How To Receive A Serve In Volleyball Video

Serve receiving in volleyball depends upon a proper beginning posture and correct footwork. Learn how to receive serves in this volleyball video.

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Maintain proper serve receive posture
Know forward patterns for each floor movement
Step shuffle on short balls
Shuffle back to original position

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Todd is the head coach for the University of Central Florida's women's volleyball team. Prior to that he coached as USC where they competed in the division one final four. He has also been a part of the coaching delegation for the USA women's team in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. He was an assistant at Michigan University early in his career and simply loves the sport and coaching it where ever he is.

TODD DAGENAIS: All right. Again, we got Kristine here from Clearwater, Florida, and she's going to show you how to serve receive. In serve receive, we start off the same way as what we did in defense. It all starts with the body position. Just like in our defensive body position, again, we have the left toe to right instep relationship. Our knees are out over our toes. Our shoulders are out over our knees, and our hands are rested and relaxed inside of our elbows. From this body position, we can go sideways. Let me show you again, the left toe to right instep allowing us to move forward and backwards and stay balanced. We've got our knees out over our toes, our shoulders out ahead of our knees, so we're in a forward body position. Again, our hands are inside our elbows and nice and relaxed. Now, the thing that's unique about serve receive is the movement. It's a little bit different than on defense. Everything is working with the people next to you to be able to pass the ball from an opponent's serve. One of the things that we do here at UCF is we work in diagonals. For example, we put Kristine in a good serve receive. And let's say the serve is coming over here in this direction, we want to maintain a perpendicular relationship to the serve. The serve is coming here in this direction. Kristine is facing this way. Show them what your angles are. You have short to that side; you have deep to this side. Okay? Vice-versa, if the service is coming from over here in this position, her perpendicular changes. The ball is coming from here so she is working along these lines. Kristine will have short in this position and deep in this position. So it's very important that you know all the forward patterns for each of these four movements. All right. So again, getting into a good body position, the serve is coming from over here. The first thing that you should do is you refresh your memory on what angles that you have. Kristine knows that she has short in this direction, deep in this direction. When she plays the ball short, she's going to do so with a step shuffle. Go ahead and show them a quick step shuffle going forward, good. And then come on back and again step shuffle on the short ball, good. And then come back and one more time, good. Now, from right there - again, good body position - when we go backwards to pass the ball, we're going to use a shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. We want to do this so we make sure our feet never get crossed up and we're maintaining perfect body balance all the way through. So go ahead and show them a couple of shuffles backward: shuffle, shuffle and pass. And again, good body position. Shuffle, shuffle and pass. Keep your arms inside, good. And shuffle, shuffle and pass. Get your angles. Good body position. Here we go. Good. And there you go. That's it right there. And that is exactly how you want to move when you are doing serve receive.

How to Receive a Serve in Volleyball Video

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