HVA Latest News

15th August 2023 - University of Portsmouth coaching opportunity

The University of Portsmouth are looking for a new coach for their women's 1st team, which competes in the South Eastern Tier 1A league. A job description is available here

14th August 2023 - Entries open for HVA GP Series 23-24

Entries are now open for the 2023-2024 HVA Grand Prix Series. See the competitions page for information on the Grand Prix Series.

16th August 2021 - Southampton Volleyball Club NVL trials

Southampton Volleyball Club runs National League teams in Men's Div 3 SW as well as Women in Div 3SW and Div 2 South. The club is running a number of open trial sessions for anyone who wants to try out for any of our teams. These are free and start this coming week. If you are interested please contact our Chair Sofia at [email protected] for more information.

2nd August 2021 - South East regional Volleyball returns

To all South East players, parents, clubs, and coaches,

I am pleased to finally be in touch with some great news: South East volleyball is back! I am delighted to be coaching the U17 South East England girls once again and am reaching out to the region to let you know of our first training session.

The training session is aimed at U17 girls who would like to represent Team South East at the Volleyball England Inter-Regional Championships 2022. The South East squad will train once a month (1 day camps) before the final squad of 12 players is selected approximately in March 2022. To be eligible, players must live in the South East region, play for a club in the South East region, OR attend school in the South East region. Players must be under 17 years old on 1st September 2021.

This year, we will be using an app called Spond to register players. You will be able to see the squad calendar, book onto training sessions, and contact coaches via the app. The first training session will be on Saturday 18th September 2021 at The Ashcombe Volleyball School, Dorking. The session will start at 10am and will end at 3pm and will cost approximately £7 (to cover hall hire). Please bring a packed lunch, plenty of drinks, and snacks.

If you would like to be part of the South East talent pathway in the upcoming 2021/22 season, please contact me at [email protected] with the following information and I will add you to the app:

Player Name
Date of Birth
Player Email
Parent/Guardian Name
Parent/Guardian Email
Parent/Guardian mobile
Club and Coach

I look forward to meeting many of you at our first training session on Saturday 18th September 2021!

Best Wishes,
Cat Machado
U17 South East England Girls Head Coach

25th March 2021 - Volleyball England release guidance on returning to play

Volleyball England have just released guidance on the return of Volleyball from 29th March, with information on the allowed number of participants, social distance rules, equipment cleaning etc.

16th Oct 2020 - AGM Minutes Published

The HVA AGM was held on 11th October via a Zoom meeting. It was originally intended that this would also facilitate a teams' meeting to discuss this season's GP Series, but with extra COVID19 restrictions meaning that adult volleyball indoors was limited to bubbles of 6 people maximum, the committee have decided to pause any indoor competitions. The minutes have now 25th Aug 2020 - Consultation on the 2020-2021 HVA GP series

25th Aug 2020 - Consultation on the 2020-2021 HVA GP series

As Volleyball England have published their plans for how we can return to volleyball (https://www.volleyballengland.org/news/article/6125/government-gives-green-light-for), the HVA committee are now thinking about the next GP Series, guided by the following priorities:

Player safety
The resilience of the competition to an incomplete season
Providing teams with competitive match-play

With these in mind, we are concerned that we cannot run the GP series in the same way as in previous seasons. One of the major restrictions is over the limit of 30 people per playing area; having multiple playing areas means that we could have more than 30 people in total, but each group of 30 people must not have any interaction with anyone from the other group (a clarification we have from the VE working group).

We typically play across two courts at Bay House, and to make the leagues work, teams can (and do) swap courts and can end up playing any other team at an event. It is near impossible to schedule a league that satisfies all of the teams' free dates AND guarantees that there is no mixing of the separate groups of 30 players. The league is also not very resilient to an incomplete season, and we have to fill in the missing results with some form of approximation as we did last season.

With this in mind, instead of running the GP series as a league we are considering the following proposal:

Run a series of stand-alone tournaments.
Each event will consist of 2 tournaments, one on each court at Bay House school.
Each court/tournament will run completely independently of the other. This means we can satisfy the restriction on the groups not interacting with each other.
Each court/tournament could run with different genders. e.g. men on one court, ladies on the other; or 2 separate mixed tournaments on each court.
Each court/tournament will consist of 4 teams where each team plays each other once (so 3 matches total). Matches will still be best-of-3-sets played to 25, 25, 15.
Teams will be limited to 7 players maximum, so each court/tournament will have 28 players in total. Teams must have the same 7 players for the whole day (this may mean some rule changes, such as allowing a libero to become a non-libero if there is a player injury).
We will attempt to arrange the tournaments so that teams are always playing opposition of similar skill levels (based on results from previous seasons). This may mean playing the same team more than once in a season, and not playing some teams at all.
As there is no single league, there won't be a league winner across the season. If the SEVA finals do go ahead then the team entries will be selected by the HVA committee (any members that have played in their respective competition will not be a part of that decision).

We believe that this format can satisfy the restrictions from running a competition under COVID19, while also providing the teams with competitive volleyball.

We have contacted all teams that have competed in HVA events over the last 3 seasons, and are inviting feedback on this proposal. Clubs can contact us via our contact page. We are also planning on scheduling a Zoom meeting, open to all clubs to discuss the proposal and the coming season, and will publish details soon.