Small Group Volleyball Practice: How to Make the Most of Fewer Players

Every coach has been there. You show up expecting a full team and find half your roster in the gym. Or you're running a private lesson with three athletes. Or your program is small by design and full practice means eight players on a single court.

Running practice with 10, 8, or as few as 4 players is something most coaches deal with regularly , a low-turnout Tuesday, an early preseason session, a post-season training group, or an ongoing reality for smaller programs. Whatever the reason, the question is the same: how do you make the most of it?

The answer is more encouraging than you might expect. Small-group practice isn't a compromise version of a real practice. Done well, it's one of the highest-quality training environments you can create.

The Advantages of Small-Group Practice

Before getting into the practical challenges, it's worth pausing on what small-group settings actually offer.

More Individual Attention

Consider the math. Fifteen players and one coach in a two-hour practice means roughly eight minutes of individual attention per player , and that's if you're coaching every single second. Halve the roster and you double the individual coaching time available.

At GMS, we say the only magic is reps and feedback. Fewer players means more of both go to each person in the gym.

More Reps Per Player

If you're running a 6v6 drill with four middles, half of them are standing out at any given time. With two middles in the gym, both are getting continuous reps. A regulation match produces roughly 12–16 contacts per player per minute. In a small-group setting with well-designed drills, a single player can easily double or triple that contact rate. That's a significant development advantage.

More Focused Feedback

In a full-team practice, coaches are managing energy, substitutions, positional rotations, and a dozen athletes simultaneously. In a small-group session, you can narrow your focus considerably , assign yourself one technical key for a drill block, watch every rep, and give feedback specific to what you just saw. The smaller the group, the more precise your coaching can be.

The Challenges Worth Knowing

Small-group practice comes with genuine limitations. Being honest about them upfront makes it easier to plan around them.

• Less drill flexibility , some drills require a full complement of players, particularly those involving 6v6 competition
• Incomplete positional rosters , session plans that call for specific combinations may not be runnable with the players you have
• Different energy , people create energy; building competitive intensity in a small group requires intentional structure rather than letting it emerge from a crowded gym

These are real constraints. They're also addressable , which is exactly what the full guide covers.

The Full Framework Is Inside GMS+

The advantages above tell you why small-group practice is worth investing in. The paid guide tells you exactly how to run it well , across every scenario a coach actually encounters:

• The one-way structure: how to decide whether to prioritize offense or defense in any given session, and how to build the drill sequence around that choice
• Prioritizing offense: the three-phase session structure with passing, hitting, and side-out work , including wash scoring systems that balance the numbers
• Prioritizing defense: how to flip the structure and make individual digging and blocking work the centerpiece
• The college model: how top programs build deliberate small-group phases into every practice for higher rep counts , and how to apply the same principle with one court and limited staff
• Private lesson settings: the highest individual rep and feedback environment possible, and how to maximize it with one to three athletes
• Five drill formats that work consistently across small-group settings , with specific scoring systems and entry variations for each

This is a paid membership guide. Start your GMS+ membership to access it.

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