Building Blocks

Base Defense

Defense is one of the most important skills a team can have. A good defense can wear down a strong offensive team. Beat a power team with control.

Like most skills in volleyball, positioning is 90% of the battle--if you are not in the right position you will not be able to effectively play defense. More importantly, if you are out of position on defense you will mess up your teammates. It's better to only have 5 people on the court, then having a sixth player that is creating "negative defense" by interfering with the ablility of your teammates to make a play on a ball.

Almost every men's team uses what is called "Deep 6 Perimeter Defense" (as opposed to a rotated defense for example). Deep 6 means the middle back player, who is player number 6 on the court by service order stays way deep. Perimeter defense means the defense starts on the perimeter of the court and knows that everything inside of them is "in" and anything outside of them is "out."

Here is what your base defensive positions should look like for Deep 6 Defense. From here on out, I will simply call it THE defensive positions with the understanding that you know I'm talking about Deep 6 Defense. If I talk about a rotated defense in an advanced topic, I will specifically name it.

Here is the position your team should be in before the ball is set by your opponent:

Notice that 6 is standing on the backline or out-of-bounds. This is very important for two reasons. First, Six needs to be able to pick up dinks to the back corners. It is almost impossible to pick up those dinks if he steps into the court because he will have to run backwards and try to play the ball forward. It is much easier to run forward and facing the net while covering a corner dink or to run and dive sideways to pick it up. Secondly, in the absence of a hole in the block Six needs to pick up the "high hands" hits off the blockers hands (high hands: hitter tools off the top of the blockers hands and out the back of the court).

Figure 2: Base Defense: Responsibilities, illustrates the responsibilites of the back row defenders. I will illustrate this better in specific hitting cases.

Posted by darkarmani at January 19, 2007 01:34 AM