Break Points Pt1: In-System
When your serving just ain't no good.
Most of September on SmarterVolley has been spent looking at Sideout Offense from the perspective of different pass qualities.
Now as we get into October, we’ll start looking at preventing our opponents from siding out, what we’ll call the Break Point phase.1 Just as we broke down Sideout by Pass Quality, we’ll do the same for Break Point. Additionally, at the end of the month, I’ll have a small-group, Subscriber-only Workshop Session with the topic of: Blocking And Lessons Learned From The Men’s World Championship. Become a Premo today to reserve your spot!
Why Look At Break Point By Pass Quality?
It’s important to look at Break Point By Pass Quality because you want to have a plan for each situation. This is how you build volleyball IQ. Volleyball IQ is this elusive concept that we probably have as coaches (due to our experience), but our players probably lack- due to their inexperience. What Volleyball IQ means is probably something like making the right decision based on how the play is unfolding.
We, as coaches, understand that when the other team is Out-of-System, they are more likely to tip or shoot the ball, they are more likely to go to the big part of the court, and we don’t need to get super dug-in on defense. We also want to be more conservative with our blocking, not wanting our block to get used when our defenders are in a good position to dig anyway. On the flip side, when the other team is In-System, they are more likely to set middle, more likely to set the ball fast if they go to the pins, hitters are likely to use sharper angles and attack toward the edges of the court, and our block probably needs to take some chances to stuff some balls because the digs are harder.
As the level gets higher, there also starts to become some decisions about, what is physically possible in this situation. For example, certain teams set Slides so fast that your middle blocker cannot realistically take a full X3 crossover swing block move. You may decide that, when they are in-system, we will always X2. These decisions vary a lot by level and the capability of both your team and your opponents, so I don’t want to get too into specifics on this. But these are decisions you need to make as a coach and having a framework for when those decisions will occur helps communicate situational awareness to your players.
How Often Is The Other Team In-System?
This depends on level. In the NCAA Women’s Power 5, 50% In-System is typical. The best passing teams will be up toward 60%, while the weaker passing teams will be down toward 40%. A lot of this does depend on how you grade it (Volleymetrics seems to weirdly downgrade a lot of men’s passing), but I think a decent ballpark for most higher-levels is about 50/30/20 In-System/Semi-System/Out-of-System. Generally there’s more Semi-System (Medium, 2-point, R!) than Out-of-System (Bad, 1-point, R-).
At the High School or Juniors level, the stronger teams will be in that 50% In-System ballpark, but lower-level Juniors play is generally well-below 50% In-System. For example, I have stats from a U-15 club team I coached lying around and our opponents were 25% In-System against us, and we were not a National Championship-caliber club team by any means. Actually, the fact that we weren’t an Open-level team is why our opponent passing was so low! If we were playing top-50 teams, they would be passing closer to 40-50% InSys, even if we were a very good serving team.
What this means is that, for most High School and Juniors teams, instead of 50/30/20, the ratios are more like 30/50/20 or 30/40/30. Either way, instead of thinking they’re going to be In-System half of the time, I’m now thinking, they’re going to be Semi-System half of the time.
What’s Important For In-System Block/Defense?
I think that the more In-System the other team is, the more you are relying on your block, and the more Out-of-System they are, the more you are relying on defense. This might not be true at the highest-level of men’s volleyball, where such a high proportion of balls are touched by the block OoS, but in women’s volleyball, I think that’s a decent paradigm.
Also, when the other team is In-System, our blocking tactics become relatively more important. The worse their quality of pass, the more predictable their offense becomes, and blocking becomes more a matter of physicality and fundamental execution. But when they are In-System we need to have:
A base blocking philosophy
(Maybe) some tactics to handle specific situations
(Hopefully) a scouting report to identify opponent tendencies
I’m a huge read block fan. In my ideal world, our blockers are just going to stay in a perfect bunch read and react to everything as they see it. I also like to think of this idea of, “touch the quick and stuff the outside.” I think it’s a losing battle to be in this guessing game where you’re trying to figure out exactly when the other team will set the middle so you can fire up this magic commit block and get a stuff on a quick.
But… I think it’s good to have some blocking tactics. Without letting this turn into a separate article, do you have any tactics in place for:
How you’ll deal if they set very fast to the pins and your wing blockers struggle to stay in their base blocking system and react to that speed.
What you’ll do if they have an overwhelming middle who is an automatic point when they pass In-System.
How to punish them when their setter is frontrow and 1 of their 2 hitters is fairly weak.
These are just a few examples, but these are things you want to think over as a coach. And a lot of it depends on your personnel. I can remember one year coaching club and one particular scrimmage stood out to me. It was basically an alumni match because we had a bunch of girls who had played for the club who were back in town over winter break and they came to my 17s club practice to scrimmage with us.
One of these alumni was a good libero and she was digging in position 5 and she was good enough to dig both of our middles with essentially no block. Our middles basically couldn’t hit that direction. Now, this was just a scrimmage at practice, but those are the kind of mismatches that can spark a 5-point run. Do you have something that you can completely take away from the other team? This is particularly relevant if they are in a 5-1 and the setter is frontrow. Now their options start getting real limited and you have a chance to go on a run.
How Do You Evaluate Your In-System Block/Defense?
The most important overall metric for In-System Block/Defense is, of course, your Break Point % or your Opponent Sideout %, whichever way you like looking at it. Personally, I prefer looking at Opponent Sideout, because I like putting them side-by-side:
If I’m a NCAA D1 team, and I use this ballpark of 67%/60%/50% as average levels of Sideout for Perfect/Good/Bad (3/2/1 on a 3-point scale), then I can assess both offense and defense in that way. Since we’re looking at Break Point specifically, I’d see that we were about average defensively when they were In-System, about average defensively when they were in Semi-System, but below average when they were Out-of-System. That allows me to assess and prioritize training moving forward.
One wrinkle in this is that Sideout is affected by Transition, whereas FBSO is not. Because of that, for an individaul match, I also like to look at First Ball Kill % by Pass Quality. This just helps check to see if there was something weird in the Transition data. If the other team only has 16 Semi-System receptions in a match, 3 Transition rallies could drastically swing the Sideout %. So just make sure you don’t have small-sample weirdness going on and check the FBK numbers too.
I’m officially converting to the international terminology for this. A lot of people in the States say “Point-Scoring” as a throwback to the sideout-scoring era, and I think it’s just a little confusing to communicate that to players who have only played in the rally scoring era. “Sideout” and “Break Point” communicate clearly different concepts, so I like that.