Laryssa M.

I have well over 10 years of coaching experienced, ranging from coaching my own club teams at Boise River Volleyball Club in Boise Idaho, to coaching the freshman team at Los Gatos High School, to coaching beach camps and clinics for the National Volleyball League and I have been conducting regular private coaching lessons on the beach for the past 4 years to date. I am still participating in the sport as a professional beach player, but have been coaching basically since I began playing (coached Junior High teams while in high school playing), so I learned the game from the coach’s perspective.

I have coached both Indoor and Outdoor as listed above, but have been most active in coaching on the beach in the past 4 years and I would say coaching Beach Volleyball would be more my specialty.

In the years that I have played on the beach, I have been coached by the very best including receiving coaching from Dane Selznick (Coached Olympic Gold Medalists Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh in their first Olympics together), Liz Masakayan (Coached Olympians Elaine Youngs and Holly McPeak and Olympian Nichole Branagh), Scott Davenport (coached men’s and women’s top 10 FIVB teams this past year) and have also worked Olympian with Stein Metzger. Having learned so much from these fantastic coaches and even great players, I have also learned to coach myself, setting up structured practices and drills for myself and several of the female athletes I compete with and against.

As a player, I played collegiate Volleyball at NCAA Division II Northwest Nazarene University and was a 4 year starter.

For the past 4 years, I have played on the Professional Beach Volleyball Pro Tour – I am currently individually ranked in the top 40 nationwide and ranked in the top 20 teams on the USAV national ranking system. I ended this past season with a win at the National Volleyball League Motherlode event.

In my experience as a coach and even as a player, what I have learned is that no matter what level you are at, if you want to improve your game it is very important to break down the sport to the absolute basic and practice perfect form, over and over. Until you can master nearly perfect form in all the basic skills (which is nearly no one), if you really want to progress, you should make sure to be including a lot of controlled repetition on the most basic skills in any practice. So, in my practices, I like to start with a dynamic warm up – first train the muscles to prepare for the skills we want to execute, then I like to cover basic skill form and footwork, with every client, to make sure they are executing properly. Depending on what you are looking for, I would structure the practice in two ways:

1. If you are only looking to have maybe one lesson or just a few, I would cover the basics of each skill and execute drills to help you naturally feel the right movements in order to execute these basic skills properly. However, this is not preferred – it is hard to make a lot of progress with just a couple of practices.

2. If you are really interested in improving in the sport and want to book multiple lessons to dedicate the time to do so, I would structure my practice like this:
A. Dynamic Warm-up
B. Basic warm-up ball control drill
C. 1/3 of the practice will be spent on developing 1 skill using drills to complete as many perfect reps as possible.
D. Reaction training drill
E. 1 Active/game-like drill – can range from game-like situational coach initiated drills to 1:1 with coach if skill appropriate.

**depending on how far the client wants to develop their skills, I will add more game-like drills once they are mastering the basic skills.

I believe in the KISS system when coaching – Keep It Simple Stupid:). Often times we try to do too many complicated drills before we even master the basics. I myself realized this in my own training and have shifted the structure of my own practices to follow a similar plan to what is listed above. I noticed a tremendous difference in my rate of improvement just by breaking down the basics and getting clean repetitions.

However, ultimately it is your practice, if you are more on the recreational side and want to be whipped into shape with a lot of active drills, I have a ton of those too. It really depends on what you as a player are wanting to achieve and I can gladly structure the practice around your needs.