Warrenton Head Volleyball Coach Kristen McDowell has a good idea of what her team will be doing the first few weeks of the 2016 season.

“We’ll be serve-receiving for a while,” she said with a laugh Monday after her team’s first practice.

After beginning the morning with conditioning drills, the Warriors spent the final portion of practice on a serve-receive drill, where three players alternated receiving serves from the rest of the team.

Team manager Paige Hartzell stood at the net and — in theory — successfully set balls over the net.

McDowell graded each of the three players on a scale of one to three.

“A zero is a shank, a one means the setter only has one option, a two means the setter has two options and a three is a perfect pass where the setter has three options with the ball,” McDowell said. “Ideally, we want more threes than anything else.”

McDowell said no one stood out with a large number of threes.

“But we had a lot of twos and threes between a couple of girls, so that’s good,” she added. “That’s what I like to see. But I think they were a little tired today because we ran them a lot in the beginning. Hopefully tomorrow we have a better day when it comes to serve-receiving and passing.”

Last season, McDowell said she was full of “fresh ideas” for the program, but realized she needed to lay a better foundation for her team before making things more complicated.

“So we worked a lot this summer on going back to the basics of volleyball,” she said. “And a lot of girls have improved, definitely. That’s what I will continue to do going forward this season.”

McDowell admitted that serve-receiving can be an issue for many high school programs, and she plans on continuing the drill the rest of the season.