First Ball Side Out Options

Lyndsey Oates, head women’s coach at the University of Northern Colorado, leads coaches through a terrific instructional volleyball coaching session that showcases her system for working through 6 different reception patterns in Rotation 1 to give you options that may work for your team.

Serve Receive Patterns: Considerations

Within these patterns Coach Oates provides suggestions, as well as explains adjustments and tweaks that will help your team score points. The 4-time Big Sky Coach of the Year takes different aspects of volleyball into consideration and covers key out of system options for each pattern,seam recognition and attack options. 

There is considerably more simplicity to serve receive patterns 2-6 through six but a coach still must organize their team to first ball side out. Coach Oates does a terrific job of providing more examples of reception patterns in these rotations and tries to get coaches to think critically about each pattern. Oates suggests taking stats and analyzing each rotation, as well as having a plan A, B and C for each rotation. 

Countering Opponents

While exploring the different reception patterns, Coach Oates stresses that you must be prepared for the opponent’s best serve. To help illustrate her points of emphasis, she stops in each rotation to show you where the opposing team will most likely serve. 

Oates dives into an explanation and recommendation on why coaches should spend time receiving serve versus these attacking types of serves to give your players experience with seams and shifts. 

Throughout the video, Coach Oates suggests to keep your team’s personnel in mind when creating serve receive patterns. She explains why you need to practice each to see what really works for your team – closing out with helpful demonstrations that provide you with multiple looks for each serve receive pattern to help position your team to first ball side out. 

After watching this video, you will gain the knowledge to tweak your reception patterns to utilize your teams’ strengths.

Coaches Review: 5 Out Of 5 Stars. ‘Most serve receive videos I have seen deal with the individual skill and possibly the seam coverage. Coach Oates dives into the actual reception patterns and how to adjust them for your own team’s success. I highly recommend this video to any coach whose teams have a hard time getting stuck in the same old reception patterns that everyone else uses.’

58 minutes. 2023.