Post-Tournament Review

The Statistics

I posted some more qualitative thoughts on post-tournament reviews earlier this week:

Today I’ll focus a little more quantitatively. What sort of stats do I use in club volleyball and how do I keep them?

Be A Coach, Not A Statistician

I like stats. I dedicate a lot of time on this Substack to quantitative metrics. And certainly, if we’re talking about international/professional/collegiate volleyball, statistics can be a critical piece of the puzzle. As the level gets higher, the margins get thinner and you need to seek competitive advantage everywhere you can. However, things are a little different at the high school and club level. Specifically: you’re dealing with limited resources.

This club weekend, I spent most of the time coaching by myself. I had an assistant coach who could be there on Day 1 of the tournament and not Days 2/3. Not uncommon in club ball; you try to find good people and you appreciate what they can do while realizing everyone else has lives. And my other assistant coach (aka: wife)… well our daughter choose a convenient time to get ravaged by the flu. Thus revealing a major flaw in husband-wife coaching duos. Sunday and Monday she was taking care of a sick kid, so I was coaching solo.

And again, this type of stuff is pretty common in club ball, so many of you reading this likely faced similar challenges. And you’ll face similar choices: do I, as the head coach, keep statistics, or do I ignore them in-tournament? For me, I’m never keeping stats as the head coach. To be honest, a lot of times I don’t even like assistants to keep stats. I think there’s too much valuable teaching and coaching that can happen in the moment. Everything you learn in sports is context-dependent and the competitive context provides incredibly clarity to allow you to teach. Don’t miss those opportunitites because your head is down recording stats.

So what you end up with is needing to do stats after the tournament. The good thing is that this involves watching video, which is helpful to do anyway. As an unemployed bum full-time volleyball coach, I have a little more time to do this than most coaches, but most of you should be able to find time to do some video review after a tournament. It’s important. And you can record some stats while you’re doing so.

What Do I Record?

I don’t spend a ton of time on individual stats. This year I’ve been uploading to Balltime, which can give you some individual stat reports. So that’s handy. But it’s not a huge priority for me to find individual hitting efficiencies or passing stats. I think in club volleyball you should, especially in the early season, set up a playing time rotation that gets everybody involved (not necessarily equally, but at least 25% of total “minutes” played) and then base your playoff playing time decisions on which lineups are winning and losing, not individual stats.

Therefore, I’m way more into team statistics. The team statistics I’m looking at are metrics of team progress and indicators of strengths and weaknesses. This helps me provide feedback to my team and to plan upcoming training blocks.

The stat sheet that I like is a “terminal contact” sheet. This means that I only record one tally mark per rally, which corresponds to how the rally was one. I don’t record any continues such as digs, block touches, attack attempts, etc. If you’re interested in that specific pdf, it’s here: