Digging Case Study - Pitt

Breaking down the current NCAA #1 team's defense

I’ve been talking digging recently on Smarter Volley. I’ll have more Digging Profiles in the next couple weeks, but with the start of the NCAA Women’s season, it’s worth checking in on what the top teams are doing. Pitt has started hot, 9-0 without dropping a set so far. They’re sitting atop the AVCA rankings which… doesn’t really mean all that much, but they’re also among the leaders in both hitting efficiency and opponent hitting efficiency. Since the focus on Smarter Volley right now is defense, let’s look at what they are doing defensively.

An exercise I like to do periodically is to just pull all the digs a team made from a given match. Since we’re talking about Pitt, here’s a dig montage from their recent match against Penn State.¹

What are your takeaways? Some observations I made: