How Video Can Enhance Your Volleyball Coaching Toolkit

It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what level of competition you’re in – coaching boils down to planning practices, scouting opponents, devising game plans and leading players. 

However, what separates the good coaches from the great ones is the ability to effectively and efficiently pass insights to staff and players. 

Outside of leveraging years of experience, the best way to enhance your coaching toolkit is to utilize the power of video.

Practice Makes Perfect

The very backbone of coaching is planning and running practices. With the power of video, you can ensure drills are run properly.

Does your team have an abnormally high service error rate? Use Hudl Technique’s slow-motion playback and drawing tools to ensure players consistently execute proper serving form. Record players as they go through the Corner Serve and Serving to 21 drills to identify hitches in any of the key components of a perfect serve – the routine, the toss, the approach and the contact.

With a second set of eyes you can run practices more efficiently. Give instant feedback by reviewing videos to make your teachings more effective. How’s that for a 1-2 punch?

Recon at the Ready

Football, basketball and soccer teams at all levels include scouting opponent video as part of their coaching routines. Why not you?

The difference between winning and losing matches lies in identifying and exploiting the weaknesses and tendencies of your opponent. Video can uncover those habits and stats can back up those findings. 

“For teams that have access to scout video, this (recognizing tendencies) may include video clips alongside handouts of top hitters and rotations, both in serve receive and point score phase, watched a couple days before the match.” - Marie E. Zidek - DePaul University, Assistant Coaches Committee

With Hudl’s in-depth reports, reviewing stats gathered from video to find an opponent’s weakest rotations and most frequent errors is easy as pie. And since we’ve partnered with popular volleyball stat applications – AOC VBStats, iStatVball 2, Volleyball Ace, and SoloStats Live – chances are there’s a tagging interface perfect for you!

Thinking of a Master Plan

Video can be a crucial tool in your opponent scouting efforts, but watching your own team’s game footage also has its benefits: you can justify assumptions regarding your best lineups and find key insights to devise potent game plans.

Tagged video is automatically filtered into playlists for you to easily find each game’s most important moments and to avoid sifting through hours of video clips.

You’ve assumed one particular rotation is the most effective for a left-side attack – now back up that assumption by reviewing all clips of attack attempts. Analyze side out and serve percentage statistics in Hudl’s reports to prove your point even more.   

To your improve your blocking, look for tendencies in the opposing team’s offense. Notice on every perfect pass within three feet, the setter likes to run the middle. Anytime the pass is outside the five foot line, the middle is no longer an option. Think how much more effective your middle blockers will be if they can identify tendencies and eliminate potential offensive options.

Say goodbye to guesswork and hello to fine-tuned strategies.

Motivate, Communicate, Dominate

Practice itineraries and game plans won’t mean anything if they aren’t communicated effectively. 

Through Hudl’s messaging tools* you can pass along coaching insights, important files or video playlists with individual coaches and athletes, custom groups or your entire team right inside the app. Now you can motivate and educate players on and off the court without the fear of intruding on their personal lines of communication.  

*You must use the most recent Hudl app to access the messaging feature. 

Ready to integrate video into your coaching routine? Try Hudl for free today. Make this the year that you start taking stats seriously. Make this the year that you DOMINATE!