Points Of The Triangle: Terminal Serving

When we looked at The Triangle method of analyzing our team, we put a different aspect of the game at each point of the triangle. Today, we’ll look at Terminal Serves. Future sections will discuss First Ball and Transition.

---

Reminder: On Wednesday, Dec 8 I’m doing an online workshop with the one and only Riley Salmon. We’re going to talk Serving and Passing (aka, the stuff the makes Terminal Serving happen) and break down some video. We’ll also do some live Q&A and open it up to Smarter Volley subscribers. I want to keep the session small enough for everybody to participate and get the chance to ask questions and interact. There’s just 3 spots (Edit: all full!) left for this session; comment on this post to claim your spot. No cost! The session is at noon PT, 3pm ET. I’ll put the video up later this week.

---

What Are Terminal Serves?

A terminal serve is an ace or a service error. They are points earned when, “volleyball didn’t happen.” We get Terminal Serve points when:

1. We serve an ace.

2. Opponents miss their serve.

On the flip side, our opponents get Terminal Serve points when:

3. They serve an ace.

4. We miss our serve.

Example

We serve 5 aces and miss 6 serves. Our opponents serve 6 aces and miss 10 serves.

Total Terminal Serves = 27 (5 + 6 + 6 + 10)

Our Terminal Serve Points = 15 (5 aces + 10 opponent errors)

Opponent Terminal Serve Points = 12 (6 aces + 6 our errors)

In this example we were +3 in Terminal Serves.

Why Group This Way?

Typical statistics often pair our aces and our missed serves. Ace-to-error ratio is a meaningful statistic. The downside is that it excludes our passing. Since we often train serving and passing together, we include it all into Terminal Serves.

Coaches often talk about, “winning the serve-pass battle.” Terminal Serves offers a way to express that in one number. It also turns a ratio into real points. For example, a “1-to-2” ace-to-error ratio can be achieved by:

1 ace, 2 errors

Or:

10 aces, 20 errors

Those are different games! For a high school JV team, the first result is better. The other team will make enough errors that 1 ace and 2 service errors is a great result. On the other hand, in Men’s Olympic Volleyball, the first result is loss, while the second gives me a chance to win.

What Are Not Terminal Serves?

Terminal Serves are only aces and errors. So shanked balls that are kept in play are not Terminal Serves. They will lead to either First Ball or Transition points. There’s some judgement needed. If we shank a pass and the setter makes an error trying to keep it in play, is it a Terminal Serve or a First Ball error? It’s your team, you decide.

How Common Are Terminal Serves?

At the high school level¹, Terminal Serves can be as high as 1/3 of the total points, although it drops a bit as the level gets higher. This applies to most juniors club levels as well, with U-14 and U-15 often seeing close to 1/3 of the serves being terminal and U-17 and U-18 coming in closer to 25%. The number of terminal serves tends to decrease at higher levels: the USA Women were in a 15% Terminal Serve environment on their way to winning a gold medal in Tokyo.

Teams that have very aggressive serving strategies will have more Terminal Serves, both positive and negative. Since jump spin serving is more common in men’s volleyball, they have more Terminal Serves. 21% of the points France played en route to their gold were terminal. NCAA men’s champion Hawaii was at a similar number.

High school teams tend to have more Terminal Serves than women’s NCAA teams, since they both miss more and are aced more often. This year the Big 10 was about 5.5% ace and 9.5% error, similar to NT-level play.

Why Do Terminal Serves Matter?

In December 2010 I attended my first Gold Medal Squared clinic. Carl McGown opened my eyes to lots of things that weekend, but one case study always stuck with me. He shared the statistics from the 2001 Men’s NCAA Championship match. Not surprisingly, for a Carl McGown clinic, that match featured a great win by a BYU team.

In this match, BYU won in 3, outscoring UCLA by 10 points: 30-26, 30-26, 32-30. (Remember when we played to 30??) There were 30 total Terminal Serves with BYU winning 21 of them and UCLA winning 9. That means, if you take out the Terminal Serves, there were 144 rallies where the ball was in play (let’s call them “Live Rallies”) and UCLA won 73 of them. UCLA was better when volleyball, as we tend to think of it, with setting and spiking and digging and blocking, happened. Yet BYU won the match because they dominated from the service line.

Maybe it sounds obvious to you, but that really hit me. I was coaching club kids in Delaware. We had a nice program, but being from a small area, we were physically outmatched by the California and Texas clubs that seemed to have an unending supply of high-flying 6-footers.

The next practice I shared this example with my teams and we made it our mission to win Terminal Serves in every match. If we could start each game with a 2-point “head start” by getting aced less and missing fewer serves, that would make up for getting outmuscled a couple times at the net.

Every year in the NCAA tournament, teams win matches by winning Terminal Serves, despite getting outscored in the other aspects of the game. For example, in the last NCAA tournament, Washington (who would eventually advance to the Final Four) was outscored by Dayton 91-87 in Live Rallies, but was able to win in 5, in large part due to a 23-12 advantage in Terminal Serves.

How Do Terminal Serves Relate To Pass Quality?

It’s hard to make a good pass if you get aced! The most accurate passers also tend to get aced the least, and vice versa. But there’s not a perfect overlap.

For example, in the 2019 Big 10 season, here’s how teams ranked by Good Pass % and Opponent Ace %.

The correlation is about 0.6, which is moderate. Accurate passers tend to get aced less and vice versa, but it’s interesting to compare a team like Michigan at 54.3% but allowing 5.6% ace to Ohio State, who passed less accurately but allowed fewer aces. For what it’s worth, in this season, not getting aced was significantly more correlated to winning than Good Pass %.

I’d love to see this data for high school or juniors level volleyball. Hudl, send me all the data you have from 16 or 17 Open Nationals! I’ll share my analysis with everybody.

How Do Terminal Serves Relate To Winning Other Aspects Of The Game

Terminal Serves are less correlated to First Ball and Transition than First Ball and Transition are to each other. I tend to see that in an empowering way. It’s a different avenue for us to beat a team that may be superior in the Live Rally areas of the game.

In fact, when a team won Terminal Serves, they won First Ball 52%² of the time. Essentially, Terminal Serving and First Ball ability was uncorrelated. (There’s a confounding factor: when I miss a serve, I take away your chance to sideout.) When a team won Terminal Serves, they won Transition 64% of the time, suggesting a stronger correlation between those two areas of the game.

Overall, when a team won Terminal Serves, they won the match about 2/3 of the time. But no category of the game stands alone. Winning only Terminal Serves (and therefore, losing both First Ball and Transition) only wins you the match about 15% of the time. Compared to winning only First Ball or only Transition, which led to wins 29% and 38% of the time, respectively. So this is an important aspect of the game (and probably more important for underdogs) but you still have to do more than just serve for aces to win high-level volleyball.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about some training implications that flow from this Terminal Serving concept. On Wednesday I’m talking to Riley Salmon about serving and passing and at the end of the week I’ll post an analysis from this current NCAA tournament, breaking down a match where Terminal Serving made a signficant impact on the outcome of the match.

1. In general, when I say, “high school level,” I tend to mean, “high school varsity.” But even that is about a broad a concept as saying “college volleyball,” which lumps in the top of D1 with the bottom of D3. So there’s a wide range in level of “high school” volleyball.

2. All these numbers are from the 2021 Big 10 season. Other conferences may shake out a little differently, but I think they’ll be in the ballpark.