High School Coaching Academy: Serve & Serve Receive

Take your opponent our of their rhythm, out of their serve receive and out of their offense

As an 11-time State Champion High School Coach Tom Keating has gained the respect and admiration of his peers. He is one of the best High School volleyball coaches in the nation.

Coach Keating shares his philosophy on how to disrupt your opponent and apply pressure with good serve and serve receive techniques. Keating makes these techniques as simple as possible while eliminating unnecessary movement. Starting with basic concepts and progressing into the specific application techniques, these skills and concepts are easily transferable to a variety of skill levels.

You will see high school level athletes demonstrate the floater, jump floater, and top spin serve. The modeling of these serves takes abstract concepts and makes them concrete and easy to understand. The demonstrators provide a full speed demonstration of each serve, followed by Keating's step-by-step build up of the skill, followed by more full speed demonstrations.

Keating then walks you through zone serving and how to use it to disrupt your opponent's offense. Several serving drills are included to fine tune accuracy while maximizing practice reps.

In the second half of the video, Keating breaks down the important elements of serve receive passing. Demonstrators model the proper body positioning starting with the feet and working up to the head. Once body position is established, he demonstrates proper footwork and movement patterns. The drills used in this section focus on training the early stages of passing and end with more complex movement patterns.

This is a good training video for coaches at any level - junior high, high school and club. At the beginning of each segment, Coach Keating reviews the fundamentals of each technique and follows up with a series of drills created to ingrain the desired mechanics. You will discover critical elements that need to be incorporated and rehearsed during practice in order to have success. Cue words are provided to enable you to communicate more accurately with your athletes in effort to correct unwanted behavior and reinforce proper technique.

The skills taught in this video will give your players and your team a competitive edge in the serve and serve receive phases of the game.

60 minutes. 2012.