Spring 2025 Mailbag Part 1

Pocket Radar, Balltime Triangles, Beach Serving, Coin Flips

This spring has been all about Triangle analysis, if you haven’t checked out:

Triangle Primer
NCAA Women’s Season Analysis
LOVB Triangles

You might enjoy those reads. I have some NCAA Men’s Analysis underway before those playoffs happen, and then I’ll be down at Gulf Shores for the NCAA Women’s Beach Championships as well. After that, I’ll switch gears and I have some more teaching-oriented content coming your way for the summer. But first, a mailbag!

Check previous mailbag posts here if you haven’t yet:

Winter 2024
Fall 2024
Summer 2024
Spring 2024

After all, as one reader said:

If you want to read my most underrated post maybe ever, check out Part 2 of the winter mailbag! Now, on to questions from the spring.

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Super-commenter Bend Rand asks in the comments of the previous mailbag:

How do you use the pocket radar? Are you holding it and reading off speed as they hit/serve, then they go write it on the whiteboard? Do you have it mounted on a tripod running in continuous mode [battery life!] linked to your phone/tablet reading off speed?

It depends on the logistics of each team/practice setting. Ex: in Korea, the teams have a ton of staff and there is cultural pressure on them to always be doing something. Even though we had tripods, the young trainers basically refused to use them. They would hold the radars and shout the speed to the players. For Canada men, we had wall-mounted radar for all the jump serving, be it in warmups or 6v6.

Here with my club kids, I have the tripod mount and I run it in continuous mode. The Pocket Radar bundle with the display is pricey but there's not really another option and we use it almost every practice so we get our money's worth. It does eat batteries if you forget to turn it off but we only have it on for 10-15 mins per practice so I only need to swap batteries every few weeks. You can use a rechargeable battery bank (like for a phone) for the pocket radar. And I could plug in an extension cord and drag it across the back for the display. But both of those seem like a bigger hassle than the $50 I'll spend on replacement batteries over the course of the season. I just went to Costco, got a bulk thing of AAAs for the radar and Cs for the display and put them in a ziploc that's in the equipment area where all my toys are. Again, because we basically do the same routine every practice, the kids know how to set it up and take it down and it's pretty fast and streamlined. If you are only going to do radar speed every couple weeks, then you might be better off holding it and calling the speed.

Even though the display is pricey, it offers tremendous value and the kids like the public feedback. When somebody hits a good ball, all their heads snap to the display and there's often big cheers. And half of the practices I coach by myself with no assistant, so if I had to hold it, then I couldn't coach. And I only actively coach the self toss about 1/3 practices. The other times I grab kids as they go through and Itsy Bitsy them off-court on misc stuff that's hard to fit in normal practice time: explaining proper setting hand positioning to a middle, teaching a kid how to pancake, extra blocking footwork for setters who mostly play a 6-2 but need to be prepared to play in a 5-1, etc.

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Another reader asks, in an email:

If I am using balltime, but don't have time to go through a sheet (like the one you mentioned using in a post), what about using the stats for balltime in the triangle. How do I get what I need?

Balltime doesn’t exactly do things in this manner, but you can get basically what you need by parsing through things. First, the Terminal Serving stats. They are all there: aces and service errors for both teams. Easy enough.

In order to do your First Ball and Transition stuff, you’ll have to use the Stats feature and filter for attacks. There’s an option for FBSO and Transition. They aren’t perfect but they are pretty good. For example, in a recent match, here’s the Serve/Pass comparison between my club team and an opponent:

Just roughly speaking, we see here that we were +4 in Terminal Serves (5 aces and 1 error compared to 5 opponent aces and 6 opponent errors) and -8 in Attacking +/-. (We had 27 kills and 12 Es/Bs compared to 37 kills and 14 Es/Bs). If we filter by FBSO:

Here we see that we’re -9 in this category (16 kills and 8 Es/Bs compared to 22 kills and 5 Es/Bs). Okay let’s look at Transition now:

Okay we’re +1 in this category. That matches the overall -8 in Live Rallies, so that makes sense. That gives us a Triangle of:

+4 Terminal Serving
-9 First Ball
+1 Transition
-4 Total Differential

We lost this match 25-21, 18-25, 13-15, which is a total differential of -5, so there’s at least one point that wasn’t pulled into either one of these categories. Specifically, I remember 3 or 4 plays from this match that wouldn’t have been counted as kills or attack errors- a setter going in the net, a mishandled freeball, a setting error, etc. So is it perfect? No, but you’re getting about a 95% estimation of your Triangle stats if you just pull the Terminal Serving and Attack stats, and split Attack into First Ball and Transition.

I was also sent this in-match stat sheet which some of you might find helpful to create something similar:

It’s not as granular as the pdf I shared in my previous mailbag, but it’s likely simpler to keep track of live.

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A beach coach asks, via Substack DM:

Coach! This last couple weeks I’ve been thinking a lot on serving and one of your kids just followed me on instagram so I thought I should ask Joe. Wanted your thoughts on serving in beach and how you would approach training. We spend a little time most days maybe 10 minutes with target in a row type serving and then we have a couple knock out / servers vs passers type games we will play. But I always feel like there’s more or a better way. I’d say we’re a good serving team but want to be great. From what I’ve seen LMU is a great serving team, so was just curious your thoughts on it. If that’s too much to respond, I understand. Appreciate the content you’ve been putting out.