Since it's been a while that I've been practicing and playing a bit, I thought it would be neat to finally look into setting!
A setter is the team's brain for the offence. They are in charge of setting to the spikers/attackers while noting where the opposing team's blockers are, who's the weakest blocker and make quick decisions regarding the placement of blockers and who to set it to (reference). At first, I was intrigued by this because I thought that I could make quick decisions on the fly, but looking at professional setters do it is so much more impressive to me. Here is one of the videos I watched:
This video was so cool to watch in a POV of the setter. It also made me realize a few important things, people need to know how to pass it to you so that you can set the ball to the attacker at any point, no matter where you are on the court which requires communication on the teams part to be able to identify where you are. The second thing I noticed was that, you (as the setter) need to be able to adapt to any circumstances and be able to set from wherever you are on the court (this happens in the first 30 seconds of the video). Usually the setter is located near the net, however, he was standing quite far back on the court, but because of his clear experience playing the game, he was able to set it up for his attackers from that far away.
After ogling at many videos of setting, I finally decided I would try it. I practiced setting drills against the wall every week until now, I'm sure I could do it right?
WRONG - This was the hardest skill I needed to learn. I decided to use my brother as an example because he was the only person I had at the time, but this guy is 6"8. It was really hard to have the momentum to get the ball up to him where his hand would reach it. Not only that, but it was also hard for me to get the ball to where it was supposed to go (to his hand).
So we tried and tried again, finally, I decided to break the movements down a little bit. Instead of trying to aim it for my brother's hand, I just tried to aim it to the height of his hand until I could get pretty consistent with that. After I was able to consistently get it to the height of his hand, we added his hand back for reference. So I started to aim for his hand. Now that I had the height down, this wasn't that hard to actually get it to his hand. However, I realized soon after that as a setter I wasn't going to be setting it directly to their hands (which is called a 'quick' if I'm not mistaken). Not everyone will be able to hit it, most likely, only a very select few will be able to hit this set. So, back to the drawing board. I had to learn to arc the ball to my brother and help make it easy for him to hit. The control needed for this is actually really crazy and out of the 50ish shots of me trying it, I only managed to get 1 to my brother successfully.
Now, having this in mind, I need to practice this more, I know that I'm not just going to pick it up the first time I do it, so I need to work at it and I am very excited too! I'm very excited to continue practicing this setting as it is fun and challenging and I feel like if I could do it more often, I would have a blast.
A few resources I used this week:
Koko Volley's - 'How To Be A Volleyball Setter'
Olympian Rachael Adams 'Tips on Becoming a Better Setter '
Thank you for joining me! One more time! もう 一回!