NCAA Tournament Triangles

Terminal Serving

January is all about major-competition analysis! I’m applying the Triangle analysis to three recent major competitions in indoor volleyball: the NCAA Women’s National Championshp, the FIVB Women’s World Championship, and the FIVB Men’s World Championship. This week we’re focusing on Terminal Serving and how that was applied in each tournament.

Today we’re looking at the 2022 NCAA Women’s National Championship Tournament. Specifically, we’re looking at Terminal Serving in that competition. I’ll add links to each piece of this series as I release them:

NCAA Women: First Ball
NCAA Women: Transition
FIVB Women: Terminal Serving
FIVB Women: First Ball
FIVB Women: Transition
FIVB Men: Terminal Serving
FIVB Men: First Ball
FIVB Men: Transition

How Common Were Terminal Serves?

Terminal Serves were about 15% of points scored in the NCAA Tournament. If we break it down by Triangle phase:

15% Terminal Serves
45% First Ball Points
40% Transition Points

So about 1 out of every 7 or 8 points was an ace or a service error in this NCAA tournament. That’s pretty typical for NCAA women’s volleyball.

The serve-in rate was 91% for the tournament and about 1-in-17 serves were aces. These numbers align pretty well as a progression from Juniors volleyball. There’s a constant balancing act of serving in and serving tough, and NCAA women’s teams are tilting pretty heavily toward serving in. We saw that the most successful Juniors teams were serving in a lot, even at the cost of not serving all that tough. NCAA teams are taking a bit more risk, but not at the level that international teams or men’s teams are.

How Did Terminal Serves Effect Winning And Losing?

The average edge of a winning team in Terminal Serving was just +1.9 and the standard deviation was 4.2. The range of Terminal Serving outcomes is a bit smaller than the other two points of the game, which make sense because it’s the smallest area (in terms of total points played) of the game.¹

The team that won Terminal Serving won the match 60% of the time. This is a bit higher than conference-only stats that we’ve seen in past years. However, there’s still more than 1-in-4 matches where a team wins Terminal Serving but loses the match. It’s a bit more common to win Terminal Serving and lose the match than it is to win First Ball or Trans and lose the match. I’m a big believer in winning the Terminal Serving game, but it has a bit less correlation to winning than do First Ball or Transition.

There were actually NO matches in the 2022 Women’s NCAA Tournament where a team won only Terminal Serving and won the match! This is a bit unusual, but it’s not entirely surprising. From the Terminal Serving Weakness profile:

These 3 ways of looking at the success of the Terminal Serving Weakness profile show us that it’s not a bad thing to have. In fact, there’s a pretty good argument that, in NCAA women’s volleyball, you might be well-served by spending less resources trying to get good at Terminal Serving relative to First Ball and Transition.

There’s probably some evolutionary pressure involved here. In order to hit and block at the highest level in the NCAA, you need to be way out on the right tail of height and jumping ability. It’s probably a tautology that the group of 99.999th-percentile spike touch athletes are going to be worse servers than the mere 99.9th-percentile spike touchers.

Based off that, it’s not surprising to see Wisconsin, likely one of the tallest teams in NCAA volleyball history, in this group. When you’re selecting that skewed of a physical profile, just getting them to be merely average servers and passers is probably going to make you a really good team.

Of course teams want to be good in the serve-pass game. But the most successful teams in the tournament weren’t making that the cornerstone of their game. (In contrast to 2021 Nebraska, for example.)

In total, 13 of 63 matches were won by teams who only won 1 point of the Triangle and none came by winning only Terminal Serving. Right now, in NCAA women’s volleyball, nobody is riding solely the serve-pass game to lots of wins.

44% of matches were won by teams who won 2/3 points of the Triangle.
43% of matches were won by teams who won all 3 points of the Triangle.

Overall, the idea of our goal is to win 2 out of 3 points of the Triangle held. If you win at least 2 out of 3 Triangle points, you won the match about 80% of the time in this year’s NCAA Championship.

What’s interesting here is that there were significantly more blowouts than we’ll see when we look at these numbers for the FIVB World Championships. Which, makes sense. The higher the level, the more the separation in ability narrows. More of that as we progress through the week.

How Did Terminal Serves Impact The Top Teams?

Let’s take a look at Terminal Serving by the 4 semi-finalsts: Texas, Louisville, USD, and Pitt:

3 of the 4 teams were positive in the Terminal Serving area, but, surprisingly, USD was not. I think there’s a natural tendency to assume that the underdog team² must be doing it through plucky grit and serving and passing. Nah. USD wasn't great in the serving and passing realm, but, as we'll see in future weeks, they were really good offensively and defensively.

Pitt was the team that dominated the Terminal Serving game. A 1.5 per-set edge is really big and you can see that it wasn’t necessarily serving aces and it wasn’t necessarily ace prevention. Pitt just served in like crazy: 94% for the tournament.

So, you heard it here folks: if you want to win in NCAA volleyball, just lollipop it in and then be really good at the net. But wait…

Okay maybe not. Texas and Louisville missed more, but stopped the other team more. USD. Louisville’s tough serving didn’t always net out in terms of ace:error ratio (compared to Pitt, for example), but it did set up a few dominant blocking performances. Texas continued with their high-ace, high-error philosophy. And it certainly worked for them.

Where USD and especially Louisville did well was in ace prevention:

4.1% Louisville
4.6% USD
5.8% Texas
6.7% Pitt

So one thing we see is that “The Serve/Pass Game” is not a monolith. Different teams are approaching that phase of the game in different ways. One thing I’d like to know more about is whether these different approaches to serve/pass are a reflection of specific philosophies or an adaptation to talent. (The answer usually seems to be: a bit of both.)

Terminal Serving In The Final Four

Let’s look at the Terminal Serve matchups in the 3 matches of the final round: the two semifinals plus the championship between Texas and Louisville.

So we can see here that the Terminal Serving game… didn’t matter in the Final Four this year. Cool, great, all the club coaches trying to get their kids to value that aspect of the game are depressed right now. But hey, that was the reality. (And we’ll see, it wasn’t just the NCAA where this was a trend.)

Conclusions

The point of this analysis is less to make a point of this is how you must play volleyball and more to continue previous themes of there are multiple ways to form winning teams. We’ve seen before in the Team Profile articles that successful teams can be built in different ways.

One thing that stood out to me was that the teams in the NCAA Final Four this year weren’t necessarily dominant in this phase (except Pitt), but they had some particular strengths. I’m a big fan of playing to your strengths as you get into the post-season. Texas and Louisville have an aggressive approach to the service line that synchs up with their ability to go hunting for the block out-of-system.

Louisville and USD save aces really well. Texas has upgraded that area from previous years, particularly considering the physicality of attackers they are playing. Pitt makes you play from the service line and thumps balls in Transition.

This analysis pretty clearly tells me that the best NCAA programs are recruiting athletes that can dominate the net and then trying to put together a good serving and passing game around that. But it also tells me that even within the realm of serving and passing there’s some different nuances that we as coaches need to be aware.

What are your takeaways? Leave a comment and let me know.

1. There’s a bit of a skew here because there were some big mismatches in the first round of the tournament. When you are winning by a lot, you are serving a lot, and if it’s the case that NCAA teams miss serves more often than they serve aces (which it is), then serving a lot drags your Terminal Serving score down a bit, compared to more even matches.

2. Was USD even an underdog? They were dominant all year. But, narratives.