Planning Practice & Drills to Achieve Success

with Cliff Hastings,
Parkland College Head Coach;
2021 NJCAA National Champions;
Back-to-Back NJCAA DII National Champions (2015-16) - finished a perfect 57-0 in 2015;
8x Mid-West Athletic Conference Champions (2009-16);
Director of the Prime Time Volleyball Club (IL)

In this video, Coach Hastings shares drills and coaching techniques as he explains the drills, corrects his players, and provides many different variations to the drills.

Hastings does a good job of showing a clear cut, step-ladder way of building a practice session with high expectations. He separates practice into three areas of focus:

• Strength and Conditioning
• Position Training - Where he breaks down the learning process to build consistency across the board.
• Team Training - Where he allows players to gain a better understanding of his expectations through game-like situations.

Strength & Conditioning Workouts

Coach Hastings shares his teams' exercises and how they are designed to prepare players for the upcoming season. You'll learn:

• The one arm bench press to allow your players to work on both arms equally.
• How the medicine ball toss can be a great way to work on abs and body rotation.
• How Bosu ball squats will help your players develop balance and strength in their squat.
• Rowing exercises that can be used to simulate body mechanics during a swing.

Position-Specific Training

Learn to use a variety of drills that simulate game-like situations. Coach Hastings divides players into different stations to help with individual skills to allocate practice time for individual player development. Position-specific training is incorporated into the team drills.

You'll see how Hastings creates consistency in the gym so that all players are on the same page. Peer to peer leadership and feedback is encouraged and seen and reinforces a legacy of learned experience and wisdom passed on from the upper classmen to the newer players. Additional skills taught include:

• Achieve correct footwork by isolating players in a series of drills to imitate moves that will happen during a match
• Isolation footwork
• Using team statistics
• Blocking as a unit
• Setting accuracy and aggression

It's critical for teams to have an understanding that during a match, not everything will run perfectly as practiced, so, in anticipation of that, Hastings spends specific practice time working on things that could go different - such as playing a bad pass, your setter taking the first ball, and other unplanned/likely to occur scenarios that lead to out of system play in a match.

Team Training

Coach Hastings takes everything learned in the position-specific training and incorporates it into the team drill segment. In this session, he uses game-like settings to work on areas that present themselves during a match. The control drill allows your team to work on various skills in a controlled environment. Hastings also shares his insights on why he uses the different drills based on statistics gathered from the season's matches.

Finally, one of the gems of this video is to see, firsthand, some of the on-court 'verbal coaching cues' Hastings uses - giving you terrific insight into his coaching while at the same time seeing how attuned he is in keeping players engaged and focused on getting better.

Need some structure and ideas for your practice time? This video from Coach Hastings is the answer!

54 minutes. 2018.