Match Analysis – NCAA Quarterfinals 2021

This week is Beach Week at Smarter Volley. I dedicate the first 3 weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the 4th to beach. If you’re not interested in anything related to beach volleyball, check back in next week.

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In the past 3 weeks, we’ve used the Triangle to analyze indoor matches. We looked at the two semifinals and the National Championship from the 2020-2021 spring indoor seasons. Today, we’ll look at a beach match. Since I spent Monday’s post talking about how awesome John Mayer is, I’ll highlight one of LMU’s biggest wins of the year. (Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ll mix it up in future breakdowns.)

The Basics

This match saw the LMU 2s pair of Reka Orsi Toth and Selina Marolf match up against the UCLA 2s pair of Lea Monkhouse and Devon Newberry. The LMU pair won 2 close sets: 21-18, 21-19.

The Triangle Lens

This is a match where the Triangle framework gives us some insight, because, while the total score was very close, none of the three aspects of the game were close. LMU dominated the Transition and Terminal Serve aspect, while UCLA dominated in First Ball. Ultimately, the LMU pair’s edge in two categories outweighed UCLA’s advantage in one. First Ball tends to be the most predictive category, but, as we’ll see in this and future breakdowns, winning First Ball isn’t a guarantee of winning the match.

Weighting The Three Aspects

First, let’s look at the weighting of each area of the game in respect to total points.

Total Points: 79

Total LMU Points: 42

Total UCLA Points: 37

Total Terminal Serves: 14

LMU Terminal Serve Points: 10 (3 Aces + 7 UCLA Serve Errors)

UCLA Terminal Serve Points: 4 (1 Ace + 3 LMU Serve Errors)

Total First Ball Points: 44

LMU First Ball Points: 18 (16 First Ball Kill + 2 First Ball Stops)

UCLA First Ball Points: 26 (21 First Ball Kill + 5 First Ball Stops)

Total Transition Points: 21

LMU Transition Points: 14 (9 Transition Kill + 5 Transition Stops)

UCLA Transition Points: 7 (5 Transition Kill + 2 First Ball Stops)

This isn’t an uncommon distribution of points in women’s NCAA volleyball. Typically, First Ball points account for about half of the points scored at this level. In this match, the ratio was a bit more than half. What’s interesting here is that UCLA lost this match, despite dominating the biggest category, which was just as prominent, if not more so, in this match than usual.

Here’s one of my favorite sideouts by UCLA in this match.

There was a pretty good cross-wind toward the ocean; you can probably see that in the background. So controlling that bumpset is huge and Monkhouse sets up a nice approach angle, keeps the ball on her right shoulder and still has power back cross-court. For those of us who coach both surfaces, indoor opposites can learn a lot from beach right-side players about getting that ball all the way on your right arm and rotating back to hit cross-court with power. Many indoor opposites do the exact opposite.

Terminal Serving

A partial reason that UCLA was so far ahead on First Ball points was that they were behind on Terminal Serving because of service errors. If you take 7 missed serves and put them in the court, you figure in women’s NCAA volleyball that 3 of them are going to be First Ball Kills. LMU did a nice job on reception; getting aced only once in a two sets. And it wasn’t for lack of service pressure:

That’s an earned sideout right there.

Often we look at Terminal Serves from the serving perspective, but thinking about it from the passing perspective is useful too. “How many serves does the other team have to miss in order to get an ace on me?” We talk to servers about making the passers work. But if the other team has to miss 7 serves just to get 1 ace on me, our passers are making the servers work, and that’s pretty valuable too.

Transition

UCLA was both more terminal, and created more stops, in First Ball than LMU. So I want to look at how LMU produced both more Transition kills and more Transition stops than UCLA did.

Something that is under-appreciated in beach volleyball is how often the “blocker” digs the ball. The traditional beach volleyball pair of “blocker and defender” is more true in high-level men’s volleyball. In NCAA women’s volleyball, the blocker certainly blocks a lot. But she also pulls a lot. It’s not uncommon to see a women’s NCAA match where the blocker pulls more than she blocks. So from a defensive perspective, digging as a puller is important. From an offensive perspective, beating the puller is important.

LMU did this well in this match.

On pulling balls:

UCLA pulled 11 times. LMU scored 6 times and made 2 errors, for a 36% efficiency.

LMU pulled 8 times. UCLA scored just twice and made an error, for a 13% efficiency.

Those are just on First Ball situations where there was a decision to pull or not. So I’m not counting shanked passes that got sent over into a waiting 2-back defense. And Transition gets messy so I’m leaving that out. I’m just looking at the situations where you’re defending in First Ball in order to create a Transition situation.

Let’s look at a few of those plays:

One takeaway is that LMU went at the puller or down the middle every time. This isn’t a ground-breaking tactic; most teams are going to try to hit at the puller when she pulls. But LMU did a nice job there; they did make a couple errors, but they made the puller play 9 times and scored on 6 of them. On the other hand, LMU got the defender in play 3 times and she dug it all 3 times.

We also see both teams using the “4” play on defense. We see a lot of this in women’s NCAA. Most players shoot line (especially right-handed left-side players) and that early release to the line gets the defender digging shots which is often a high-percentage dig. The flip side is that the blocker has to pull into the cross-court when you have a 4 on and it’s really tough to cover that ground. Early in the match UCLA ended up pulling on 4s quite a bit and got beat almost every time.

In comparison, when they were pulling line, LMU had a tougher time and made a couple errors trying to find the sideline.

Translation To Training

This is the point of statistical analysis. It’s not about journalism. It’s about understanding the macro trends (“what do we need to spend more time on?”) and getting you to ask the right questions to dig down into the micro-level execution stuff. I was at this match, but I didn’t have that memory of the pulling offense/defense being such a critical part of it until I dove deeper to write this article.

The better your coaching eye gets, the more accurate your Blink intuitions will be. But having a statistical framework will help you ask the right questions to dive back into the film to catch the stuff you missed.