Setters are key members of a team’s offense. They are skilled in the overhand set, speed, accuracy, and court awareness.
Do you want to Become A Better Setter?
These 3 types of Volleyball drills and workouts can help improve your setting:
Wall Workouts
Setters specific workouts build up the right muscles and stamina that players need to be the offensive leaders of their teams. For these workouts, all you need is a ball and an empty wall space to get in some reps. This is a great warm-up to complete before practices or games:
- 100 Single Arm Isolations - Mini sets against the wall with only the left and then only the right hand. The arm should be still with only the wrist and hand moving.
- 100 Mini Sets - Short quick sets at the wall ensuring hand placement, movement, and weight is shifted forward
- 25 Set Squats - Continuing with the mini sets, squat as lows as you can keeping your setting rhythm down the wall, and then work your way back up completing a squat and repeat
- 15 Rainbow Sets - Continuing with the mini sets create an arch be leaning to set to the left as far and possible and the back to the right as far as possible to complete a rainbow and repeat
- 50 Speed Change Sets - Step back from the wall now and give yourself 10-15 ft. of space. Toss to yourself and set a high, medium speed set, and as it returns to your hands, sets a low, quick set to warm up the change in wrist speed. Continue by tossing to self and repeating
Star Footwork
Setter footwork is just as important as their hands with the ball. Targeted practice and repetitions can make this footwork apart of the player’s muscle memory so that it happens second nature. To set up Star Footwork, you will need a couple of cones or markers.
- Make your “setting spot” that you want setters to release to from their base with every ball over the net.
- Using your other markers, make spots on the court away from the setters spot in a half star between 4-6 feet away (directly in front, left front, left, left-back, directly back, etc.)
- Setters will start release to the setting spot from right back and then use their left right left footwork to get to each cone, plant, push forward with their right foot and use their hands to push forward in a setting motion and then returning to the original spot.
Rock, Paper, Scissors, Set
Court awareness and sharp peripheral vision are both important setter skills that can be trained with this drill. You will need two people to run the drill with your setters. Have the setters start in right back and transition to the net.
- One person will toss a ball to set while the others will hand signal rock, paper, or scissors. Start by having the setters call out what signals they see.
- As they get the hang of transitioning and seeing the calls, have them start trying to “win” the battle by calling out the item that beats the call (rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper, paper beats rock).
This could be continued by assigning different sets to the different calls.
Setting doesn’t stop with these skill sets. Learn what drills can help you Improve Your Defense (Link article) and Improve your Vertical.
