Best of Club Volleyball: Base Defense and Blocking Assignments

with Eric Schulze,
General Manager and Director of Coaching and Player Development for Club Fusion Volleyball (IL); Woodstock North (IL) Head Coach

Base defense is often a misunderstood topic. By understanding the broad scope of base defense, players can adjust to get better touches on the ball. Base defense needs to be trained in order for players to make the best decision for alignments according to what the opposing team is doing offensively.

Through demonstrating the two- and three-hitter alignments, Eric Schulze emphasizes the pre-set and situational adjustments that need to be made to enhance your team's defensive level. Coach Schulze takes you from reading the quality of the pass on the opposite side of the court to understanding and recognizing all the options that the offense might run against your defense.

Schulze details the responsibilities in base defense and explains what players need to know. He covers how to:

• Identify the quality of the pass.
• Handle or terminate the overpass.
• Handle the setter dump.
• Identify patters and routes.
• Defend the first tempo attack.

Schulze provides several competitive game-like drills with a small group of offensive players going against the full team defense, which provides the needed repetitions for players to understand their responsibilities and recognize what's happening on the other side of the court.

Defend Quick Tempo

Coach Schulze explains how the front row blockers can be adjusted against a two- and three-hitter offense to more effectively cover the attackers with less effort and describes the rationale on lining-up your back row players to defend the quick tempo attacks and be prepared to quickly transition to a perimeter defense.

Read and Communicate

Schulze provides drills to recognize the effectiveness of the opponent's passing and adjust based on what they will likely run against you. He then provides drills to work on transitioning your blockers based on the options available to the offense.

Drills include:

• Passing Identification - emphasizes the need to read the initial pass from the offense and determine if it will be "on, off or over."
• Transition Defense - has the blocker line up and then read the play that unfolds before making the move from base to position. This drill is run against both two hitter and three hitter offenses so that the defense has the opportunity to see many offensive possibilities run against them.

Using these strategies will make your team more confident in covering the setter dumps and first tempo attacks that too often surprise the defense.

Overpass Identification

Schulze emphasizes drills that will increase player awareness of adjustments that must be made for overpass situations. Multiple suggestions from Coach Schulze regarding situational reads will help you train your team to make better decisions on how to handle overpasses.

• Train front row players to use hands as a powerful tool for defense.
• Train players to "swipe" an overpass at an angle in order to be most effective in their chance to end a rally.
• Train players to identify each overpass ball and to make a confident decision on how to handle the overpass.

Schulze explains the responsibilities of each defensive player on the court based on the offensive look they get and covers the necessary switches or changes the defense needs to make as they recognize what's going on with the opposing offense.

The drills Coach Schulze runs do an excellent job of having players make the necessary reads and then execute to stop the opposing offense. Once mastered, the drills in this video can be run at a faster pace to provide multiple reps and replicate the speed of the game.

45 minutes. 2017.