Sandy Sundays: Beach "Rotations"

Bang for your buck

In lieu of the full-on Beach Weeks from last year, this spring I’ll be doing one beach post each week.

The NCAA Beach season is underway this weekend. I’ve consulted with the LMU team for the past several seasons. I have less of a pulse on the NCAA Beach scene than normal right now, but with my time here in Korea wrapping up soon, I’m looking forward to diving back into… the sand.

Last we talked about 5 valuable performance indicators for your beach teams this spring.

In this week’s post I’ll actually back up one level more macro to talk about the most general piece of statistical information I use for beach teams.

Indoor coaches often analyze stats by rotation. While that doesn’t transfer perfectly to beach, I do like a simple 2 x 2 matrix:

1. Player A or B

2. Sideout and Break Point

Here’s an old tournament report I used from a pro pair I coached:

You can see there’s also some First Ball and Transition information in there.

What I like about this framework is that it’s both simple and powerful. It’s a bit more general than some of the more specific KPIs that I shared last week. But I would also that you could effectively organize training for almost any pair just based off this info alone. What you can see here is:

1. Overall level of sideout play. This was Pro Men, so overall Sideout is extremely high.

2. First Ball and Transition information.

3. Transition information both when serving and receiving. I mentioned this in last week’s KPI.

4. Disparities between the two partners. It’s not uncommon for one partner to score more break points as the server but for the other to be a better sideout player.

What I like about this is you can also integrate these numbers into drill variations like 8-Ball. After all, the essence of an 8-Ball drill for the beach is that each player is going to get to serve 2 different players and receive serve from 2 different players. Since you can easily play 5-10 rounds of 8-Ball in a practice, you can actually accumulate some reasonable stats from practice.

And it’s less that those practice stats are driving where a player gets slotted in a tournament, or anything like that, but many players like the short-term targets.

And finally, nothing here requires DataVolley or any other advanced stat program. You can easily keep this with pencil and paper. For high school aged teams, even a parent volunteer can keep this, because there’s no judgements- you’re simply tracking when and how the rally ended.

Simple, but useful!