Volleyball Team Building Drills – Coaching Volleyball

We can approach the subject of team building from both an on-court and off-court perspective. In this post I am going to focus on the on-court aspect and offer a collection of volleyball team building drills you can use to get your teams playing in a more cohesive, collaborative fashion.

Before I get to the activities, though, let me lay some groundwork.

Understanding team training

Volleyball is a coordination and collaboration sport. Even at it’s most basic level (2v2), it’s about working with another person to achieve competitive objectives. That requires understanding of individual roles, communication, collective problem-solving, and trust.

The problem a lot of coaches have in this regard is that they spend massive amounts of time working on individual skills (technical training), and not nearly enough on collective ones (team training). Before you say, “But we play 6v6 every practice!”, let me clarify.

Team training isn’t simply about playing games. Rather, it’s being very intentional about developing the team’s collective skills – just as we should with technical training. That means really focusing in on two overarching aspects. One is making sure everyone knows – or can quickly ascertain – their role and responsibility in any given situation, carries it out, and trusts the other players to do the same. The other is to work collectively to problem-solve and generally collaborate in game situations.

Each of the volleyball team building drills and games I share here work to that end.

The activities

In coming up with this list I looked for drills – actually, it’s mostly games – that strongly encourage players to work together without much coach intervention. By that I mean the activity has built-in pressure to talk, problem-solve, etc. You may need to nudge them here and there. Ultimately, however, it needs to be about the players working things out for themselves.

Brazilian (a.k.a. 2-player/2-ball volley tennis) – I tend to use this game as a warm-up, though you could put it anywhere you like in your practice. Lots of competitive pressure on the players to communicate and coordinate with each other. Watch it on YouTube.

The Hard Drill (a.k.a. cooperative back row 3s) – You can vary the requirements of this one to make it easier or harder. No matter what, though, it’s an activity very much focused on the players figuring out how to beat the drill. Because it can be very frustrating, and puts individual players under pressure at key moments. That makes i a good one for building both individual and collective resilience and mental toughness. Honestly, a lot of cooperative drills serve this sort of purpose.

Amoeba serving – This game skews more toward building competitiveness and mutual support, but there’s an element of collective strategizing as well.

2-Touch – Only allowing 2 contacts per side nicely shakes players out of the 3-touch mentality and forces them to think strategically in news ways. It also tends to make them more deliberate with their 1st contact.

More than 3 touches – Going the other way, if you allow teams more than 3 touches, it creates all kinds of potential for on-the-fly strategy. That encourages more communication, collective game-planning, etc.

3v3 all touch – Here, in a 3v3 game construct, all three players much touch the ball before it goes over. You could do this in a simple Winners or Speedball structure. Or you could do it in a more narrowly constrained fashion like 3 v 3 All-Touch Transition & Attack. No matter, the players have to work things out among themselves on the fly.

Playing both sides of the net – Forcing the players to have to use both sides of the net during a 3-contact activity definitely makes them have to talk and problem-solve. Here’s an example.

Building Teamwork in 6v6 play

Aside from Amoeba serving, the volleyball team building drills above are generally small-sided. That limits the complexity of coordination required. We definitely need to work on it in a 6v6 framework too, though. Here are some ways you can do so.

Use games focused on certain objectives. For example, Bingo and Yahtzee type games have certain things a team needs to do to win. This pushes each team to work together to accomplish those objectives.

Create chaos: A drill like Scramble puts the players in a variety of chaotic situations where clean 3-contact play is a challenge. Players are have quickly evaluate situations, determine their roles, and make plays. Because there isn’t much time between plays, however, the focus is more on communication. Not much room for strategy.

Create new challenges: Team problem-solving skills come from having to overcome new challenges together. Find ways to force players to work through new obstacles. This can be extremely useful when working on phases of play. For example, the team wants to run a certain play in serve receive. Serve the ball to part of the court that makes that very challenging, if not impossible. This forces them to adapt.

Stand back and let them work

The sort of team building we’re trying to accomplish here is all about the players working together. Our job is to put them in situations and let them work things out collectively for themselves. The less direct input we have in that, the better.

If they’re stuck and need a push, ask questions rather then giving solutions. This way they’ll learn to be self-sufficient in game situations where you can’t tell the what to do.

Got any volleyball team building drills you think worth adding to this list? Share them in the comments below.