Serve Receive in Volleyball

                  Many coaches say that the two most important parts of the sport of volleyball are the serve and the serve receive that comes along with the serve. In order for a team to get a point, they must side out and win the serve receive. This means that teams must serve tough and pass well to be defined as a good team. Because of this, I support the idea that the aspects of serving in volleyball are the most important components of the game. 

                  For the last few practices, I have been working on the techniques that Marv Dunphy and Rod Wilde recommend in their book, Volleyball Essentials. A seam is defined as "the area between two receivers on a serve" (Dunphy Wilde 22). As I played with my team during practices, I began to notice that the servers would tend to serve those spaces and lots of times, the placement would tend to be effective. Noticing these trends, I found that calling which seams you would take if the ball landed there prepared me better to take the ball and make the good pass. Another result of me calling the seams before the other team served, was that my teammates talked as well. This led to all three of the serve receivers in at that moment to be a strong line that knew whose balls were whose. 

                   On the other end of serving, Volleyball Essentials helped me practice better techniques for giving the receiving team a tough serve or getting an ace, where the receiving team isn't able to send a playable serve back over to the other team. A floater is a type of serve that doesn't have spin, which causes the ball to move in various directions (Dunphy Wilde 22). Instead of sending the ball over only aiming to make the ball have a flat trajectory, I tried practicing this jump serve. Jump serving proved to cause the other team difficulty than standing and serving. Jump float serving caused me to become a more dangerous server that the other teams couldn't pass easily. In Volleyball Essentials, it says that the weakest areas in a serve receive are "deep corners, the sidelines, the short middle area, and the seams" (Dunphy Wilde 68). To put all of the serving strategies together, I created a jump float serve for myself that ended with my team getting more aces and getting easier balls from the other team in result of a tough serve. 

                    So comes a question concerning volleyball service. What is more important: serving or serve receive passing? Both are essential for a team to be considered great, but if you had to pick one over the other to be really good at, which would you choose?

Dunphy, Marv, and Rod Wilde. Volleyball Essentials: Video-Text. Total Health Publications, 2014