Beach Week: World Champs Triangle Pt2
Over to the women's side
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 Women’s World Championship
First, let’s look at the 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 round-of-16 onward.
With that, let’s turn to the pieces of the Triangle.
Terminal Serving
Unlike on the men’s side, winning teams had a small-but-significant edge in Terminal Serving. Winning teams earned 3.7 points in the Terminal Serving phase compared to 3.3 for the losing teams.
In this sample, the both winning and losing teams served in at comparable rates, but the winning teams served more aces- or, to say it another way, winning teams gave up fewer aces.
Winning Teams Serve-In Rate: 90%
Winning Teams Ace Rate: 8.1%
Losing Teams Serve-In Rate: 89.2%
Losing Teams Ace Rate: 6.5%
Average Serve-In Rate: 89.4%
Average Ace Rate: 7.6%
One noticeable difference between the men and women was the ace rate. Both men and women served in at a similar rate, but women produced a full ace per set more on average than the men.
First Ball
Again, we see some significant differences between Winning and Losing Teams.
11.0 Average First Ball Points
11.6 Winning Team First Ball Points
10.3 Losing Team First Ball Points
1.3 Average Winner-Loser Differential
The differential was exactly the same on the women’s side as it was on the men’s side. On average, slightly more of the game was played in first ball on the men’s side than the women’s side- 12.6 to 11.0.
Let’s look at kills and stops on a % basis:
53% Winning Team First Ball Kill
44% Losing Team First Ball Kill
15% Winning Team First Ball Stop
12% Losing Team First Ball Stop
The 9% gap between Winning and Losing team FBK was almost exactly the same as on the men’s side. The only difference was that overall average FBK was about 60% on the men’s side and about 50% on the women’s side. The rate of First Ball Stops was pretty similar, and there was a smaller winner-loser differential than on the men’s side.
Transition
Here’s where we see some differences between the men’s and women’s side:
5.4 Average Transition Points
5.7 Winning Team Transition Points
4.9 Losing Team Transition Points
0.8 Average Winner-Loser Differential
Overall, women played a bit more of the game in transition than the men did. 5.4 to 4.6 points. But, the winner-loser differential was smaller. That’s counterintuitive, and could just be a small-sample size factor. But I thought that was interesting. When we look at share of the game:
Winning Teams Won
53% of Terminal Serving Points (44% on the men’s side)
53% of First Ball Points (52% on the men’s side)
54% of Transition Points (61% on the men’s side)
Honestly, those numbers make more sense to me than the men’s side. Winning teams held a moderate advantage in all 3 areas of the game? Yeah that makes sense. I thought it was bizarre to see the winning teams lose the Terminal Serving game while also destroying opponents so badly in Transition. Women: thank you for playing to my rational sensibilities.
Check back this weekend for some follow-up. And next Beach Week will focus on the NCAA National Tournament. We’ll see how the collegiate ladies compare to the FIVB World Championships.