hi i'm john spura national champion and olympic gold medal volleyball coach in this segment we're going to be talking about some of the fundamentals with passing and passing technique we're going to be using taylor wilson here who played for me at uc irvine and won two national championships in 2007 and 2009. first thing to mention when we start talking about passing is the hands there's lots of different ways people teach to hold your hands the best way to do it is palm and palm just bring your hands together so your fingertips overlay one another then bring your thumbs so that they're even and that your palms are pretty even so it's kind of flat along these lines here so it's pretty flat with a wide fairly wide base but also make sure that you can put pressure on your fingertips so they don't come apart okay so that's the the perfect passing hand position and then once we talk about the hands and we talk about what we call the platform which is the arms and how you hold your arms and contact the ball so you take your hands and you rotate them down a little bit and open up your arms so that your elbows are as close as they can go together some people can touch their elbows which is beneficial for passing which is why i was a middle blocker but so you open that up so that the flat part of your lower forearm is what's touching the ball okay that's that's what's called the platform taylor why don't you demonstrate here right now about just your basic body position so now we've talked about the hands and the platform we're going to talk about the shoulders and the body position some guys get really deep into a squat and i've seen all kinds of crazy things really it's just about being in a neutral comfortable position like taylor is his shoulders are a little bit over his knees his hands are down i've seen lots of people start with passing with their arms really wide we want those hands down kind of neutral in between your knees with the palms ready to go kind of up a little bit we want the passer to be oriented towards the server now some people are taught to angle themselves towards the target but you have a ball coming from this way and then you're trying to angle it that way that's actually not the right way to do it we want him facing wherever the server is coming from so pretend the server is coming from over there he's facing the server and where the ball is coming from and he's going to create an angle we talk lots about angles with passers he's going to create an angle with his shoulders to angle that ball towards the target so right here he's actually dropping his inside shoulder a little bit and creating an angle with his platform so he has good hand position good platform position he's creating a good angle right here towards the target okay so that's what we talk about with angles his feet some people teach right foot forward it doesn't really matter because truthfully as soon as that ball is served you're moving anyways most the time so really it's about how your body is positioned and oriented and the angle you create really it's mostly important about the angle you create a lot of people with that platform too i forgot to mention you want to keep that locked out those elbows locked out the entire way through the movement pattern in fact when we're teaching passing a lot of times and taylor can attest this we talk to them about holding the platform and finishing the platform a little bit when they're done to make sure they're not bending their arms or bending their wrists this should be a board all the way through the passing movement and then you should learn how to angle that ball that board with your shoulders not with your arms or your elbows or your hands just with your shoulders to learn how you should change the angle if you need to pass a little bit better i'm going to step on the other side of the net throw some balls at taylor here he's going to pass the ball to an all-american setter here at uc irvine and won a national championship in 2007 brian thornton sets for the national team now um i'm going to toss the ball to bryant or to taylor he's going to pass to brian here so good starting position good movement pattern pass the ball a little bit too tight we're starting to teach guys to pass the ball off the net a little bit more maybe three feet is the target okay now one of the things taylor did right there he kind of stood up a little bit i'll try and get a little more velocity on the ball a lot of beginners they get a real bendy with their knees and they try and lift the ball to the center why don't you do it wrong right here taylor kind of show what a lot of beginners do they kind of stand up and lift and see his arms were swinging all over the place lots of movement one more time wrong lift see how his head's coming way up we want that we really the whole point of passing all these technical aspects of this skill are to try and make it as quiet as possible we want to limit the movement as much as possible because the ball is moving so much it's such a difficult thing to do that we want to keep him quiet so we talk a lot about keeping that head steady so he'll you'll notice that he'll start with his hands kind of on his knees and as soon as the ball is passed he literally just kind of pulls his hands out his head stays steady and if it's ideal he moves with that head in the same plane and passes that ball without lifting let's do it right here taylor see how his head stayed steady that was a very smooth pass now the other thing that beginners do a lot we call it swinging and we'll probably get a good angle on this camera right here in front but a lot of times when the ball is passed over or served over this side they try and shovel that ball over to the target what we want to do is we want to just make angles and let the ball do the work we want the ball to bounce off the angle you create with your arms so he's going to leave it out here and just create an angle and let the ball bounce off of his arms okay so we're going to do it wrong to start he's going to swing we call this swinging i'll toss the ball to his left and he swings it across see that a lot he actually exaggerated that quite a bit swinging can be as much as a little few inches you see that a lot where guys are just doing it a few inches that's a few extra inches of movement you don't need see that's that happens a lot so there he swung about a foot now he's going to create the angle it's going to create the angle he's just going to leave his arms out there see how he left his arms out there that's perfect it's perfect one more time here see he's in a neutral position his hands come down on and they're ready in front ball's served the angle creates an angle keeps his head steady so just to summary actually you know what we should do when you're teaching passing one of the things you have to do in terms of being proper motor learning is you can toss balls all day long as a coach and you can pass to a target and stop and pass to a target but it's not the best way to learn the best way to learn is to actually do other things like the game so for example under normal circumstances he'd pass the ball and then he'd have to go hit so he's thinking about multiple things at the same time so when we're teaching passing and you're learning passing it's important to do all the things at the same time so we've identified an expectation we've told taylor this is how you hold your hands and this is how you hold your angle and this is how your body should look but as soon as we know the basics as soon as we tell them what the expectations are we immediately get them into game mode we immediately get them in the point where they're doing multiple things at the same time so if i was teaching taylor right now i would have taught him all those things because this is what the expectations are and now i'm going to toss you a ball and brian's going to set and you're going to hit and play some volleyball so that's what we're going to do here and give feedback during the course of real play hit angle taylor okay so he's going to create the angle go and hit one more time you got a little bit of a swing there see if you can create a little bit more angle feel your angle good better one more time one more time so he's gonna start in his good neutral position hands come up in between his knees palms up makes a good angle goes into his approach perfect so again that just the basics of what we we did right here in this segment talked about hand position talked about platform talked about what you should be doing with your elbows when you're passing body position and then how to make angles really the most important thing how that ball is touched off the forearm and the angle you create with your shoulders is the most important thing passing is tough it's maybe the hardest thing to do in volleyball it takes a lot of practice but if you do those fundamentals well youtube can become a great passer thanks for watching this clip again i'm john sprawl we'll see you on another one [Music] [Music] you