with Cliff Hastings,
Parkland College Head Coach;
Back-to-Back NJCAA DII National Champions (2015-16) - finished a perfect 57-0 in 2015;
8x Mid-West Athletic Conference Champions (2009-16);
Director of the Prime Time Volleyball Club (IL)
In this video, Coach Hastings shares drills and coaching techniques as he explains the drills, corrects his players, and provides many different variations to the drills.
Hastings does a good job of showing a clear cut, step-ladder way of building a practice session with high expectations. He separates practice into three areas of focus:
- Strength and Conditioning
- Position Training - Where he breaks down the learning process to build consistency across the board.
- Team Training - Where he allows players to gain a better understanding of his expectations through game-like situations.
Strength & Conditioning Workouts
Coach Hastings shares his teams' exercises and how they are designed to prepare players for the upcoming season. You'll learn:
- The one arm bench press to allow your players to work on both arms equally.
- How the medicine ball toss can be a great way to work on abs and body rotation.
- How Bosu ball squats will help your players develop balance and strength in their squat.
- Rowing exercises that can be used to simulate body mechanics during a swing.
Position-Specific Training
Learn to use a variety of drills that simulate game-like situations. Coach Hastings divides players into different stations to help with individual skills to allocate practice time for individual player development. Position-specific training is incorporated into the team drills.
You'll see how Hastings creates consistency in the gym so that all players are on the same page. Peer to peer leadership and feedback is encouraged and seen and reinforces a legacy of learned experience and wisdom passed on from the upper classmen to the newer players. Additional skills taught include:
- Achieve correct footwork by isolating players in a series of drills to imitate moves that will happen during a match
- Isolation footwork
- Using team statistics
- Blocking as a unit
- Setting accuracy and aggression
It's critical for teams to have an understanding that during a match, not everything will run perfectly as practiced, so, in anticipation of that, Hastings spends specific practice time working on things that could go different - such as playing a bad pass, your setter taking the first ball, and other unplanned/likely to occur scenarios that lead to out of system play in a match.
Team Training
Coach Hastings takes everything learned in the position-specific training and incorporates it into the team drill segment. In this session, he uses game-like settings to work on areas that present themselves during a match. The control drill allows your team to work on various skills in a controlled environment. Hastings also shares his insights on why he uses the different drills based on statistics gathered from the season's matches.
Finally, one of the gems of this video is to see, firsthand, some of the on-court 'verbal coaching cues' Hastings uses - giving you terrific insight into his coaching while at the same time seeing how attuned he is in keeping players engaged and focused on getting better.
Need some structure and ideas for your practice time? This video from Coach Hastings is the answer!
54 minutes. 2018.
VD-05315B:
with Cliff Hastings,
Parkland College Head Coach;
Back-to-Back NJCAA DII National Champions (2015-16) - finished a perfect 57-0 in 2015;
8x Mid-West Athletic Conference Champions (2009-16);
Director of the Prime Time Volleyball Club (IL)
Cliff Hastings and his team are known for implementing the short serve into their volleyball arsenal, which has helped the Parkland College Cobras win back-to-back national championships. The approach to strategically using the short serve will lead to your opponent spending more time hitting out of system, which will help your team's defensive effectiveness and ability to control the opponent.
Hastings walks through the purposes of using the short serve, specific technical approaches to performing a short serve effectively, and how to defend against the short serve. Throughout this video, he provides tips for helping players disguise their short serve, recognize situations where a short serve will be most effective, and maneuvers to pass a short serve to target in game situations.
Executing the Short Serve and Alternating Between Short to Deep Serves
Coach Hastings uses a series of seven drills to teach the technical aspects of serving short in zones 2 and 4 while emphasizing the importance of a higher trajectory for the ball and proper follow through for the serving arm. These include engaging and competitive drills to serve in targeted locations to hit flat targets, to knock a ball off a cone, and others that have teammates work together to serve to each other in rotating short serve zones.
Hastings then migrates to drills that help players find control to be able to serve deep immediately after completing a short serve and vice versa to keep teams off balance. He also shares an effective technique of serving high and deep when you face a team that can pass short serves well. One drill focuses on players learning to approach short and deep serves with the same speed and body position while finishing with a solid contact for a punishing float serve.
Short Serve Strategy
You'll get rotation-specific strategies for short-serve options that will put the most pressure on the other team's passers. The strategies will also try to force the other team's setter to backtrack to find the pass and/or be forced to set to the outside, where your team can more easily defend.
Defending the Short Serve
Hastings shows how to implement a partner drill that teaches sliding forward on two knee pads to be able to pass the short serve more effectively, followed by a full game-like drill that integrates this passing technique with execution of an attack. He ends the video describing a strategy to break another team out of short serving by pushing the serve into a deep corner location.
Take advantage of this video to systematically teach your team how to serve short consistently, implement a strong short-deep serving strategy, know the best game situations and zones for the short serve, and defend against the short serve!
55 minutes. 2018.