2025 New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball

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Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Coaching Philosophy
• 2. Skill Development
  • Volleyball Skills and Focus
• 3. Practice Planning
  • Early Season Practices
  • Mid-Season Practices
  • Late Season Practices
  • Practice Plan Tips
• 4. Game Day Preparation
  • Game Day Checklist
  • In-Match Adjustments
• 5. Off-Season & Conditioning
  • Strength & Agility Programs
  • Player Development Plans
• 6. Resources & Tools
  • Recommend Websites
  • Recommended Volleyball Stats Application
• Conclusion
• Check Out These Recent Posts!

Introduction

Welcome to the 2025 edition of the New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball. Whether you coach a high school team, a college squad, or a youth league team, this comprehensive guide is designed to help you elevate your coaching philosophy and strategies to improve your team’s performance. Volleyball is a complex sport, and to ensure one does not waste their time, we have created a starting point for brand-new coaches in this New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball.

1. Coaching Philosophy

Each new coach should create their coaching philosophy. It should be written down to be reworked and remembered. It is important to have a philosophy that can guide them and their players to a playing standard and culture.

Knowing how to coach and act in certain situations is critical because it has to be consistent across the board.

Recommendations to write down answers to the following when creating a coaching philosophy

• How would you like to be taught?
• How do you dislike being taught?
• How would you get a point across effectively?
• Do you believe in physical punishments?
• How will you keep the team disciplined and focused?

Setting boundaries and a foundation for a coach-to-player relationship, practices, and tournament etiquette are essential. Being too friendly or too strict can cause many issues. Bouncing between the two is even worse.

Creating a fun, encouraging team culture is hard work. The more work a coach puts into their team, practices, and games, the more they will get out of their players.

The New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball emphasizes the importance of understanding the game and implementing effective coaching techniques.

Coaches get excited to design a crazy offense, and buy all the gadgets and toys to assist their coaching. Before any of that happens, a foundation and a philosophy must be created and implemented.

2. Skill Development

Volleyball Skills and Focus

• Hitting: Approach Jump, Arm Swing, Snapping, Timing.
• Passing/Serve Receive: Athletic Stance, Straight and Simple Platform, Contacting the ball, Angles, Shuffling.
• Setting: Footwork, Receiving the ball to setting it out, Location, Tempo
• Serving: Footwork, Contact, Arm Swing
• Blocking: Footwork, Jumping, Pressing over the net, Hand Placement, Lining Up.
• Digging: Reading Opponents, Defensive Stance, Platform Contact, Transitioning, Absorption, Platform Angles.

As you read through the New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball, you will find essential tips and strategies that are crucial for building a successful volleyball program.

Utilizing the principles outlined in the New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball can significantly enhance your team’s performance.

3. Practice Planning

Writing down a practice plan will not only keep the team on task with a proper focus, but also the coaches. The more detailed a practice plan, the more likely a player is to improve. Including a focus, a how, and a why in each drill will help players understand better what it will take to get the job done.

Early Season Practices

Early season practice plans should focus on ball control drills, installing how serve-receive shall be done, and what defensive system will be used. These early practices should also implement any rules that should be followed all year long and set a standard of effort that is warranted for each practice moving forward.

Having the team on the same page early is important to being able to move from the rudimentary skills and drills and advance to more difficult skills later.

Mid-Season Practices

Games have begun as the season progresses, and coaches will start to understand their team more. This is the time to see how the players and the team as a whole perform individually in live games.

Focusing on weaknesses from games and tournaments becomes a vital part of practice. Listing the immediate problems in previous games that can be quick fixes by putting drill-specific time towards them becomes more common.

The team that wins the serve and serve-receive battle wins more than not. Focusing on ways to improve serve and serve-receive will continue.

Adding higher-level skills. The coach’s job is not just to win games but to push their athletes to improve. Becoming stagnant to where the team is a failure. Adding higher-level skills in practice will start pushing the athletes more in hopes that they become adequate in these new skills by the end of the season.

Late Season Practices

As the season nears the end, the team’s focus tends to fade. Keeping practices fresh, fun, and challenging is vital. The end of the season usually brings along a big tournament to end the year, and having the team play their best is the goal.

Continuing to refine serve and serve-receive is extra important as both skills are high-focus type skills. Working on the setter to hitter connection and making sure there is no disconnect.

Focus type drills are important. Training them to stay focused when times get tough.

Any issues that can be fixed quickly. Learning a new skill at this point is a waste of time, and you should be working on anything that can move the needle before the final games.

Practice Plan Tips

• Designate Time for Each Drill
• Overplan. A drill may go quicker than you expect.
• Be Specific. ex. Don’t just serve. What about serving should be worked on? The Toss? Contact? Timing?
• Serve and Serve Receive are the most important.
• Always include Competition. Doesn’t have to be 6 against 6. The best way to learn is by playing.
• Scrimmage. Simulate match situations to develop decision-making and teamwork.

4. Game Day Preparation

Game Day is completely different from a high school match to a club tournament, and preparation will be done differently. Playing at 8 am in a different city has a different preparation model than a 7 pm Varsity match.

Every level of play will have a different type of preparation, and it is important to know the rules of each level to prepare a productive preparation for your team.

In-Match Adjustments

Not only does the coach need to prepare everything before and after the actual match. They must prepare for what they will do during the match itself.

The coach must prepare to put their players in a position of success before the match even starts. Writing lineups, serve-receive rotations, defensive schemes, substitutions, and time-out strategies. A coach affects more in a match than most realize, not including coaching and teaching the players.

As you implement the advice from the New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball, you’ll witness remarkable progress in your athletes’ skills.

The New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball offers innovative drills to improve specific skills, ensuring players excel in their roles.

The coach must consider what they will do on the bench. What coaching personality do they need to have to help their team? From a cheerleader-style coaching style to sitting on the bench, keeping statistics. Each team will require a different type of coach for success.

5. Off-Season & Conditioning

Running a program or a club requires more than just practices with the players to become successful. Offseason plans for building explosive power and injury prevention are critical to taking the next step. Player Development and recruiting will also come into play. A lot more than just playing volleyball goes into building a successful and sufficient program.

Refer to the New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball for insights on maintaining team morale during challenging seasons.

Strength & Agility Programs

Utilize the New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball to create personalized coaching strategies that resonate with your team’s dynamics.

Many speed and performance companies are willing to work with school and club programs for a price. Not everyone is willing to pay for that or capable. Creating a strength & Agility program on your own, it is essential to do your research to ensure the players are not doing too much, and keeping the players’ safety in mind.

Volleyball players are meant to be explosive and powerful, and have quick agility. Long-distance running is not something they would need to work on.

Player Development Plans

In this New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball, we also explore how to create a supportive environment that encourages player development. Creating individual player development plans is a good idea to track growth and have a focused goal throughout the season. These plans can be focused on volleyball-related skills, being a good teammate, or creating good character traits that will benefit them on and off the court.

Coaching higher-level players brings the responsibility of assisting the player with college recruiting. Setting expectations for the player and what they need to do daily to make a college team. College volleyball is one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States, and more and more programs are being created. Understanding the different levels will help you set up your player for success.

6. Resources & Tools

To further enhance your coaching journey, the New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball provides access to valuable resources and tools. There are many tools and toys that can help enhance practices for the players, but they should not be relied on to replace having a focused practice plan. Tools need to be used very specifically to help the team and players. There are great resources out there to improve volleyball knowledge and give new ideas to help with creating a coaching philosophy, to adding new drills to practices.

Recommend Websites

• The Art of Coaching Volleyball
• Gold Medal Squared
• AVCA
• Championship Productions Volleyball

Recommended Volleyball Stats Application

Keeping statistics on players can be very beneficial for understanding any underlying issues with the team or individual players. However, statistics should be used as a tool and not a decision maker. An easy user user-friendly application is Solo Stats 123. Solo Stats 123 makes keeping statistics easy and gives excellent additional breakdowns and overall stat sheets for each match and the season as a whole.

A lot of teams are using Hudl as their film-sharing software, and Hudl will break down the match and keep the statistics for you, and will send reports to the coaches and players as they become available.

Conclusion

The landscape of volleyball coaching continues to evolve, and staying ahead means constantly learning and adapting. Use this guide as a foundation, but remember that your greatest asset is your passion and commitment to yourself and your athletes’ growth. This guide will continue to grow and adapt and will continue to be a point of reference. Embrace the principles in the New Coach’s Guide to Volleyball for long-term benefits in your coaching career.

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