FREE SHIPPING In The Lower 48
Posted by Volley CART on
Tip by Karan Price, Altoona Area, PA.
To help players who struggle serving right after a timeout in a match, we have now started randomly picking players to go to the service line after a drink break at practice.
We put a "consequence" on the line for the entire team if they error. In our recent winter junior high league playoffs, we had two players go to the line after timeouts and serve with confidence because they had already felt the pressure and been successful in practice.
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You have to create pressure in practice to be successful, this is one way to do it. It also teaches them how to deal with success/failure. Learning to deal with failure is an important life lesson, and that is our job to teach them how to handle it now. You learn more from your failures in life than you do your successes.
Punishing errors makes kids cautious. As they get older, cautious kids get overwhelmed by the kids who have been encouraged to throw caution to the wind and just rip it. Kids don’t learn to hit hard, aggressive serves by hitting soft, tentative ones.
Disappointing to see that consequences are used. The fact that you put them in quotation marks means you know they are really punishments. Until we coaches learn to stop using punishment as a motivator, we will keep limiting the development of internal motivation in our players.
Try telling your players to aim for a “safer” spot after a TO. Dropping the ball in the seam between zones 1/6 is one such spot.
And punishing the entire team for a kid missing a serve is probably making that kid feel pretty crappy as well.
Sorry to be such a downer, but I do disagree with this approach.