Volleyball pre-match warm-up: the plan from arrival

The warm-up and the on-court warm-up are not the same thing, and that is exactly where it goes wrong. The warm-up gets bodies ready; the on-court warm-up tunes your team to this hall and this opponent. Everywhere you look there is a schedule for match day, and nowhere a plan for those last ten minutes at the net. This is that plan, minute by minute, plus what you can read off the other side before the first ball drops.

Two separate things you tend to lump together

The warm-up is about your players: temperature up, muscle groups switched on, joints through their full range, finishing at close to match intensity. That build-up belongs in four phases and is not fundamentally different for a match than for a practice — only longer at the back end. How to build it is set out in full in building a good warm-up; you do not need to read that again here.

The on-court warm-up is something else. That is the official period at the net, with the ball, usually with the opponent on the other side and with the referee present. The aim is not to get warm — that should already have happened — but to calibrate. In five to ten minutes your players tune themselves to the tension of this net, the height of this ceiling, the grip of this floor, the light above this end line and the ball this club uses. Treat it as "getting warm with a ball" and you throw that calibration away and start the first rally on feel.

The practical distinction: skip the warm-up and you are asking a lot of cold shoulders. Skip the on-court warm-up and it costs you points at the start of the first set.

The schedule from the moment you arrive

Count back from the first serve, not forward from the door. How early you have to be there and whether the home team gets the hall sooner differs by federation and by competition — that is in the regulations for your division.

• 60 minutes before — inside. Home team: net to height, posts fixed, antennas on, scorer and referee received. Visitors: changing room and bags.
• 45 minutes — changed and all present. From here on every player counts. Anyone not there by then is not in your starting six either.
• 40 minutes — five minutes in the changing room. Starting six, the first server, two or three agreements. Nobody remembers more than that.
• 35 minutes — warm-up away from the net. In the free zone, in the corridor or on the other half of the court: the Raise, Activate and Mobilise phases from the RAMP build-up. Duration: twelve to fifteen minutes.
• 20 minutes — the toss and the hall check. Captains to the referee, and in those same two minutes you walk the court.
• 15 minutes — hitting in pairs, away from the net. Building from knee height to full, three to four minutes.
• 10 minutes — the official on-court warm-up at the net. From here your plan is fixed, see below.
• 2 minutes — serving. The last two minutes of that same period: the last thing you do, because it is the first thing that happens.
• 0 — line-up sheet handed in, whistle.

Add it up and there are a few gaps of a couple of minutes in there: you need those for fetching balls, getting jackets off and a referee who is not ready yet. What often goes wrong sits at the front — the warm-up has to start earlier than coaches think. After the last mobility exercise there is still the toss, the pair hitting and ten minutes of official on-court time to come: twenty minutes together. Make sure your players are not standing around waiting in that stretch, because that is exactly the moment the temperature you built up drains away.

Toss and hall check: the two minutes where you can win something

Under the international rules the toss takes place before the on-court warm-up, in the presence of both captains. The winner chooses one of two things: the serve (to serve or to receive) or the side of the court. Make sure your captain actually knows what you are choosing before he walks over there — which choice pays off when is in serve or receive after the toss. A captain who has to work it out on the spot almost always takes the side.

While he is standing there, you walk the court once. Four things, all within two minutes:

1. The net. The height is measured in the middle and the rules allow the ends at the sidelines to hang up to two centimetres higher; which height applies to your category differs by age and by federation — see net height in volleyball. Feel the tension as well: a slack net changes how the ball behaves off your block.
2. The antennas. Are they straight, are they fixed, are they on the sideline? A crooked antenna is worth an argument for the whole match.
3. The floor. Walk the attack zone looking for wet or slippery patches and report them to the referee.
4. What hangs above and behind you. Low beams, basketball backboards, a bright light box directly above the end line. Tell your team what you see in one sentence: "the ceiling is low above position four, no high balls to that side."

Splitting the on-court time: 4-4-2

How much time you get is not the same everywhere. The international rules give an official warm-up period of six minutes together at the net if both teams have already had a court available, and ten minutes if they have not; if one of the captains asks to warm up separately, it becomes three and five minutes per team. Whether your competition follows those times exactly, and whether there is separate time for serving afterwards, is in your own regulations. So plan for ten minutes and keep a shortened version ready.

This is the plan for ten minutes: four minutes on the left, four minutes middle and right, two minutes serving. It is not an order that emerges by itself — somebody has to announce it out loud.

• Minute 0-4 — left (position 4). Start with half a minute without a swing: the setter puts up five or six balls and the hitters run their approach and jump without hitting. That way everybody feels this net and this floor before the first ball goes hard. Then hit: in a decent rhythm a ball goes every eight to ten seconds, so count on a good twenty balls — five to six per outside hitter if you have four of them. First half line, second half cross, every hitter both. One high ball from the back row belongs here too, because you will get one in the match anyway.
• Minute 4-8 — middle, then right. Middles first and most: six balls per player, because the first tempo is the most sensitive to a net that is a couple of centimetres off. Then four balls per opposite, and if he also hits from the back row, one ball from position 1 goes with it. With three middles and two opposites that comes to twenty-eight balls; in four minutes that fits exactly.
• Minute 8-10 — serving. Everyone who is serving today, at least four balls, from the spot behind the end line where he will stand in the match. Two easy in, two full.

Two roles make the difference between this plan and a chaotic knockabout. The tosser: one player who is not in the starting six, or the libero, feeds every ball to the setter in a fixed rhythm. The ball chaser: a second non-starter keeps the cart or the basket full. Without those two roles the rhythm sags, the queue stands waiting and your setter is picking up his own balls.

You serve last on purpose. The first action of the match is a serve or a reception, and the feel of whatever you did last is still there. Get your serving done in minute two and then spike for eight minutes, and you start with a cold serve — and that first service turn is precisely one you can do something with, see targeted serving.

What the setter works out in those ten minutes

For most players the on-court warm-up is a repetition. For the setter it is a measurement, and he is the only one who really has to take information out of it. Four things, and he can ask all four out loud:

• Carry. How far does the ball run on at this net and in this hall? A cold, dry hall and a hard ball give a different set from a damp hall in November.
• The height his hitter wants today. Ask it literally: "higher or flatter?" Two balls later he knows. That is a minute's work and saves a few balls in set one that would otherwise end up in the block.
• Is the middle on tempo? A middle who starts his approach too late shows up within the first four balls. Know that beforehand and you set him a little higher in set one, instead of discovering mid-match that the first tempo is not running today.
• The approach distance. On a grippy floor hitters brake earlier and end up closer to the net. That changes where the set has to be.

What you are doing in the meantime

The biggest waste on match day is the coach who spends ten minutes tossing balls. A player can do that. In those same ten minutes you have three jobs nobody else can do.

One: finalise your line-up. You set it up at home already — that is the core of preparing your line-up. In the hall you only check who is actually there and whether anyone walked in limping. Get your live screen ready with that line-up in it, so you do not have to type anything at the first serve; how that works is in tracking a match live. Fill in the line-up sheet well before the whistle, not in the last twenty seconds.

Two: watching the other side. More on that below; these are the only ten minutes in which you get to see the opponent play for free.

Three: two players aside for a moment. Whoever is not starting today hears it now and not at the first substitution; the player you are counting on hears in one sentence what you want from him. That is all the conversations it takes.

Reading what the opponent shows you

On the other side stands a team showing you its preferences with no block, no pressure and in a fixed order. That is free scouting, and for many teams the only scouting they get. If you have seen this opponent play beforehand, these ten minutes are a check on what you already knew; how to set that watching up is in scouting the opposition. Watch four things and write down no more than three shirt numbers — you will not remember more anyway.

• Who serves what. In the serving phase you see it immediately: who backs up for an approach and jumps, and who stands still with a short, flat swing. A jump serve and a float ask for a different position in your reception, and a team with one real jump server has one rotation where it gets awkward.
• Which direction their best hitter goes. Count eight balls off their strongest outside hitter. If seven go cross, that is probably also the ball he picks at 23-23. Set your defence to it, with the nuance from hitting line or cross.
• How their setter sets. High balls hanging well out towards the sideline mean a hitter who waits: your block has time to get two up. Flat, quick balls mean your block has to read instead of jumping along.
• What the block does. Do they do any blocking footwork at the net at all, and how high do their middles reach? A middle who barely gets above the tape during the on-court warm-up is not suddenly going to block higher in the match.

Be just as sharp about what you cannot see here. Hitting lines happen with no block, off a tossed ball: you read direction and preference, not power and not reliability under match pressure. The hitter who kills everything in the warm-up can be a very different player off a mediocre pass. So note preferences, not verdicts, and record them against this opponent afterwards instead of in your head — see remembering opponents.

Share what you found in the last thirty seconds, in three sentences at most. For example: "number 6 jump serves, we take that one with three; number 11 hits almost everything cross; their middle only comes on first tempo." More than three points just before the whistle is noise.

When the schedule falls apart

Half an hour stuck in traffic. You get out of the car with ten minutes to go. The order of cutting is then: Mobilise first, then Raise, never the progressive hitting. A workable six-minute version: two minutes of solid movement and shoulder circles while the rest get changed, three minutes of hitting (two left, one middle), one minute of serving. Anyone who has not hit at all does not start — put him on the bench for set one and bring him in for set two. That is not a punishment, it is shoulder policy.

Travelling smart. Agree that the first three minutes in the hall are for moving, before getting changed. A team that sits straight down in the changing room after two hours in the car is still stiff at the first serve.

The match before yours overruns. Then your team is warm and has to wait. Rule of thumb: if your team stands still for more than ten minutes, do Raise again. Two minutes of movement in the corridor solves that — above all, stop your players sitting down in a cold stand.

No space to warm up, or two matches in a day. If there is only one court, do Raise, Activate and Mobilise in the corridor or behind the end line; that works without a ball, and you take the hitting entirely out of the official on-court time. For a second match on the same day you do not start from zero, but you never skip the progressive hitting and the serving.

Make it a routine the team runs itself

Everything above only works if it is the same every week. Write the schedule out once on a card: the times, who tosses, who chases balls, who watches the clock. Pin it up in the changing room or put it in your team app as a standing agreement. After three matches you will not have to announce anything — and on the day you walk in late yourself, there is a team already warmed up.

With youth teams, hand the roles out explicitly and rotate them: tosser, ball chaser, timekeeper. Without those roles the on-court warm-up with twelve-year-olds disintegrates into twelve individual knockabouts. And for players with match nerves a fixed, predictable routine helps: someone who knows what he is doing for the next twenty minutes has twenty minutes less time to worry.

Frequently asked questions