I've entered another dimension. The dimension of coaching volleyball. Well, let's clarify this: Technically, what I am coaching really isn't
VOLLEYball. Given that the team is made up
of 7 and 8 year old girls, many of which have never played on a sports team
before, there really isn't much volleying going on. The ball rarely clears the net on a serve and
comes back to the team that initiated first contact. The concept of rally is completely
non-existent and "volleys" are rare and far between. I've noticed there is plenty of squealing,
though.
Virtually every practice is comprised of derivatives of
two basic drills: one focusing on
serving and one focused on passing.
There is no "setting" and "attacking" in seven year
old volleyball. But, there are
kneepads. Boy, do they love to slide
around on them when they should be listening to "Coach Greg".
Despite this young offshoot of the game we all love, I
have been struck with some similarities to the college game. Never were the basics of "first
contact" more on display than last week when SFA hosted Northwestern
State. The match - almost entirely -
could be described as a battle between serve and serve receive.
Two years ago, I was interviewing Paige Holland for this
blog. I had a legal pad with a page full
of setting related questions. At one
point, I asked Holland what things a beginning player should work on. Since she was a setter, I initially thought
her answer might in some way have to do with setting, footwork used by setters,
how to hold one's hands while trying to set, etc. Of course, about a millisecond after I had
asked the question, I realized that any reasonable answer wasn't going to have
anything to do with setting in the sense that we see Paige Holland or any other
college setter perform.
Paige succinctly said that she would have the girls work
on serve and receive, since they are the two basic tenants of the game. Two years later, she has, of course, been
proven very right by my brief experiences.
The answer made sense to me then.
It makes more sense to me now, but it is truly profound that volleyball
can at many times have basically NOTHING to do with volleying.
The point of first contact for each team is so very
important. How many times have you heard
coaches refer to a "service run" as a momentum changer? How many times have you seen timeouts taken
after a couple of shanked returns? Why
is there a position called "defensive specialist" and not
"offensive specialist"? Why
are certain players "hidden" in the corner in various receive
patterns? Why did Paige work to perfect
the short serve and why has Jill Ivy continued to serve from the neighboring
county?
Because serve and receive are the most fundamental skills
in the game.
I basically can't write a post without stating that I
love digs. I love, love , love - in
rally, back row defense. But, you can't
even have a dig until the ball returns to the serving team. The concept of the "dig" requires
the beginning of a rally. An ace serve,
a serve into the net or out of bounds, a shanked receive, a miscommunication on
the back row - all of these preclude there being even one dig on the play. Yes, even I have to admit (and it's really an
easy call when you think about it), serving and receiving serve are generally
more important than digging up attacks.
Because of my career profession, I have a penchant for
numbers. I love sports statistics and at
times am able to make convincing arguments using them and at other times
probably over state their importance.
Honestly, volleyball is sorely lacking in truly meaningful
statistics. There are statistics that
could be created that would be more representative of talent, but they'd
require review of film to accurately record.
Either that or many people on the sideline tracking very specific
information. Now, it's really hard to
record the volleyball statistics that we do have at our disposal due to the
pace of the game. Any time someone new
works at a volleyball media table, one of the first things they remark about is
the "stat calling" that takes place.
Often times it takes three people to record the statistics that you see
in a typical volleyball box score: an "inputter"
, a "caller" and a "writer". The input person basically
doesn't see the match. He/she is typing
at a furious pace based at what they hear from the caller. The caller just barks out codes - for two
hours straight.
"Serve Home 11, receive 5, attack 9, dig 12, attack 2,
over, dig 11, attack 15, kill, assist 1"
This would be what a caller would say on a very short
rally. Now imagine the ball going over
the net more than three or four times in a rally. It gets INSANE. That's why you often have a
"writer". The writers
job? Simply to write down - in shorthand
- everything the caller says. Why? Because over the course of two hours there
probably are going to be close to a thousand calls. At least several hundred. Do you think that can be done without
occasionally mistaking a "3" for an "8" on a jersey? Or occasionally not saying "over"
when the ball is blocked or batted back on to the attacking side without a dig? Corrections in the flow of play have to be
made.
Two years ago, we played at Louisiana-Monroe and the
"caller" and the "inputter" were both rookies. Plus, they didn't use a
"writer". It was
horrible. Absolutely horrible. At the end of three sets, we had scored more
than 70 points and our setter had 5 assists in the box score. This is almost physically impossible to
actually happen. That is, unless it is 7
and 8 year old league! The entire box
score was redone later that night, in part by using Katzy Randall's stats that
she had recorded on the sideline just for coaching purposes. It was an utter disaster and without Katzy's
help, the statistics would have had to been completely redone by video.
So, it is hard to imagine that volleyball will ever adopt
many more "official statistics".
What the game needs is a stat that accurately measures serve and receive
effectiveness. Aces are a nice stat, but
they are too course. As mentioned in previous
posts, many teams use a passing "point system" whereby points are
given to passers based on how accurately their passes go to target. But, despite these numbers being important
they miss one huge component: the
correlation between the quality of the serve and the quality of the pass. It simply is not true that the accuracy of a pass
can be claimed to be independent of the quality of the serve.
Simply put, if I am serving, an opposing team will score
better on their passing score than if Jill Ivy or Paige Holland is
serving. An extreme example, but still
one that makes the point. Some players
simply don't have the serving skill that others do. So, if you are tracking passing scores on the
sideline, your recorded numbers are artificially inflated when you play poor
serving teams. Likewise, they are
systematically depressed when you play a tough serving team. So, your recorded ability to receive is
correlated to the quality of serves you face.
No volleyball metric I know factors these two things in TOGETHER. They are always separated. That's at least marginally deceiving. In some cases, it may render what you are
recording close to useless.
On a similar note, take a look at this: Last Tuesday, SFA won the first set against
Northwestern State despite being outhit .200 to .194. Now, of course, that difference is negligible. There is no meaningful difference in those
attack percentages across dozens of games, much less a single set. It's just that one starts with a
"2" and the other starts with a "1", so it has a different
feel. In the second set against the
Demons, SFA won the set despite hitting only .041. You hardly ever win sets in which you hit
that low. Northwestern State hit only
.065 in that second set. If all you saw
was the box score, you might conclude that both teams were having awful
attacking nights. Actually, that wasn't
really the case.
Additionally, if you look only at the numbers you'll find
that SFA had six aces compared to just one for Northwestern State. This isn't overly impressive in and of
itself. Six aces is not a HUGE total for
three sets. SFA averages about four aces
per three sets, so six isn't ridiculously large compared to average.
Now, if you were to go back and watch the tape of the
match, you'd be inclined to believe that Demon OH Caiti O'Connell had a nice
attacking match. However, the stats say
she had 9 kills with 7 errors on 32 swings for paltry .062 attack
percentage. Still, I claim O'Connell
kept the Demons in the first two sets with her attacking.
Why? What gives
here with all these seemingly poor numbers?
They don't come close to telling the real story. And there is a simple explanation why. All of these numbers depend upon first
contact for each side being clean in order to have a high level of
relevance. O'Connell's nine kills were
virtually all skillful attacks on out-of-system balls. Many of the 16 attacks that didn't result in
a kill or error were artful plays just to keep the ball in alive. Those nine kills were hardly EVER in
system. Most of them were off junk sets
by Jaeger or Johnson - balls just flipped to O'Connell because she was the only
place the ball could go. Yet, O'Connell
scored on some of them and kept others in a rally.
The missing link here?
Attack percentage is correlated to receive quality. Yet, we have no true measure of this
correlation. Northwestern State REALLY
struggled to pass against us last week. Their
poor first contact led (in part) to poor attacking numbers.
Why? How much of
it is due to Bailey Martin having an off match?
How much of it is due to SFA serving the Demons tough? See, I think both of those things are
true. I think SFA served REALLY well,
but yet six aces don't tell that story completely. I also think that Bailey Martin really
struggled. Bad. Her four reception errors tell part of that
story, but they don't come close to explaining all the times that the Demon
setters were sent sprinting all over the court for second touch.
Now, hey, this is not to dog on Martin. Martin actually has played well in place of
Keelie Arneson. Plus, the other back row
serve receive players for NWLA weren't exactly blameless either. The Demons just did not pass well and if you
go by the recorded stats alone you really wouldn't think it was the biggest key
to the match - yet, it was.
One number we can see is .103. Northwestern State hit .103 for the entire
match. This number is almost entirely
due to each teams' first contact. That
number is FAR better explained by SFA's serving and NWLA's receipt of serve as
opposed to the swings of the Demon hitters.
So, here what I am saying. In
THIS case, the poor "attack" percentage of .103 had little to do with
"attacking". It had far more
to do with serving and passing.
The point being made here is one that we all need to keep
in mind when looking at just box scores, or things like GameTracker. The point is especially relevant for
statheads like me. This is certainly one
of those "talk in the mirror" type posts.
We love numbers in sports. Some of us adore them more than others. It's often said that the numbers don't lie -
and to a point, that is true. However,
in volleyball so many of our main numbers are correlated or associated with
variables that we can "see" when we watch matches, but that we don't
have a statistic for. This is
particularly true when it comes to serve and receive.
A better measure of serve quality than aces would
be: "What fraction of serves lead
to the other team becoming out-of-system over and above what would be expected
by an average reception team?" This
is almost impossible to measure.
A better measure of reception would be "What
fraction of balls on serves of average difficulty are passed to
target?" Then, ask the question
again replacing the phrase "average difficulty" with "low/high
degree of difficulty". This might
could be measured, but we'd have to try and define what average/low/high degree
of difficulty serves would be. This is
difficult and surely subjective.
Instead, we relegate ourselves to the yes/no granularity
of "ace or no ace". Likewise,
we subjectively rate serve receives as things like "1's" or
"2's". Finally, serve receive
is almost always rated by the team doing the receiving and not someone acting
in a neutral capacity. So, I claim
passing scores rated by the bench are subject to some degree of human error and
bias. This doesn't render these numbers
useless. It just means they are a
function of the actual person doing the recording.
On the other hand:
A kill is a kill. An ace is an
ace. An assist is an assist. A dig is a dig. There is little to no subjectivity in their
definitions. So, we record these things.
Volleyball needs both statistics and the "eye
test". That said, to measure true
talent, volleyball needs to consider adopting progressive performance measures
that utilize the concept of correlation in some succinct way.
I'm not holding my breath on the last of these
suggestions become a reality soon. It
just isn't functional. The game is too
fast to ask for recording much more than what we already record. So, in the meantime, we should try and use
numbers in the proper context. We should
try and realize they are informative, but not without multiple causes for their
creation. We should always look to not
only describe WHAT happened, but HOW and WHY it happened. For those harder questions, box scores like
those created in the game between Northwestern State and SFA last Tuesday
should be relegated to lesser importance.
Northwestern State lost to SFA in large part because they
passed poorly. The box score doesn't
provide much more to that main story line.
"Numbers Never Lie" isn't the same thing as
saying they tell the whole truth. For
last week's match against the Demons, they most certainly did not.
