The first session of the project was 14/1/2013 and we had decided to attach the big net (provided by the school) across the length of the hall and allow anyone that turned up to practice their newly learned techniques however they were confident with.
Firstly we put the group of 25 into pairs with a ball each. Demonstrated the skills which we as a group felt were a neccessity, then allowed the pairs to practice the skill with or without the net. This worked very well and at the end of the time we allowed for practice, every person who attended felt confident enough to practice using the net.
Our main aim is to ensure every week is fun, because the sessions are being run during a lunchtime, we do not want to provide the students with another lesson as we feel this will lead to poor numbers and a lack of interest.
So once everyone involved felt comfortable we moved them onto another ‘game’ type practice, it was essentially running a drill without it feeling or appearing like a drill. We had a very positive reaction to this second practice which involved: a server, digger, setter and finisher. The names which we allocated each position also benefited the participants and they also enjoyed them.
To end the session we ran a ‘king of the court’ stlye tournament with the winning teams moving towards the top court and the losers moving away from the top court. Introducing competition only benfited the session and provided even more of a positive outlook on the session, as the feedback we recieved from both students and coaches was all positive and full of enthusiasm. We finished the session with the question of ‘Will we see you all next week? Same place, same time!’ and the response we recieved overwhelmed the group with positivity.
As a group we are very much looking forward to the next 5 weeks!
Created by Ben Matthews