What Is a Volleyball Practice Plan?

Playing volleyball requires constant movement, quick reactions, strong endurance, and skill precision. There are so many parts to coaching a well-rounded volleyball team! To get the most out of your practice time, learn to make a practice plan that fits your team’s needs.

A volleyball practice plan should include times for warm-ups, skill-specific drills, conditioning or strength training, teamwork drills, and a cooldown. A prepared coach will have specific drills, exercises, and games planned ahead of time to keep their practice organized and efficient.

Throughout this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about the primary components of a volleyball practice plan, an example plan, and a few useful tips to keep in mind. 

Elements of the Practice Plan

A volleyball practice plan can be broken down into several elements. If you want to create the ultimate routine, you’ll need to include various stretches, exercises, games, and drills, to groom your team to reach their peak potential.

• Warm-ups are necessary. Have you seen coaches who will let their players stretch while they’re coming in, while other players are getting dressed, some players are putting up the net and there’s not a coordinated focus on warming up? This is a missed opportunity! Dynamic warm-ups will help your athletes avoid injury, improve flexibility, and help them practice at a higher level. Get everyone on the same page and have the team captain lead them through the warm-ups that you identify.
• Skill-specific drills. These can be broken up throughout your practice and don’t need to be just in one block of time. These can be drills that focus on serving, passing, digging, diving, hitting, tipping, blocking, transitioning, and more. By focusing on one specific skill and repeating and correcting technique, your team can make great progress in a short time. Take the opportunity to incorporate several skills into one drill by having players interact with each other throughout the exercise.
• Speed and endurance training is vital. Volleyball isn’t played on a massive field like football, soccer, or rugby, but there’s plenty of running. Whether you’re hustling to save the ball, transitioning to hit, making your approach, or shifting to block, your athletes need to be able to run with a high motor. As a coach you can assign conditioning outside of practice time, but you’ll only see how your athletes actually train if you spend some of your time training together as a team.
• Strength drills are often overlooked. Your players need to be pushed to grow as an athlete and that comes from training for power. Whether this is using weight-lifting equipment or bodyweight exercises, volleyball players need to know how to train to jump higher, set farther, and hit and serve harder. Using bodyweight exercises are great because players can continue to do those same exercises outside of practice time.
• Teamwork drills can be fun and challenging. Sometimes coaches feel like the only way to practice teamwork is doing regular scrimmage play. NOT TRUE! Try some fun, fast-paced or creative team drills to get your team better at communication, anticipation, and reacting to one another.
  • Quick-challenge games like 3 on 3 half-court scrimmage, kings of the court/queens of the court style – where losers leave and the next team rotates in.
  • Complicated passing drills where you have multiple balls in play at once while the players have to shift positions.
  • Drills where teams are working toward a goal but when one player makes a mistake they have a disadvantage and have to try to overcome it.
• Cooldown time can be purposeful. Do you just end practices without doing a real cooldown? I suggest using the last few minutes of your practice to do a cooldown time with a combination of talking with your players. Use this precious time while they’re stretching to reinforce what you’ve worked on today and emphasize encouragement in the progress you’re seeing.

As you can imagine, working in these elements can drastically improve a volleyball team’s results. Using these different parts of a practice together will keep your practices from being stale and keep athletes engaged. You might not be sure how to make them all flow together yet, but keep reading! 

Would you like to see our Recommended Plyometric Boxes?

Plan for Your Volleyball Practice

Sometimes it’s just hard to know where to start until you have the pieces put together and then you can adjust the pieces to match your situation as a coach. Above, I listed the different elements in a logical order, but let’s talk about them in an example 60 minute practice format.

If you’re not sure how much time to allow, plan for short time frames, which gives you more activities, and then if you need to leave one out that’s fine. It’s always easier to adjust if you have more options than you need.

Example Volleyball 60-minute Practice Plan

Equipment needed: tennis balls for half the members of your team, volleyball serving machine if available.

1. Warm-ups (8 Minutes) 

Dynamic warm-ups are great to get the blood flowing and muscle stretching while also preparing your mind for practice. 

• Jog – A light jog 2 laps around the volleyball court. 
• Lunges – 1 down & back of slow deliberate lunge steps. 
• High Knees – 1 down & back of light jogging bring your knees as high as you can.
• Open the gate – 1 down & back slowly, raise your knee up horizontally and go from straight in front of you to rotating your knee out to the side while keeping the rest of your body straight forward. Alternate legs by doing this every 3rd step.
• Sprint – 2 laps of the court running at close to full speed.
• Slow throws – players find a partner and space out about 15’ apart. They slowly throw the ball with their hitting hand, bouncing it to their partner.
• Partner pepper – players partner up and pepper until warm-up time is over.

2. Practice Serving and Serve Receive (13 minutes) Use a few players lined up to serve, or a volleyball serving machine. 

Have your starting rotation line up in serve receive formation and practice passing the serves to their setter in their correct location and complete an attack. Instead of scrimmaging the ball back and forth, as soon as the ball crosses the net or is hit out of bounds, have the team quickly reset and launch the next serve. Rotate after each successful attack play. The players not in the current rotation are lined up to serve and the server shags the ball at the end of the play.

The Skill Attack Volleyball Machine has multiple settings to train with, which makes it perfect for all ages. You can load the volleyballs into the machine and point in the direction you choose and vary the speed and trajectory with a dial. One of the great benefits is: as a coach you can have someone else load the balls and you be right beside your players, or even take their place to demonstrate.

Learn more about why we recommend the Skill Attack Volleyball Machine.

3. Tennis Ball Catch (10 minutes)

To practice quick reaction, have your team divide into pairs with half the pairs on each side of the court. They spread out with 1 partner on the attack line and 1 on the end line in a ready position. The partner on the attack line holds the ball out at shoulder height and without warning, drops the ball. The other partner must not move before the ball is dropped, but has to catch it before the second bounce. Be ready to adjust the drill depending on skill level by moving players closer or further away or having players kneel instead of starting in a ready position.

4. Standing Squat Jumps + Spinning Squat Jumps (7 minutes) 

Have your team spread out and stand in an athletic stance. Practice all together doing full effort Squat Jumps, do these in sets of 5. Pause in between sets to discuss good technique, the reason for practicing this, and how they should practice these on their own as well. Then switch to Spinning Squat Jumps.

5. Practice Scrimmage to Apply (15 minutes)

Play a traditional 6 on 6 scrimmage (or 5 on 5 if you don’t have enough players) with the plan to reinforce what’s been covered today. Serve receive, quick reactions, and full effort jumping for both hitting and blocking are the main focus. You may correct other details as needed, but really focus on those keys and pause the play as needed to dissect and call attention when players aren’t properly executing what they’ve just practiced today.

6. Cooldown + Recap (7 minutes)

Have your team stretch and do some breathing exercises while you recap the practice. What did they do well? What should they work on in between now and their next practice or game? This is a great time to talk about a winning mentality as an athlete and a team. Talk about strategies you’d like to implement or goals you’d like to achieve as a team.

You can mix and match this routine with others you’ve found and of course a variety of drills, but the most important thing is that you have a plan. You should be flexible enough that you modify the plan if your team is really struggling with one thing and needs more time on that part. The plan doesn’t have to be set in stone, it’s just a guide. 

You want to make sure the players improve their overall fitness, practice their specific skills, gel together as a team, and most importantly HAVE FUN! Not every practice will be perfect, but if you’re trying to hit each of these aspects, your team will be sure to improve. 

More Concepts and Tips for Planning Your Volleyball Practice

• More touches = better. Every single time you have the opportunity, have more players active in a drill at the same time. Don’t make your players stand in line for half their practice, break into smaller groups or use multiple balls as necessary, or add another step to the drill.
• Always plan to include water breaks for hydration. Try to keep them short and use the breaks between activities since you’re already changing gears. 
• Don’t spend a lot of time talking with your players just listening. Athletes are hands-on learners and you can coach while they’re active.
• Keep the practice flowing. While you have a plan, don’t be afraid to adjust it on the fly.
• Teamwork should always be at the forefront of your practices. One good habit is to tell the team when they have to partner up that they have to choose a different partner each time.
• Try to identify weak skills, bad habits, or other trouble areas and continually have a list in the back of your mind (or in your notes) on the items you want to work on next – as in the next practice – to take your team to the next level.
• Don’t let your practices become too predictable. If it’s getting stale, do something completely different to mix it up! Try drills that use different items – a beach ball, tennis ball, cones, or boxes. Try mixing up the warm-up exercises to completely different ones. If you’re able to play, insert yourself into a drill or scrimmage to play alongside them.
• Identify weaknesses and then make a plan for which weaknesses you need to strengthen through coaching and which weaknesses you can design a strategy to overcome.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to make a solid volleyball practice plan, you can stay on track and ready to go next time. Make planning a habit and your practices will become more effective and productive over time.

For more help with your coaching, check out our post: Improve Your Volleyball Strategy

Photo Credits

Feature image by Tania Van den Berghen from Pixabay

Coaching serves and serve receive images both by thepanamerican on flickr.com: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/, both cropped to re-size.

Blocking image by Tania Van den Berghen from Pixabay