First Ball Strength Where Are You
This week is Beach Week at Smarter Volley. Yes, that’s two Beach Weeks in a row! Well it only makes sense, given that the NCAA Beach Volleyball National Championship just concluded.
ALSO: June will be subscriber month here at Smarter Volley. Every article will be behind the paywall in June. I want people to pay me money to add more value to the premium subscribers at different times throughout the year and I thought this would be something fun to try. I’ll put about one per week out with a free preview, but in the interest of not spamming the freebies with a bunch of articles they can’t read, most of June will just go directly to my beloved premium subscribers. That makes now a great time to finally upgrade to premium. :)
Since indoor gets more posts in this newsletter, we’ve moved through the first part of the Triangle framework more quickly for the indoor side than for the beach. The indoor posts tend to be a little more math-heavy, so if you want to scan through them for a little more of the theory behind this analysis, the last post has a bunch of links you might like:
Otherwise, we’ll look at an example of a First Ball Strength profile leading to a key win in the recent NCAA Beach National Championship.
My plan was to examine First Ball Strength leading to a key win in the NCAAs. We know the importance of First Ball Kill and how it’s arguably the most important factor in winning beach volleyball matches. So, my plan was to look at some of the closest matches (that I have video of), run the numbers, and share the story of how a First Ball Strength led to a win.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do this yet. I wanted to look at the two USC - Florida State matches: the winner’s bracket semi-finals, and then the eventual National Championship. The first match I looked at was the semi-final 2s match, where the Florida State pair of Chacon and Fitzpatrick pulled out a win over USC’s Kraft and Slater. I got about 2/3 of the way through the match when it became clear that the difference in this match was Terminal Serving. Cool to see, but not the point of the article I wanted to right.
Next, I looked at the 4s from the same match, where USC earned a narrow victory.
The teams played each other to a draw in First Ball. USC had a few more kills while FSU got a few more stops. FSU earned a Terminal Serving edge with fewer aces but also fewer errors. The difference here was in Transition. USC won 5 more Transition rallies than the Florida State pair did, which accounted for all of their edge in the match. There were more than twice as many First Ball rallies as Transition (50 to 21), but the First Ball was a wash while Transition provided the critical edge.
I’ve shown this before in other posts (such as Live Rallies), but it always fascinates me how one aspect can be an objectively smaller part of the game than another, but it can still contain the points necessary to swing the match to one team.
We talked about playing Centerfield defense last week, and here’s a great example of USC getting a dig on a nice high line shot out of a Centerfield play.
Next, I looked Georgia State’s upset win over TCU. I analyzed the 2s pair, a super-close match which saw both teams score 50 total points.
Again, a deadlock in First Ball that was broken in other areas. Georgia State had a huge Terminal Serving advantage, based mostly off TCU missed serves, while TCU won more Transition rallies than Georgia State.
There was a lot less Centerfield played in this match, especially in the third set. Both teams were putting on a lot of plays with their defense; defenders running early to shots, blockers showing and taking, etc.
Georgia State baited TCU into a shot which turns into them beating the puller for a big Transition point.
Toward the end of the 3rd set, Georgia State had a critical sideout opportunity. TCU was showing some different looks. I looked at this in Beat The Puller, where the blocker can pull either line or cross. The cross pull is harder, but puts some pressure on the vision and communication of the attackers. Some attackers assume the line pull and the cross pull can set your defender up for an easy dig. Or the puller is there for the short cut/poke.
But here Georgia State maintains good vision and beats the puller to the deep cross for a big sideout.
I’ll have a sideout-related training drill tomorrow and more analysis of the NCAA Beach National Championship to come. For sure the First Ball game will be the deciding factor in some of those matches, and I’ll highlight some different profiles that emerged.
In other news, I flew right from Gulf Shores to Canada and have been jumping in with both feet. I’ll be an assistant with the Men’s (Indoor) National Team this summer up to and including the World Championships. And, if we’re able to do our jobs, at the Paris Olympic Games in 2024. So expect some more posts looking at the men’s side of the game as I mine the analysis I would do anyway for blog content share a different perspective than I have over the past few months. Enjoy!