Odd Week Mailbag August 2022

August 2022 Edition

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. Earlier this week I had a Short Takes post and a Guest Post on some serving and passing concepts.

Previous mailbags:

November 2021
January 2022
July 2022 Mini-Mailbag
July 2022 Mini-Mailbag Part 2

One final note before we get started! I don’t really check my joe.trinsey email that often anymore. I scanned through it for this mailbag, and found some back emails in there. Sorry about the delay in responding. Try my jtrinsey instead. I (might) respond more quickly. But I’m also taking a hiatus from email for most of the next few months. So the comment section here is the best place to get a question answered quickly.

From an email:

Do you give any credence to my challenge to yours and others studies on midline passing?

That challenge being that easier serves tend to be received midline and tougher serves (deeper, farther away, and faster) tend to be received outside the midline.

If a study was done with ONLY easy serves and each passer was required to perform x number of passes midline and x number of passes left of midline. 

Yes, I give this a lot of credence! I think at least some, and possibly even most, of the “advantage” of midline passing is that balls that are received midline have less of a movement demand. I’m not sure I’d say that they are easier serves per se. A 110 km/hr spin serve is not necessarily an easy pass, but it is probably easier to pass a 110 km/hr serve right on your midline than a 100 km/hr serve 1m away.

But also… that’s part of the point. If you stand where the 100 km/hr serve would land, then it would be easier than the 110 km/hr on the midline, and the 110 km/hr serve in the seam would be harder than the 100 km/hr serve in the seam.

That’s why we stand where we stand. You stand so that a combination of “most serves” plus “hardest serves” are going to be on your midline more often and the less-common serves will be in the seams. If it was easier to pass a ball outside your body than right on your platform, then passers would prefer to not stand in the highest-probability spaces. Since every decent passers prefers to align in the most likely serving lanes, we can infer that midline is an advantage as opposed to taking balls outside the body.

And for clarification, I’m calling “midline” to be sort of “within the feet” or “within the knees” rather than “exactly on your belly button.” There’s plenty of passers that would prefer to be slightly “left hip” than “on the belly button” but I’d call a “left hip” pass to still generally be a “midline” pass and that’s how they are also generally graded on Volleymetrics.

This also aligns with some of my thoughts on Sanky’s studies that I posted earlier this week. Zone 5 passers pass more accurately on their left than their right, but they are aced more on their left than their right. There are lots of balls that they are taking “slightly left” and “slightly right" and they are more accurate “slightly left” than they are “slightly right.” However, there are a chunk of balls that are “way left” being served on the true sideline, as well as balls that are let go that catch the line, and these are also coded as “left side passes.” Balls that are let go in the interior seam of the Zone 5 passer have a 50/50 shot to get coded as a “right side” for the Zone 5 passer or “left side” for the Zone 6 passer and there’s not as many “way right” balls for the Zone 5 passer as there are “way left” balls, because they have help to their right but not their left.