what's going on everybody Welcome to the channel in this video we're breaking down how to block like a pro let's get right into it [Music] [Music] [Laughter] blocking is a huge part of the game of volleyball as I'm sure you already know if you happen to watch any of the Olympic Beach or Olympic indoor volleyball then I'm sure you were able to see firsthand how having a really good block can take your team to the next level Poland is one of the most dominant blocking teams and they run full display and obviously France coming home with the Olympic gold did a really good job of of blocking and and taking away some hitters at the net so with that being said we're going to talk about blocking today I covered a previous video on blocking but this one we're going to dive into some more specific Concepts that you may have not heard before or some things that I just think work really effectively in the indoor game so without further Ado let's get into it first thing about blocking that I want to bring up is you don't have to be 6'8 to be a great Blocker on the opposite side of things if you're on the shorter side it doesn't mean you can't block just as effectively stuff blocks are amazing block touches and getting a chance for your team to ex further extend the rally is honestly just as effective in my book because when you get a block a Quality Block touch and can turn that into a kill that slows the other team down to me it doesn't really matter if you're 6'8 if you're Kyle lensing or your 6 foot and your keani Tim anyone if they're using the right blocking fundamentals can have the ability to get quality touches on the ball and that's all we're really looking for as a coach yes the block the block stuffs are great the roofs are awesome and they look cool in the highlights but how can you impact your team on every every single given play are you putting yourself in good positions to make touches are you at a position making it easy for really good attackers to hit right around you I'm less focused on how hard the ball hits the ground from your block and more concerned on what are you doing to get in good positioning to get touches on balls to begin with and also when you make a block Touch where is that ball going is it staying on your side is it flying out of bounds is it hitting your elbows and dropping down figuring out where that Ball's going doing a little bit of self-reflection can really go a long way and understanding what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong so with that let's get right into film and break down some of these Concepts first video I want to touch on comes from our semi-final CVC match against Ruckers we get a good serve in from Will and and they set the middle on a pretty below average pass but Mason is ready and he takes this ball away and now it's not a stuff Block it's not even a block on the stat sheet cuz they cover it but a couple things to point out here first one being Mason is in great position between ball man and his opposing attacker that he's responsible for so he's forcing him to take this shot back to Diego back to the one he takes that away and this attacker just swings right into his hands which is exactly what we want and they're able to cover it and they end up hitting the ball out of bounds but one thing to point out here that he does better than most and that's what I like to call the give and take block so he takes his little stuff Shuffle step to the right and you can see based on where he's lined up from his Shuffle step versus where his hands are penetrated over the net he's taking away all of this angle here above the net now if Mason takes this Shuffle step to the right and jump straight up this still might be a block and that's partly because this was a horrible swing by their middle swinging right low and straight in front of him body line right into the hands but even if this guy wanted to swing into the angle Mason had it fully covered he had it fully taken away and was all over this guy because he showed one thing and took away this guy's entire angle with his give and take block blocking stagnantly just straight up and down at the college level further on you go it's not going to give you a lot of success when it does typically an indication of a pretty poor attacker just not using their vision and just swinging straight in front of them so give and take give and take and reach into the seam you're going to find a lot of blocks like Mason did here even if it's not St block like I said we'll take it all right number two clip here same set same match against Ruckers nework This one coming on the opposite with Luke Morris on our right side blocking the opposing team's outside you can see he takes a shuffle step to the right which I talked about in my previous video a lot you can feel free to reference that on shuffle steps versus swing blocks but he takes the shuffle step and sees that ball is out to the PIN and he does a little bit of of give and take as well as he originally is probably going to take away that angle but sees this attacker turning his shoulders to want to go down the line so he moves his hand into that line fills it and is able to get a perfect perfectly executed block now the thing about the give and take block is you want to be over the net you have to make sure that you're still getting penetrated coaches say that word a lot penetration it means if my Net is here I want my hands to be taking real estate off across the net if you're straight up behind the net that's the easiest way to get tooled so Luke does a good job of Reaching Across but still having his hands penetrated over the net that's extending that real estate which leads to a block it's really tough for an attacker to react to those late hands if you go if Luke goes straight up and down here this is probably a bounce ball down the line but because those late hands and the give and take on this line block he's able to make something out of it and um that was all year for Luke Morris blocking outside hitters the whole year so something to take away from that all right clip number three here this one is from our match against Southern Virginia and this is an outside block from will wri now in this clip you'll see there's not really a lot of give and take but there's a bunch of takeaways from this clip that I want you to to focus on the first one being Will's timing here is absolutely perfect and before his timing is his positioning he's really exactly where we want him to be in this rotation given the middle is so far pulled on the other side he's not going to help out with the middle this is his guy one-on-one on the opposite so he's in great position and then more importantly than his positioning is his timing like I said he jumps exactly the same time this opposite hitter jumps and that leads to to him being penetrated right when he's about to swing if you can get your hands over the net on contact it's going to lead to a lot of blocks because when you're late you're going to get tooled when you're on time you're going to get blocks when you're perfectly on time you're going to get roofs so will did a great job here of seeing the ball all the way through and you know with this Lefty he didn't really have a whole lot of options given the set he can't really turn this ball down the line unless he chops it a little bit so will recognizes that has really good timing here and and puts his hands over the net at the appropriate time which leads to the block as you can see in our next clip here another block from will that I want to highlight and this one it's a lot of moving parts so I'll break it down as quickly as I can for you and as simply as I can so this Messiah is in rotation six which means there is a front row Setter and they have two front row hitters number 10 and number 24 so will recognizes that pre- serve he he's aware of that fact and he knows that his responsibility is the setter his secondary responsibility is the dball who is out on this play and then from there his third responsibility is the middle third of the court so whether that's the middle attacker or the bck so it's kind of like a progression in football you go through your reads so his first read here is the setter and based on this pass the setter is not going to dump the ball he's off the net and if he does dump it then we expect our back row Defenders to pick that ball up so his first read he's he's not jumping with the setter second read would be to go out and transition for this dball but this dball attacker is late he's like two seconds late to this set so he's completely out of the play took himself out so he's not even worried about that guy after those two reads are done he moves to the middle third of the court and he can see this player number 12 coming in on a big attack which is a first Tempo set from the back middle and he takes his Shuffle step to the right gets a beautiful block touch on this ball and we're we're able to contact it on two now Devon doesn't put this ball away but this is exactly what we want in terms of recognizing what the other team's doing helping on your assignments and getting a Quality Block touch you'll also notice here that not only will got this block touch but Mason was up and Luke we had five hands up for this bck when you can get five hands up on a bck that means you're really seeing the game well and block blocking as a unit which is what we talk about a lot of marry Mount so that's really good stuff from these boys on the flip side of things you see Devon going for this two ball now he doesn't put it away but Messiah is kind of caught looking they don't really know what's going on here they only have one block up so if Devon is able to get on top of this ball nine out of 10 times we like our chances with the kill here cuz that this outside's in no man's land the setter has no clue what's going on and um they aren't really aware of the fact that that's a possibility so kind of two ways to approach blocking blocking as a unit is how we really like to attack it and I think it works really well in slowing down the opposite team when they're running a lot of front row back row variation so try that out next clip here is a blocking move that I think there's a little bit of room for improvement I'm not going to say it's bad cuz I don't think there are really bad blocking moves you can get lucky and get block on a on a quote unquote bad blocking move and you can have the perfect move in the world and still not really be where you need to be all the time but that being said I think there are some things that you can do to increase your likelihood of getting blocks so in this play against Ruckers you can see Diego does a really good job of sequencing this play so his responsibility is the outside hitter but he's here to help on the middle so he waits until he sees that set go out to the pin and he goes for his guy and they get the kill now you might look at this and be like okay he did a pretty good job of getting up there and yes he does a fine job this is probably a seven out of 10 block and and most coaches I would say would be happy with this my only RI with this blocking move is if you watch his hips and his feet so when he makes this little Shuffle step his feet are pointed towards the bleachers and his hips are pointed in the same direction and he does a little bit of like a almost like a 180 with his hips and that causes him to slightly Drift from his feet stopping point to the end of his blocking move and the reason I have issue with that is because whenever you are drifting on your block a it's easier to Tool and B you can't take away any of that angle when you drift away so so basically here is what I want to see out of Diego instead of what he did I'll show you in this in this clip right here from Devon so Devon on the other side the court here on the flip side blocking on the left you can see he goes for the swing block but when his feet get stopped he doesn't drift he immediately turns his hips and presses into the court into the angle to get this block it's a very subtle difference but when you can get your feet stopped your hips turned and your arms into the angle you're going to get so many more blocks I'm telling you when you drift and get your feet angled toward the bleachers angle towards the sidelines your arms are going to pull their way with your whole body and it's going to be so easy for that attacker to just hit around you into the angle there's so much court on the other side of those hands when you drift but when you get stopped when you get set when you get set a good hitter in this situation is going to see a one-onone block and either put this ball down the line or put this ball deep into the angle where the block can't touch it so the only way you touch this ball as a blocker is by setting up inside and reaching into that angle and you can hope that you get that with your inside hand so Devon does that gets the block and and taking away space taking away angles and getting blocks all right here's the last clip here just a little nugget of information as we close and this one's all about where you put your hands over the net you know you get all this information about pretending like you're touching the outside of a volleyball or maybe you just reach your hands out or thumbs up or all this stuff one thing that we can't do is pencil block is be really shallow be really close together it's one way to get a stuff block but it's not really going to help anyone out in blocking the court so you can see on this play here the setter comes up and just dumps this ball down if his hand are shoulder width apart here this is a block touch at minimum if not a block but since he's his hands are inside his shoulders really narrow really pencil that's why this set is able to just tuck this ball inside so just a small thing but I like I like and what I see a lot is players coming in wide outside their shoulders and then coming in from there to their shoulder withth apart wi just a small thing like I said but again blocking is a lot about putting the small things together and when you do a lot of small things right you end up getting a lot of touches a lot of blocks and uh yeah it's a simple game when you put the fundamentals together things like this timing footwork hand placement Vision um and that is how you become a better volleyball player one little piece at a time I hope you guys enjoyed this content blocking is huge like I said let me know if you got any questions below any position middle outside opposite if you're shorter if you're taller if you're mobile maybe not as mobile hit the comments and um let's chat that's all I got for yall we'll see you in the next one peace [Music] [Applause] [Music]