Scouting Part 1
Serving and Passing
The NCAA Women’s Volleyball playoffs are here. This is exciting because you get to watch some good volleyball. But more importantly, I get to use one of my all-time favorite Youtube clips:
In the spirit of PLAYOFFS??? I’m going to take a look at some scouting and gameplanning concepts over the next 3 weeks. This first installment will cover scouting opponent serving and passing.
Why Scout Serving And Passing?
Terminal Serving is one of the 3 points of the Triangle.
Remember that our goal is to win at least 2 out of 3 of these points, we’re likely to win the match. We also know that Terminal Serving is less correlated with the other 2 points than they are to each other. That means if you’re an underdog, Terminal Serving is a potential area to “steal” from a team that’s ranked higher than you. On the flip side, if you’re the favorite, you don’t want to let an underdog give themselves a chance to beat you by stealing this aspect of the game.
Teams that win Terminal Serves win the match about 2/3 of the time. So let’s give ourselves a chance here!
I also find Serving and Passing a bit underrated when it comes to scouting. Whenever people talk to me about scouting, what always comes up first is scouting opponent hitting. But the first thing I always scout is Serving and Passing. Since it’s underrated, it’s probably an area to gain an edge over what some people aren’t doing.
Scouting Serving
Scouting serving is a little different from the women’s game to the men’s game. Since there are so many more spin servers in the men’s game, men’s coaches (in my experience) are a bit more aware of scouting serving and tend to scout the spin servers like hitters: 1-to-1 righty spin with some crosscourt cut; External spin back to the 5 sideline; etc.
I like scouting spin servers like this as well. On a spin server, what I’d like to do is see which seam we can risk.
I like this nomenclature of numbering seams 1 through 4. It works well for targeting our servers and it also works well for scouting servers. Most servers have a seam (usually one of the sidelines) that they won’t really serve to with any sort of heat. So if we’re going to risk the 1-seam on a hard spin server, everybody might shade a step left. Vice versa if we’re going to risk the 4-seam.
Many float servers can target the whole court (that’s sort of the point of float serving), so they might not have a predictable trend. But some do! In particularly, I find this to be more the case with middles. There’s quite a few big middles with good float servers who almost always just hit it hard 5-to-5. It’s a tough serve to handle, so it’s good to know that.
I’ve heard it said that one aspect of being good at reading the game is knowing what options to eliminate. Part of why unskilled players are unskilled is because they chase the wrong information. And the other part is that they don’t know when to eliminate options that aren’t possible. So for scouting opponent servers, I’m more thinking about what options can I eliminate. I think of it almost in checklist fashion. Does this server?
Serve short, ie, close to the 10’ line?
If she does serve short, will she do it on her first serve of the game or sequence? Many servers won’t go short on their first serve, they’ll do it on the second serve of a serving run.
Will she ever serve off-line? That is, does she line up down the line and the serve the ball crosscourt? Or does she always hit where she faces?
How often does she serve out long? The easiest way to not let a tough server get on a run is to let her serve out. (This is especially true in Juniors volleyball where hard servers are often 30% error… don’t play the ball that’s going long!)
Does she ABC her serve or stick with the same serve? If she gets a point serving long, is she likely to go short on the next one?
If they use serving subs, I also want to scout them. Some teams use regular serving subs all the time. Okay, easy enough. Some teams use serving subs for a specific reason. Is this girl coming in to hit a tactical short serve?
Also, when they do serve short (notice this is a theme for scouting float servers), do they pair that with a block/defense tactic? Some teams will try to serve short to take a hitter out and then trap their block the other way. So they’ll try to serve into traffic in Ro6 and then leave for the outside. Or they’ll serve the frontrow outside short and then commit on the middle.
In summary, scouting spin servers is more like scouting hitters. You’re trying to get a little information on tendency so that you can stack over a little more in one part of the court to give yourself a better chance against a fast-moving ball.
Scouting float servers can be like that if they are a “let it rip” sort of server. But sometimes, it can almost be more like scouting the coach. Okay, when they serve here, what are they trying to do?
Scouting Passing
We want our servers to be confident and aggressive when they’re back at the service line. We can give them extra confidence by having a clear service plan. In order to do that, we want to know some information about their passers.
It’s important not to overthink this. I’m about to give a whole checklist of things you’ll want to scout, but remember that we’re trying to win the Terminal Serving game here. The first rule of serving is:
Just serve the girl who gets aced the most.
Is there more to a serving plan than that? Sure. But I know I’m not the only one who has made a gameplan (whether serving or offense or defense) too complicated and at the end of the match sat down and thought the equivalent of, “why didn’t we just serve the girl who gives up the most aces?”
At a base level, I like to scout each passer by InSys%, Aced%, and Sideout%. To me, the Aced% is the number-1 thing to scout, but I like to see the other two things. Every now and then you might have a passer who has a slightly higher Aced% than another passer (say: 9.3% compared to 8.0%), but she’s significantly higher InSys% (say 56% to 44%). In that case, I’ll serve the passer with the lower InSys%. I equate about every 6 points of InSys% to be worth 1 point of Aced%.
I also like to look at Sideout% when that passer passes the ball. It’s not uncommon to see liberos whose passing numbers are in the ballpark of the other passers, but the team sides out significantly better when she passes. Not that we want to serve liberos, but it’s just a comment on that phenomenon. The big thing you’re looking here is likely at an outside hitter.
This is leading us to this thought: generally we’re deciding between which of 2 non-liberos to serve. Many teams default to serving the frontrow outside hitter. I don’t think that’s a bad idea! But… make sure you check to see that their Sideout % is actually affected by that player passing. This summer in the Canada MNT season, we encountered multiple outside hitters who attacked better (in the frontrow, pipe hitting is another story) after passing than they did when they didn’t pass. Some players just find that the rhythm is better.
And besides, you can serve to takeout an outside hitter, but if it just means an In-System ball where they can set their best middle… then you haven’t really helped yourself.
Another item in your checklist is to look at how their passers pass in different zones of the court. In particular, look at how they pass in Zone 5 and Zone 1. If you’re going to serve somebody in Zone 6, they better be the clear worst passer, because we know that passers are much more effective in Zone 6.
The final parts of your checklist are visual, they won’t necessarily show up from pulling stats:
Does the setter have a tendency after the ball is passed from a certain zone? As a broad trend, passers tend to keep the ball a little toward them and setters tend to keep sets in their zone. So does this setter tend to set outside after the ball is passed in 5? Does this setter tend to set the opposite after the ball is passed in 1?
Does the passer struggle with particular serves? Hard and deep? Short droppers?
How is their short serve protection? Do their middles help pass short balls? If they do help pass short, are they any good at it?
If you serve short, do they set that player, or will they set away from them?
How quickly do they adjust after an ace or bad pass? If you get them short, are they going to let you get them short again? Or are they going to overplay for the short ball and let you get them deep?
How aggressive is their libero at pinching or helping? Is she going to let you pick off her outsides all day? Or is she going to pinch hard and you can beat her back the other way?
So there we go, a few things to help you scout your opponents in order to win the Terminal Serve game. I hope that helps!