Championship Classroom: Gulf Shores pt4

USC v TCU 5s

3 down, 2 more to go in our Championship Classroom series.

Cal v Long Beach 4s
Stanford v Grand Canyon 4s
LSU v FAU 4s
USC v TCU 5s
USC v UCLA 3s

I’ll fill in the links as I post each write-up. This will conclude the extended run of beach content from the month of May. I’ll wrap things up in the June Beach Week and summarize some lessons learned.

The Stats

(From USC’s perspective, because they won the match)

USC Triangle Stats
+6 Total Point Differential
+4 Terminal Serves
+/- 0 First Ball
+2 Transition

Okay, here’s one of these close matches where the Terminal Serving battle was a determining factor. The two teams played to a wash in First Ball and USC gained a small edge in Transition. But, in a close match, +4 in Terminal Serving makes a big difference.

Terminal Serving
2 USC Aces
6 TCU Serve Errors
2 TCU Aces
2 USC Serve Errors

You know, it isn’t often, but sometimes the annoying dad with a daughter on the U-13 team is actually right, “we have to make our serves!” USC and TCU both served 2 aces, but the difference here was that TCU missed 6 serves to do so.

There isn’t a strong correlation in NCAA Women’s Beach Volleyball between missed serves and winning. We know the classic concept of a tradeoff between serving in and serving tough. TCU served tougher. After accounting for the fact that TCU served a bit less and missed a little more, you end up with USC getting aced twice on 47 receptions while TCU was aced twice on 53 reception. TCU also passed in-system a bit more.

But… I think there’s a deeper principle here.

The Principle: The Tipping Point

I don’t want this to end up coming off like a criticism of TCU. I try to avoid discussing really specific recent matches that I wasn’t involved in. So this very well might have been what they wanted to do. But I see the debate between serving in and serving tough as a Tipping Point concept.

I will always incorporate The Roots album covers when I get the chance.

The annoying dad I made up above has a (limited) point: if you can’t serve well enough to win the match, make sure you serve well enough not to lose it.

My first college job was at LMU in 2012. We had a nice team that year; we made the NCAA-tournament, ending a decade-long postseason drought. We were undersized but athletic and scrappy. We weren’t going to be a good blocking team and we didn’t make blocking a priority in our training. But we certainly served tough. Hey, if you serve tough enough, maybe your blocking might not be that big of a deal. If you miss your serve, you don’t have to block!

I often lean toward the serve tough end of the spectrum. But you have to get a result with that tough serving. If you serve conservatively and avoid them being in complete rhythm, you’re in decent shape. If you miss a bunch of serves, but knock them out-of-system a lot and pick up some aces, you’re also in decent shape.

But if you fail to get past that Tipping Point, so that you miss some serves, but the serving pressure never gets high enough to really crack their reception? Now you’re in trouble.

And other areas of the game are like this too. Speed of offense comes to mind. Execution almost always drops as you try to speed up the offense. If you become more terminal because of the pressure on their block/defense, it’s worth it. But if you speed up the offense and make more errors but you’re not fast enough to really stress the block… now you’re in trouble.

Deciding which Tipping Points you can get past is one of the big decisions you have to make as a coach, because it often involves forward planning. In some situations, it can even be a multi-year decision process. When I coached at Pepperdine, we had a big physical freshman middle. He could crank up a jump serve at the velocity needed and it had some tough movement on it. But, at the beginning of the year, he was a 60-70% in guy. He just missed too much to be effective.

So you have the debate. He serves tough enough. Over the course of the season, can he cross the Tipping Point to where he’s hitting his serve just as tough but he’s more like 80% in? Or does he need to switch to a float? The fact that he was a freshman also impacts your decision-making process. Does sticking with his jump spin as a freshman speed up the process of him becoming effective in the future, even if it doesn’t totally fall into place this year?

These are the decisions that are way bigger than one individual match, but looking at the stat report made me think of this concept and I wanted to share.

The Plays