Watching Film

Many teams watch film of their opponents. This is typically used in high school volleyball more than in club volleyball because in school volleyball you know who your opponent is way before you play them and have access to their game film. 

In club, it is much different. In club, you do not know who you are going to play in advance. For tournaments, you receive a tournament schedule, saying which teams are in your starting pools, but you still don't know which teams you would play later in the tournament. You receive this schedule about a week before the tournament, since they have to deal with teams dropping out of the tournament or adding on. And then you still don't know anything about these teams if it is a national tournament, like a qualifier, because they are from a different state than you. You may recognize some of the teams from previous years, but most of the teams there are ones you have never seen play before. The only exception might be in town tournaments, because you know how the local teams play, but you still don't watch any film on them. 

When we watch film for school volleyball, it is usually for important or difficult upcoming matches. Sometimes we just watch it first without talking about rotations, so we can just take notes on things we notice about the team. Other times, we will talk about rotations and certain players first so that we know what to look for when we watch it. We usually  look for team and player weaknesses, strengths, rotations, defense and offense systems, team tendencies, and anything else worth noting. We then take that and think of things that we can do or change to help us win against them. On very important matches, we watch film a couple of times before the match, so we can see them multiple times and maybe notice things we didn't before.  

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