Drills in Depth - 3 Each Way with Jon Newman-Gonchar
A High-Tempo Game from a High-Tempo Coach
Jon Newman-Gonchar is a great example of the overnight success years in the making. He has led New Mexico to historically good results as a team as a first-time head coach but he got to that point by relentlessly learning and growing as an assistant coach. While he may have acquired some traits and ideas from the coaches he worked with, he spent years crafting who he wanted to be and what mattered most to him as a coach. Now, as a head coach, Jon is making sure that how his practices flow is an embodiment of what he believes about sports and about people. 3 Each Way shows how much attention he gives to the things that matter most to him and how he ensures that practices don’t get bogged down in what he feels is less important. Throughout our discussion, he impressed on me how important it is to him that each player on his team feels that they (and their individual goals) matter.
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The Drill
Who: Jon uses this game with his NCAA Division I women’s team but he also adapts it for play by all ages (12s to 18s) at his Lobo Volleyball Summer Camps. As you will see, the structure of the game (multiple rallies in a single round) allows for a great deal of flexibility in how play begins and continues. This flexibility gives coaches a great deal of freedom to customize the game for different skill/age groups. For example, teams with very little experience or skill may have multiple rallies begin with a tossed ball from a coach rather than a free ball or a serve. When playing with his college team, Jon has two assistant coaches who, along with him, facilitate play by entering balls when needed.
What: A 6v6 game in which rallies are played to their natural conclusion but in which each rally may begin in different ways and with occasional constraints on how play proceeds. Jon regularly uses bonus points and penalty points in addition to the points earned for winning rallies.
When: This game is a staple in Jon’s practices because of how adaptable it is to different needs and circumstances. He told me that it is one of maybe five games his teams regularly play and that 3 Each Way has become “a bit of a default way to train stuff.” He will use it at any time in the season. It usually appears in the middle of practice, after other skill training and before a more-traditional 6v6 game that ends practice. Practices sometimes finish with 3 Each Way but that is less common.
How: As you may have guessed from the name, one round of play consists of three consecutive rallies with play initiated on the same side followed by three consecutive rallies with play initiated on the other side. Play can start almost any way the coach would like. Jon often plays this with the first and third balls being served and the second ball being initiated in a different way, like a coach hitting a ball at a defender to simulate a particular transition situation. One round of play consists of “3 each way” and a team wins the round by winning a majority of the rallies in the round. (If teams are tied, a “one ball serve-off” is played. Technically, it’s two balls, since each team serves one ball at the other team. Two rallies are played and if it’s still tied, repeat.) Jon will play a predetermined number of rounds in a game, depending on what he wants to work on. (Occasionally, they will play for a set amount of time but we’re not going to focus on that version here.) He might play six rounds, one in each rotation, or he might determine the number of rounds based on how many different personnel combinations he wants to see, like having each middle play a total of four rounds (if he has three middles, that would require six rounds if the rotate regularly through two front row positions, one on each side of the net). Personnel and team rotations remain the same for all six balls of a single round. Depending on how the rounds are structured, different player and team changes happen between each round. Often, players rotate within their position group but that movement is often pre-determined to ensure certain combinations of players are playing together at certain times.
Each rally win gains a team a “small point” and each round win gains a team a “big point”. The winner is the team with more “big points”. Jon will often start the game with a scoreboard of 22-22 “big points” and teams are competing to get to 25 first. Teams only need to win by one big point. Losers are given a consequence by the winning team. Jon likes to have the consequences be volleyball-related moves that can be completed quickly. “The players lost because they weren’t as good at volleyball so they should do something that could help them get better at volleyball.”
The Depth
Who: Jon sees himself as high-energy and he prioritizes efficient use of training time. He commented to me that he is more picky about how his teams spend their training time than how they actually play the game. In his weekly staff meetings, he is much more likely to quickly consent to a change in a volleyball technique than he is to consent to changing the amount of time that is spent training that small change. He prioritizes “as many game-like contacts as possible” so 3 Each Way is, to him, a great tool to wrap energy and efficiency into one game. In his first year at New Mexico, he found that he kept challenging the players on their effort. This led him to ask questions about effort: “I asked myself what does effort look like, sound like, feel like?” This led to him codify the “Four E’s” (Energy, Enthusiasm, Excitement, and the pursuit of Excellence) as embodiments of the team’s effort. 3 Each Way gives Jon a medium for teams to constantly work on maximizing those Four E’s, even as they work on other skills and tactics. You can see this in how he uses bonus and penalty points within the game (more about these below). In keeping with his push for efficiency in training, Jon keeps some solid restrictions on the feedback that he and assistant coaches give during 3 Each Way. Each coach has positional and/or skill focus areas so players aren’t bombarded by feedback about everything from every direction. The players can expect to hear about certain aspects of their play from only certain coaches. Further, the weekly staff meetings mentioned above set the team’s (and therefore, the coaches’) focus for the upcoming week so coaches are going to prioritize feedback in those areas on any given day. Jon and the staff also have weekly individual meetings with players in which the players decide on a single technical/tactical area of focus as well as a single mental area. These are recorded on the “Lobo Board” (a dry erase board) in the gym as a reminder not just to the players but to the coaches about what they’re working on. These “anchors”, as Jon refers to them, serve as focal points for coaches’ feedback within practices. Because Jon is wary of a coach’s tendency to over-coach, he also imposes a “10 second rule” on himself and assistant coaches, coaches must limit their feedback during games to 10 seconds or less. More than that, he feels, is too likely to tie a player up. As a result, his guiding thoughts on giving feedback are “what does this player need to move forward?” and “don’t make it bigger than it needs to be.” The first thought helps him make sure that his feedback keeps a player’s thoughts on the next play as much as possible and the second thought reminds him that, more than likely, the thing that he wants to give feedback on isn’t as important as he thinks it is in that moment.
What: Since Jon wants to maximize the game-like contacts that the players are making in a given practice, Jon likes the tempo of 3 Each Way to be very high. When one rally ends, there will only be a handful of seconds before the next ball is entered. Often, there will be a three-second countdown between the end of one rally and the beginning of the next. There can be “little debriefs” in between rounds of play, but even those are meant to be rapid so that play can continue. Besides demanding high energy (one of the team’s Four E’s), this tempo serves the purpose of making an actual match feel slow by comparison. By spending lots of time in these high-cadence settings, Jon and the team know that they can hold that high energy for at least two hours and they challenge other teams to match them. The tempo of 3 Each Way doesn’t have to be high but playing it that way supports how Jon and his teams want to play volleyball.
When: Since Jon’s teams play this game a lot, the variations keep the game engaging for players and coaches. During his competitive season, he definitely wants there to be a lot or rallies initiated with a serve but he’ll also vary some constraints. In addition to playing the game to work on his team’s skills and abilities, he’ll add constraints that force both sides to defend against attacks and patterns that upcoming opponents are likely to use. He gave me an example of an opponent that would frequently run slide-bic when their setter was in the front row so he made one of the rallies in 3 Each Way begin with a free ball but with the constraint that the receiving team had to run that combination on the first play. Jon told me that, during the competitive season, he prefers to use 3 Each Way 3-4 days per week to work on his team’s skills and, at most, have one day of the game be set up more as a scouting tool. (This is similar in concept to how Rob Graham uses XONTRO.)
How: One of the biggest reasons Jon prefers to limit 3 Each Way’s use as a scouting tool is that he wants to use the game to focus on his team rather than on an opponent. Something that he brought up several times in our conversation is that he wants the game to provide equitable opportunities for all players. Jon values giving players “lots of opportunities to learn, grow, and work through stuff.” To do that, they all need lots of time on the court in challenging situations, working on things that they and the coaches have agreed on. (Remember their weekly meetings and the Lobo Board?) The goal of equitable opportunities means that Jon will very rarely have an “A-side vs. B-side” set up in 3 Each Way. In fact, the teams and the personnel changes are often dictated by “the Grid”, a player matrix, also written on a dry erase board, that indicates which players will play together and when. Jon and his staff pay attention to things like the number of opportunities hitters have to hit off of each setter on the team. If they see imbalances surfacing, they will be sure to adjust the Grid to even things out. They are also on the lookout for poor combinations of players that lead to less consistent or useful play. For example, he said that having 3-4 of the best players on the same side of the net together “wasn’t helping those players”, much less the other players on the team. Lastly, while it may be obvious that how balls are entered, different constraints, and bonus points can be used to reinforce different technical and tactical goals, it is not as obvious that these things can also be used to reinforce program values. Jon talked about using bonus points to reward players for doing things that showed a “dragon” mentality. He talks to his team about being like dragons, swooping down aggressively and powerfully, rather than being like butterflies, floating down softly and delicately. To that end, players may be rewarded for taking “dragon” swings rather than soft tips. Another way they talk about this mentality is using the acronym B.R.O. (Big Rips Only). If 3 Each Way rallies begin with an in system ball, he expects the attackers to think B.R.O. and can either reward big swings in good situations with bonus points or penalize teams that back away from those opportunities. Jon also talked about developing “closers” in this game, reminding players, “what do we want to be at the end?” Do attackers want to be set at the end of close games? Which players want to serve when the match is on the line? 3 Each Way isn’t just a rapid-fire game to keep players moving, it is also a game that give athletes lots of opportunities to shape themselves into more complete players (and into dragons).
Have questions for Jon? You can ask me here or you can email Jon directly.