Guest Post: Sanky Sanny

Passing Analysis: Zones and Locations

I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the fourth week to beach volleyball. Since there’s 5 Mondays in August, I’m using this week to bring in some content that doesn’t fit the ordinary structure of Smarter Volley. This is also when I incorporate guest posts. This guest post is a cool one because it ties in well with some recent Smarter Volley posts.

If you haven’t read my Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Serve Zones posts, check out Part 1 and Part 2, as this post by Sanky compliments them well.

Quite a bit of this content is in an article Sanky produced for the AVCA, check that out here: Passing Study: A study in Passing Locations. I’ll be quoting some from that article and also from a couple email exchanges Sanky and I have had over the years. Final note: all of this data is from Women’s NCAA data. Part 2 of my Serve Zones post bringing in some FIVB Men’s data if you want to see how it compares.

Enter Sanky

For this study, I sampled matches from 2019 NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball tournament. I looked at serve-receive passes executed by all 64 teams from the 2019 NCAA tournament. My sample size was 8,718 serve-receive passes from 64 teams. The criteria I chose to evaluate were the % of good passes and the passer rating based upon where on the body the reception took place. I broke this down by zone as well as specifically if the reception was overhead, low to the floor, on the left side, on the right side, or in the midline of their body. I then provided an aggregate of the data for all zones. From this study I am not interpreting or hypothesizing anything. This is just to provide some data and provoke critical thinking on passing in general, and how athletes pass in various locations relative to their body. I think as coaches, we should be training our athletes to get practice reps from all possible locations around their body and from all different zones on the court.

My Thoughts

I get asked a lot about passing seams and sides of the body!

I think these concepts are at once underrated and overrated, if that can be possible. Long before I even knew what GMS was, Carl McGown and co were talking about how passing balls on the left was more effective than passing balls on the right, and how midline passing was better than either side of the body. None of this has changed and I’m skeptical it ever will.

That said… the server gets a pretty strong vote in where you’ll have to take the ball. When the ball is served hard one step on your right in Zone 5, you only have so many options. It’s unlikely that your teammates will be able to range that far to her left and you may not be able to track the ball to a perfect midline position in time.

So when forming passing strategies, we should understand that organizing our reception so that passers take more balls on the left than right is ideal, we should generally be skeptical of passers that think they are uniquely more effective on their right than their left (generally I have not seen this to be true), and we should also understand that balls will be taken on the right and get good at these angles too.

You also see in this data that overhand passing was pretty effective. This matches previous research I’ve done before. There was probably a pendulum that swung too far in the direction of “let’s get our girls overhand passing like we see the guys doing in the NCAA,” without fully realizing the implications of strength differences and the higher arc on the 8’ net. Now the pendulum might be swinging back the other way and some coaches are making it forbidden to take a serve overhand. My opinion: it’s a useful tool that has its place. There are a few specific serves that are tough to take with a forearm angle that might be more manageable with an overhand pass.

She could open up on this tough deep-right ball, but this is a fine option too.

More From Sanky

It was interesting to see how players were passing from Zone 5 and 1. Them having trouble passing on their Right from Zone 1 and passing on the Left from Zone 5. I was thinking about the passing angle from Zone 1 Right side, and maybe the passes are going more towards the right antenna. The Positive pass % is similar but high errors compared to Left from Zone 1. 

I'll attach the serving study I did along with this email and you can take a look at it as well. It’s interesting to see where top teams like to serve. Some of them love to go 5-5 and some of love to go 1-1. I wonder if its a player preference or tactics. I know that we have 2 players that will bomb a serve from 1-1 but if I change up and ask them to go 1-5 they might not drive it fast enough because they are scared of missing it on the net or deep. So we have been working of players with helping them get more reps on areas where they don't want to serve. 

I (clumsily) combined the Zone 1 and Zone 5 images so they could be next to each other for comparison.

An interesting note here is that the serve on the sideline side is passed more accurately, but you get aced more. That is, the Zone 1 passer passed a higher Good Pass % on her right, but also got aced more on her right. The Zone 5 passer passed a higher Good Pass % on her left, but also got aced more on her left.

In contrast, Zone 6 passers had both a significantly higher Good Pass % and lower ace % on their left than on their right.

To me, this all fits together with some of the stuff I’ve posted in the Serving Zones posts. Hitting the sideline is a nice tactic; passers handle interior serves better than sideline serves, regardless of the angle that they use.

More Serving Info

Finally, Sanky also included a serving zone graphic in an email to me.

This is a little bit of a broader stroke than some of the charts I had in the Serving Zones articles. This attempts to just classify two four broad classes of serve direction: 5-to-5, 5-to-1, 1-to-1, and 1-to-5. So there’s a combination of sideline and interior serving on both. Interesting that we see both 5-to-5 and 5-to-1 numbers come out exactly the same, but servers missed more serving 1-to-1 than they did 1-to-5. Is that randomness in the sample or something to do with the natural tendency of righty armswings to pull the ball down in the net across the body/off the thumb when you mishit the ball? Not sure about that one.

In any case, some great info here. If you have any questions for Sanky on this info, drop a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll see if I can get him to comment.