Volleyball Tryout Drills

Start with the things a player cannot fake. Before anyone touches a system or a strategy, you want a clean read on how they move. Jump, foot speed, and body control are the athletic floor every other skill stands on, and they are the easiest markers to capture as a plain number.

Recruiters open the same way. The standard recruiting measurables in volleyball are height, standing reach, block jump, and approach jump, weighed by position. Recruiting services publish baselines for each of them, and NCSA's volleyball recruiting guidelines(opens in new tab) are a useful reference for the position-by-position numbers. You do not need college numbers at a middle-school tryout. You do need the same idea at a smaller scale. Capture the athletic markers cleanly, then treat them as one input among several.

The two drills below screen movement fast. Add the ones you use to your plan as you read.

Volleyball is a game of three contacts, and the first two are the ones tryouts underrate. A team that passes and sets cleanly gets to attack. A team that shanks the first ball never runs its offense at all. So before you fall for the biggest swing in the gym, find out who can control a ball with a serve bearing down on them.

The drills here put passing and setting under a little heat, because a comfortable pass in a warm-up line tells you nothing. Score them honestly. At the youth and club level, a steady passer is worth more to your roster than a spectacular hitter who cannot keep the first ball off the floor.

Reading Passers Under Fatigue with the 5-3-5-3-5

The 5-3-5-3-5 is a serve-receive passing ladder where a single miss resets the standard, so a group of passers has to hold their form as the count climbs and the legs tire. That reset is exactly why it earns a place at a tryout. You are not scoring one clean pass. You are watching who stays composed as the standard keeps slipping back. For the full 5-3-5-3-5 count and how it scales for younger groups, see our volleyball drills guide. The card below has the tryout setup and the fault to watch for.

Here is where a volleyball tryout gets genuinely hard. A setter, a middle blocker, and a libero do almost nothing alike. Run every player through one generic gauntlet and you will cut a brilliant libero for being a mediocre hitter, which is a quick way to weaken your own team.

Score each player against their position instead. A setter is graded on hands and decisions, a middle on block footwork, a libero on the first ball off a hard-driven attack. USA Volleyball's own coaching material calls a good setter a coach on the court(opens in new tab), which is the right lens for every station. You are grading the job a role actually asks for, not a checklist of generic skills.

The table sorts what a strong player shows at each position from the red flag that most often drops a borderline one.

Watch two players at once wherever you can. A setter station is also a hitting look for whoever is swinging, and a defensive station doubles as a serving read. Run the four stations below as parallel rounds, one evaluator locked to each, and rotate small groups through so no one waits in a queue.

Stations measure a skill in isolation. A match measures the player. Some athletes look ordinary in a passing line and then turn into the loudest, most reliable competitor in the gym the second the ball is live, and you only ever see that in a game. Save real scrimmage time for the back half of your tryout, once the skill scores are in.

Rotate players through positions and teams while they play. You learn more about a kid's ceiling by watching them adapt to a new spot than by leaving them where they are comfortable. And keep half an eye off the ball. The player covering the hitter, backing up a teammate, and calling the seam is often the one who lifts everyone around them.

The Intangibles a Scrimmage Reveals

Some of what decides a match never reaches a stat line. Coachability is whether a player takes a correction and applies it on the very next rep. Communication is the talk that keeps a rotation from colliding. Competitiveness is what a player does when their side is down two and the next serve is coming. A stations circuit cannot test any of these. A scrimmage tests all three, which is why the competitive block earns its place in your plan.

Every piece above fits into one afternoon. The plan below runs 90 minutes in a single gym with four or five evaluators, sized for a group of 30 to 45. Keep each block on the clock. The surest way to waste a tryout is letting one station run long while half your players stand against the wall watching.

Download it for your clipboard, or drop it into a spreadsheet and shift the times to fit the group you have.

Prefer to build the day around the specific drills you liked? Everything you added from the sections above collects here, totalled into one block you can save, print, or share with an assistant coach. The drills you evaluate with also make a strong first practice after the roster is posted, so this plan does double duty.

Running a tryout badly is easy, and most of the harm comes from a short list of repeatable mistakes. Avoiding them matters as much as any drill you pick.

• Do not score from memory. Write every number down before the next player steps in. An hour later two similar passers blur into one, and the score you reconstruct is a guess.
• Do not let one skill decide everything. A huge vertical is exciting, but a player who cannot pass or read the game will not help you win. Weigh the whole picture.
• Do not leave players standing. Long lines at one net turn a tryout into a wait. Split into more groups with more balls so every player is moving and being seen.
• Do not skip the position lens. Judge a libero on their swing, or a setter on their block, and you send good players home. Score each player against the job you need them to do.
• Do not rank kids out loud. Keep every conversation about one player and their next step. Comparing one child to another in front of others is the quickest way to sour a gym.

The last one carries past tryout day. How you cut a player is how their family remembers your program. Tell everyone how and when results go out before they leave, and deliver hard news in person or in a message you send each player.

The drills give you numbers. Turning those numbers into a roster is the part that actually decides your season. Lay every score sheet side by side and the picture usually sorts into three groups. The top scorers are on the team. The clear cuts are hard but obvious. Your real work is the middle, the borderline players where one evaluator saw something another missed.

A consistent scoring sheet is what keeps that meeting honest, because every player ran the same gauntlet and earned the same kind of number. Score each skill on a simple 1-to-5 scale, add a one-line note while it is fresh, and weight the categories toward what your team actually needs. A side that already passes well can lean its scoring toward attacking, while a team that leaks serve-receive should reward a steady passer. Our printable volleyball tryout evaluation form lays the whole card out with a rubric behind every number, so a 4 reads the same for every coach on your staff.

Movement numbers deserve the same care. Striveon's performance testing tools record approach jumps and shuttle times and compare them across sessions, so a player's athleticism reads as a line over a whole season. With the team named, build your evaluation criteria once and reuse them so next year's tryout starts from the same yardstick you built this year.

A tryout is day one of a season, not a final verdict. Once you have a roster, those first scores become the starting line for every player. Striveon's athlete development tracking carries each player's tryout numbers forward, so the afternoon of evaluations grows into a record you actually coach from. When the drills, the scores, and each athlete's progress live in one place, the whole picture from tryout day to season sits in a single system.