“ACE” screams Lydia Samuelson. “Yes Lydia, that’s the kind of energy we’re looking for,” says Isabella Boyum. When the athletes show up for practice they better be ready to work. Despite having a practice on the shorter end most days, the coaches still want to make the most amount of progress each day. Middle school volleyball teams are geared towards making leaps and bounds in the athlete’s skill sets, not necessarily winning. “So there is no excuse if you are thinking about trying it out, but are too nervous to.” Says Lydia Samuelson.
Despite the fact that the middle schools teams are geared towards making advancements in skills, that doesn’t mean they don’t try to win. When they play games they play for time, they play for an hour and a half not including warm ups which is typically a twenty minutes to half hour, this means that they could play anywhere from one set all the way up to maybe even five sets. Since this is the case they don’t really focus on who won, there can be a variety of reasons for this. An example of this could be, the time is up and they play four sets to twenty-five and each team wins two sets there isn’t really a winner unless they get really nitpicky with it but that isn’t very common, they typically just settle for it being a tie. Even though wins don’t really mean anything other than bragging rights unlike varsity, some players and coaches like to keep stats on how they did and basically if they won or lost, how well they played, and other statistical achievements. They do this just for themselves, for whatever reason that might be.
Even though their practices are only an hour and forty-five minutes long each day they make the most of every practice. Their practices consist of warm ups such as running, stretching, Ten Ten Ten (Ten Ten Ten is a drill that volleyball players typically do to warm up which consists of passing and diving from the athletes knees while their partner throws the ball to them) and more. Once they finish warming up they go straight into drills or scrimmaging. No matter what they do it always has a purpose, whether it be to work on controlling the ball or consistently serve in bounds and straight, maybe even spot serving. Spot serving is a form of serving where you strategically try to place the ball in a specific spot on the court. An example of this is if the opposing team’s center of their side of the court is wide open the coach might tell a player to aim for that spot because the coach knows it will be hard for the other team to receive. Typically when the team has a practice after a game they will huddle in a circle and talk about what went well and what they need to improve on.
These athletes have to work their tails off every practice relentlessly to make improvements and to do well in games. If these athletes don’t work hard the coaches will take notice and talk to the athletes. If no improvements are made the athletes will run, for instance they might do On The Line (which is a drill where the athlete will run to the ten foot line then to the middle line then to the ten foot line on the other side of the court and finally to the end line on the other side of the court in between running to each line the athlete will run back to the end line they started on) or do down and backs. The coaches do this because it is extremely important for them to focus and be on task during practice mainly because of their short practices. It is clear that with the athletes putting in all this work they are bound to make improvements in a realistic but short time frame. This means that if there are new faces on the team they shouldn’t be worried about being too far behind, improvements are in their near future if they put the work in.
