Team practices are the most important part of a club volleyball experience. The vast majority of the club season is spent in the practice gym working alongside your teammates and coaching staff.
From the outside, tournaments seem like the most important since that is when matches are being played and mom and dad are in the stands watching. In all reality, tournaments are just an opportunity to showcase all of the hard work that is put into the practice gym by a team. By the numbers, tournaments represent about 10% of the time that a player invests into a season.
Since we rank practices as the most important aspect of the club volleyball experience that is why we require our athletes to make practice attendance a #1 priority.
At Bay to Bay, we like to start with the end goal in mind. From there we work backwards and plan out a training schedule that will help our athletes reach the end goal. For our teams we always have two goals:
These are lofty goals, but by keeping these two pillars behind every decision that we make we can ensure that each athlete has a rewarding role amongst their team and the club as a whole.
During the Fall, we structure our practice and competition schedule to be all about development. This is the time to try new things, fail, take one step backwards and two steps forward. While winning tournaments is always a plus, it is never the main focus during our regional competition schedule as we seek to develop each and every athlete on our teams for a higher level of play by the end of the season in the Summer.
Team Practices: Between August - January our teams will practice almost entirely on the weekends (Saturdays and Sundays). This helps alleviate the travel burden for our athletes coming from long distances and provides a simple schedule for our coaching staff which allows us to recruit and retain the best coaches in the area.
Skills Practices: We supplement our team practices with weeknight Skills Practices that allow us to bring all of our travel team athletes together under one roof to work on a unified curriculum.
<aside> <img src="/icons/exclamation-mark-double_gray.svg" alt="/icons/exclamation-mark-double_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Directors note: there is nothing greater than getting our eldest players in a gym together with our youngest players. That is where the magic of Bay to Bay happens.
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Local Power League: We register all of our travel teams in a regional power league to help develop the skill of competition while also minimizing the travel.
Travel Tournaments: Our teams attend 2-3 travel tournaments during the Fall. These act as “barometer events” for our teams to see where they stack up in comparison to teams around the country.
During the Spring, our high school age teams (15’s-18’s) begin their CIF sanctioned high school season. Our middle school age teams (12’s-14’s) begin their Spring training block.