Beach Week: First Ball Weakness
This week is Beach Week at SmarterVolley. Typically I dedicate the first three weeks of content to indoor volleyball, with the fourth week focusing on beach. If you’re not interested in beach, then feel free to skip this one.
I’ve fleshed out a lot of the Triangle analysis concepts in this newsletter and have been showing how this framework applies for beach teams as well.
Other posts in this series include:
Terminal Serving First Ball Transition Terminal Serving Strength Terminal Serving Weakness First Ball Strength
Starting with that idea of the three points of the Triangle means that we have 3 phases of the game to win. If you can consistently win all 3 phases… great! Your analysis won’t tell you much. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” is a pretty short team meeting.
But most teams, even successful ones, don’t consistently dominate every aspect of the game. You have strengths and weaknesses, which is where the concept of a Team Profile comes in. Profiling your team helps you understand what you need to do to coach them effectively. Profiling opponents helps you understand what you need to do to play against them.
You can start from scratch every time you try to plan a block of training, but the Profile exercise speeds up the process.
I also think that understanding your strengths and weaknesses helps you understand what chances you need to take tactically. If you’re weaker in the Terminal Serve game, you may need to take some chances with your block and defense in order to produce points there. If you aren’t a strong Transition team, your First Ball offense needs to be aggressive, even if your Make Them Play number suffers a little bit.
Now let’s come to a challenging question. How do we win with a First Ball Weakness?
A Less Than Ideal Situation
At most levels of beach volleyball, First Ball is about half of the points that are scored. In NCAA women’s volleyball, it’s in the ballpark of 20% Terminal Serves, 30% Transition, 50% First Ball. So clearly, when one point of the Triangle is half of the game, that’s a really important phase! We’d like to be strong here, but what do we do when it’s not our strength?
One quick note: First Ball Weakness doesn’t necessarily mean you’re bad in that area, it just means that it’s not as strong as your other two phases. It’s going to be hard to win much if you’re just straight-up bad in First Ball. But you can win a lot if your First Ball lags behind the other two phases because it’s merely average, while your Terminal Serving and Transition is very strong.
Let’s see what this looks like in practice. Can we find an FIVB match from the World Pro Tour where a team lost the First Ball battle, but won the match? And even more importantly, can we make sure this is an American team?1
It would be really weird if I wrote all that and this wasn’t the case, so here we go:
Kolinske/Hughes vs Stam/Schoon
Americans Kelley Kolinske and Sara Hughes got a big win over the Dutch pair of Stam and Schoon at the Itapema stop of the FIVB tour. Hat tip to the great Tyler Widdison for sharing some FIVB data for me to sort through.
The match score was 21-18, 21-18, giving USA a +6 overall point differential, although the database I have only has them at +5, so we’ll use that2. Let’s see how it breaks out.
So here we go, you can lose the First Ball battle but still win the match if you win the other two phases convincingly. From a strategy perspective, there’s a few ways this can happen:
Turn The Game Into A Transition Scrap-fest
Surprisingly, this isn’t really what happened. One of the first things I look at is the proportion of the game played in each phase. Let’s take a look with that column added:
This is about a typical breakdown. Half the game was played in First Ball, 30% in Trans, and 20% of the points were Terminal Serves. If I’m coaching a team that isn’t great in First Ball, but is really strong in Transition, I want to be thinking about how to get more of that game into the Transition phase. Maybe it means being more conservative with blocking or your own first ball attacking. But it’s a mindset of, “let’s drag them into transition and beat them there.”
But that isn’t what happened here. Kolinske and Hughes didn’t necessarily get more of the game into the Transition phase, they just dominated the portion of the game that is usually spent in Trans.
Make Them Play At A Really High Rate
This also didn’t happen!
We know that, in NCAA Beach Volleyball, “Making Them Play” has a really high correlation to winning. Or perhaps said differently, NOT Making Them Play has a really high correlation to losing.
So what were the Make Them Play stats here?
90% NED 72% USA
Ooook… scratch that one!
In fact, USA was arguably the more aggressive offense team in First Ball. They had a higher error-rate while also having a slightly higher kill rate. Part of this is also dealing with the aggressive serving of the Dutch team.
We’ve seen this chart before:
My data has NED at 39% FBK and USA at 41%, which is pretty interesting, because 40% FBK is kind of right at the dividing line where you flip from below 50/50 shot of winning to above 50/50. That data is for NCAA beach volleyball, but I think it’s probably at least in the ballpark of the FIVB women’s success curve.
Netherlands had more First Ball Kills, purely because they had a lot more First Ball Attempts. NED missed more serves and produced more aces, which means they had 15 more chances to attack in First Ball.
Which leads me to the final strategy.
Hold Up Defensively While Serving In A Lot
This is related to the “turn the game into a Transition scrap-fest” strategy from above, but maybe it’s a little more narrowly-focused. It is really hard to serve conservatively and stop good teams on the beach, especially at the FIVB level. They didn’t necessarily shut down the Dutch team in First Ball, but they held them to an average kill rate while serving in at 95%.
And THAT is a winning combo.
I wouldn’t say that USA served easily by any means. But they targeted one player (Stam) pretty relentlessly and took the sideline out of the equation. They served balls she would have a chance to pass rather than work the sideline or endline looking for the ace.
They also did this primarily by digging the ball. I’ll unpack more of that defense later this week. For now I’ll just leave you with this way to win a Transition point.
Sorry Canada; I still have to root for the Americans on the beach!
Sometimes there are weird plays that aren’t assigned as an ace, kill, block, or error, so the Triangle analysis can be off by a random point here or there when I don’t code these matches by hand. It doesn’t change this analysis, so, in the interest of time and efficiency, let’s just use +5.