Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Serve Zones (Part 2)

Yes, there's more.

On Monday, August 15th I’m going to host another small-group workshop. This will be available for premium subscribers only. Our topic is, “Rosters and Rotations.” I’ll share some of my thoughts on putting together a roster and forming those players into a starting lineup and then we’ll dive into attendee questions. Wondering about which player to play as the next-to middle and which player to play away from the setter? Debating between starting in Rotation 1 or 2? You’ll enjoy this session. Upgrade to a premium subscription now to attend.

Let’s dive right into it, Part 1 here if you missed it:

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Serve Zones (Part 1)

Follow-Up To Part 1

A poster in the Volleytalk thread asked:

In your write up, there were two parts where you indicated that you have service error data considered.

"...2. Some of the advantage of serving the sidelines is nullified by increased errors....When doing this study, I included service errors into the seam..."

and

"...again you see that effectiveness about halved by missed serves, relative to serving the interior seams."

I didn't see that data in those tables, is that something you'd be able to share? 

I have error rates of 18% and 17% respectively when I judged the player to be aiming for the 1 or 4-seams (sideline seams), compared with an error rate of 8% when not.

There's definitely some fuzzy judgment here as I assign every sideline miss to have been aiming for the 1 or 4-seam. For misses in the net or out the back I assigned the seam (or lack of seam) that most closely matched the flight of the ball. So it's possible that I overcounted sideline errors; there has to be some non-zero number of serves where the player was aiming for an interior seam and miss-hit the ball badly enough to miss out the sideline.

But I think it's probably safe to say that players miss serves about twice as often when aiming for a sideline seam as when aiming for an interior seam.

Men’s Volleyball Data

We saw some of the data from NCAA Women’s data, here’s some data from FIVB Men’s volleyball:

Serve Effectiveness By Start Zone

Men’s FIVB. All serves.

Interesting. A clear premium on serving out of Zone 1. Pretty similar ratings out of the interior serves, and a clear decline serving out of Zone 5. But are there compounding factors? Let’s break this out between Jump Spin and Jump Float.

Jump Spin Effectiveness By Start Zone

Men’s FIVB. Jump Spin.

Pretty similar distribution here. The Zone 1 servers were a bit more effective, with the Zone 5 servers the least effective on the spin serves. Interior serves were in between.

Jump Float Effectiveness By Start Zone

Men’s FIVB. Jump Float.

So the picture comes into focus a little bit more. There’s more jump floats in men’s volleyball coming from Zone 5 than any other zone, because middles jump float more frequently than outsides/setters/opposites and middles usually jump float from Zone 5.

There appears to be a small premium (at least in terms of preventing sideout) in jump floating from 5 or 1, which matches up with the women’s data. Since the women’s data is over 90% float, this all seems to line up.

Let’s stick with Jump Float and look a little more.

Jump Float Effectiveness By End Zone

Men’s FIVB. Jump Float.

So this also matches up with what we saw in the previous article. Start your jump float servers near the sidelines and have them hit zones 1 and 5. Even at the international men’s level, 1/3 of jump float serves end up in Zone 6. Do. Better. People.

And one more…

Most Effective Start Zone + End Zone Combinations.

Men’s FIVB. Jump Spin Serves.

I thought this was worth noting. Here’s the 3 most effective start zone + end zone combinations in this sample of men’s spin serves. So although serving from Zone 1 was overall the most effective overall¹, the ability to hit Zone 5 with a more externally-cutting serve was really valuable. And so was the shallower serve back to Zone 1.

Some of these servers are lefties cutting with their natural spin, but I’m also seeing a trend of right-handers using a less-typical external spin to attack the Zone 5 sideline. It’s a challenging hand contact for passers to read and deal with.

Serve Depth

Let’s look just a float serves here. When we look at spin serves, we see a clear premium on them landing deep in the court, and most spin serves don’t land in front of 6m anyway.

Float Serve Depth - NCAA Women’s

NCAA Women. Float serves.

There appears to be a slight premium to serving deep in NCAA women’s volleyball. The Good Pass % is slightly worse, the Ace % is a bit higher, and the corresponding Sideout % is about 1% lower on serves deeper than 6m. While it’s not quite as significant as the premium on serving Zones 1 and 5 vs Zone 6 (3% difference in Sideout!), 1% isn’t nothing.

Float Serve Depth - FIVB Men

FIVB Men. Float serves.

Now here’s what’s interesting. We see a similar effect on the pass quality, but not the same effect on sideout. In fact, the serves shorter than 6m actually have a slightly lower sideout %.² So what gives? I think we’re seeing here the effect of pipe takeouts. If the pass quality is a bit higher on the shallower float serves, but the pipe hitter can’t get a full runway, the resulting offensive quality is about equal.

What About Errors?

One thing that can’t be reflected in this data is serving errors. Volleymetrics doesn’t pull errors into locations that can be charted in the way that I’ve shown. You saw the data from Part 1 that describes errors in terms of serving direction, but you can’t bring depth into that calculation. When a server misses long, it’s a fair bet that they weren’t aiming shorter than 6m. But when a server clips the tape, were they aiming shallow? Or were they aiming hard and deep and caught the tape? Would that serve have landed on the end line if it was 2” higher?

My suspicion is that, for women’s volleyball, serving deep does indeed carry the premium as shown above, but that you’ll likely miss more serves. As a rough ballpark, a 2% change in serving errors is a bit more than a 1% change in sideout. So if you serve in at 90% aiming deeper than 6m, you’re better off serving in at 92% aiming shallower than 6m. But…

1. I’m assuming that aiming deeper in the court results in more errors, but I’m not positive. Certain servers might miss more trying to aim shallow.

2. If you only aim deep, I don’t think your serving effectiveness diminishes much. It’s still tough to pass deep float serves. But if you only aim shallow, your serving effectiveness definitely diminishes. So any serving strategy must incorporate variety.

Note that I use “shallow” instead of “short” when talking about serving. I find that most people associate a “short serve” with a high, arcing serve that lands around the 3m line. We’re not talking about that. I like to use the term “shallow” for a serve that is still flat, but without as much power, such that it lands between 4 and 5.5m.

“Girls, just do this every time. What’s so hard about that?”

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for Part 3.

1. Or perhaps it’s better to say, the most effective servers tended to serve out of Zone 1. Those aren’t quite the same statement.

2. Close enough to call it even, if you ask me.