Team Profile: Terminal Serving Weakness
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. Last week discussed a team with a Terminal Serving Strength. This week, we’ll flip it around. What does a team with a Terminal Serving Weakness look like? What are the coaching implications of that?
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 teams strengths and weaknesses to what needs to be done in training.
What Do You Mean By Terminal Serving Weakness?
A team with a Terminal Serving weakness is a team where their ability to score points (and prevent points) in the serve-pass aspect is significantly weaker than their ability to score points once the rally begins. These teams might miss a bunch of serves or get aced a lot, but be better once they get into setting, attacking, blocking, and digging the ball.
An important note is that this is relative to the overall strength of the team. For example, a team that is well above-average in First Ball and Transition might have a Terminal Serving weakness if they are simply average in Terminal Serves1, whereas a team that is below-average in First Ball and Transition needs to be badly outscored in Terminal Serves for that aspect of the game to stand out in a negative way.
How Do I Know If An Aspect Is A Strength Or A Weakness?
I define a weakness 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 Terminal Serves has a Terminal Serving weakness if they are outstanding in First Ball 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 Terminal Serving Weakness?
Of the 63 teams in this database2, 11 had a Terminal Serving Weakness3. That means about 1 out of every 5 or 6 teams fits this profile.
Terminal Serving Strength was the most common Team Profile among Power 5 schools, and Terminal Serving Weakness was the 2nd-most common. 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 “Terminal Serving Index.” So instead of using a binary split of “Strength” or “Weakness” designation, you can see the gradient. The more relatively weak Terminal Serving is (compared to the other two areas), the lower the TS Index score. So reading this chart, you can see that Stanford was the (Power 5) school that scored the fewest % of points via Terminal Serves.
Or, put another way, Stanford scored the highest proportion of their points within the rally. As we’ll see below, this is the crux of what we’re talking about here. Labeling something as a Weakness feels like you’re necessarily saying a team is absolutely bad at that skill. That’s not it. What we’re talking about here is the relative contribution of each aspect of the game.
How Successful Are Teams With A Terminal Serving Weakness?
Well, just read the list again. Clearly you can be pretty successful with this profile!
For teams that fit the category of Terminal Serving Weakness, the average winning % was 57%, the equivalent of going 17-13 over the course of the season. Not bad.
I mentioned in last week’s post that the correlation between TS Index and Win % was slightly negative; teams with lower TS Index scores tended to win a bit more than teams with high TS Index scores. However, it’s not a very strong correlation. While I think you can say that, “improving your TS Index doesn’t improve your record,” you probably can’t go so far as to say that, “lowering your TS Index improves your record.”
A third way is to look at tournament success. Of the 18 profiles in the Sweet 164 this recent tournament, 3 of them (Wisconsin, Texas, Georgia Tech) were Terminal Serve Weakness profiles. Since there’s 7 profiles5, that’s about proportional representation. You could also say that, given that there were 11 teams in the overall sample with a Terminal Serving Weakness and 3 of them made it to the Sweet 16, that, given that you’re a Power 5 team, if you cultivate a Terminal Serving Weakness (put better: you strengthen your First Ball and Transition games at the expense of your Terminal Serving), you have an 27% chance of reaching the Sweet 16.
These 3 ways of looking at the success of the Terminal Serving Weakness profile show us that it’s not a bad thing to have. In fact, there’s a pretty good argument that, in NCAA women’s volleyball, you might be well-served by spending less resources trying to get good at Terminal Serving relative to First Ball and Transition.
There’s probably some evolutionary pressure involved here. In order to hit and block at the highest level in the NCAA, you need to be way out on the right tail of height and jumping ability. It’s probably a tautology that the group of 99.999th-percentile spike touch athletes are going to be worse servers than the mere 99.9th-percentile spike touchers.
Based off that, it’s not surprising to see Wisconsin, likely one of the tallest teams in NCAA volleyball history, in this group. When you’re selecting that skewed of a physical profile, just getting them to be merely average servers and passers is probably going to make you a really good team.
So What Do I Do If This Is My Profile?
Here’s my takeaways of this profile exercise:
Terminal Serving is inherently a more distinct skill. “Bad” teams can get good at it, and “good” teams can still lag behind in this area.
If you’re behind in the recruiting curve (relative to your level), Terminal Serving is probably a way of playing catch-up in the short-term. But if you have the capability to recruit the most elite athletes at your level, you might have to accept being relatively weaker at Terminal Serving.
Since a relative Terminal Serving Weakness also implies that you’re relatively stronger in First Ball and Transition, you can probably stay in this profile and have long-term success.
At that point, the question becomes, “is our Terminal Serving ‘Weakness’ still average for our level?” Because that means you’re solidly above-average in the other two categories and probably in pretty good shape.
I’ll continue to share some training implications for Terminal Serving profiles. Later this week I’ll look at an example from the men’s side of the Tokyo Olympics. We also have relevant small-group workshops:
You’ll see soon that you can in fact be a VERY good team and have this be the case..
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 profiles as a First Ball Strength team.
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