Serving Profiles - Part 2

Serving for aces

Related:
Digging Profiles
Blocking Profiles

Articles in this series:
Part 1 - Introducing The Data
Part 2 - Serving For Aces
Part 3 - Serving In
Part 4 - Knockout Queens

Serving For Aces

In Part 1, I introduced 3 broad profiles of serving teams:

1. Teams who serve a lot of aces, at the cost of missing serves

2. Teams who serve in a lot, at the cost of less service pressure

3. Teams with high service pressure but who don’t necessarily serve a ton of aces

The first profile we’re going to look at is the Serve For Aces team. These teams are relatively better at producing aces than keeping the ball in play or applying pressure on non-ace/non-error serves.

First, let’s look at our leaderboard:

Like most of these profiles, we see the full gamut here. We see an undefeated team like WKU, as well as 19-1 Stanford and 14-2 Lipscomb (in-conference records). And we also see a couple of sub-.500 teams in there as well. Again, it seems to be a constant refrain that there are few micro-level winning strategies in volleyball. Execution generally trumps tactics, and there’s a variety of tactics than can produce success.

Winning And Losing

There is some correlation between Serving For Aces and winning. In this sample, there was a 0.15 correlation between Ace % and Win %. That’s not nothing, but it’s not an especially strong correlation. Hitting %, for example, will have a much higher correlation. However, Hitting % factors in at least 3 skills (passing/digging, setting, and attacking) and it factors in both producing kills as well as avoiding errors/being blocked.

For a slice of one skill, 0.15 correlation isn’t nothing. Serving For Aces is good! Let’s look at the other correlations I pulled that specifically relate to serving:

0.15 - Ace %
0.21 - Error %¹
0.05 - Opponent Good Pass²
0.33 - Ace:Error Ratio
0.12 - Knockout %

It’s also worth nothing that the correlation to Opponent Good Pass is only -0.05. In other words, how well or poorly your opponents passed had almost 0 correlation to winning. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter. But it does mean that, in the 2023 NCAA Women’s Volleyball season, teams that forced more opponent bad passes didn’t necessarily win more (or less) matches than teams that forced fewer opponent bad passes.

Correlations are crude tools, so you don’t want to over-infer. BUT…

I’ve said a statement at plenty of coaching clinics, that’s something like:

Aces and errors don’t really matter, because that’s only like 1-out-of-5 serves. What matters is the pressure you apply on the serves that go in the court.

Or

It’s not about aces and errors, it’s about knocking the other team out-of-system.

Over the past 3-5 years, I’ve been questioning that statement more and more. In fact, it’s actually my involvement on the beach side of the game that has made me question that statement. Over time, when analyzing NCAA beach servers for LMU, there seemed to be servers who didn’t serve a ton of knockout serves, but who had a knack for some strategic serves to produce aces here or there, while still keeping their A:E ratio solid.

Basically, I assumed A:E ratio and KO% moved in lockstep. And indeed, there is correlation. In this sample, it was 0.45. But still, it’s only 0.45! That means there’s plenty of wiggle room for teams to have relatively poor A:E ratio while serving for a strong KO% or vice versa.

Is This A Midwit Situation?

Again, I don’t want to indulge in excessive correlational teasing with some of these numbers. Sometimes you can find what you want to find. But, in a lot of ways, I’d be way more comfortable with the “aces/errors aren’t that big of a deal” narrative. In this case, I might end up being the midwit here. Or at least, a version of me was probably there and I find myself pulling away from it a bit.

There is a balance here. I do think you can start chasing aces or get into some goofy things from the service line trying to magically conjure aces, when the fact of the matter is that aces do come from tough serving. (To bring correlations back into it, the correlation in this sample between Ace % and OGP % was -0.72. That means there’s a pretty strong correlation between serving for aces and forcing bad passes.)

However, I will regale a story from a coaching clinic I watched from an old school coach somewhere along the line. Maybe it was Russ Rose, but I feel like, with the passing of time, I increasingly attribute all old-school/politically incorrect coaching aphorisms to Russ Rose. And it was something like:

I have a few servers on my team who are allowed to serve tough. And I never care if they miss. And everybody else, I tell them they better serve the ball in the court.

I came away from watching that like, “hey this guy doesn’t really get it and he’s leaving points on the table by not optimizing both ends of the serving continuum. Not every player is going to fit cleanly into one or the other. Good teams win by continual, steady serving pressure and break the opponents down over time.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

1. Technically it was -0.21, because the more errors your make, the less you win and the fewer errors you make, the more you win, but I’m just showing the magnitudes here to make comparison less-confusing for less statistically inclined people.

2. Again, technically -0.05, as in, “the less opponent good passes you allow, the more you win…. slightly.”