This is a periodic update in my role as Indoor Performance Director for Volleyball England. I laid out the high level priorities under which I’m operating in my initial post.
As I write this, I’m just coming off completing the U17 and U19 NEVZA tournament teams selection camp I mentioned in the last edition. I also ran two of our Futures camps for younger kids and attended Senior Women’s training one day. So 7 straight days at our National Volleyball Center. I’m pretty shattered!
Mostly my Summer has been one of planning. Many of our Indoor athletes also compete on the Beach, so we don’t do much with the age group players from May to August. Different story for the Seniors, of course.
NEVZA Selection Camp
This ran over 5 days – midday Monday to midday Friday. We had between 70 and 80 players there. On the women’s side there was a fairly clean split between U17 and U19 players, with only one of those eligible for U17 being considered to play up.
Things were more muddled on the men’s side. We had a bunch of 2008s that could potentially have gone in either direction. As such, they started the camp doing a lot of things jointly. Progressively, though, they moved to being more separated as it became clearer which players needed to go which direction.
Unfortunately, this camp ran entirely on weekdays. This limited us to about 7 hours of court time. I would have liked to have done 90 minute morning sessions and 2 hour ones in the afternoon. The meal timings wouldn’t have worked, though, so we had to do it the other way. Definitely would have been better to have weekend days in the mix. That’s something we plan to always do moving forward. And there are a couple other things we’re looking at doing in the future to make these shorter days more manageable.
Seniors Activity
As I noted above, our Senior/U22 Women got some training in recently. This was their first time in quite a while, Expectations, though, are that this becomes much more regular. They do, after all, have some competitions to prepare for.
The men also ran some training camps. Their big activity, though, was competing in the Nordic Cup in Denmark. There they played the hosts, as well as Norway and Sweden. This was a great opportunity for the guys to benchmark themselves against the tier of teams that should be our target right now.
Athlete Management System
Perfbook were due to roll out a major version update in early July. Rather than…
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