‘Even distribution’ By TJ Sanders
This is another catch phrase that I would hear a lot throughout my career. One stating that our goal is to run our
offense equally through all parts of the court. I took that to mean that I should set everyone the same amount because I was supposed to, because my offense would then be ‘balanced’.
That thinking would be a mistake. It would not lead to the most efficient offense.
On the surface, the bigger idea holds some merit, but it doesn’t give us the whole picture. We want to exploit and expose our opponent. That will naturally require us to unevenly distribute the ball since our offensive advantages will not be equal.
Distribution evens out once your opponent has adapted to their weaknesses and exposes new ones (aka they begin hedging to those weaknesses/disadvantages). This is the beginning of layering your offense.
We don’t want to let the blockers off the hook by distributing the ball evenly without intention.
I recognize the sentiment of ‘even distribution’ may be to emphasize that setters should be able to set the ball everywhere and not have tendencies (or should understand their tendencies so they can turn them into an advantage). This I completely agree with, but wanted to clarify that the topic is bigger and more complicated than that.
Dissecting and reframing these concepts was a key factor in me reaching the level I did. My new the goal is to pass along the ones that I believe to be valuable.