Functional warmups are great. Obviously. A lot of highly educated specialists have created exercises that perfectly prepare a player’s body (Note: always a player, never an athlete) for ultimate performance. New information alert… the mind also plays a role in practice and sometimes, not always, but sometimes, players need to relax their minds to be fully ready for practice and a structured, perfect warmup does not help. In that case there is a class of volleyball based (barely) games that coaches use for the purpose. Different languages have different names for these games. Vollis. Bagherone. Baggerspiel. Baggertennis. Mostly variations of the word bagger/bagher, which translates roughly as ‘dig’ and is used as the term for the technical skill of underarm passing.
There are many variations starting with ‘Classico’ in which teams are on each side of the net, one player inside the court, others standing behind the court. Players have one contact to direct the ball over the net using only underarm pass. After playing the ball, the player goes off the court and is replaced by the next player. And so on and so forth. One game I like to play sometimes is called ‘Don’t Drop the Baby’. In this game, two players are on each side. One player on each side has a ball. Let’s call it a baby. The rules are the same as ‘Classico’. The ball must go over the net with one contact BUT or AND the baby cannot be dropped. Players cannot play the ball while holding the baby, but are allowed to transfer the baby between them. The basic idea is to create confusion so that both players try to play the ball and forget about the baby, or protect the baby and miss the ball. Sometimes when I play it in my practices I use a different kind of ball for very deeply considered pedagogical reasons. Or just to make it different from the last time we played it. Yesterday I played it using baseballs as babies.
Team B was leading 7-2 when the the Team A called a timeout (solving problems is allowed in my practices). There are a variety of tactics that can be used, and Team A chose ‘put the player with the baby in the corner and play with only one player’. As they reeled off the next three points, coming back to 5-7, my mind frantically scrambled with solutions to combat one team having ‘solved’ the game. But I needn’t have worried. The inherent flaw in the tactic soon revealed itself. Obviously Team B started probing the area close to the corner and made some errors, but soon they hit the sweet spot. The inherent flaw with making strict rules on who should play the ball is that eventually something happens that the rules don’t cover. Excluding a player from the play, however well intentioned and tactically sound, inevitably leads to a loss of attention. The player doesn’t expect to the play the ball, and so is not ready to play it when it comes. Once Team B found the sweet spot around the player holding the baby, 7-5 very quickly became 15-7, with Team A in inevitable disarray.
The lesson is that in volleyball, all players, even middles, have to play and be ready to play. Systems of strict specialisation provide the illusion of organisation and efficacy. Until the moment they don’t.
About Mark Lebedew:
Mark Lebedew authors the At Home on the Court Blog. He coaches professionally in Poland, from january 2021 with eWinner Gwardia Wrocław, in season 2019/20 with Aluron Virtu CMC Warta Zawiercie and in the period 2015-2018 with KS Jastrzębski Węgiel. That follows five seasons Germany where his Berlin Recycling Volleys won three straight league titles and a CEV Champions League bronze medal. He has prior professional experience in Belgium and Italy. Mark was also Head Coach for the Australian Men’s National Team. From 2021/2022 until the end of the 2023/2024 season he was at the helm of VfB Friedrichshafen, while in 2022 he led the Slovenian national team during the Volleyball Nations League. In the 2024/2025 season, Mark Lebedew takes charge of the Netherlands’ team, Nova Tech Lycurgus.
Mark partnered with his brother and father to translate and publish “My Profession: The Game“, the last book by legendary Russian coach, Vyacheslav Platonov.
With John Forman, he is behind the Volleyball Coaching Wizards project (link http://volleyballcoachingwizards.com/) which identifies great coaches from all levels, making their experience, insights, and expertise available to people all over the world. The project has produced multiple books, a in e-book format available here ( link to http://bit.ly/34yakou ) or at Amazon here (link https://amzn.to/2JRqTE6).
In 2021, he launched project Webinars and Presentations on Demand. If you are interested for coaching presentations and webinars available on demand, click here.
- JPN M: SV.League Men’s Quarterfinals – First Leg
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- POL M: Leon Leads LUK Lublin to Stunning 3:1 Win Over Jastrzębski
- JPN W: SV.League Quarterfinal Openers
- By Mark Lebedew: Small Games. Big Lessons
