How To Play Defense In Volleyball Video

The volleyball defensive priority is to contact the ball in the body's midline. Maintaining perfect body position is essential to good volleyball defense. Learn how to play defense in this volleyball video.

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Contact ball in midline of body
Contact ball between the knees
Keep ball close to body
Maintain body position
Extend or bend knees appropriately

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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: Next, we have Kristine from Clearwater, and she's going to show you how to play defense. First off, in defense, the number one principle is we want to contact this ball in the midline of our body. So no matter how high or how low this ball is, we want to contact this ball in the midline of our body. When we're talking about digging a ball or passing this ball with our forearms, we want to make sure that we contact the ball directly between our knees in our midline and we want to make sure that our hips are below the ball. By having our hips below the ball, that allows us to pop the ball up in the air where somebody else can come in and set. Also, by getting our hips around and behind the ball, it allows us to redirect the ball towards our target. So here with Kristine, we're going to stay right here. We want to contact this ball between our knees. We want our hips below the ball, and we want this ball as close to our body as possible when we contact it. That gives us maximum amount of control. Now, where it gets confusing is if the ball is high or low, we want to make sure that we are maintaining that perfect body position that we had talked about before. So come on back, Kristine, we're going to show them what we're going to do. If that ball is higher, we maintain our position by extending and bending our knees. If that ball gets lower and lower and lower, we want to still maintain that body position with our back. If that ball is really low, we go all the way down to our knees, just so we can maintain that body position in our back. Now, if you look at this, she's still contacting the ball between her knees in the midline of her body and her hips remain below the ball. Go ahead and stand up. Again, let's show it to them this way. Same thing, we want to contact the ball in the midline of our body. And no matter how low the ball is, we want to maintain that back posture, that body position, so we have optimal digging position which allows for the ball to go up at high trajectory for digging. Go ahead and stand up. The last thing that we have to talk about when we're digging a ball is that we may have to dig this ball overhand. If it comes in this high, it's impossible to dig it with your forearms. You have to now dig it with your hands. Same principles apply, we want to get the ball in the midline of our body and we want to get directly behind the ball. So for example, if that ball comes in high on Kristine, you can see that she's got the ball perfectly in the midline of her body, and now she can dig it overhand. The skills are a little different from setting in that the hands are going to be very firm and very rigid versus in setting they're a lot softer. So here, Kristine is going to dig the ball with her hands with a very firm body position, extending outwards and upwards so that somebody else can come in and set the ball to a hitter.

How to Play Defense in Volleyball Video

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