Julien Prosser bump sets in the 2010 NSW Open on Manly Beach - photo courtessy of Justin Kern - JFK Audio Visual

This season I’ve had very few opportunities to train on the sand, so I have concentrated more on my fitness than my skills. The only skill that has noticeably suffered has been my hand setting, so I have slowly started using my hands less and less.

Last weekend I had my first serious tournament in about three years. I threw up one horrible set in our first match, (that the ref failed to call), and told my partner: “Sorry mate, I’m going to trade my surf board in for a body board, and start bump setting.”

I didn’t use my hands to set a ball for the rest of the tournament, and I’m pretty sure I only made about 3 or 4 bad sets in the next 4 games. (We won the tourney, although my surf board is still in the garage).

So how do you decide? What should you take into account?

In favour of hand setting:

Hand setting is more accurate. No question. If your partner has a small hitting window then it’s harder to get it there with a bump set.

Hand setting looks better and give you more street cred. with your beach volleyball mates.

In favour of bump setting:

A bump set will never get called a double. Personally, I can count on at least one bad set per game, so bump setting puts me up 1 – 0 before a ball is even served.

The Dutch team of Nummerdor/Schuil are a good example of a team that bump sets. They seem to do pretty well.

And my final comment in favour of bump setting is that by removing the possibility of being called for a double, you remove a distraction from your mind. You will never think to yourself as you are about to set your partner on match point, “I hope I don’t double”. And I’ve seen some of the best get caught throwing a set on match point.

As Forrest gump says, “One less thing to worry about.”

What do you think? Are you a hand setter or a bump setter?

The high deep jump serve

This jump serve is one idea that might be useful to some of you out there.

Obviously serving an ace against the wind is easier than without a wind. You can hit harder, and your top spin will be much more effective. It also creates other opportunities, one of which is the high deep jump serve.

The idea with this serve is to go over the receivers head, and drop the ball on or close to the baseline. If you hit it right, this jump serve should be almost impossible for the passer to touch without moving right to the back of the court, because the ball will be dropping almost vertically.

This serve gets easier as the wind gets stronger, but in a strong wind, you really need to hit it hard.

Here’s how to do it.

Put the ball toss closer to yourself than with a normal jump serve, so that you can over run the ball a little bit. You want to hit the ball slightly behind your head, and with a bent arm. I.e. you contact the ball earlier in you arm swing, while your hand is still moving up. (Not at the top of your reach as you normally would)

This allows two things to happen. Firstly, the trajectory of the jump serve will be higher. You will need to clear the net by about 2 or 3 metres for this serve to work. (depending on the strength of the wind). Secondly, it will allow you give the ball a lot more spin than usual because you can start the contact from further under the ball, and bring your hand over as you hit it.

And that’s a bout it. Just practice really ripping that jump serve with as much spin as possible.

A word of warning! This jump serve can put a lot of pressure on your back. Because you are hyper extending more than usual to contact the ball behind your head, you really need to be careful that your abdominal muscles are in good shape, and you are nice and balanced. Always start with a good posture, and keep your abs tight throughout the serve. Don’t go and hit 50 of these in the first training. Ease into it and make sure your body is ready for the new movement.

Martin ROHRER throws down three aces in a row in his second round match - A Cup Wolfsberg Austria 2009

As I mentioned in a recent post, serving an ace is usually a matter of placement, rather than power. Having said that, the ace is often set up with a couple of powerful serves followed by a slower, more accurate serve.

This diagram shows the areas on the court where you are most likely to hit an ace.

The three across the back of the court are pretty obvious, and usually require a fairly fast serve, having said that, the closer you get to the line, the less speed you will need. The middle ball in particular often causes confusion, and is more often left with a hopeful “out” call, when both passers hesitate.

How to jump serve an ace under pressure. If I want to jump serve an ace, but also need the serve to go in, aiming at the cross court side of deep middle is my preferred option. It gives me a good length of court to work with, and allows some room for mishitting the ball left or right.

The three zones across the front of the court are where I hit 70% of my best serves. Not necessarily aces, but serves that cause my opponents problems. Notice the two arrows showing the cross court short serves. These serves need to be hit low across the net, with more spin and a little bit softer than your standard jump serve.

The reasons that I really like these two serves are that when you hit them just right, they are clean aces, and even if it’s not an ace, it is usually a very hard ball to pass well. Moving the passer forward and outwards, away from his or her partner.

So, getting back to the topic at hand: “How to jump serve an ace”

Here are a few ideas to try out next time you play a training match.

1. Jump serve two or three good deep serves to the middle zone, then follow up with a short cross court serve. Try to make the cross court player pass the two middle balls, so that he gets used to stepping to the middle.
2. Jump serve two or three high deep line serves then follow up with a short line serve. It is often hard to judge depth on a ball when it is coming straight at you. The line serve is harder to read because it is a shorter distance so the reaction time is less.
3. Aim for a different area on court every time you jump serve, so that your opponent doesn’t get into a rythm. This might make them more likely to make an error
4. Just keep bombing away at the deep middle as hard as you can

You have probably noticed that good players have a habit of being in the right place at the right time. This is often attributed to experience, and a players ability to read the play, but there is nothing magic about it. Reading your opponent is a skill just like any other.

So how do you become one of these magic players?

Firstly, you need to understand how these players seemingly know what is about to happen before it happens. And the answer is a combination of reading cues from their opponents, and calculating probabilities as a scenario develops.

Let’s use a common scenario.

Your team is siding out. You hit a ball from the right hand side, cross court, and they make a dig.

The dig is not controlled well, and their blocker needs to run across the net, and make a running bump set, back over his head.

The set is somewhere near the middle of the net and it is a little low and tight.

If the guy who made the dig (and is therefore the guy who will be hitting back at you) is right handed, then this creates a very predictable scenario, and one that is relatively easy to defend against.

The attacker is approaching a tight set, a little bit late, and he is approaching from right to left. His approach and position eliminates almost any option for a power attack to his right. The diagram below shows two areas of the court, A and B. Our attacker is far more likely to play the ball into area “A” than area “B”.

The smart blocker moves in front of the attacker, to take away the power spike directly in line with the attackers approach. The smart defender knows that the attacker has two comfortable options, deep corner, or short angle and is ready to move to either of these areas. (See the arrows in the first diagram below).

As the attacker gets closer, the smart defender is measuring the probability of the attacker cutting back to area “B”. This comes down to the attackers position in relation to the ball. If his body is still to the side of the ball, then he will find it very difficult to turn the ball back to area “B” and the smart defender can move early to area “A”. If the attacker is fast, and adjusts his approach so that he is behind the ball, and in good position, then the defender needs to be ready to cover a larger area. (See the second and third diagrams above.)

The moment of contact.

Up until now, we have been reading the play based on the attackers approach and the position of the ball. The smart defender should now be in the best possible position to deal with whatever the attacker does when he actually contacts the ball.

The diagram below shows the attacker a fraction of a second before he contacts the ball. The set is tight, he is reaching forward, and has no chance of cutting the ball back. He is clearly about to poke the ball either deep corner, or short angle. This is the moment when the smart defender moves early enuogh to make the dig look easy.

Focus should be 100% on the attackers hand at this point. The smart defender is looking for cues to further reduce the area of court that he needs to cover.

Here are a few common hand positions that you might see. (Please excuse my crappy drawing skills

This pokie looks like it will go straight. Probably deep corner.

Here the wrist has turned a bit, so it is probably an angle pokie.

The hand is closed, which suggests it will likely be a cut shot or straight roll shot

This hand is wide open. Maybe he’s going to try to play a Sinjin Smith cut shot back into the 10% area of the court.

Just like any other skill, the ability to read your opponent will become second nature if you actively practice it.

Golden Rule: In almost every situation, it is better to be stationary at the moment the attacker contacts the ball. Be ready in your mind to make a particular move, and perhaps you have taken a few steps left or right, just before contact, but at the exact moment of contact, your wieght should be centered, and you should be able to react to any unexpected events. Block touches, mis-hits, or net tapes to name a few.

Got questions?

Want us to write a drill for your team? Drop us a comment and tell us what you want to learn.

There were some great games. Having been away from the scene for a while it was good to see some of the guys after a summer of training. Guys like Shane Kennedy, Willem Veenhuyzen and Jason Pepene were playing better volleyball than I have ever seen them play.

So the AA tourney had 13 teams, with a pretty good standard throughout. There were a few movements in seedings after the pool play with some minor upsets. Due to a pretty low sedding of 7th, (which I spend half an hour double checking ofter the tourney to find that it was perfectly accurate.) we came up against Mike and Frank in the Quarters. This could have been a very tough match but as it turned out, we caught them on a low and got through quite easily. Other quarters were:

Raf/Jason vs Shane/Phil – Shane and Phil came out of this 21 – 14 and although Raf and Jason were disapointed, it sounds like they were outplayed.

Andy/Will vs Aaron/Adam – This was a close game, which went to three sets. I didn’t see a lot of it but it was a very even match up. Andy and Will came out on top.

Jules/Paul vs Nigel/Bomber – This was an exciting game. Classic example of a team with no chance of winning goping balls out and getting some results. Nige and Bomber got to 17 points with some great serving and awesome back court from Bomber. (Never under estimate Bomber . But at the end of the day, Jules and Paul were on another level, and won reasonably easily.

This left semi finals:

Jules/Paul vs Shane/Phil – ’nuff said

Tristo/Milton vs Andy/Will – This started off as a pretty easy game… we were up 15 – 20 in the first set, lost 23 – 25… Second set we won quite easily, which took us to the third set, which was a “ding dong battle” as Tama would say. We swapped the lead throughout the entire set before finally winning 18 – 16 (or something like that).

And that brought us to the final against Julien and Paul.

And that is when the lesson in beach volleyball began…. to be continued.

The results are on the NBVA website.

Here is a great sequence of pics from local photographer: Justin Kern
Mike Mattern making a great dig on the sharp angle.