Serve to pass more? – Coaching volleyball

I saw someone posting the following on an FB group. This is a U14 coach. They have noted that the percentages of their team in competitions are around 83%, while in practice it is only more than 70%.

I have always explained it as players who try different things in practice (that’s what I want), players who are more focused during a game (understandable), and maybe just gamers are (not sure if I fully believe that something like that exists).

But we are never at the level of passing by that I am satisfied with. So we served and passed a lot. Almost all our exercises started with a serve. Yet our death has never been great. Then it came to me today that, although in practice we ‘serve and pass’ all the time, we miss a lot of services, so it is more serving than passing.

So in short, I am going to demand more in practice, even if it means to tell that they should be less aggressive.

My immediate response was to say that this coach must pump the brakes and think things through more. The three things that immediately come to mind are:

1. Fewer service errors do not necessarily mean much more passing representatives. If your passers -by on average about 100 reception options per session on average (just to use a simple number), getting 10% more is employed in just 10 more balls. And they are spread over the passers -by. Yes, there is certainly a cumulative effect over time. I just don’t want to make it look like from 70% to 80% means that everyone still passes a lot more.
2. More volume does not necessarily mean better training. If the reception training is not intentional – which means that the players work on specific things to get better – then simply adding more serves will not have much impact. In fact, it can simply anchor things that you don’t want.
3. Why would you take the lead of your servers if they do well? I would not want to make the aggressiveness of my servers in competitions boring (assuming it is at a suitable level) by training them to call it in in practice. Recipients who are more difficult to confront, are also better at passing it. There are ways to accommodate both – such as the concept of Tennis Serve.

The other that I certainly want to understand better is what the lower serve % underlies in practice. If they are children, go for it, that’s one thing. If the lack of focus or another is less productive problem, that is the priority to tackle.