volleyball statistics Archives - Page 2 of 4

Tag Archive for volleyball statistics

Kill percentage off perfect pass

September 6, 2016 John Forman Volleyball Coaching Q&A No comments

The following question came in from a reader:

What percent of kills should we expect on a perfect pass? Serve receive or free balls?

The answer to this is reliant very much on level of play. High school girls probably do not score at the same rate as college men, for example. Unfortunately, the mailer didn’t tell me what level they are at.

I honestly don’t have a specific answer in any case. I reached out to Mark Lebedew from At Home on the Court to see what he had to say, and he told me in the men’s PlusLiga in Poland (the top professional division) it’s a 62% kills rate, with a 47% hitting efficiency. This struck me as low, but that just goes to show that personal impressions aren’t always (or even often?) right. 🙂

Mark went on to say the PlusLiga sideout rate off perfect passes is 72%.

My analysis from the 2017 Midwestern State suggested our perfect pass kill rate was below 40%, which was definitely sub-optimal.

I’m curious to hear what folks with good figures say about kill % and sideout rates at their level. If you have any data, please share via a comment below.

Possible paths for volleyball research

February 10, 2016 John Forman Volleyball Coaching Strategy One comment

The subject of the influence of a coach’s decisions on match outcomes is now a talking point in coaching circles. That wasn’t always the case in the past. For many years the assumption was that coaching interventions (timeouts, subs, etc.) without doubt influence outcomes. This is the coaching mythology. The research challenges that mythology.

Examples of this come from Mark Lebedew. He did a basic study based on the question of whether timeouts in any way influence the likelihood of the server missing their serve. In other words, are servers more likely to miss after a timeout. This is believed by many coaches. Confirmation bias is likely a factor here, though.

A while back Mark also wrote about some research into whether timeouts impact the next point. That piece was was based on some findings from basketball which suggest they are actually counterproductive. Not content to stop there, Mark followed up with additional posts here, here, here, here, here, and here. A researcher in a presentation at the 2016 AVCA convention also took on the subject of timeout effectiveness.

This research is definitely a good start. That’s all it is for the moment, though. I’d like to go down some other research paths with respect to volleyball. What do you think? What question(s) do you have?

Your mandate and situation influences your coaching approach

November 12, 2015 John Forman Volleyball Coaching No comments

A post by Coach Rey explores the anti-Moneyball idea with respect to Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost. It references a NY Times article on the subject which talks about how Yost doesn’t operate based on analytics. This is something for which he was regularly criticized. The general thrust of both the blog post and the article seems to be that you can win without relying on the stats.

Here’s my own takeaway, though.

Yost specifically talks about making long-term decisions with respect to player development. He wasn’t trying to win every game. His mandate in both of his most recent two jobs was to develop young teams. When that is your priority, you make different types of decisions than you do when trying to win the largest possible number of games.

The same sort of thing applies in the type of situation some of us are in as coaches. It’s a case of how we play at season’s end being more important than how we play today. Mark Lebedew in his time at BR Volleys had the luxury of being able to mix up his lineup from match to match in German league play. He knew his team was stronger than others, and it was all about the playoffs. That allowed him to spread playing time and develop the younger guys.

I was in a similar sort of situation at Svedala in that every team made the playoffs. Yes, there’s an advantage to finishing higher in the regular season standings. Yes, we also wanted to qualify for the mid-season Gran Prix by being top 4 at the halfway point. The big objective was going after the league championship, though, so I could take a somewhat more developmental than “win now” attitude early in the season.

Obviously, not everyone has that luxury. When I was coaching at Brown there was no conference tournament. It was just the regular season schedule. When I was at Exeter for the first two years we needed to finish in the top three in our league to reach Championships and were VERY motivated to not finish 3rd to avoid having a first round playoff against one of the winners of the other leagues. In cases like that, winning now is very important.

What about you? What sort of situation do you operate in?

Coaching Log – Nov 2, 2015

November 2, 2015 John Forman 2015-16 Svedala Volleybollklubb No comments

This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log for 2015-16.

There was only one other match besides our last week, with Örebro beating RIG. No surprise there. That pushed them to the top of the Eliteserie table on 8 points to our 7. They’ve played 4 matches, though, to our 3. There were no other Oresundliga matches, so Engelholm’s win over us sees them to of the table there on 7 points from 3 matches. Everyone else only has 2 matches, aside from Gislaved (our opponent this week) who is 0-3 thus far.

I spent a lot of time in the latter part of the prior week working on getting hold of and analyzing the video from our match. Technology issues really slowed things down. I basically ended up manually going through every attack for both teams and coding the rotation, the pass/dig, the type of set, the type of attack, and the outcome. I really wanted to take a look at our set distribution and effectiveness.

Two things really jumped out. First, the disparity between when we pass well and when we don’t. Obvious, you expect to be more effective with better passes. When we passed or dug a 3 (see the rating system) we had a 55% kill rate with only 7% errors or blocked. When our pass/dig was a 2 we had a 45% kills rate with only 5% errors/blocks. When we passed/dug a 1 our kills were only 8% and the error/block rate was 20%. I’d like to see us push the 3s up maybe 10 points and get the 2s up to 50%. As for the 3s, I think we need to flip the percentages around, more or less.

The other thing that jumped out was how few middle quicks we ran – just 7 total. Part of that was a match-up thing for that match as we ran more slides, but even still those numbers need to be much higher. I also wasn’t happy with our overall numbers for right side attacks.

Monday
We had a pair of guest players in training. They both play at RIG, but were on a school break. One of them is from Svedala and has played in various teams with the Swedish players. The other is from Ystad, which is the home town of one our players, so again known to most of the groups. That gave us an even 12.

Ball-handling was a major focus for this session. After warm-ups we did Continuous Cross-Court Digging. I instructed the hitters to pick up the power of the attacks to increase the challenge. From there we shifted to some serving and passing. I began with the setters and middles (4 players) serving to everyone else on two sides – so 3 passers and a target, with a passer rotating to target after two good passes.

To continue working on middle quicks I then shifted the setters and MBs to the net. I left two passers in on each side covering half the court, with the other two players serving. Again, a passer rotated out to go serve after two good passes. At the tail end I added in a pipe attack.

I then shifted that into Speedball Winners with fixed setters and MBs. This time the setters were back row to work on the timing with their transitions. We finished with Bingo-Bango-Bongo. I mainly did that to work on Rotation 1 when we’re in transition after reception (so the OH in 2 and OPP in 4), but we did all the rotations.

Tuesday
I met with the team for about 15 minutes before training to talk about my analysis of the video from our last match. We talked about looking to get kills more out of our good passes and digs (mainly about speeding up the offense) and in better dealing with things when we’re out of system. In the case of the latter the focus was on bettering the ball and getting our back row attackers more active. We also talked a bit about improving our block/defense, in particular with regards to how the defenders in 6 play.

Just one of the RIG players in training this session, plus our part-time MB. After warm-ups and pre-hab exercises I had the player do some partner 2-touch pepper over the net to warm-up their shoulders. That was followed by a variation of passing triplets. In this case, to work on proper platform angles I had them dig/pass down balls coming at them down the line (1 to 5, 5 to 1) to properly redirect them toward target in Zone 2.5.

My American OH had an idea of a drill to do to work on block positioning and penetration, so I let her run that next. Basically, it was liberos hitting from boxes at the pins (they tried from the ground, but they were having to hit upwards too much) against a 3-person block with the MB closing to double and the off blocking moving into defense. The blockers got a point for a stuff block or a touch that could be played by one of the 3 involved. They went until they got 50 points.

From there I broke the group in half to work on offense. The OHs and Liberos were on one court with one setter. I had one of each serving, with the other two OHs and the other Libero in serve reception working on faster sets. The OHs rotated on 5 good kills and at the same time the Liberos swapped.

On the other court I had the MBs and OPPs with the other setter. They worked on middle and right side attacks with the OPPs passing coach-tossed balls. There were 3 MBs, so one was the attacker for 5 good balls, while one was the opposing middle and the other the opposing OH for blocking purposes. After the OHs on the other court each got 1 round of 5 good sets, I had the setters switch courts. The MB/OPP group came up with some interesting play options that are worth developing further.

We finished up with 22 v 22 to get both serve receive and transition work in. The games were quite competitive, so we only got through rotations 1, 4, and 6. I had the MBs rotate so one of them was playing defense each round on the team with only one OH.

Wednesday
This was a very technically oriented session with just the core group. After warming up I had them do some positional digging in groups. Basically, on a rotating basis each player dug a ball from 2 and one from 4 (hitters on boxes), with a group target of net good digs (-1 for overpasses). We went through positions 5, 1, and 6. Then we did combined digging of cross-court balls for defenders in 1 and 2 and 5 and 6 to work on seams and tips.

I then split the team to have the setters and MBs working on the timing of 1s. The others did serving and passing. Two players passed half the court. There was a target and the other three players serving. The passing pair needed to get to +20. They got 2 points for a 3 pass, 1 point for a 2 pass, -1 for an ace or overpass.

The last exercise was a 5 v 5 game. One side had an OH, a Setter, a Libero and both MBs. The Setter was back row, leaving one MB to block in 2. The other side had one OH and a RS hitter front row, with a Setter, Libero, and OH back row. I coach served every ball to the no-MB side. The focus was on faster balls to the pin hitters, plus pipes. The receiving team got a point if they got a kill or caused the defensive team to dig 1 ball, otherwise the defensive team got the point. They played out the rallies, but I scored only based on the first attack. We played 3 games to 10 to rotate the OHs through, also moving the setters and liberos around.

The players said they liked the training – all the technical work. Honestly, though, a big part of its motivation was that they worked really hard the night before and had weight training immediately prior to practice this night. If we’d pushed things with another high intensity game-play session they probably wouldn’t have lasted very long – at least at the level of focus and effort I’d want to see.

Thursday
Our Saturday opposition (Gislaved) played a match on Tuesday night. After getting it downloaded, I created a trimmed version (no timeouts, no between set breaks, etc.) and then focused on just the 2nd set when Gislaved was nearest the camera. I made some notations in the video, then posted it up for the players to watch (with a link to see the full one if they wanted).

This time I went back to focusing on how we can attack their block/defense. For the last match I isolated the swings of their major attackers, but this time around I wanted to focus on what we’re doing. Basically, a return to the approach I was taking before.

Friday
No no returning guest players, meaning only had 9 in training (see Other stuff for the reason it wasn’t 10). After warm-up and pre-hab and some ball-handling I had the players do back court winners 3s to work on both back row attacking and defending against it as we’d likely see plenty of it on Saturday. I then ran a servers vs passers game with the OHs and RS going against the Setters, MBs, and Libero.

Basically, the rest of the session was spent running through the rotations in a 5 v 4 fashion. On the 4 side I had the Setter front row along with a MB and OH, and an OH in 6. On the 5 side the Setter was back row with the Libero and 3 front row attackers. The OH on the 4 side served to start each sequence. After that rally ended, I gave the 4 side a free ball. Rallies were played out where possible, but the scoring was based based on the first attack (kill or + attack = point for the receiving team, otherwise point for the defending side, except for a covered block which was no point for either side). We played games to 10, flipping the Setter and RS player on the 5 side, and switching the back row OH from the 4 side with the OH from the 5 side. The teams were set so they matched rotation personnel.

The offense run during that last phase was quite aggressive as we started working the OHs in some different faster sets.

Saturday
Match Day started with team photos at 10:00. We did them once in September for league website purposes, but this was actually the official shooting with all the right numbers, etc. That was followed by our hour of serve & pass at 11:00, then team lunch following. The match was at 15:00, with Gislaved in town for the first of our 4 matches against them this regular season. You may recall they were the first team we played in pre-season.

As seems to be the case so often, we really got on top of the other team early in the match. Our serving pressure really put Gislaved off their game – even forcing their best hitter to be subbed out in both sets 1 and 2 – resulting in 25-15 and 25-20 scorelines. Set 3 was one of those weird ones that happens at times. They got on top of us early and we never could claw back. It ended up 15-25. The fourth set was pretty tight, with some back and forth momentum swings. We were able to pull it out 25-22 in the end, though.

The funny thing is our passing was markedly better in sets 3 and 4 than in the first two. We sided out better in the weaker passing sets than in the better ones, though. We struggled with block positioning when we played this team the first time and did so again once more. Yes, we got 9 blocks, but that’s actually a bit below our average.

Thoughts and observations
Overall the energy and intensity level was good. We did some interesting new things on offense in terms of diversifying the attack and going faster. I still think our defense could be much better in certain respects, though being better in the block is part of that.

Other stuff
One of my liberos spoke with me before training on Tuesday. She’s going to be starting a new job in the not-too-distant future. The result is that she probably won’t be staying with the team. In fact, on Friday at about midday she let the team know via the Facebook group that she wouldn’t be training that night or attending Saturday’s match. Surprise! That sees us down to 9 for the core squad, which is tough. I need to look at options for getting more alternative bodies involved.

Old school analysis

October 28, 2015 John Forman Volleyball Coaching 2 comments

In modern volleyball there are any number of applications and technological tools that can be applied to coaching. DataVolley, for example, is widely used for statistical and video analysis. There is also VolleyMetrics, for those who want to outsource this time of work. These things cost money, though, and not everyone has that – or the staff to put it to use. That means sometimes you have to revert to old school methods.

That’s what I found myself doing once when I coached Svedala in Sweden. I wanted to do a thorough analysis of a recent match. It was a disappointing loss. We were up 2-0 and had leads late in both Sets 3 and 4. Not having a better option at hand, I went through the video. I wrote out the rotation, pass/dig rating, set, attack type, and result for every non-serve ball played over the net by us and the opposition. I then plugged that into a spreadsheet so I could break it down.

Yeah. Fun stuff! :-/

We did have official match stats, though they are of dubious value – especially the first version of them. We also used SoloStats on the bench during matches to track serve reception stats and examine rotation performance. I needed, though, to be able to drill down and cross-section things to get a better handle on what we’re doing well and what not so well.

I hoped we could eventually come up with a better way to do all this, but it was a small club with a limited budget. More or less, I had to go that route for all our matches where I wanted more detailed analysis.

What were my findings, you ask?

The big one was we needed to be much better out of system. We got kills only 8% of the time and it was either errors or blocks on 20% of the plays. And therein is the value of statistics – even very basic or hand tallied ones. They give you ideas for things to look at more closely or to spend more time on.

Coaching Log – Oct 26, 2015

October 26, 2015 John Forman 2015-16 Svedala Volleybollklubb 2 comments

This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log for 2015-16.

Generally speaking, the weekend league results went probably about as might be expected. Gislaved won 3-0 over the youngsters at RIG and Lindesberg won 3-0 over Sollentuna. We might have expected Örebro to have a harder time with Engleholm than a 3-0, but they seemed to be able to contain Engelholm’s main attacker. This was of interest to us as we played the latter on Tuesday.

Those results have the league table looking very top-heavy, though Hylte/Halmstad and Svedala remain on top despite playing one fewer match.

Click for full-sized version

Obviously, it’s too early to make any real strong forecasts, but the distribution of results so far does tend to suggest it will be a 6-team race for the four places available in the Gran Prix. Those spots are based on the first half of league play, which basically means up to the December break.

As noted, Engelholm was on our schedule for Tuesday – at their place. This is one of the domestic matches which also counts toward standing in the Oresundliga. A win would see us go top of both that and the Elitserie.

Monday
Had a sick player, so only 9 healthy bodies in training. I allowed the players to determine a warm-up exercise to do. They opted for a new variation on volley tennis. From there the focus was on preparation for Tuesday’s match, but mainly from the perspective of working on long-term developmental needs as well.

After getting their shoulders warmed up for serving, I had them do some serving against a 4-person reception formation, which is what we were expecting to primarily see in Tuesday’s match. I used boxes to have them work on hitting the seams.

From there we did some serving and passing with one setter and a MB in to have the latter working on hitting the corners. This is something that we observed would likely be successful against Tuesday’s opposition, but is something I’ve wanted to get our MBs better at generally anyway.

After that we did a cooperative cross-court drill with the attacking from 2. I had the two MBs and the libero rotating around through the setting positions on both sides. The two starting OHs stayed in 6 while the Setters and OPPs flipped back and forth between positions 1 and 2. Again, this was to work on something defensively for Tuesday, but we also could stand the work on defense on that side of the court in any case.

Next up was back court attack Winners 3s. The last part of the session was a team serve reception through all 6 rotations with 3 blockers. Myself and the team manager were the servers. The focus was on attacking to certain areas of the court.

Overall, I think it was a good preparation session for the next day’s match.

Tuesday
Really tough match. We went up 2-0 in the match, and were up late in both sets 3 and 4, but ended up losing. A case could be made that we didn’t deserve on our own merits to have the 2-0 lead, but the other team made a lot of mistakes – especially in serve – to keep us in contention. At different points they swapped both their setter and libero. We definitely struggled to contain their strong OPP but my feeling overall was that we tightened up at the end of the 3rd and 4th sets and were playing not to lose.

The official match stats are a joke, so I can’t really use them for much in the way of analysis. Our bench stats point to major struggles scoring in Rotations 1 and 6 (using the international rotation labeling system based on where the setter is). In prior matches were were consistently above 50% overall, but this time only Rotation 5 was that high. That was our starting rotation, so it’s a positive from that perspective (and we sided out at 77%). Those other two rotations were below 30% in terms of point scoring, and in the case of Rotation 1 we sided out less than 50% as well. Despite passing only 1.80 for the match as a team, we still managed to side out at 57%. Admittedly, that was boosted by all the opposition’s missed serves.

I’m going to need to really go over the video and re-stat the match myself (probably at least the other Elitserie matches we’ve played as well) to do a thorough analysis . Generally speaking, though, we continue to suffer from a lack of composure. There were a number of inexplicable errors and poor decisions.

Despite the loss, we still temporarily went to the top of the standings in the Elitserie on the basis of earning a point for winning two sets. We also got a point in the Oresundliga, where we now sit 3rd.

Wednesday
I sat the team down before training to talk about the previous night’s match. It was a positive, productive meeting. There was a sense of anger about losing, but no one was down about it. Everyone was eager to move forward and get better. I started it off by getting the observations of the players who were on the bench. Communication and defensive responsibility issues were mentioned. We talked about playing not to lose and getting too conservative in crunch time.

One of the more interesting parts of the discussion was on ways to improve training. There was talk about trying to incorporate more positional relationships in the game-like exercises – meaning making the line-ups more closely approximate match-day rotations. The issue there is not overworking players and trying to give them opportunities to be challenged in all their roles, which is the tricky part of having such a limited roster. I need to give the MBs breaks and I need to give my OHs the chance to play back row as well as front row.

We also talked about incorporating more drills in training. Not surprisingly, the desire for “more reps” motivated this from the player perspective. In parallel, though, my American OH expressed her feeling that the load of the game play exercises was too high for her – that by the latter parts of training she was telling our setter not to give her the ball. The players may not have realized this, but we have actually been doing more drills in training since the season started. The point on the game-play load is one I need to think more about. In particular, it occurs to me that perhaps the small-sided stuff I usually do before we shift to full-team games could be dropped or cut back – or counted as part of the game-play portion of training if I’m using them to focus on specific elements.

The actually training after the meeting was meant to mainly be recovery oriented – work on a few technical things and generally keep the bodies active. After they warmed-up and played a bit of volley tennis, I split out the setters to do some reps. For the American setter it was to work on the consistency of her sets for the OHs – each of which needs a slightly different height. For the young Swedish setter it was about working on her mechanics, in particular on her back sets. While that was going on, the rest of the players played 2 v 2 games of 2-touch.

After that, I brought everyone together for what was a serving and passing focused game at it’s core, but with a couple other elements. Each side had a MB and Setter front row, with an OH, Libero, and OPP in the back row. The teams alternated serving. The primary objective was to run the MBs on front and back quicks, but if that wasn’t on, they could attack out of the back row. We thus had the passers focused on getting good passes so the MBs could run their attacks, and the middles had a chance to attack against a solid 3-person defense to work on finding the gaps. The energy and attitudes were good. The passers did well, resulting in the middles getting some really nice swings.

Friday
I had planned for a few weeks to give everyone this day off. We don’t have a match until next Saturday and for the most part haven’t had more than a single day off at a time since we started training. The Swedish players primarily work or go to school, so for them it was a break to do some of their own things. For the Americans it was a few clear days to do whatever (they had talked about taking a trip) – and to allow aching bodies to recover some. I told them after Wednesday’s training to make sure they stayed active so that Monday’s training wasn’t some kind of shock to the system.

Thoughts and observations
Losses are great motivators for change. I’ve been feeling like in some ways we were winning despite our performance. To a certain degree, that was even true in the first part of Tuesday’s match when we won the first set in large part because the other team made so many errors. I’ve identified some of the broader issues in need of focus before (e.g. lack of composure), so in this case it’s not about a major change in concentration.

That said, I do feel like I need to really map out where I want the team to be going into the play-offs. Then it becomes a question of getting buy-in from the team and plotting the path toward that destination.

Other stuff
I spent a lot of the latter part of the week trying to sort through video and statistical analysis options, applications, and efforts. We have access to a very basic version of DataVolley (Media) which has no video integration. Part of what I was trying to do was learn about the options we might be able to use to overcome that and to get to the point where I can do a more specific analysis of different segments of play. Because of my internet access limitations, it took me a LONG time getting the match video from Tuesday downloaded so I could share it with the team and go through an do my own analysis (and eventually to pull individual player clips).

I was approached by our second team coach on Friday about using up to 6 of the first team players on a Svedala team for a national U23 tournament the first weekend of November. We have no matches then (because of said tournament), and nothing until the following Sunday, so no issue on my end. It’s up to the players if they want to take part.

Coaching Log – Oct 12, 2015

October 12, 2015 John Forman 2015-16 Svedala Volleybollklubb One comment

This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log for 2015-16.

Based on the stats from the first match, there were a couple of areas of focus I had in mind for this week’s training. One was hitting. Our kill % from the Örebro match was only 30%, and we probably need to be at 40% or better. Also, our hitting error % was right around 18% (not counting blocked attacks), which is too high. It probably needs to be around 10%. These targets are based on last year’s statistics. A big part of this is increasing our effectiveness out of the middle. We only had 6 kills on 30 swings, which is way too low for that position.

By comparison, the official passing numbers look quite good, with a nearly 50% perfect rating. Our bench numbers have it at less than 40%, though, but one match with the vast majority of balls going to one player isn’t really enough to go on. That will remain an area of focus regardless.

The flip side of that is serving. We could be doing better there in terms of focusing on our targets, hitting seams, etc. Örebro is listed as having a 55% perfect rate, which no doubt is at least as inflated as our own, but still goes to show that we could put more pressure on the opposition.

Monday
I got the player’s impressions on Saturday’s match and shared my own at the start of training. We also walked through the 6 serve reception rotations to look at ways we can change things up if needed, and took a look at the rotation defense. That’s something we’ll probably do some work on in the future to have available in case we want to use it.

The talking and walk-through ate up some time in an already shorter session (Monday’s are 2 hours). I wasn’t worried about it, though, as I wouldn’t have wanted to go very long anyway since my plan was to put a heavy focus on the MBs.

After warm-ups I had them play the Amoeba serving game to work a bit on serving accuracy and to get the competitive juices flowing. That resulted in a discussion about over-thinking things because they were making assumptions about rules that were never stated or intended, which came back around later in training in a different context.

I had them play Winners after that, but with a new wrinkle. This time I had both the setters and middles be fixed. The rest of them were split up into teams of 2, so the final result was that they played 4s. I also had them run it on a narrow court to encourage rallies and to force the hitters to find more ways of scoring. About midway through I had the MBs switch to work with the other setter.

From there we progressed to a 5 v 5 playing 3 up and 2 back (Zone 6 was designated as out of bounds). In this game only the MBs could score. They got a point by either getting a kill or a block, or by the other MB making an error. If someone other than the MB scored, that team earned the right to receive serve. The first game had the setters in 1 for the purposes of serve reception.

What I ended up observing was that balls were being forced to the MB in positions where their chances of getting a kill were virtually nil. Again, the players were over-thinking as I never said only the MBs could attack. We talked about the decision-making and how sometimes the better play was to not go for the point. After that, I moved the setters to 4 for serve reception and had the MBs switch teams. The second set ended up being much more competitive.

I had them do some target serving to finish training.

I didn’t take any stats on it, but I felt like the focus on running the middle attack had the passers more locked in. It also served to force a bit more creativity and invention in the attack, and might have provided a few ideas for use in matches. That was the point, so good outcome from that perspective.

Tuesday
We had a couple of guest players for training to bring our number up to 12, so I took the opportunity to work in some 6 v 6 activities. After warming-up and doing some ball-handling I had them play Speedball. As with Monday, though, I had the setters and MBs fixed, so it was 4 teams of two playing with them.

We then moved on to a combination of games. The primary one was Baseball, which we played through all 6 rotations. That was to work on transition play. Because I only have two MBs and they would have to play front row all the time, after each inning I pulled them out to serve for a 3 point wash-game. It featured alternating serves to get a bit more serve reception work, with the winner of the initial rally getting a second ball. If they won that rally as well, they got the point. I saw a lot of good defense in those games.

After doing some target serving, I finished up with a couple rounds of Scramble to work on staying focused on the job at hand (letting mistakes go) and developing more calm during scrappy periods in matches.

Wednesday
Back to the core group. After a physically demanding session on Tuesday, and having weight training beforehand, this was a somewhat lower intensity practice. It actually started with a discussion about the stats from Saturday’s match. They were substantially adjusted at the league level. Our team hitting efficiency jumped up to .268 with a near 40% kill rate. Although the numbers for our middle attack were better, they still weren’t where they need to be, so I wasn’t operating under a false evaluation in my earlier sessions.

On the flip side, our passing numbers went totally the other way. Our perfect pass percentage was 11%. The thing about passing numbers, though, is they are heavily reliant on the characteristics of the setter. My suspicion is that the revised figures were strict interpretation rather than reality based. Regardless, we’ll be focusing on our own bench stats for consistency’s sake.

After our usual warm-up game, we did some positional digging in pairs. That was followed by serving and passing with setters and MBs getting some work on their connections. From there we went to back court attack winners 3s, and then Speedball with fixed setters. The remainder of the session was 5 v 5 play using a wash game. We played 3 front, 2 back. One side had defenders in 5 and 6 and the other had them in 1 and 5. The empty spaces were declared out. I rotated players around so they were attacking and defending in both ways.

Friday
We had a guest male player to get us up to 11 for this training, which actually was in our Monday gym because of a community event in our main hall. After warm-ups, we did Continuous Cross-Court Digging to keep working on digging technique and general defensive mentality. I’ve seen definite improvements in both areas of late, particularly in the mentality.

To carry the defensive stuff over into game play while also starting to prepare for game play later, we next played back court attack Winners 3s with fixed setters. That then shifted to narrow court Winners 4s with fixed setters and middles to continue the week’s work on developing our middle offense.

From there we did a pair of alternating games. First was Bingo-Bango-Bongo to work on transition play. Because of the strain that puts on the MBs, though, after each round of that we shifted the MBs into a serving and defense roll and played a wash game of 5 v 5 with no middle blockers. The session finished with a regular game of 5 v 6.

Sunday
Our match was at 15:00, after the second team played theirs. It was against Sollentuna, which is another one of the northern teams in the league. My review of their match from last weekend pointed to struggles in serve reception and a very shallow defense which made them vulnerable to deep attacks. The feeling was that the main focus should be on serving effectively and putting up a good block against their strong OH.

Unfortunately for the home crowd, it didn’t turn out to be the most exciting match. Aside from a couple of tricky patches, we were the dominant side in a 3-0 win. As expected, Sollentuna struggled in serve reception, which resulted in a lot of high outside sets. Our block was a bit off to start, but adjusted and forced their best hitter into quite a few errors.

Thoughts and observations
We continue to get overly excited in our play. It’s getting better, but we’re still making errors of the over-aggression type – like wanting to win the match with a single swing. Need to keep working on that.

Defense generally showed good improvement over the week, especially in the commitment perspective. I’d like to see more 2-armed digging efforts, though, to improve ball control.

I’d like to see us do a little more bettering the ball at times.

Other stuff
I finished up with initial individual meetings this week, which I think went pretty well. I could see immediate effects from some of the discussions in training during the week.

The second team coach asked to use two of our non-starters in their match, which was before ours. Both got a lot of playing time, especially since the match went 5.

Coaching Log – Sep 28, 2015

September 28, 2015 John Forman 2015-16 Svedala Volleybollklubb No comments

This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log for 2015-16.

Here’s how things went over the final week of pre-season:

Monday
I had one player message me on Sunday night saying she’d miss the first couple trainings of the week because she was back home in Stockholm with her family having a think about her situation because of some stuff going on off-the-court. Not exactly the sort of thing a coach wants to be getting after the fact. I told her in the future that I wanted to hear about this sort of thing ahead of time so that maybe I could help, and if not it would at least not be a surprise (a view echoed by the team manager). Needless to say, this went to the top of my list of things to talk with the team about that night.

We actually talked about a couple of different things at the start of training. Most of it was related to Saturday’s match. I let the players talk about what they thought and then added my own impressions. The two main ones were becoming a more aggressive, committed team on defense and making an adjustment to how we do hitting in the pre-match warm-up to encourage more reaching and hitting high rather than hitting balls right over the top of the net.

Only 9 players for training. I did a mix of slower tempo and faster tempo activities. It started with 21, which is on the slow side. The players struggled to complete it and I eventually stopped the drill to talk with them about the need for focus on skill execution in that sort of circumstance. In the end, only one of the three groups finished before I moved on to new things.

I introduced the Belly Drill next. After going through a non-scoring period to get them familiar with how it works, I tried something I’ve never done before. We did a kind of negative scoring system where a team earned a point for losing a rally. The first team to 21 ended the drill. We did back row attacking only, so there were some lengthy rallies. That made for a slightly longer game than I had planned, but it was fine. I liked how it played out in terms of encouraging a lot of scrambling on defense and forcing players to try to problem solve winning rallies. I also liked that it gave me an opportunity to give players a second ball right away after they’ve made an error.

We slowed things down again after that and did some serving and passing. Initially, I had the setters working with the middles off the passes. After that I also rotated the pin hitters through.

The last 10 minutes was spent playing Winners 3s on a narrow court.

Tuesday
Had 10 again for this training. After pre-hab, some partner pepper, and a serving warm-up, I did a serving and passing drill. On each side there was a setter, a pair of passers from the group of OHs and the Libero, plus a target for the setter and a server from the MB and RS group. I had the passers in 5 and 6 with the server first going from 1 and then from 5. The initial server did 10 good balls, then swapped with the target. The objective was to keep the passers working on communication, while giving the other players a chance to work on their own skills.

From there I had them do Speedball 2s (with fixed setters) on a narrow court as a game play warm-up. The rest of training was work on Rotations 2 and 5 (setter in 2, setter in 5), which were ones I identified from the rotation scoring stats of Saturday’s match as likely needing some attention. I did this through a series of mini games to 7 points with one side in each of the rotations. The Rotation 2 side had a libero back row with the setter, so they played 1 & 6 defense. The Rotation 5 side had a MB and OH back row playing in 5 & 6. I had the teams only attack in the direction of the defenders. Each mini game featured only on side serving. They played two of those games, then I rotated the 3 MBs, 3 OHs, and 2 setters alternatively. I think that means we played 5 or 6 pairs of games in total.

It was a pretty loose session in terms of the players being pretty relaxed and having fun (and the watching parents having a few laughs), but I still did a fair amount of coaching in terms of stopping things quickly at times to make a point or to talk through a positioning question.

Wednesday
Only 9 at training again this time. We share the gym with the second/Juniors team for about 30 minutes these nights as they wrap up their session. Because the players have basically just come from weight training, there’s not much need for a real warm-up. Because we’re on a side court with limited space on the ends and one side, what we can do is constrained. I’ve taken to beginning things with a game – a 2-ball, doubles version of bagger tennis (volley tennis). Basically, each team has someone underhand serve to the other side so that two balls are in play at the same time, with two players on each side. The players love it and get quite competitive.

After that, still working on the side court, we did did team cross-court pepper. Having 9 players with just one setter, I set it up to the setter was fixed on one side for the first half, then switched to the other side. That means the other side had a player rotating through setting. I also had fixed liberos in position 5.

My original plan was to play Winners 3s on the full court once the other group was done, or maybe the Belly Drill. We did play Winners, but with a twist. We grabbed some of the Juniors and mixed them in with the squad to make teams of four or five. The younger players could mainly only stay for about 15 minutes, so that was how long we let it run. It was a good, positive environment.

After that I had the players work through rotations 2, 3, and 6. With only 9 bodies, I had to set it up as MB, RS, OH, and L on each side. I set the mini games up so that one team served each ball, and the receiving team had the setter. After the initial ball, I then hit a down ball to the libero of the serving side. Along with working on those particular rotations, these games also involved a lot of work on out-of-system attacking.

I was done with what I wanted to do after about 90 minutes, so I gave the players the opportunity to work on some other stuff. They ended up doing a bunch of serving and passing with the MBs doing some hitting and blocking work in conjunction. I had my young MB play around with running a front slide.

Friday
Off to Denmark to start the Time Vision Cup preseason tournament, hosted by Brøndby Volleyball Klub. The opposition for our first match was Swedish defending champions Engelholm. We’d heard they were struggling a bit in their preseason matches, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The team were looking forward to the match, though.

The tournament structure was round-robin pool play (2 pools of 4) over the first two days, with cross-over matches on Sunday. Each match was three sets to 25, regardless of results. My plan was to rotate the players more or less regardless of results. I began with what I expect to be our starting 7 in the first set, which we won fairly easily – mostly thanks to effective serving. Our young middle began the set with several points straight away, many aces, and that set the tone.

In the second set I swapped out the setter, libero, and right side positions. This set was closer, but we still won without too much difficulty. In the last set I started with the first set line-up, but brought in the second set subs midway through (except setter, as our young setter was a bit sick). We ended up dropping a close one, mainly because we struggled to get our block right against their one very strong attacker (OPP). That had me thinking about whether I should have played around with the match-ups a bit to see how it would have gone with our stronger hitting and blocking OH against her most of the time.

Saturday
This was a two match day against the two Danish teams in our pool. We got to see them play a bit before our match on Friday. Neither could really match us in terms of the power of our attack, but both were pretty scrappy. This day I had an extra MB and had my second libero mix in a bit at OH to give some players a break. What I decided to do was to go starters in the first set. In the second set I put the reserve MB in for the younger MB, and then put the younger one in for our American MB in the 3rd set. I had the two liberos split the first two sets, then switched the second one to OH for the third set and had her go in for the American OH. The two RS players each played a full set out of the first two, then about equally split time the 3rd set. The American setter set the first two sets with the young Swedish one acting as a serving sub. The latter then set the third set herself, meaning it was an All-Sweden third set for us in both matches.

Team Køge was up first. Not a particular big team, but solid on defense. They gave us some trouble and fought really hard. We won all three sets, but it was 22, 23, and 23 and we had to come from behind each set. The serving subs I used did a good job and really helped get us over the top.

Amager was the opposition in the second set. We’ll see them again in the Oresund Liga. They beat Team Køge the prior day thanks to having a bit more offense. We made pretty short work of them in the first two sets, though, mainly through strong serving. We did lose the third set 26-28, but had needed to come back to get it to even make it that close. There might have been a bit of a focus slip there, as having won all three matches already by winning the first two sets, we had already assured ourselves of being in the title match.

The interesting question is what I would have done if we hadn’t won the first two sets. My plan all along was to rotate the MBs and the OHs to give the American players a bit of a break. If we needed to win the third set I probably would have kept the American setter in, especially given that the young Swedish one was still under the weather.

Sunday
Hylte/Halmstad won the other pool, so was our opposition in Sunday’s final match. Like Engelholm, they are a team we’ll see at least 4 times during the Swedish season. We saw them play between our two matches on Saturday. The impression was that they were a good blocking team with some legit weapons in attack. I figured it would make for an interesting challenge for the team.

My approach to this one was treat it like the championship match it was in terms of playing to win, though for me it was still very much an evaluation opportunity. We again began the match with the presumed starters in, and promptly fell quickly behind. The energy wasn’t great. The players weren’t talking so much. We got blocked a couple times early. In the end we dropped that one 15-25.

I kept the same line-up to start the second set, but rather than starting with our setter in 5, I spun the rotation and had her start in 3 to get our stronger OH at the net. We ended up winning easily, 25-19. The rotation change may have been a factor in terms of favorable match-ups, but I think more important was the players talking through adjustments, who to go after in serve and attack, etc.

We were pretty in control for most of third set as well, using the same line-up and rotation from the second set. I did call a timeout at I think 21-20 when we’d let them creep back on us, but we ended up winning 25-22. We ended up with 15 blocks in the match, which is more than we had all of Saturday.

I would have liked to have won the first two sets again to allow me to give the back-up players a full set in the third, but I think getting slapped around in the first set actually may end up paying off in terms of getting the team to be more engaged from the start. I used all three of the bench players in at least two sets each (the first went so fast I didn’t really get a chance) and they were all effective, which is good.

Thoughts and observations
It’s always nice to get the season off to a winning start, especially when you know you aren’t playing anywhere near where you’ll be later if the players stay healthy and all that. My big focus in preseason was in getting the players working together as a unit, which they definitely did during the tournament. Now the focus will shift to working on developing some specific technical abilities, improving and expanding our defensive tactics, and refining our offensive capabilities.

Other stuff
Saturday is our first league match of the year against Örebro. We haven’t played them, so our scouting will have to be from player recollections and some video of them playing in preseason that is apparently available.

The team manager was with me on the bench for all the matches using SoloStats 1-2-3 on my iPad mini to keep track of passing and the rally-ending plays. That doesn’t give us the figures to come up with something like hitting percentages, but it does produce a fair amount of useful information on performance and rotational analysis. I’ve played around with it before, but this is the first time it’s gotten serious use. We’ll have proper stats during the matches moving forward, but it might be worth keeping in use anyway. We’ll see.

What is this statistic really measuring?

August 13, 2015 John Forman Volleyball Coaching 15 comments

Mark from At Home on the Court once posed a question on Facebook. It went like this:

What does number of transition attacks divided by number of serves measure? If anything.

After a bit of discussion, Mark made the following clarification:

So now I have removed service errors and direct block points. I am left with transition attack attempts divided by number of times the attack gets past the block. What am I measuring now?

So we have this formula:

Transition Attacks / (Opponent Attacks – Blocks – Hitting Errors)

My response at the time was to say that broadly speaking you are measuring dig %. After all, you must dig the ball to get a transition swing. If you consider Transition Attacks to be something other than simply playing the 3rd ball over the net, then you are effectively deriving a “good” dig %. The first requirement of attacking back at the opposition is a settable dig (or, in theory, hittable on 2).

I’d be curious to hear what you would say in response to Mark. Beyond that, though, I wanted to point out the importance with regards to statistics of actually understanding what you’re measuring. It might not be the same as what you think you’re measuring.

Tags:
volleyball statistics

Page 2 of 4«123 4 »

Coaching Volleyball

Sharing volleyball coaching insights and ideas

Tag Archive for volleyball statistics

Kill percentage off perfect pass

Possible paths for volleyball research

Your mandate and situation influences your coaching approach

Coaching Log – Nov 2, 2015

Old school analysis

Coaching Log – Oct 26, 2015

Coaching Log – Oct 12, 2015

Coaching Log – Sep 28, 2015

What is this statistic really measuring?

Recent Posts

Website Question or Comment?

Coaching Volleyball

Sharing volleyball coaching insights and ideas

Tag Archive for volleyball statistics

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Most Popular Items This Week

Recent Posts

Website Question or Comment?