Washburn 1

Hellen Washburn
ENC 1101
14 November 2014
Paper 2 Final Draft
Survival of the Fittest

Different Types of Volleyball

Volleyball has been around for over one hundred years and is an internationally
recognized sport. Over the years, the game has evolved and new rules have been established such
as the manner in which a player can touch a ball, which players can be on the court, the
dimensions of the court, etc. All of those aspects contribute to the type of volleyball that is being
played. The two main types are indoor and beach. Indoor usually consists of two teams with six
players on each team; three front row and three back row. Each side can touch the ball three
times without one player touching it consecutively. Beach is very different because theres only
two people on each team and the courts are much smaller; its also played in the sand which can
make it more difficult for the player to move around in. There are also some restrictions on how
beach players can touch the ball when they send it over the net.
When people play beach volleyball its either in a tournament or just for fun. Conversely,
with indoor volleyball, theres many different forms of it such as school teams and club teams. I
know what youre thinking, thats only two things, not many and youre right; except that
club teams can vary immensely making it many. School and club teams are different because
they abide by slightly altered rules. For example, in school, no player can touch any part of the
net but in club, a player can only not touch the top part of the net referred to as the tape. No

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matter what, every indoor set is won by one team getting 25 points and winning by two points.
However, with school, a game is won with the best three out of five while club is only best two
out of three. With the many differences in school and club teams, there are even more specific
differences in the community of club volleyball. I wanted to provide some background
information about the different types of volleyball so that we can already see how it all varies.
For this paper, I will only be focusing on the aforementioned specific differences of club
volleyball. The reason Im writing this paper is to explain these differences for any college
students that want to play club or any professors with children that are interested in playing club.
To further prove my point and to help clarify, I will be including interviews from girls that
played for different club teams.

Methods
For this paper I am drawing on John Swales concept of a discourse community to
portray the differences between club teams. He describes a discourse community as having six
specific characteristics: common goals, intercommunication between members, provide
information and feedback, genres, specific lexis, and membership threshold. Im only focusing
on the exchange of information and feedback and the specific lexis of each team that I talk about
because I believe that these two characteristics present the most help when talking about the
differences between each team. For the research part of this paper I am basing the information
off of my experience with the club teams that I played for: Club Storm for 3 years and Tampa
Elite for 1 year where I was an outside hitter and a middle blocker. I have also asked multiple
people from different teams about their involvement and how each differs from one another.

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Sarah played for Wolf Pack as a right side hitter. Hayley played for Ocean Breeze as an outside
hitter.

Clubs All Around

Exchange of Information and Feedback

Im from Tampa and there are so many volleyball clubs to choose from: Pinellas Heat,
Top Select, Tampa United, Power Volleyball, and many more. For my freshman, sophomore,
and junior year, I played for Club Storm and during my senior year I was with Tampa Elite. I had
four different coaches throughout the years (Tilley=year 1, Ryan=years 2 and 3, Louis and
Antonio=year 4) and none of them had the same coaching style. The purpose of a coach is to
teach players a particular sport and to help them grow as an athlete by providing information and
feedback. Tilley was very outgoing and just wanted us to have fun as a team. He didnt give us
very many punishments for playing poorly, but he did make us work out a lot to stay in shape.
He also avoided giving us criticism which was essential for the team to grow so that wasnt
really helpful. When I played for Ryan it was a whole different story. He was a cool guy but a
stern coach. If we werent playing our best during a game, he didnt hesitate to tell us, but he also
told us how to fix our mistakes. During practice he made us run if we werent focused. One thing
that really helped was that we watched game tape at practices sometimes so that we could
actually see what we were doing wrong and figure out how to make it better. He also made
everyone on the team recruiting videos for colleges even if we didnt want to play in college.

Switching from Club Storm to Tampa Elite was a hard transition but I learned how to
adjust. At the beginning of the season I played for Louis and towards the end I played for him

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and Antonio on two different teams. Louis had a very heavy Spanish accent which made it hard
to understand him at times so he didnt talk much. He wasnt a very good coach due to the fact
that he didnt really talk to us about the problems we were having as a team. During games, if we
werent playing great he would just get mad and throw his hands up in the air. There was no
feedback coming from him which didnt help any players grow at all. Antonio was vastly
different. Of course he got mad when we werent playing well, but, like Ryan, he told us where
we were going wrong and helped us fix it.

I asked Haley and Sarah what their experience is like with their coaches and what kind of
feedback they get. Haley said that her coach, Coach Miller, was very hard on her team. She
explains that anytime anyone messes up, the entire team had to run until the coach is satisfied.
She never allows any shenanigans during practice said Haley. As for feedback, Haley stated
that after every tournament, Coach Miller sits down with each individual player and goes over
what they did well and how they can improve. Conversely, Sarah said that her coach, Coach
Steganga, rarely gave her team any feedback. Sarah mentioned, At times, it doesnt really seem
like Coach Steganga even wants to be there. She explains that the coach doesnt stop plays
during practice when the girls arent playing very well which doesnt help anyone.

Lexis

Another huge difference between club teams is the lexis, or specific language, that they
use. In volleyball, everyone has to communicate with each other on the court to know whats
happening. To do this, the hitters, who are offensive players, talk to the setter, who sets the ball
to the hitters, and tells them what hit they want to run. However, each team might refer to the
same hit by a different name. For instance, while playing for Club Storm with Ryan, one of the

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hits that I called was a loop. For Tampa Elite, I hit the exact same spot but it was just called a
four. To make it more confusing, some teams use the same name for different hits. In Figure 1,
it shows a 5 being a hit on the left side of the net while Figure 2 shows it being on the right
side. Sarah, the right side hitter, said that she calls her hit an 8 while figure 2 shows it as back

Figure 1

3.

Figure 2

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Furthermore about the lexis of club teams, along with calling hits, we needed to show
what we wanted to hit by using different hand gestures. Figure 4 shows how to call many
different hits. When I played for Tampa Elite, I ran shoots which is a fast set to the left side of
the net. In Figure 4, it shows that a shoot looks like a hand gun. However, on my team, that
hand signal was used to run a fluffy which is a hit for the middle blocker, so we had to come
up with a different sign (Figure 3.) Hayley, the outside hitter, said that Figure 5 is the gesture she
uses when calling for a hut which is another name for a four. The purpose of coming up with
different names and signals for hits is so that it confuses the other team and so they have no idea

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

what to expect until its too late.

So Whats the Difference?

When it comes to volleyball, a huge aspect of it is adjusting. Unless someone stays with
the same team and the same coach every club season, they have to change something about how

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they play. Whether it be how a player calls a hit or how they communicate with their coach,
something is going to change. When a player changes teams theyre going to get a new set of
teammates and they have to learn how to communicate with one another. Hitters have to talk to
the setter to know what plays to run. Defensive players communicate with hitters to tell them
where to hit on the other side of the court. And everyone has to communicate with the coach to
know whats happening because sometimes they see things that the players dont. Also, players
have to be able to adjust to different coaching styles because not all of them are the same. In the
end, it doesnt matter what club team you choose, as long as you remember to adjust.