Volleyball drills that work in a private lesson.

What changes with one player

Two things change. The first is contact count. In team practice a player might get a few dozen quality contacts on a given skill; in a private, the same player can get that many in ten minutes. That volume is what the family is paying for, so avoid drills with waiting built in.

The second is the feeder. With no teammates, the coach supplies every ball: tosses for early technical work, then served, set, and hit balls as soon as the player is ready. A drill becomes game-like when the ball comes from a real serve or swing instead of a toss. Move to live balls as early as form allows.

Ball-control warm-up

Start with coach-player pepper: pass, set, and a controlled hit back and forth, eight to ten minutes. Gold Medal Squared recommends warming up with a ball instead of laps, and in a private this is also a diagnostic. You can see platform angle, hand shape, and footwork before you pick the day's focus.

Finish the warm-up with passing to a target from easy coach tosses. Score it lightly, for example passes to the target out of 10, so the player is already counting before the real benchmark.

Serve receive from a coach serve

This is the core drill for most privates and the easiest to score. The coach serves from the far baseline; the player passes to a target at the setter's spot. Rate every pass 0 to 3: 3 gives the setter every option, 2 gives two options, 1 leaves one option or forces a non-setter to set, and 0 is an ace or overpass.

Run it in sets of 10 and write the average after each set. Start with float serves to the player's body, then move them left and right, then deep and short. Twenty rated passes at the start of the lesson and twenty at the end give you a before and after.

Seam and short-serve reads

Many passing errors come from serves the player has to move to. With a single player, set a cone or a second target to mark a partner's position and serve into the seam between them. The player calls the ball early and passes it. Then mix in short serves to the front third of the court, where players often read late.

Score it the same 0 to 3 way, and add a simple count for calls: did the player call the ball before it crossed the net? A player whose average holds up on seam and short serves is ready for the next level of difficulty.

Setter drills

Start with footwork to a fixed target. The coach tosses from different spots on the court; the setter moves, stops square to the target, and sets to a marked zone near the left antenna. Count sets in the zone out of 10.

Then add jump sets from good passes, and finally out-of-system sets: the coach tosses tight, off the net, or deep, and the setter has to get a hittable ball to the outside. Score out-of-system sets separately. They are harder, and the gap between in-system and out-of-system accuracy is a useful number to track over weeks.

Hitter drills

Begin with approach footwork without a ball: the steps for a four-step or three-step approach, arm swing timed with the last two steps. Once the footwork is steady, add a coach toss, then live sets.

Score attacks by where they land: count balls hit into a called zone out of 10, or balls kept in the court with full swing. Every few lessons, measure standing reach and spike touch with the Volleyball Canada protocol: a full approach to a Vertec or marked wall, jumping until three consecutive misses, 15 to 20 seconds rest between jumps, highest touch recorded.

Libero and defensive drills

The coach stands on a box or at the net and hits down-balls, then harder attacks, at the defender. The player reads the coach's shoulder and arm, gets to a low, balanced position, and digs to a target in the middle of the court.

Score it the same 0 to 3 way as passing: a dig the setter can run offense from is a 3, and so on down. Add reads by hitting to set spots (line, cross, tip) and counting how often the defender starts moving the right way before contact.

Zone serving

Serving needs no feeder at all, which makes it a good drill to end a lesson with while you write notes. Call a zone before each serve (zone 1 right back, 6 middle back, 5 left back, 4 left front, 3 middle front, 2 right front) and count hits out of 10. The Art of Coaching Volleyball uses zone serving as a standard drill.

Keep the called zones and their order the same from lesson to lesson so the number is comparable. When a player can land 7 or 8 out of 10 deep, add short zones and a second serve type.

Versions for two to four players

With two to four players you can use team drills at small scale. A passing butterfly runs with three players rotating from server to passer to target. Queen or King of the Court works on a short court with pairs. Gold Medal Squared lists both among its standard warm-up and small-group drills.

Keep scoring individual. In a three-player serve-receive drill, each player still gets a 0 to 3 average, even if the drill is shared. A small group should not mean less measurement per player.

Beach adaptations

On sand, the same drills need two changes. Wind: serve and set in both directions, and score each direction separately, because a player who passes well into the wind can struggle with it. Partner communication: beach pairs cover the whole court between two players, so add calls to every serve-receive and defensive drill and count them.

Weather also changes the lesson plan itself. Many beach programs play through rain and stop for lightning. Have a short indoor or sand-only version of the plan ready, and a clear rule for what happens to the session and the family's credit if it is called off.

Build the drills into a timed plan

Drills work best inside a fixed structure: ball warm-up, a baseline benchmark, one or two skill blocks, a game-like block, and a re-test at the end. The volleyball practice plan template guide writes out a 60-minute private in that shape. In Upswing, you save it as a session plan and run it from your phone on court, block by block, with the benchmark logging to the player's record. Upswing includes starter volleyball plans for serve receive, setting, hitting, and defense that you can copy and edit.

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