🏐 New practice video time (Men's slide attacks?!)

Welcome to The VolleyBrains Weekly. It’s that time again!

Here's what we've got this week

• Practice video time: Alessandro Lodi 🔥

• Libero action 👑

• BQT: John Cook’s Big Quote Time 🥇

• The Christmas Tree effect 🎄

Alessandro Lodi on VolleyBrains

Last Sunday we launched a new Practice video session on volleybrains.com

The coach we featured:

Alessandro Lodi has 26 years of coaching experience across all levels: juniors, college, pro men's, and women's club teams.

He coached in 10 countries among which Italy, Poland, Japan, USA, Finland, Switzerland and now Germany.

For our readers in the United States, coach Lodi cooperated with Carl McGown (in Switzerland) and with Jim McLaughlin (at Washington University).

In the full edit coach Lodi will go into detail on:

• Why running ('football') patterns is important

• The importance of pivot setting (for any level)

• How to efficiently organize a serve and pass warmup

• Why implementing 'trick plays' is valuable

• How to warmup your spikers in a deliberate way

• Why he never lets athletes repeat after an error

• 6 on 6 competitiveness: mixing teams, scoring system

• How to handle serve errors in different parts of the practice

• and so much more...

Alessandro shared the footage of what his typical practice looks like.

Here is a sneak peek on why slide attacks should also be used in men's volleyball.

The entire practice video is 79 minutes long and timestamped.

Click below or go to volleybrains.com.

Libero greatness.

Let’s feature an awesome libero receiving action instead of a gnarly ‘spiketown’ video…is a thought that has never ever crossed my mind. 😅

Here it is though: 

Team Italy’s and Civitanova’s libero Fabio Balaso pulled this one out of his hat.

Take your time to consider what is happening here:

• Receiving line with outside hitters Aleksandar Nikolov (left) and Ivan Zaytsev (right), both aren’t natural born receivers.

• Balaso doing the ‘smoke and mirrors’ move during the server’s toss to prioritize helping Nikolov

• ‘Cirque du Soleil’ recovery and a (maybe one handed?!) double plus pass to De Cecco

Thanks to Voleischool for making this clip available.

BQT: Big Quote Time.

Let me play it cool here for a minute.

VolleyBrains doesn’t want or need to be a ‘Social Media Sensation’ or ‘Viral Video Virtuoso’s’.

But when a post or a video goes viral, it does serve our purpose.

Which is:

John Cook’s important insight out of one of our earliest interviews caught fire on the interweb last week.

Thank you.

My own favorite part: ‘…and we enjoy those moments’

The dangers of addition 🎄

David Epstein is the author of ‘Range and’ ‘The Sports Gene’.

Range is an automatic buy for any coach or teacher btw. (find that Amazon link yourself though😇)

In one of Epstein’s latest blog posts he talks about our tendency to add rather than subtract.

“The Christmas Tree Effect” happens when new features are added to a system, similar to hanging ornaments on a tree, but ultimately, the overall system suffers. 🎄

Even though each new feature is a positive.

Worth a few minutes of your time.

You want to level up?

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Humblebrag over.

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Thanks for your support.

See you in 2 weeks.

Matias