Beach Week: NCAA Championship Triangles
And a comparison to FIVB Worlds
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.
The theme of this current block of Beach Weeks is Winter Wrap-Up. Each week I’ll take a look at 1 of 3 major championships : FIVB Men’s World Championships, FIVB Women’s World Championships, and the NCAA National Championship. In particular, I’m looking at what the Triangle relationships were in these different competitions and seeing if we can draw any trends.
2022 NCAA Beach National Championships
First, let’s look at some numbers:
A few notes about these numbers:
This is a per-set basis, but I stopped when a team reached 21, because I wanted to keep that frame of reference. So there’s a few in the data set where a team won 21-20.
I only included sets that were 21-17 or closer. I wanted to keep the analysis to close sets, to see where the thin margins of victory were.
Everything here is from 4s and 5s pairs only. There are FIVB-caliber players at the 1s pairs, so I want to separate things to allow some distinction. This summer, I hope to gather some data from juniors beach competitions to start to build the same juniors → NCAA → FIVB trend chains that I’ve done indoors.
With that, let’s turn to the pieces of the Triangle.
Terminal Serving
Winning teams had a small edge here.
Winning Team Terminal Serving +/- By Competition
+0.4 Women’s World Championship
+0.3 NCAA Championship
-0.6 Men’s World Championship
I have some worries about the FIVB sample set, because they are a bit more biased toward the championship teams. If Sorum/Mol win everything, then over time the data gets a little biased toward their style of play. But also… it’s good to study how the dominant teams get dominant!
That is why I like to provide a mix of these sorts of analysis throughout the arc of this Substack. My previous analysis of Team Profiles in NCAA indoor touches on that. As a wise friend said as we were listening and discussion the recent CYBO discussion:
I think understanding averages is important… as long as you also look at variation around averages. I think it’s good to see what the typical differentials are in, for example, Terminal Serving. I also think it’s good to see how tightly winning and losing teams get clustered around that average. As track coach Adarian Barr likes to say, “study the freaks.” If a team is winning a lot despite getting crushed in one area of the game, I want to know about that. And if another team is riding that area of the game to lots of wins, I also want to know about that.
First Ball
Not as big of a factor here!
10.1 Average First Ball Points
10.4 Winning Team First Ball Points
9.9 Losing Team First Ball Points
0.5 Average Winner-Loser Differential
In fact, the differential here was not much bigger than Terminal Serving.
NOW… also remember that the conditions in Rome were pretty good, while the first day of Gulf Shores was played in stormy conditions. The total amount of Terminal Serving wasn’t too different between FIVB Women (3.6 per set) and NCAA (3.9 per set), but it’s something to come in mind.
But still, pretty interesting to see.
Winning Team First Ball +/- By Competition
+1.3 Women’s World Championship
+1.3 Men’s World Championship
+0.5 NCAA Championship
Overall, the total amount of First Ball kills/blocks/errors declined from FIVB Men → FIVB Women → NCAA Women, as you might expect. There are more errors in NCAA and fewer in FIVB Men. There are more blocks and kills in FIVB Men and fewer blocks and kills in NCAA. FIVB Women are in between.
All of that is pretty intuitive. It’s not a huge change, but you wind up with a higher rate of continues in NCAA. Which leads to the final side of the Triangle:
Transition
Let’s look at Transition numbers for the NCAA:
5.7 Average Transition Points
6.7 Winning Team Transition Points
4.9 Losing Team Transition Points
1.8 Average Winner-Loser Differential
And let’s just see how it compares:
Winning Team Transition +/- By Competition
+1.9 Men’s World Championship
+1.8 NCAA Championship
+0.8 Women’s World Championship
So here’s one of the few things we’ve studied that aren’t in a clear trendline from NCAA → FIVB Women → FIVB Men.
And again, let’s take the caveats that this is one competition, it can be influenced by the specific teams in the sample size, etc. However, I think it’s clear that Transition is the biggest gap in NCAA volleyball between winning and losing teams.
Winning Team +/- By Aspect, NCAA Championship
+0.3 Terminal Serving
+0.5 First Ball
+1.8 Transition
As I mentioned last week on the indoor side, Transition is downside of other two aspects. Tough serving sets up Transition opportunities. Preventing the other team from scoring in First Ball sets up Transition opportunities. And so on. But still, 37% of kills in the NCAAs came in Transition. You might want to dedicate at least that much training time to Transition attacking. In my experience, players take many more First Ball swings at practice.
Finally, another concept I’ve been studying is the idea of Good Zeroes. I’ve touched on this concept a little bit in other articles. But what I want to dive into more is not just the Transition Win %, but Transition Win % when you serve v when you receive. If you win a lot of Transition rallies when you serve, you probably are digging with good quality; you’re creating chances to score off that dig. If you win a lot of Transition rallies when you receive, it’s becuase you’re getting dug, but not with good quality. You’re getting the ball back with a chance to score.
I’ve seen this factor be critical for some teams, so I want to see how well it generalizes.
More on this topic soon…