Volleyball practice plan template

Gym time goes fast in volleyball

A volleyball team gets the gym for an hour and a half if it is lucky, and putting the net up and taking it down comes out of that. A list of drills does not warn you that pepper has run ten minutes over and the scrimmage is shrinking. A plan with a start time beside every block shows you straight away, while you can still decide what to cut.

So this template is a run sheet. Each block has its length and the minute it starts, counted from the first whistle, with a tick box to mark it done and the coaching cue printed under each drill. It prints on one page, with lines at the foot for notes.

What is in the plan

It is the plan the practice plan maker opens on for volleyball:

• a five-minute team talk;
• a fifteen-minute warm-up of easy laps and dynamic stretches;
• pepper: pass, set, hit, two players and one ball, every contact in the order a rally uses them;
• serve-receive passing to target, live serves passed from the real formation to a target, with the setter leaving on the serve and not before;
• a water break;
• a twenty-minute scrimmage;
• a cool-down.

It runs eighty minutes, which leaves time inside a ninety-minute gym booking to put the net up.

The cues that matter in volleyball

Pepper is only worth doing if every contact is clean. Under the FIVB rules the ball must be hit, not caught or thrown, and a player may not touch it twice in a row, so the cue is dig it high, set it in front of your partner, and hit a controlled down ball back at their middle. A pair that catches and throws is practising nothing.

Serve receive is where youth matches are won and lost. The passers move their feet to the ball and angle the platform to the target rather than swinging their arms at it. The setter starts in the back row, tucked behind a passer, and runs to the target only when the server hits the ball, because at the moment of the serve every player has to be in rotation order: each front-row player nearer the net than the back-row player behind them, and each row in its left-to-right order (FIVB rule 7.4). A team rotates one place clockwise each time it wins the serve back, so the scrimmage is the place to run every rotation, not only the strongest one. Youth and school rule books differ on the libero, substitutions and the serve, so check your federation's or league's.

Changing it

On paper, cross a drill out and write yours beside it, keeping its minutes so the later start times still hold. On screen, the edit button opens the practice plan maker with this plan loaded. Swap either drill for any of the volleyball drills in the library, such as serving to zones or the free-ball transition, change the minutes, and print it again with every start time worked out. It is free and needs no account.

If the rotations are the other thing you put on paper, the volleyball rotation sheet template prints all six rotations of a 5-1 or a 6-2 on one page.