Beach Week: Dig Locations

Dig - Create - Convert

This week is Beach Week at Smarter Volley. I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the fourth week to the beach game. If you are purely here for indoor volleyball, you might want to skip this one.

Earlier this week I broke down one of the women’s semifinal matches at the recent FIVB Beach World Championships. And then we took at look at some digging technique from that match. Today we’ll look at digging locations, where these digs took place.

Like our previous Beach Week charting exercise, the purpose of this demonstration is less about global takeaways from one match and more about the ways you can start investigating this for your own teams.

If you’re going to chart your own digging, here’s a few things to keep in mind:

First Ball or Trans

The above chart contains only first ball digs. In general, I find charting the first ball defense to be more valuable, since it’s a more controlled, intentional play. I think there’s value in looking at everything, so I’m not saying there’s no value in looking at Trans, I’m just saying that I think you get less concrete evidence and more noise when you chart trans. When I’m trying to build an offense, I start with the first ball, and I do the same when analyzing defense.

One Hitter or Both

This chart contains both hitters, from both teams. So there’s a lot of noise on there. But what it does give you is a less hitter-specific feel for where balls are attacked on the court. So this is more general information for defenders. If you want to narrow in on defensive strengths and weaknesses, this starts to give you an idea. But at some point, you also want to separate defense v left-side players and defense v right-side players. You may see that your defender goes to the right well but not the left. Maybe she’s good at picking up the cutshot from one side, but not the other. Etc. Charting in this way might reveal some mechanical pieces that you need to address in training.

With Block Or Pulling

This chart is all digs made by the defender, excluding pulling situations. One is not better or worse than the other. The chart is going to look different when you have the puller up; likely with more balls hit to the interior.

Dig - Create - Convert

One thing I like to think about is the Dig - Create - Convert chain. Remember that the point of defense is not to dig the ball. It’s to create a transition attack. No ref has ever blown her whistle and awarded a team a point for a good dig. Yes, digging the ball prevents the other team from directly scoring a point. But if you don’t transition, you just end up back in the same spot. In this definition:

A Dig just prevents the other team from scoring.

A Create is a dig that leads to a transition attack.

A Convert is a dig that leads to a transition kill.

I like to visualize a defense as a chain that is equally strong. A good defensive team keeps balls off the sand, turns them into swings, and converts a lot of those swings. Different teams break down in different elements on the chain.

Some teams just don’t get enough balls up. The ball is hitting the sand on their side a lot.

Some teams dig enough balls, but they lose swings. This can be because the digs are low quality and hard to set, or because the transition setting is really bad.

Some teams get swings, but they don’t turn them into kills. This could also be because of poor dig or set quality, and it can also be due to lack of organization in transition offense.

Another thing to note is that certain balls are easier to transition than others. This is true from a global perspective (“all teams are better at transitioning ball X”) or from a micro perspective of a specific team struggling in a specific transition situation.

Imagine this chart was only a chart of defending left-side players.¹ What would the takeaways be? Pretty simple: we got a lot of digs on the angle balls, but we hardly converted any. On the flip side, we converted the high line shots when we dug them.

And in fact, that specific takeaway would be a common one in beach volleyball. High line shots, when dug, are converted at a fairly high rate. This is why teams put on “4” plays with a planned run to the angle. The cost:benefit analysis here is not, “how likely are we to get a dig?” but instead, “how likely is this play to produce a transition kill?”

In order to do that, you have to understand your Dig - Create - Convert chain.

I hope this charting exercise was helpful. Next time, we’ll analyze a World Championship match from the men’s side and see what takeaways we can get.

1. Since the left-siders got way more serves in this match, it’s not too far off, actually.