Volleyball Drill Sitemap

About the Authors - E. DOUGLAS BOYDEN is president of the U.S. Volleyball Association. A national referee, he was chairman of the committee on officials and certification during 1953-59 and did much to help standardize officiating throughout the country. In 1956 he received the "Leader in Volleyball" award,* and in 1959 he was selected to conduct volleyball clinics in Hawaii and Japan for the U.S. Air Force.

Foreword - How to play and teach volleyball is an effort to present volleyball as played by champions. The champions in any sport give us the best picture of how a game should be played. Champions are champions because they have mastered the fundamentals—not because they dream up fancy plays. For this reason How to Play and Teach Volleyball will have value to all instructors, coaches, players, officials, and students of the game.

Preface - Imagine a ball hit so hard it is coming toward you at a speed of 110 miles per hour! The ball is moving so fast you can hardly see it. Your job is to get under this flash of white and pass it accurately to the proper teammate. He, in turn, then passes the ball up to a spiker who jumps high in the air and smashes this moving ball with tremendous speed over the net and into your opponents' court.

Volleyball Spirit - Volleyball, in reality, has no spirit. It is only a game, and as such has potentialities either for good or evil, depending in large degree upon the quality of the leadership involved. However, there is a distinctive spirit that characterizes the majority of the men who play volleyball.

First of all, the men who play this great game have fun playing it.

01. The Serve - The serve is the act of putting the ball in play by a player from the service area. This statement, which once appeared in the USVBA rules, sounds simple, but actually it describes one of the most important plays in the game of volleyball. There are several reasons why the serve is so important.

02. The Pass - A truism, which cannot be too often repeated, is this: team success in any competitive sport demands a mastery of fundamentals. This generality, important in so many games, is particularly relevant to volleyball, where basic procedures are repeated over and over again, endlessly, on both attack and defense, on both sides of the net, and in a numberless variety of situations.

03. The Setup - "Pass, Set, Spike—Pass, Set, Spike" are the offensive fundamentals to be drilled into the novice volleyballer, improved in the mediocre player, and admired in the great player. Without the effective execution of all three maneuvers, no volleyball team can muster a winning offense. Without a good pass, the set is usually bad.

04. The Soike - It is important for any writer or any reader to realize that in sport there is never one "way to do it," or one way to coach, or perform. Those with wide experience and observation have seen champion athletes, in many sports, break some of the "musts" of what many coaches teach as basic. It is also important to understand that the views, the presentation, the principles of only one writer, or one school of thought, or one nation, do not truly cover the possibilities of the subject.

05. The Block - The block is only one phase of the total defensive system. Other phases include receiving the serve, covering behind the spiker, and executing various recovery shots. These will be treated in Chapter 8. It is difficult to separate the parts of a defensive system, for they go hand in hand. For this reason, additional attention will be devoted to blocking in Chapter 8.

06. Recovery Shots - The term "recovery" implies immediately that the shots or skills covered here are attempts to regain control of the ball. You have been thrown off balance or out of position by a bad "break," your own mistakes, or by the expertness of your opponent's placement. A ball you must play has reached a position where you are unable to use the safe, sure, and controlled chest pass but must resort to a more difficult play.

07. Offense - Before becoming involved in details of attack formations and strategy, there are a few principles of sound volleyball offense which must be considered. The principles outlined below are based entirely on the experience and opinions of the writer. Therefore, they are probably incomplete and possibly inaccurate in spots. In any case they serve as a basis for the evaluations of the various attack patterns discussed later.

08. Defense - A good philosophy to have when thinking about volleyball is that a team is on the defense whenever the ball is on the other side of the net from your team. Too often has a team or player relaxed after making a play across the net only to find the ball being returned to him or into his court.

09. Conditioning - Any player to deliver his best possible performance must be at his best possible physical efficiency. This is a simple but true statement. In fact, the truth of this is so simple that most players and coaches do not observe it.

"A player must be in top physical condition in order to perform fundamental skills with excellence. He must not be too tired physically or mentally to do his part, for if he failed, team morale would suffer.

10. Officiating - In every sport the officials are an important part of the game. Upon their judgment, many times, rests the outcome of the game or match. Volleyball is no exception to this rule. Having alert, decisive, and discerning officials can make the difference between a good or poor tournament.

Since "power" volleyball in this country is a relatively new game, there is a good bit of educating to be done with the general public and with many players relative to what constitutes good officiating.

11. Teaching - In the preceding chapters the fundamentals of volleyball have been discussed in detail. An instructor must have a thorough knowledge of the fundamentals of any sport before he can do a real good job of teaching. Methods and techniques of teaching are not sufficient without this grounding in the basic aspects of a sport.

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