Behind the Laptop Week 8
If you’re interested in watching any of our matches, all of them are on ESPN+
Sunday 10/20
We flew back from Arizona yesterday and today is an off day, which allows me to work from home. As always, the first few days of the week are for opponent scouting, but the new Big 12 schedule compresses that schedule a bit because we play again on Wednesday instead of Friday, as we were accustomed to when we played in the Pac 12. When we played Friday-Sunday and traveled home on Sunday night, we would have four days in between each week’s matches (Monday-Thursday). When we play Wednesday-Friday and travel on Saturday, we lose a day (Sunday-Tuesday). If you play at home then you get Saturday back so traveling costs the traveling team a day of practice and preparation. Either way, the work needs to get done so I spent time on our flight home yesterday and a lot of time today scouting.
One aspect of scouting that I’m partially responsible for that I haven’t described much yet is scouting opposing setters. There are various aspects of scouting setters but my area of responsibility is creating videos of each setter for the players on our team to watch. There are plenty of ways to show a setter’s tendencies and distribution but video shows things that are harder to visualize in other ways. I want to show the players a couple of things with the videos I make, the setter’s range and body positions.
I select clips of the setter making different sets as they move in various directions. I group the clips together by set area first, for example all the middle sets will go together and I will organize those sets further into different set types, like Gaps, Pushes, Slides, etcetera. Within those set types, I will select sets that show the setter moving in different directions but setting the same set type so the players watching get a sense of how far the setter is able to go in any direction and still set a particular set type. Additionally, I select multiple clips of each set type and direction. Showing a setter doing the same thing while moving in the same direction multiple times allows players watching to see how the setter tends to shape their body and where they tend to contact the ball when they make certain sets. To wrap up, I finish each video with clips of the setter attacking different areas of the court.
Each video I make ends up being 5-6 minutes long so the players can watch them fairly quickly but can get a lot of information about the setter in that time. The videos I create are only part of the overall scouting work our staff does but the videos provide an additional way for players to learn valuable information about our opponents.