Club Month: U-13s Analysis
Starting from the bottom
November is Juniors Month at Smarter Volley. Juniors clubs have been underway in Europe for a little while now, and in North America most boys have already started and girls are just now getting going. Because of that, most of the content this month will be geared around the Juniors game and be directly applicable for Juniors coaches. But, a lot of it will be useful for coaches at other levels, including this one. Enjoy!
Here’s my primary organizational principle for my Substack content production:
I write about what I’m interested in and hope enough other people are interested too.
Most of my initial posts in the winter of 2021/2022 revolved around NCAA Volleyball, because that’s what was going on. In the late spring, I shared some of my experiences with the Athletes Unlimited pro league, and in the summer I’ve looked more at some of the men’s side, since that’s where I’ve been coaching. In December when the NCAA Women’s tournament gets going, I’ll turn my attention there, but right now I’m thinking a lot about juniors and club volleyball.
Something that’s always benefited me is the breadth of athletes I work with in a given year. I’ll never claim to be the world’s best coach (unless you catch me after the right win, but isn’t that all of us?), but I rarely meet another coach who has coached in the variety of situations I have. I’ve done the volunteer role, the video coordinator role, the assistant coach role, and the head coach role. In the past year or so alone I’ve gone from coaching the USA Women’s National Team, to coaching in a U-16 club tournament a few months later, to coaching in the AU Women’s Pro League, to doing statistical consulting work in NCAA beach volleyball, to coaching in the FIVB Men’s World Championship.
And now, Juniors volleyball is back on my mind, because I’ll be spending most of the next 2 months in club gyms all over the US and Canada, running player camps and/or coaching clinics. (Side note: I did have a weekend in January just open up… if you’re interested in bringing me out to work with your program, shoot me an email and we can see if it will work.)
One thing that is constantly re-affirmed for me is that the same principles of coaching apply across ages, levels, genders, countries… whatever you can think of. The principles are the same, it’s just a matter of finding the right method to pick the lock with what that particular team or player needs. There’s also always takeaways to find. After coaching in a men’s World Championship, literally the highest level in the world, I’m excited to reset back to the Juniors level and work with players that are closer to the start of their journey in the sport.
Okay, So How About That U-13 Analysis?
Preamble aside, let’s get to some numbers. I’ve shared a lot of Triangle analysis of NCAA Women’s volleyball, because it’s so relevant to a lot of the readership of this Substack. But, I think there’s some good lessons that can be learned from seeing the trends working up from lower-level volleyball up to the NCAA, and then even looking beyond the NCAA at the pro level or the men’s level.
So let’s see some data from U-13. This won’t be as exhaustive as the research from NCAA, because I don’t have the trove of Volleymetrics data to pull from. I took this data by hand, from 3 years of U-13 AAU National Championships, available from Youtube.
There’s a bunch here, so let’s unpack some of it, first, we can see the portion of the game played in each phase:
A few things stand out to me.
The average score differential was 25-19, and we’ll see similar differentials in the U-15 and U-17 Analyses in coming weeks. This is despite the fact that many of these matches went to 3. It wasn’t uncommon to see 25-19 one way followed by 19-25 the other. We know that momentum, as a concept, largely doesn’t exist at the professional levels. Whether one team has just sided out or is on a 3-point run, we can largely predict the odds of the next sideout by the average sideout differential between the two teams over time. I wonder if Juniors volleyball players, being less-developed and less-skilled, are more subject to things like momentum, runs, timeouts, etc. It would be interesting to build a dataset to look at that, but that’s for another time.
I was surprised at how low the Terminal Serving portion was! From my previous data-sets, I know typical Terminal Serving rates (Aces + Missed Serves) tend to be close to 1/3 of total points at the U-13 or U-14 level. That probably rings true to most of us who have coached at this level. But what this data shows is that the best teams at the U-13 level are keeping the ball in play at a level that more resembles NCAA rates, which are about 15% Terminal. Although, you’ll note that Ace:Error ratio here is 1.4:1 (3 aces to 2 errors), whereas in the NCAA it’s closer to 0.5:1 (1 ace to 2 errors), and in the men’s FIVB it’s more like 0.2:1 (1 ace to 5 errors). This is telling us that the best U-13 teams are serving pretty conservatively (over 90% in) and are able to keep a fairly low reception-error rate.
Transition is a bigger deal at this level… but not quite as much as I thought. The NCAA is ending above 40% of rallies on First Ball attempts, and it’s not uncommon to see high-level NCAA matches in an over 50% First Ball environment. Let’s break things down a little more.
Let’s key in on those First Ball numbers again. Notice anything interesting?
What stands out to me is that there’s a bigger gap between Errors by the winning and losing teams than the gap between Kills by the winning and losing teams. The winning teams had 0.9 more kills, but 1.5 fewer errors.1 So this tells us that First Ball Kill is important, but Make Them Play might be even more important, especially at this level.
Now, let’s highlight the Transition aspect:
Now here’s the flip side! The winning teams actually made more errors and got blocked more in Transition, but had a massive gap in Transition Kills. This tells us that (a) Winning teams were just in Transition more2 and (b) the difference was their ability to kill the ball in Transition.
Not all of that is hitting. You have dig quality, you have set quality, etc. But the ability to dig a ball with control and set it and kill it in Transition is clearly the differentiating factor here. The 3.2-point gap between winning and losing teams in Transition Kills was more than half of the margin of victory.
So in conclusion:
You need to be able to control the ball in serve and serve receive. On average, winning teams missed fewer than 2 serves out of 25. And both winning and losing teams were aced fewer than 3 times per set.
Be clean in your First Ball phase. You don’t necessarily have to kill every ball (the way you might at the higher levels), but you can’t give away points. Make Them Play.
Train to terminate in Transition. Don’t just get the ball up and give a downball or tip back. Improve your dig quality, improve your non-setter setting, and look for opportunities where your blockers can release off the net in a freeball/downball situation to have better approaches.
Do you have any takeaways from reading this? Drop a comment if you do.
Remember that the 3.0 in "Opponent First Ball Errors” under the “Win” column is how many errors the other team makes. So the losing teams made 3.0 errors and the winning teams made 1.5.
A bit of a tautology… when you’re winning you serve more so you have the first chance to be in Transition, etc. But still.