Sugar Loaf

 Copacabana Beach Walk

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Hello  from Brazil…. 

This morning I was a little concerned as last night we had players out past our curfew of 11:30pm (keep in mind we are in a secure facility, with a 20 foot wall surrounding the volleyball compound and only one way in and out..) But it still bothered me that the players were walking back to their rooms at about 2am!!

 We met at breakfast at our normal (groundhog day) time of 7:30 – 8am…They all seemed a little more sleepy than normal…  I asked the girls what was going on…. Last night… They told me that they had some team issues that needed to be worked out so they had a team meeting that started at about 10:30 pm and lasted until 1:30am… I asked if there was anything that I needed to address or know about and they said that everything was COOL…

All teams will have issues…. During the season…. It is best to address them early … before the issues become PROBLEMS…

After breakfast we started our morning practice sessions at 9:00am and continued until about 11:45am…  We were working on individual ball handling skills.

 We went directly to lunch as some of the girls did not eat breakfast because they were still sleepy from the late night meetings.

After lunch some of the girls went back to the rooms to sleep, some of them took their clothes to the laundry (here on the compound and FREE) while others simply slept by the pool..

 Our afternoon practice started at 2:30pm … We continued to plug in our individual skills into the team systems.  Running selected plays of our offense…

The energy level and enthusiasm was not very high … we had a discussion about brining GAME QUALITY ENERGY AND EFFORT to practices… 

We ended practice at about 5pm .. just in time for … (you guessed it) SNACK TIME 

A new team arrived to the training center today .. it is a team from Sao Paulo Brazil … they are a Club team but also the play in the professional division… They played the German team starting at 6pm AND the U18 Brazilian Junior team played the U20 Brazilian Junior team…. Needless to say …. There was lots of good volleyball to watch….

We watched these teams for about 30 minutes and then headed off to our practice court.

We worked on team play / scrimmage the entire time…We divided the squad into two equal groups and played a game but not rotating positions… The offense stayed in Rotation 6 the entire time (the hitters and setter could get use to running play sets off of that one rotation… The score of the first set was 25 -23. 

We then changed the hitters (to work with the other setter on the other court….) and again played the same game…. The score was 26-24 …  I guess the division of players was about as close as we could get…

 What I liked most about the scrimmage was the ENERGY LEVEL and the COMPETITIVE SPIRT was much higher than it was earlier in the day …

 I am sure there are no TEAM MEETINGS scheduled for tonight … Everyone will sleep well…

Bye from Brazil …

John Littleman
Head Coach
Highline CC Women's Volleyball Team

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