Cue the 1950s documentary-style male narrative voice, “I bet you want to know what the future holds for volleyball coaches who love to game plan don’t you? Well, your answer is here. Learn what Rotate123 can do for you in… Rotate123 and You!”

Seriously though, as a suggestion from my only Finnish Twitter follower, Jim Crossett (@crossett), I’m writing this article to help coaches learn how to utilize the software rotate123 (rotate123.com). I have used rotate123 before and love it. So this is a great opportunity to talk about it.

Rotate123 is a subscription-based service available to anyone at $30.00 per year. If you are a member of the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) or want to become one, your Rotate123 subscription is free with a renewal of your membership. The program was developed by two coaches, Kyle Prescott and Lee Mashima. They are avid players, and both coach club and high school volleyball. While coaching, as many of us can attest, they found a number of coaching tasks that were incredibly time consuming. This experience led to the creation of their first product: Rotate 123.

The Basics:

At it’s core, Rotate123 is a line-up and rotation helper and you truly, like anything similar to it, get out of it what you put into it.  It is very easy to add your lineup, if you know it. Or using it as a handout, you can label your players OH#1 and OH#2 for instance, to teach younger players rotations.

I often print out a basic “teaching handout” in this way for younger players. It really helps when they have a copy in front of them as you work through it. All they really need to know is, “Coach told me I’m MB #1″ then they can follow along.

If you have your roster already and want to use it to game plan, you can do that very easily. Enter your lineup, choose your offense, then get to it. There are presets in drop-down menus that can help you figure out basic things if you need help. It is also very simple to click and move players and arrows around the court area if you want to try something new. When you are done, you are provided with a nice sheet as a rotation wheel or court lineups. This can be shared with players and that gives them homework so valuable practice time isn’t wasted.

Advanced:

The good thing about Rotate123 is that you can move everyone around. I like to use the options already created for me, but then tweak them. For instance, I hate hiding my right-back setter behind the front-right hitter on serve-receive because it is too easy for a server to throw off your SR percentage. So instead, I drop back my OPP from front-left to pass and push up the OH. This is easy to do on Rotate123.

Shortcomings:

I’m not a complete fanboy of Rotate123 just in case you were wondering, but there is not much to complain about. I think the printing capabilities are a little slim. I truly think this is a big concern for the developers in that it takes a little tweaking to print the rotations. I feel this should be very easy for the money the application costs. Many coaches are not that technical and they need the printing to be easy. I would also like to see an option for 2 person serve-receive. Of course, it is very easy to move players into this formation, but there are options for 3, 4 and 5 and 2 person is a valid formation so it should be added.

I would also love to see the ability to port this application to the iPad, as that device is, if you haven’t tried it already, a great dry erase board/statistics gathering device for coaches who can afford it. It would be great to have the “App” on the iPad to work on rotations and situational plays on the fly (or in the hotel room on those two day tournaments) and show the team during timeouts.

Estimated Time Saved: 9 Hours!

I just created 4 line-ups for my club volleyball team today as research for this article. I have 10 players; 2 MB, 5 OH/RS/DS, 2 S, 1 Lib.

I use a modified 5-1 with 2 setters sharing the setter position, this allows a lefty RS to hit on her strong side. I have 4 Hitters and had to figure out a way to use all of them in different slots. Mostly having 2 playing DS and the other two hitting.

I’m a Microsoft Visio coach. meaning I use flowcharting software to create line-ups. Visio was not made for this and it took me about an hour to draw the court templates a few years ago. Then I move the player markers onto the court, then manually add arrows based one where I need players to go, after receiving serve for example. To create one rotation, it might have taken me 2 hours total by the time I printed it. So I created 4 lineups, that’s 8 hours creating lineups and 1 hour for creating that template I told you about. That is 9 Hours of work, 10 if you include the tweaking and moving until you’re truly satisfied (Are we ever really?).

Using Rotate123, I entered my roster in 2 minutes. Created a plan, moved players into position and set their “after rally” option in the drop-downs and I finished one lineup in Serve Receive, Serve and Defense in 10 minutes. I created 4 lineups that i can print out and hand to my players in less than an hour.

Overall:

I know this kind of turned into a review of sorts even thought I didn’t mean it too and I think that is fine. Any coach that tries the 14 day trial will see the benefits after just 10 minutes. It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the interface. The new version is currently in beta and I’m excited to work with it.

The ability to add notes to each lineup helps players understand the printout. Some players may be new to it, however once players understand the diagram, it only takes a few minutes for players to learn where they need to be at any point in time during a match.

The amount of practice time saved is much greater than you can imagine. Running through a rotation can sometimes take more than an entire 2 hour practice, especially if you have younger players. Give each player a printout, show them who they are on the diagram and let them walk through it in one shot, then play through it and be done in 20 minutes.

Check it out if you haven’t http://www.rotate123.com.