Volleyball Drills – Adding Fun Factor to Practices

Volleyball drills and countless repetitions of technical volleyball skills seem to be boring sometimes, don't they? How could we make those more fun?

This article does not focus on traditional volleyball skills training – the purpose of it is to give ideas what kind of volleyball drills are important when learning how to play volleyball – while keeping practices interesting and fun.

Volleyball practices and monotonous repetitions of the skills can sometimes feel boring. Especially coaches of the beginning volleyball players often run into dilemma – how to keep practicing technical volleyball skills and make practices interesting at the same time?

The answer is very simple: beginning volleyball players want to have fun and play – so we let them play - just not with the regular court and rules.

By being creative the coach is able to make up tens or hundreds of different volleyball games for any skills – limited only by the imagination of the coach.

This kind of training has been practiced by some of the leading European volleyball nations very successfully. Often these games are applied for 7-13 years old beginning volleyball players, but of course are suitable for any age group, even adults.

It is a good idea to teach basic volleyball skills with the traditional way through the repetitions, but when coach adds these games in, the practices all of a sudden become much more fun. These fun volleyball drills make the practices exciting and interesting also for the beginning volleyball players.

In the following example there are some ideas what coaches can use when planning practices.

For example after explaining and working on basic principles of forearm passing, coach can divide the volleyball court into several small 5 feet X 5 feet area (or similar) and ask players to partner up to play 1 on 1 games (one player against another player). The small area makes the rallies longer, which serves the purpose of learning techniques due to several repetitions.

In this game touches to the ball could be limited to one. That forces players to move quickly on the court, which will improve their footwork. The second benefit is the players learn to read the opponent’s court quickly and are working on placing the ball to the uncovered spot – which is the fundamental strategy of volleyball game.

I hope that helps seeing the importance of playing games – they are not for improving the technical skills only, but also to teach understanding of the game and footwork at the same time.

It is very important for the coach to watch techniques of the players while they are playing – correcting players between the rallies and helping them to use the correct techniques which were taught in the beginning.

Imagination is the only limit for coach to make up more games. When players start getting tired of the particular game, coach should change it.

On volleyball passing drillswhen players’ skills develop, coach can require one hand pass with the left or right hand, which is a great way to develop hand-eye coordination. Or in the beginning coach can tell players trying to get behind the ball and perform the pass right in front of the body. Later on when skills develop coach can allow players to perform a pass on the side of the body – with a purpose to extend the passing range.

Coach can change the court measures; having extremely narrow and a long court, or extremely wide and short court. Or coach can allow players to have two touches before returning the ball to another side, or three touches, or even four. Or coach can increase the number of players and play 2 on 2, or 3 on 3 etc.

Naturally similar games can be applied to setting, overhead volleyball passing or even when starting to teach them volleyball spike etc. All the volleyball skills can be taught with these games by changing the court size, allowing different number of touches to the ball, using different amount of players and so on.

For example when learning the volleyball spike coach can allow players to have two touches to the ball. First touch got to be done by forearm pass and the next one either by swinging or setting the ball over the net. Players are not allowed to jump and the net will be lowered to the height that makes a natural swing possible without jumping.

Have fun making the games - only imagination is your limit.