Team Profile: First Ball Strength
We’ve introduced The Triangle framework of analyzing teams and matches. We discussed Terminal Serves, First Ball, and Transition. We also introduced the concept of Team Profiles. We spent a couple weeks looking at teams with either a strength or weakness in Terminal Serving. Now we shift our attention to First Ball.
Review: What Is A Team Profile?
Using The Triangle to create a Team Profile means to understand which of the factors are relatively strong or weak for that team. If you think about a team that is perfectly average in all three aspects, the triangle would be even on all sides. Equilateral, if you will. But if one aspect is much stronger than the other two, you can imagine that point would move away from the other two, skewing the triangle in that direction. Likewise, if one aspect is much weaker than the other two, you can imagine that point moving toward the other two, skewing the triangle in a different way.
Ultimately, a Team Profile is a visualization that helps coaches connect their team’s strengths and weaknesses to what needs to be done in training.
What Do You Mean By First Ball Strength?
A team with a First Ball strength is a team where their ability to score points on their first attack out of serve receive is stronger than their ability to score points from the service line (with aces) and stronger than their ability to score in Transition. A First Ball strength could also mean that they are good at preventing points on their opponent’s first ball attack, but not as good once the rally is extended.
An important note is that this is relative to the overall strength of the team. For example, a team that is well below-average in Terminal Serves and Transition might have a First Ball strength by being just a bit above-average, whereas a team that is strong in those two aspects would have to be outstanding in First Ball for it to be a relative strength.
How Do I Know If An Aspect Is A Strength Or A Weakness?
I define a strength as an aspect that is at least a half standard-deviation below the other two aspects. For example, a team that’s a bit above-average in First Ball has a First Ball strength if they are below-average in Terminal Serving and Transition.
Why half of a standard deviation? I don’t know, it seems about right to me.
But more importantly, it’s not even about the specific statistical quantification. If you’re a high school coach, you don’t know what the standard deviation is for all of these aspects- although I will share some data as we go. But most coaches have a sense for the strengths and weaknesses of their teams. Where do you seem to gain an advantage? Where you do seem to have a disadvantage?
Some teams are balanced. That’s informative as well. Don’t assume you team is clearly skewed in one direction without taking some time to think about it.
Also, don’t assume your team has a strength in an area of the game, just because you WANT them to have a strength in that area of the game. You may value scrappy defense and smart transition play, but it may not have translated into results on the court. Yet.
How Common Are Teams With A First Ball Strength?
Of the 63 teams in this database1, 8 had a First Ball Strength2. That’s in the ball-park of 1-out-of-8 teams.
“Terminal Serving Strength” was actually the most common Team Profile among Power 5 schools. That makes sense; Terminal Serving is less correlated with First Ball and Transition than First Ball and Transition are to each other. That’s part of the purpose of the Triangle, to untangle these related-but-not-totally-related aspects of the game. So there’s going to be more teams that are noticeably strong or noticeably lagging in Terminal Serving than the two other two categories.
The last column there is what I’m calling “First Ball Index.” So instead of using a somewhat arbitrary “Strength” or “Weakness” designation, you can see the gradient. The more relatively strong First Ball is (compared to the other two areas), the higher the FB Index score. So you can see there that although Pitt and Florida both meet the arbitrary cutoff of a First Ball Strength Profile, Florida was much more reliant on their First Ball game than Pitt or Michigan State.3
How Successful Are Teams With A First Ball Weakness?
I included (conference) winning % in the above graph, so you can see that for yourself. If we’re using this (again, somewhat arbitrary) cut-off to form the profile of First Ball Strength, the average winning % was 52%, the equivalent of going 15-15 or 16-14 over the course of a season.
A second way of looking at it is to correlation FB Index with Win %. The correlation in this sample was 0.09. That’s essentially zero. That doesn’t mean that teams with a First Ball Strength win less, it means that they could win more or less. The fact that a team has a First Ball Strength doesn’t predict whether they will be a winning or losing team.4
A third way is to look at tournament success this year. Of the 18 profiles in the Sweet 165, 4 of them (Florida, Pitt, Georgia Tech, and Nebraska) were a First Ball Strength profile. Since there’s 7 profiles6, that’s a really disproportionate representation. Also, 3 of those 4 made the Elite 8. Which tells us that First Ball Strength doesn’t predict winning records in the regular season but it definitely predicts success in the NCAA Tournament probably nothing. But it’s interesting!
You could also say that, given that there were 8 teams in the sample with a First Ball Strength, and 4 of them made it to the Sweet 16, that, given that you’re a Power 5 team, if you cultivate a First Ball Strength, you have an 50% chance of reaching the Sweet 16. Big if true. Probably a bit of an aberration for this year. But I am curious to see if it holds up. 7
So What Do I Do If This Is My Profile?
Here’s my takeaways of this profile exercise:
I’m not mad at it. I think you can be really successful relying on First Ball strength. There’s some of my own bias creeping in there, but it’s also a fact that the higher the level, the better the First Ball play.
I want to know the experience level of my team. I think of First Ball as an area that responds to standardization and coach control more than Transition. As the rally lengthens, things get more chaotic. Are my players disciplined defenders when they have time to set up, but they lose coordination as the rally continues?
What’s their hitting toolkit like? It’s generally easier to create good approach lines and attack angles in First Ball than in Transition. So do I have the mental (decision-making) and physical (approach angles, hand control) toolkit to be successful in more difficult situations?
Since First Ball Strength might imply a relative lag in Terminal Serving, is there anything we can do tactically as servers? I was recently talking to a coach about, “when do we let a high-error server keep riding it out and when do we just change them and tell them to keep it in?” There’s no strict formula for that, but it’s something you want to think about as you get past the mid-season.
I’ll continue to share some training implications for First Ball Strength profiles. Later this week we’ll profile some examples of First Ball in action from the 2021 NCAA Tournament.
Drawing here from Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, ACC, and SEC. I’m also using some VM numbers to pull these a little faster than running separate .dvw analyses for every team. This is going to be slightly less-accurate than the more detailed numbers I provided in my NCAA tournament analysis, but it turns dozens of hours of research into just hours. I’m okay with that trade-off right now.
There are a few teams that have both a “strength” in one area and a “weakness” in another. In this case: Georgia Tech also profiled as a Terminal Serving Strength and Nebraska and Pitt both profiled as a Transition Weakness.
Wait, why the heck does Pitt profile as First Ball Strength when all 3 categories look fairly even? Because there’s less variability in First Ball than the other areas. So 55% First Ball Win % is actually quite a bit farther from the mean than 55% Win % in Transition.
Or more specifically, it didn’t predict that among Power-5 teams in 2021.
Okay, that’s a little confusing. First of all, BYU wasn’t in this sample because I only pulled from Power 5. (Sorry WCC!) But 3 teams (Nebraska, Georgia Tech, and Pitt) had “double-profiles.”
Terminal Serving Strength, Terminal Serving Weakness, First Ball Strength, First Ball Weakness, Transition Strength, Transition Weakness, Balanced.
It’s also worth noting that quite a few of the least-winning teams in the sample were fairly high on the FB Index.