The SR Rotations Volleyball Drill: Perfect Your Weak Serve Receive Rotations
Posted on: 1/11/26
Last updated: 1/11/26
Author: Thalia A. U.
Perfect your teams weakest rotations during practice with one drill: ‘The SR Rotations’ Drill
After a tough loss, great Volleyball coaches often look at specific metrics/data to help decipher what specific areas their team struggled with. This sometimes translates to easy mistakes such as serving errors, setting errors, or hitting errors… but where the true change can happen is when coaches look to each rotation’s strength, and weaknesses.
As a head coach I use my gameday iPad which I (or my assistant coaches) take live game statistics on. This helps me click on each rotations serve receive (and also service) to see which ones we excelled with, and which ones we struggled with.
Often times there were clear outliers for rotations where my teams struggled, like serve receive on rotation 3. Noticing, and also keeping track of what rotations your team excels and struggles with will help you strengthen your teams’ weaknesses for the next matchup.
In this blog post I explain my drill; ‘The SR Rotations drill’ (not too creative of a name on my end… haha) which helps you coach and correct your teams’ mistakes for each serve receive.
1) Setting Up For The Drill
Before coming into practice you need to do your “homework” as a coach. That means using your last games statistics to determine what serve receive rotations you struggled with the most. This can be done the “old-school” way with paper statistics, or the “new school” way using an app/iPad/Hudle camera to take your statistics.
Once you have figured out the 3 rotations (of our total 6) that the team struggled with the most on serve receive we can plan to utilize this info during our SR rotations drill.
As a coach you are looking for the 3 serve receive rotations which had the most attempts to get out of SR. For instance: Rotations 1,3, and 5 had the most “attempts” to get out of serve receive because our opponents served at us more times than 2, 4, and 6. This could mean one opponent went on a serving run and we had a tough time passing their serve, we struggled to pass, struggled to set, or even struggled to hit/finish the ball. Having this info will help us figure out what that issue was during this drill… and correct it/work on bettering it!
Set up one side (Side A) in serve receive rotation 1 (ideally your starting line-up) Setter, Opp, OH1, OH2, L, MH1, MH2 all determined (including DS substitutes). Try to have the athletes on the court who were on the court the last match-up where they struggled with rotation 1 SR.
Set up other side (Side B) with 6 on if you have enough athletes, or set up a line of servers behind the service line to serve at side A.
2) Running The Drill
Instruct side A that they will get 5 serves as a “warm-up” from side B’s athletes one at a time.
Once the 5 warm-up serve receive plays are complete, you will give side A 10 serves. Out of those 10 serves they need to have 5 of them be successful serve receives that include a pass, set, and attack landing inside court lines.
Side B’s athletes are instructed to “play out” each of Side A’s attempts at serve receive (if you have 6 players also on side b’s court) If you only have servers behind the service line on side B, those athletes will be instructed to serve their strongest/toughest at different areas of the court.
Side B should be alternating servers each time to give Side A more of a challenge, or coach can decide to use one server to see if they can adjust to the server over time.
3) Adding Intensity To The Drill
If side A does not have 5 (or more) successful serve receive attempts (pass, set, attack inside court lines) then they will get a quick conditioning punishment.
Punishments for not meeting the 5 attempts can be:
5 laps around the volleyball court
10(etc) burpees, pushups, sit ups…. etc!
If side A does not meet the 5 successful attempts, after their conditioning punishment they will set back up on the court to try again.
As a coach, you should tell Side A what adjustments they need to make to fix what they did wrong the first attempt. Then they can again get 5 warm up balls, and their 10 serves.
4) Continuing The Drill
Once your team has successfully completed their 5 (or more) SR attempts side A can be moved into their next serve receive rotation they struggled with. The process would continue as they get 5 warm up serves, and then get their 10 serves to get their 5 (or more) successful SR’s.
Continue steps 2-3 until all the rotations you struggled with are completed.
5) Conclusion
There are many ways to strengthen your weaknesses as a team, and working on specific rotations is one way to do it!
I love having the opportunity to focus on one rotation at a time, give my athletes their options on offense, and ways to change their mistakes that often ended in back to back points for our opponents.
Check out my YouTube video (posted this week) to learn in depth all about this SR rotations drill.
See you in the next blog post!
-Coach T