Day 3 here we go! If you haven’t seen them already, here are my updates from Day 1 and Day 2.
One quick note. Given that the virtual version of the convention started a day after the in-person event and runs to the day after the in-person one ends, I’d suspected we weren’t seeing sessions from it live. That was confirmed for me last night while texting with someone I know who’s in Omaha. He attended a session on Friday that only shows up on the virtual platform Saturday.
Catch-up: Pre-Convention Seminar Part 2: Feedback Strategies During Training – Coach and Athlete Collaboration is Key
This is one of the sessions I’d wanted to take in on Thursday that I couldn’t at the time. It was presented by USA Women’s National Team assistants Erin Virtue and Tama Miyashiro. This was an on-court session mixing discussion with practice activities.
The idea of extrinsic vs. intrinsic feedback came up here, along with frequency of feedback. They also mentioned direct vs. indirect feedback. The former is mainly giving them a corrective statement while the latter is more about asking them what happened.
Something Tama mentioned was having players give thumbs up/down if they did the thing you have them focused on. So after each rep they give a signal. This allows you to see how they’re doing when you can’t necessarily be right next to them (which likely will often be the case). It also keeps them focused on that specific element.
Tama also talked about when a player is ready to move on with regards to a specific focus element. She said that when they are doing it more than half the time you should progress them (see also this post). That means if you want to keep working on that element you need to increase complexity.
One of the interesting elements from a serve-pass-set-block (no hit) drill was mirroring. There were three blockers at the net focused on reading the setter, then reacting to the set (which was going to catchers). Behind them was a second line of blockers at the 3m line doing the exact same thing as the ones at the net. Thus, you had twice as many blockers working.
Catch-up: Developing and Training an Elite Blocking System
This was an on-court session from John Speraw I missed on Friday. Any time you can listen to John talk about blocking it’s well worth doing. He’s very engaging and will readily get into how techniques and systems have developed, and are continuing to develop. This session was no…
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