How To Teach a Young Player How to Play Volleyball

Here's How:

1. Demonstrate passing.
2. Let kids work on passing. Use some drills.
3. Have some type of competition (bonus points for doing it exactly like I taught!). Again, sometimes simple drills, giving points for performance will raise their game-level.
4. Demonstrate underhand serving.
5. Let kids work on serving. Again, try using serving drills.
6. Have some type of competition.
7. Then setting . . . same sequence.
8. Then the spike approach
9. Then digging.
10. Then overhand serving.

Tips:

1. AVOID: physical punishment like laps or push-ups. Correct by talking one-on-one or use "time-outs." Kids and pre-teens don't understand why there are consequences for losing drills. At the high school, when they are old enough to see the value in this corrective style of training, we call the laps, situps, etc. "encouragement."
2. AVOID: avoid drills that push players to pain. This is especially true for age groups 10's, 11's and 12's. Sometimes you have to be careful even with 14's. Young ladies are going through a lot of changes, and the wrong drill can cause some serious damage.
3. For the newer younger kids, you may HAVE to buy some little kid volleyballs . . . they are really soft, but expensive. You don't want newer players giving up because the balls are just too painful to play. Get them toughened up, then switch to the hard balls.

What You Need:

• Volleyball Court
• 10-30 Volleyballs
• Volleyball Bag
• Note Pad
• Clipboard