Beach Week: Offensive Factors Part 1

Plus some 2nd-Step Tempo video for the indoor coaches

I’ve been a little off the typical SmarterVolley content cycle, where I usually reserve the 4th week of every month as Beach Week and tailor some content toward beach coaches and especially dual-surface coaches. With the NCAA just having its fall Pairs Championship and the spring season coming up before we know it, I want to get back in the routine of Beach Week content.

But also, for the indoor-only coaches, I want to make sure you don’t cancel your subscriptions during Beach Weeks still give you some value, so check out the In The Gym link on the main page nav bar at the top. I’m in the gym now working with a club program, so I’m posting some practice plans and whiteboard pictures there. And at the bottom of this article I have a video explaining some 2nd-Step Tempo concepts. So, if you’re only interested in indoor stuff, feel free to scroll on down to the bottom.

And so, we proceed.

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Beach Analytics

It’s been a while since I talked about the core Triangle concepts as they apply to beach volleyball. In case you’re new:

Beach Triangles
Serve/Pass with Betsi
First Ball
Transition

There’s more in the archives, but that will definitely get you started if you want to catch up.

This summer, I used a large dataset to create Offensive Profiles of NCAA Women’s indoor volleyball teams. Doing this same sort of analysis on the beach side is trickier because there’s just not nearly the data-set and sample size, and analytics aren’t quite as standardized. I’m hopeful that the explosion of Balltime on the scene might lead to the ability to create big datasets to do more analysis on the beach side.

I’m in the process of redesigning my match analysis worksheets for beach to be able to handle the data I’m recording and analyzing with Balltime. Right now I’m in a bit of half-and-half mode where I watch the video on balltime, because the automatic rally tagging cuts down the time of watching a video manually, but I’m still recording some of my stats with good old pencil and paper. No seriously…

And some people think I’m a tech guy…

Part of this is just a time crunch issue. I’ve worked with LMU Beach volleyball for years, so I wanted to be able to analyze fall matches and practices, but with the Athletes Unlimited season shifting to the fall, I just didn’t have the time to build out all new worksheets and export from Balltime.

Balltime has a pretty good setup of statistics that you can pull, especially with the ability to add filters to your stats page. For example, you can pretty easily filter only FBSO attacking to get your attack efficiency there.

The thing about Balltime is that it’s more oriented around video and analyzing an individual match, rather than large data-set statistical analysis. So I think there will be some amount of time where you’ll have to set filters and do some manual entry, as I mention in the MTP $7 Study from last week.

Okay, so what do we want to start filtering? We’re talking factors that affect our ability to sideout, so it’s pretty simple:

Passing
Attacking

We’ll peel back some additional layers on the attacking side in future articles, but for now, let’s start with how we can analyze passing.

First, let’s start with how Balltime codes passing by default:

One player took the bulk of the reception in this particular match, so you can see her there in the top line. Partner B is on line 2 and then the team totals are bolded. To my understanding, Balltime is basing this just based off how their AI tracks the location and trajectory of the pass. Let’s see how it compares to how I would grade them…

So you can see that I regraded one reception error from one player to the other. It was a seam ball and perhaps a bit of a judgement call, but I think it was more Player A than B. Also, I regraded a ton of passes of higher-quality. For me, I judge it as:

3 = In-System
2 = Everything else that resulted in an attack
1 = Non-Ace but did not result in an attack
0 = Ace

I think there’s much less utility in the idea of a medium pass on the beach. For example, Balltime grades this as a 2:

Location-wise, it’s a bit off the net, but I think you’d be hard press to show a significant difference in Sideout % if that ball were passed 3 feet closer. I like to grade passing by the differences in sideout. For example, even though a 1-pass in my grading is still a very bad pass (overpass or shank that results in a freeball), the change in sideout from 0 → 1 is still about 30%!¹

Likewise, the change in sideout from 1 → 2 is another nearly 30% change as players tend to side out in the 50-60% range after starting with an out-of-system swing.

And then you get another 10% or so going from a 2→ 3, so it’s actually the least important step-wise change, although it’s still meaningful if you are playing at a level where ace rates are <20%, as in NCAA or high level high school.

The reason I don’t care as much about distinguishing between “good” and “perfect” is because the change in sideout just isn’t very high. Maybe a couple % between the pass I show above and a truly perfect pass. Maybe at the pro level, that might² make a bit of a difference, but at the vast majority of levels of volleyball, the big things we’re trying to track are:

Saving Aces
Getting Swings
Getting In-System

And probably in that order of importance. I’ll cut this article off here and we’ll talk more about that later this week.

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Warning: Indoor Content Resuming…

Okay, if you scrolled down for the indoor-only stuff, here’s a quick morsel to tide you over. This is an approximately 2-minute video I made to remind my team of what 2nd-Step Tempo looks like as an outside attacker. We’ve gone over it in practice, but, of course, this stuff takes a while to get down. We had a bunch of 6v6 scrimmaging with other teams over the weekend and, as is often the case, our tempo was slower against external competition than in the internal practice setting. Very common.

So here’s the example model video for players to compare against the video of themselves. Very often young players will be moving their 2nd-step and feel like they are hitting at a 2nd-step timing. But comparing their own video to what a hitter who is truly on a full 2nd-step timing can help them see the difference. (And this helps setters realize how fast and flat they actually have to set the ball now…)

This is a video for players, but I figured I would share it with you coaches as well if you’re looking for ideas about how to teach players these concepts, or maybe even if you’re trying to understand what that idea of 2nd-Step Tempo actually means. Enjoy and let me know what other short videos like this you’d like to see by leaving a comment below.