Beach Week: First Ball

Have NCAA Beach Teams Improved In The Last 2 Years?

This week is beach week. I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to the indoor side of the game and reserve the fourth week for beach-focused discussion. If you’re not interested in beach volleyball, feel free to skip this one.

I’ve talked about using the Triangle framework on the beach in previous posts. December’s Beach Week focused more on Terminal Serving, and this week I’ll talk more about the First Ball side of the game.

We know that First Ball is important in indoor volleyball. It’s important on the beach as well.

From 2019 Data

I suppose it’s kind of obvious that scoring more in First Ball leads to more wins.

When I look at that graph, I see the inflection point between 0.38 and 0.48. It’s tough to win below 38% FBK and the winning % doesn’t change too drastically above 48%. Ok, now here’s that data plotted on the same graph for the 2021 NCAA Nationals.

From 2021 Nationals

Ooook…

So clearly there’s some differences. First, some caveats. The 2019 data is a bigger sample set, and it’s not just from the National Championships. About half of it is from Nationals and half of it is from regular season matches involving comparable teams.

But still…

NCAA Beach Volleyball is an evolving sport and it wouldn’t surprise me if the level of play is still evolving year-to-year. There’s no doubt that it was hard to win at Gulf Shores in 2021 if you couldn’t kill it in First Ball. There were no matches¹ where a team won a match with less than 39% FBK. The average FBK at Gulf Shores in 2021 was 45.8% FBK.

And you see that on the chart. 44% FBK and below was almost always a loss. 48% FBK and above was almost always a win.

Standards of Play

Indoor volleyball teams have had some pretty long-established standards of play. The indoor game has been around so long and the statistical infrastrure has been around for long enough that there’s a pretty good idea of what it takes (from a statistical perspective) to win matches, to have a winning record, to win championships, etc.

A lot of beach teams are interested in the same thing, but the game is obviously evolving fast enough that the standards of play are likely to continue to evolve over the next 5-10 years as well.

I don’t have this proved statistically yet, but my intuition is that a lot of this improvement is at the backend. To my eye, if you watch 4s and 5s pairs from 2017 vs 4s and 5s pairs from 2021, there’s been a huge improvement in the depth of play.

Based on what I’ve seen at Gulf Shores, I think teams have to be bumping up around 50% FBK to have championship aspirations.

FBK And Make Them Play

I’m deliberately not saying “First Ball Sideout” because I’m excluding opponent missed serves in this equation. If I’m analyzing my team, I want to focus on what we can control, and you can’t control whether the other team misses their serve or not.

Additionally, when I say “First Ball Kill,” I’m counting this as, “number of kills divided by total receptions.” Not, “divided by total attempts.” The pass and the attack are so necessarily linked, because about 90% of the time, the player doing the passing is also doing the attacking.² So this isn’t just measuring attacking, it’s measuring passing as well. If you get aced, you can’t kill the ball. If you shank the pass and have to send it over, you can’t kill the ball.

This also leads to an even more basic concept than FBK, which is nonetheless critical for success in beach volleyball. And that’s the idea of Make Them Play.

When I was on Coach Your Brains Out, the crew paid me some nice compliments, and pretended to be envious of my homeless nomadic lifestyle. I tried to point out that I’m really just the Forrest Gump of volleyball. I’ve somehow been fortunate enough to come across some of the best people in the game. I then do a whole lot of work in order to issue recommendations like, “if we serve better, we’ll win more,” or, “if we stand in the right spot, we’ll dig more balls.” But if I use pretty pictures, people seem to be impressed.

Ohhhh, pretty!

Well, my big insight for beach volleyball (that I discussed on CYBO) is that, “if you don’t make the other team play, you will lose.” Brilliant.

To be specific, I’m going to say that you Make Them Play when they serve the ball in and you do not (a) get aced (b) give a freeballl (d)³ make a hitting error.⁴ Imagine this as a funnel where the other team puts 100 serves in at the top and you need X amount to survive these 3 filters and make it through in the form of an attack into their court.

If we put some numbers on it, it looks like this:

100 Serves in the court.

7 aces

93… non-aces⁵

10 hitting errors

83 balls going over the net⁶

4 freeballs

79 Make Them Plays (also known as “attack attempts.”)

I’ve talked about this with teams I’ve worked with. If you’re under 80% Make Them Play, your Win % looks a lot different than if you’re over 80% MTP. And the top teams at Gulf Shores were closer to 90%. So what I’m saying is: it is bad to get aced and it is also bad to make hitting errors, and if you do too much of that, it is very bad.

Revolutionary.

Do The Conditions Matter?

Of course conditions matter. This is another thing that’s always going to challenge analytics on the beach end. Gulf Shores was a pretty packed surface and the weather was mostly good. It got pretty windy during some matches. So how do you compare that to deeper sands? How do you compare Gulf Shores in May to the Norcal teams playing at home in February?

Well, you do the best you can, and then don’t overstate data that might not apply. In the NCAA beach game, things are evolving, and numbers might look different in a few more years.

But you also match things up to common sense. It’s common sense to know that Making Them Play is important. It’s common sense to know that killing the First Ball is important. The numbers help us do better triage and help us make the most of our training time.

Spend some time looking at Make Them Play the next time you’re on the sand (or in the gym) and let me know what you see.

1. Well… it’s possible there were. This sample contains about 80% of the matches from Gulf Shores because I didn’t get every match recorded. Come on people, send me that video!

2. Of course, some teams go over on 2 more often, but overall the rate of on-2 attacks is about 10% in NCAA beach volleyball.

3. Option c kept becoming the © symbol. Come on Substack, knock it off.

4. Specifically an unforced hitting error. I count “getting blocked” as “making them play,” because blocking requires the other team to have done something.

5. We really need a better word to sum that up. Any suggestions?

6. Really struggling for terms here…