Serving Profiles - Part 3

Just Serve It In!

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

Just Serve It In!

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 Just Serve It In teams. These teams are relatively better at serving the ball in the court and avoiding errors, as opposed to serving for aces or knocking the other team out-of-system.

First, let’s look at our leaderboard:

As usual, there’s a wide range of teams that can fall into a profile. Undefeated Northern Iowa had a clear low-ace, low-error profile (although they were also pretty good at knocking teams OoS too) and they went undefeated. Other teams had winning but not championship seasons. Let’s look more into the correlations and see if we can tease out any other information.

Winning And Losing

There is correlation between Serving In and winning. In this sample, there was a -0.21 correlation between Error % and Win %. Meaning, as teams make less errors they do tend to win a bit more. This correlation isn’t nearly as high as something like Hitting Efficiency, but Hitting Efficiency is influenced by 3 skills (passing, setting, and attacking) as opposed to just one.

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.

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Addendum!
Eric Neely (who knows a thing or two about winning seasons!) comments:

This is a good observation and this is where correlations can be a bit of a dangerous tool. I’ve done other studies where I just looked at individual sets within a match and found a stronger correlation between Good Pass % and Win %. And clearly, within a given rally However, and here’s where I think the big point is:

These correlations are not in a vacuum.

If we were truly trying to design a test to correlate OGP% and Win%, we would somehow clone a team and then run multiple seasons with different OGP%. But we can’t do that. And clearly, within a given rally, there’s a significant correlation between pass quality and Sideout %. And Sideout % matters a lot.

So on an individual play basis, knocking the opponent clearly matters. But yet, at least in this recent NCAA season, teams that are good at knocking opponents out-of-system over the course of the season don’t seem to have meaningfully higher Win % than teams that aren’t quite as good. Why? We’ll get to that more in the next article :)

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I said this in the last article, but since errors are the flip side of aces, I’ll mention it again. I used to say things like this at coaching clinics:

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.

I also have always been a “I’d rather serve tough and lose making errors than serve in a lot and risk giving up easy sideouts.”

Our coaching philosophies will always be shaped by our early experiences and my earliest coaching experiences are (1) coaching at a small (but successful) club in Delaware and (2) coaching at a small (but successful) NCAA D1 program at LMU. If you’re LMU (especially LMU circa-2012, not having made the NCAA tournament in almost 10 years) and you’re trying to knock off a power-conference school in a non-conference match, there’s a feeling that you’re going to be physically overmatched at the net. Likewise, if you’re taking a club team from little old Delaware to an Open qualifier and trying to win some matches against the Texas/California/Florida teams that seemed packed with 10’+ kids, lobbing the ball in seems like a recipe for disaster.

I’ve always emphasized serving tough, taking some risk, being okay with some missed serves.

But… I also have to look at the numbers.

I’m not sure these numbers tell me conclusively, “I want to have a conservative serving strategy and emphasize serving in at the cost of serving a bit easier.” If we sort the data set by highest Error %:

You have 19-1 Stanford, 14-2 Lipscomb, 17-1 Kentucky, 16-2 Towson, 14-0 High Point, and 19-1 Nebraska all being high-error teams. Stanford has been a high-error team under Kevin Hambly. To quote from a previous mailbag (worth reading the whole thing, there’s some additional data in there):

Indeed, Stanford was on the aggressive side: they missed 12.1% of serves, which is above-average for an NCAA Woman’s team, especially a very good one. They earned 44.1% Break Points, a very strong number. And they held teams to just 45.3% Good Pass. So: Hambly is preaching an aggressive mindset, Stanford is playing that way, and having success.

Finally, let’s look at Stanford’s record when they serve in more or less often than their opponents:

10 Wins where they missed less often than opponents
16 Wins where they missed more often than opponents
1 Loss where they missed less often than opponents
4 Losses where they missed more often than opponents

Strangely enough, Stanford served in a lot more in the tournament than the regular season, missing only 7.6% of their serves. And in their epic battle against USD, Stanford served in at 96.2%, missing only 4 of 104 serves in their loss to USD, who also missed only 6 of 103 serves. (And it’s also worth noting that, while Stanford did lose that match, they outscored USD.)

You could look at this and say:

Stanford went 10-1 when missing less often than opponents.
Stanford went 16-4 when missing more often than opponents.

But I dunno… when you’re talking about a team that only loses 5 matches all year (and outscored their opponents in one of those 5), I wouldn’t parse that up. I would summarize by saying:

-Yes, Stanford was more aggressive than most teams.
-This aggressive serving helped (or at least, did not hinder) their Break Point ability.
-Teams in general are served well by serving in, and 2 serve errors or fewer per set is a good goal for women’s volleyball. But this isn’t nearly as big of a factor as other aspects of the game.

Serving tough is kind of like emphasizing slide hitting. Having a good slide hitter is unquestionably an asset in NCAA women’s volleyball. But most teams don’t hit the slide well and are probably hurt by their decision to try to be good at it. If you can make aggressive serving work, it’s beneficial. And that’s always been my philosophy. But the data might be indicating here that more teams should emphasize serving in and playing low-error volleyball.

Something to think about, at least. In the next article I’ll get into teams that were the best at knocking opponents out-of-system and how that differs from serving in and/or serving for aces.

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.”