Washburn 1

Hellen Washburn

ENC 1101

27 October 2014

Paper 2 Workshop Draft

Volleyball as a Discourse Community

Different Types of Volleyball

Volleyball has been around for over one hundred years and is an internationally
recognized sport. Over the years, volleyball has developed in many different ways 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 be much more
difficult to move around in. Also, there are 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

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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 matter what, every indoor set is won by one team getting 25 points
and winning by two. 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. The reason Im writing this
paper is to explain these differences for anyone that is interested in playing club.

Methods
For this paper I am using John Swales 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. 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. Sarah played for Wolf Pack as a right side hitter. Hayley
played for Ocean Breeze as an outside hitter.

Clubs All Around

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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 never really told us what we were doing wrong or what we could improve on so it wasnt
very 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 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.

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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
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
3.

Figure 2
Figure 1

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

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uses when calling for a hut which is another name for a four. The purpose of coming up
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
they play. 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

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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.