Kills Analysis
Count them up and figure out how to get more of them
This is a Beach Week article. People seemed to like the format of the previous week where I combined multiple articles into one, longer article. So I’m doing that again this week. Initially, I planned to split this into a 2-parter where I looked at FBSO Kills and Transition Kills separately, but I’m going to keep testing this format out. It’s a long article with plenty of video and images, so it may work better for some of you in your browser than in your email client.
If you’re not into the beach game at all, feel free to skip this one. I’ll be back next week with Mailbag Q&A and then in August we’ll start a defensive analytics cycle of content.
The Olympics are almost here! The best part about Olympics and World Championship years is that they are amazing exhibitions of the highest level of our sport. The next best part is that they provide a ton of great content to analyze on SmarterVolley. In fact, by the time you’re reading this, they might already be playing beach volleyball in Paris. So look for more analysis of that to come.
In the meantime, we’ll run back the match we looked at last week in order to do some additional analysis. I’ve been both On The Road and In The Gym a fair amount the past couple weeks, so this analysis is a little easier to do since I’ve already uploaded and run through all the tags in Balltime.
First Ball Kills
Let’s do some analysis of the First Ball Kills by Nuss and Kloth in this match.
By Player
15 - Kloth
3 - Nuss
No surprise that Kloth had the majority of FBK, because she was by far the serving target in this match.
By Setting Action
10 - Handset
8 - Bumpset
This is a pair that handsets a lot, so I was surprised to see almost half their kills coming off bumpsets. This is part of the reason I really love simple counting stats. It might be natural for most of your coaching feedback to be related to their handsetting. But if almost half of the kills are coming on bumpsets, then you need to make sure you’re attending to that detail. Make sure your training drills don’t neglect that area of the game, etc.
Since Kloth was the main FBSO attacker, we’ll focus on her for the next couple pieces of analysis.
By Attack Route (Kloth)
3 - Wide
6 - Slot
3 - Middle
3 - Behind
0 - Option
Kloth mostly attacked out of the slot this match. Most of the wide routes were when the pass shifted toward the left, rather than a deliberate set to the pin. For example:
I want to make this less about scouting and more about your internal analysis. So what’s the purpose of this?
There’s 2 reasons to look at your counting stats for something like this:
To better understand the frequency at which events actually occur in real matches, so that you can better align your training with reality.
To see if an area that lags behind can be trained up.
These 2 points are in slight tension, but here’s what I mean. Say you’re spending a lot of time in training working on pushing sets wide to the pin. But for multiple matches, you find you’re not killing balls on wide sets. Then you need to decide if you need be more in (1) or (2). In general, you want to have some humility in your coaching and lean toward option (1). If you’re dedicating a bunch of training time to something that’s not producing results in the match, you might not be helping your players as much as you think.
However, there is some judgement involved here. You might judge that your team has the capability to improve in an area, and if it’s lagging behind, then you need to allocate some additional training time to that area.
I’ll use a bit of a thought experiment as an example, knowing that it doesn’t work exactly like this in practice. But let’s imagine something like this:
Kill Distribution by Attack Route
20% - Wide
40% - Slot
20% - Middle
20% - Behind
Attack Training Practice Time by Attack Route
50% - Wide
40% - Slot
5% - Middle
5% - Behind
If I’m dedicating 50% of my attacking training to hitting wide sets, but they are only producing 20% of the kills, then I think I’m in (1). “Hey, we’re dedicating too much time to something that’s not producing results.”
But on the other hand, the Middle and Behind routes (in this hypothetical) are more in (2). “Hey, we could probably get even more results in these areas if we shifted some training time to them.”
Now, your training time isn’t so clearly defined and things are a little more fluid than that, but maybe you get the point.
By Velocity (Kloth)
2 - Soft
5 - Shot
8 - Hard
There’s some judgement here, but I’m judging Soft as something very offspeed where Shot is a roll with some pace taken off. Your standard high line over the block would be Shot in this, whereas a shallow poke over would be a Soft.
So Kloth got the majority of her kills from attacking hard to the seam or cross (as in the above gif) and her secondary shot was the high line shot.
Again, this is an area that you’re going to run through those (1) and (2) filters from above. Does your training match the reality of the game? Are there undertrained areas you could dedicate more time to?
By Pass Location
2 - Short
5 - Inside
4 - Served At
4 - Outside
In an individual match, the raw counting numbers are handy. Over the time, you might want to convert this to an efficiency… a Kill% based on Pass Location. These numbers have some meaning as just basic counting stats, but, over time, they are going to have more meaning when you know the frequency at which they are happening. If the Swiss team had been serving Kloth short all match (they weren’t) but she only had 2 kills, then you might conclude that you need to dedicate some additional time in training.
In summary, I like looking at FBKs based on a few categories
By Player
Handsets and Bumpsets
Attack Route
Shot Type
Pass Location
These 4 categories (for each player) will give you information on how your training matches the reality of the game, plus it may spark some ideas for how to design either direct instruction or constraints-led games to emphasize or improve certain pieces of the game.
Transition Kills
Now that we’ve looked at First Ball Kills, let’s dive right into Transition.
By Player
4 - Kloth
5 - Nuss
Both players scored in transition in this match. Since there were fewer transition kills than FBK, rather than isolate one player or split them up, I’ll do the following analysis on both players together. As you work with a team for an extended period of time and they play multiple matches, you could do this analysis for each player, as they likely have different strengths and weaknesses.
By Quality
4 - In-System Digs
5 - Out-of-System Digs
I like to look to see if players are digging more balls in an In-System context where the pair has choices about what they want to do, or if they are in a scramble situation.
For a lot of youth teams, the majority of kills tend to happen in In-System situations, since the ability to attack in the scramble is limited. That’s okay. Many youth teams can have success by simply trying to keep the ball in play after difficult digs and being patient enough to get a controllable attack that they can dig in-system and attack with the potential to kill.
Here was one of the coolest transition kills of the match.
They broke this one out in the 3rd set after barely going fast-tempo all match. Pretty sweet setup for an easy kill.
By Defensive Scheme
3 - Read
1 - Commit
1 - Pull
4 - Other
Nuss and Kloth didn’t run a ton of defensive schemes where the defender had a pre-determined commit to a shot. (Why have the fastest defender in the world if you’re not going to let her read and run down balls?) In fact, the above gif was the 1 kill they transitioned off a scheme like that.
Also, note the Other categories. This includes overpasses, coverage balls, or other odd plays that don’t fit into a clean defensive scheme.
In juniors volleyball, I’d be surprised if Other wasn’t the biggest basket of kills at many tournaments for your players. Even at the professional level, we see these plays a ton. All the more reason to invent some games with funky rules like 2-touch, 5-touch, etc. Remember that a non-trivial amount of defense won’t be played with a clean read from well-positioned blockers and defenders.
By Attack Type Defended
2 - Soft
3 - Roll
1 - Hard
0 - Option
3 - Other
By Attack Type
3 - Soft
2 - Roll
1 - Hard
3 - Option
I like to look at both the types of attack’s being defended as well as how we’re attackign coming back. Often, the attacking toolbox will be different in transition than in first ball. In this match, as you might imagine, the Option was a bigger factor in transition, with Nuss handling more first contacts, allowing for Kloth to go on-2.
There’s always a natural fit between scrimmaging at practice and the demands of the game. But sometimes they don’t totally match up and you need to engineer certain situations to happen more or less.
Takeaways
Ultimately, that’s what analysis like this is all about. You want to track it back to “how is this going to change what I’m going to do at practice tomorrow?” Consider those 2 lenses:
First, the main lens is making sure your training matches the demands of the game. Where are most of your kills produced? What kinds of situations? What kind of intent? Are those things happening at practice?
Next, identify a limited number of pieces of the game that you can upgrade and see if you can allocate some more training time to them.
Counting isn’t the most clever form of statistics, but it’s the most important! And the good thing is that it’s easy to do, easy for your players to understand, and therefore, easy to extract value from.
Many of you are playing beach tournaments as we speak. Try getting some video and counting up some of these aspects of either First Ball or Transition and let me know what you find.