clearly better prepared than those that chose not to attend.

An additional benefit

As this blog guides you through your season, I will frequently refer to steps that I believe are vital to building a strong program (as opposed to just the varsity team). Here is one of these considerations:

I want to provide my entire program with workout shirts for practice sessions (3 shirts per player). I felt this would support the program concept along with dealing with the question of what is appropriate to wear to practice, etc. (Players were given the shirts once teams were set and were expected to keep them for two years. If they lost one, they would have to pay for the replacement.)

Since school budgets typically don’t provide enough funds for this - I used the conditioning camp as a fundraiser. I would charge each camper $15 to attend the camp. All of these funds (along with funds raised by hosting an elementary volleyball camp in the summer) went to purchasing our practice shirts. Typically I bought three different shirts and each practice day was assigned a color: Monday = red shirt, Wednesday = gray shirt, and Friday = black shirt (we had matches on Tuesday/Thursday).

Tryouts

Tryouts are typically a challenging process. How do you make qualified decisions on personnel in a timely manner? For most of the returning players you have a base understanding of their skills, attitude, and what they will bring to the program. What should be accomplished with these players is a comparison of their growth since the prior season and how each player will fit into the program plan for the coming season. In addition, be prepared for the surprise of players that decide to opt out of playing and/or new players that have decided to tryout.

The main focus of tryouts should be the freshmen group. Your goal during this time period is to assess each player’s volleyball skill level, overall athletic ability, work ethic, and willingness to learn. Typically you and your staff will not have much experience working with these players. Therefore, I would suggest that you take more time to make decisions about who will make a team.

In the next blog, I will go dig into a suggested tryout process along with other preseason suggestions.