Summer 2025 Mailbag Part 1

Terminal contact stats, Broad jumping, Doubles scoring variations, Pass height, and EcoD

I’ve been doing mailbags since the beginning of SmarterVolley. Many of you email me, text me, talk to me at coaching clinics or when you see me out and about in the volleyball world and I post some of those discussions (excluding personal/identifying information) in mailbags.

Some of these discussions are also pulled from comment threads from older posts, which you might not see if you only read the newsletter email.

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

Fall 2024
Summer 2024
Spring 2024
Spring 2025

And now, this season’s questions and comments:

In the Post-Tournament Review comment section, Ben Rand asks:

You're tracking the terminal contact, so is GP (good pass) and BP (bad pass) in the context of that final contact? Example, we're past first ball, and into transition play, the opponent makes a good pass (dig) off a free ball and hits a kill off our block. So the tally goes in Opp Dtk (block)|Opp GP?

(If you don’t know what he’s talking about, check out that post for how I use Terminal Contact sheets in situations where you have limited statistical resources.)

Okay good question. No, the GP/BP is for the initial reception of the rally. So say we make an In-System pass to start the rally, then we get dug, then we get a dig, then we get dug again and our opponent kills a ball off our block. That would go in the "Opp Kill (Block)" category in transition (below the bold line) in the column under "Our Good Pass."

Doing it that way also allows me to get some passing statistics and sideout number, even though I'm just making a tally mark for the terminal contact. If you do it live, it means you just need to remember what the initial pass of the rally was. (I hold my finger on the piece of paper to not lose track during a long rally)

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A reader asks, in an email:

I could not find a reference to explain " PR on Self-Toss"

PR = Personal Record. Meaning: you hit the ball faster than you ever had before.

Self-Toss is a self-toss spike. It looks like a mini jump-serve. I allow players to come into the court an amount relative to their proficiency. Smaller/less-proficient players can come into the court so they hit from about the 10’ line. Bigger/better players start near the end-line so they can spike from 15-20’ deep in the court. The most advanced players can just start from far enough behind the end-line to hit a legal jump spike serve.

How much, in the scheme of things, does a server's speed of approach behind the line increase serve velocity. Is that vector significant enough to warrant encouraging good servers to become even faster/better?

(There were a couple other questions in the email that are asking variations of this question: basically you could sum up by saying: “how much should servers, spikers broad jump into the ball to hit it harder?”)

Yes, approach speed into the ball does positively add to spike velocity. Most spikers broad jump a bit. That's counterbalanced by the fact that too much broad jumping makes rotation into the ball difficult. As an extreme example, imagine a long jumper in track and field also trying to spike. The way you have to jump in order to travel so far horizontally would make it hard to twist and spike. (This is also why slide hitters generally can't hit the same velocity as when jumping off 2 feet)

Higher point of contact is good for sure.

You're basically intuiting most of the trade-offs in spiking. The more you broad jump, you get some additional "oomph" into your attack. This is counterbalanced by the fact that you lose some range on your attack, both vertically (if you're flying forward, you need to stay farther off the net and thus can't spike down as easily) and horizontally. If you're flying forward it's difficult to spike left and right and your attacking range narrows.

Different teams will work different ends of this trade-off when they run their offense. On average, you tend to see men's attackers going a little more up-and-down in the front row, because they need the extra velocity less (they have plenty of power as is) and they need the extreme range because the block is so big. Women's attackers broad jump a little more because they often need to generate additional velocity. Or sometimes... they needed to generate that additional velocity when they are teenagers and habits are hard to change as they get older.

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Dwayne Wiberto asks:

Didn't see a place to comment on the In the Gym section but on your 5/14 post you had the doubles sideout battle. Wanted to make sure I understand it. Running it narrow court so 2 teams are going at once. Receving side stays on the whole 3 minutes? Only receive side scores, kind of like neville's?.Run it through until each pairing has gone through twice? Or do you switch partners the second time through so its more of an individual game? Thank you.

(Note: I’m switching In The Gym to free for a bit, so if any of you have been curious about the specifics of how I run training for a club volleyball team, go check that out.)

Doubles Sideout Battle was a little variation I made up for my ordinary Split-Court Doubles setup. If you’re unsure of what that looks like: