Welcome to HITS Power Volleyball

HITS Power Volleyball Program

Philosophy:
If you want to play Power Volleyball it is necessary to be exposed to proper form and technique. There exists in all sports a continuity of levels from Beginner to Advanced. Beginners will progress to higher levels according to their athleticism and to the degree to which they are introduced to their sport's form or technique. While proper form is beneficial in any sport, it is deemed critical in the two sports of Volleyball and Tennis.

Background:
We hold Tryouts for the HITS Power Volleyball Training Program to categorize the players, principally by capability. Consequently, we are asked about the player’s ratings from various organizations such as USVA, YANKEE Volleyball, Outdoor Doubles, or quasi-organized player’s leagues. The response is that for HITS we don’t reference any ratings from any systems, as they are highly subjective, political, or unsuitable for our purpose. USVA ranks teams, not players. The supposition was that if you played on an A team, you were automatically an A player. While this concept may work in USVA Regions of many teams, it tends to be at best vague for the few teams in New England. As individual rankings meant nothing, for many years the USVA groups would refer to players using a 3-point system: Professionals, Beginners, and None of the Above.

Subsequently, YANKEE Volleyball was initiated, and in comparison to a Team Rating Scale, Yankee Volleyball provided the Yankee Volleyball Individual Player Rating Scale based on a 10-point System: Recreational to Professional. It then turns out that the distinction of players within a position on the Yankee Scale is very fine, in that a player might be quite strong in one category and considerably less strong in another, and his / her counterpart the opposite. Yet the same logic may be put forth to place either player in an adjacent category, higher or lower. One can consider the Yankee Individual Player Rating System to have evolved to become not the anticipated exact scale of player aptitude, but rather a comparative scale in the applied sense, fully suitable to the task at hand, to form reasonably balanced Teams of Rated Individual Players, to compete at well run Yankee Volleyball Tournaments. While the Yankee Rating System works well in its intended application, the overall task of HITS Tryouts has a significantly different purpose. Consequently, the Yankee Volleyball Individual Player Rating System becomes somewhat less applicable to our task. >Outdoor and league ratings tend to be entirely relative, depending upon who is participating that particular day, week or season. While this is adequate for local pools, it becomes inadequate when taking players from many diverse pools.

Analysis:
To group players at HITS Tryouts, we prefer to evaluate form, control, power, reading and continuity, as the various tryout activities progress. Players come from various teams or from no team. Players may have participated only in indoor 6’s or only in outdoor 2’s, or anything in between. As HITS does not enter into the realm of team skills, we can accept players from any of the diverse team activities. In general, a 6-point scale has emerged, ranging from Beginner to Professional. We prefer to not engage in Beginner programs, as there are many Town Recreational Departments and YMCA’s which offer such courses. We do not offer a program for Professionals who want to be On-the-Tour. When we tried to establish this type of program several years ago the professional or near-professional caliber of player did not attend tryouts; thus, no program at the Professional level.

In the middle are roughly four groups, which I arbitrarily label Near-Intermediate, Intermediate, Advanced and Outrageous. At HITS Tryouts, the question then becomes, given the top 6 players, what variation of a ten week Power Volleyball training session would benefit these players the most, what next 6 players can readily support that basic activity, and what 6 players on the bubble have an ability sufficiently strong as to bring to the established program a positive contribution.

Note that while 18 players would tend to overload a team training program, this size group works extremely well with an individual skills program, as everyone goes through the same set of drills.

Conclusions:
In its context, this system has worked quite well for many years. Considering the players who have been in HITS over the past several years, one observes that of the Men’s teams from the New England Region that went into the A pool at Nationals, more than 50 percent of the players were in the Men’s Advanced HITS at one time or another. I feel this speaks well for the HITS Power Volleyball program.