Team Profile: Transition 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. Here are the first 6 posts in the Team Profiles series:
Terminal Serving Strength Terminal Serving Weakness Serving and Game Theory First Ball Strength First Ball Weakness First Ball Data Dump
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 Transition Strength?
A team with a Transition strength is a team where their ability to win points in Transition is stronger than their ability to win the Serve/Pass battle or on the First Ball out of serve receive. A Transition strength could also mean that they are good at winning long rallies by being low-error or getting stops with a block in Transition.
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 First Ball might have a Transition strength by being just a bit above-average, whereas a team that is strong in those two aspects would have to be outstanding in Transition for it to be a relative strength.1
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 Transition Strength?
Of the 63 teams in this database2, just 3 had a Transition Strength3 profile.
“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. For whatever reason, Transition strength was a less-common profile this season.
The last column there is what I’m calling “Transition Index.” So instead of using a somewhat arbitrary “Strength” or “Weakness” designation, you can see the gradient. The more relatively strong Transition is (compared to the other two areas), the higher the Trans Index score. So you can see there that although NC State met the arbitrary cutoff of a Transition Strength Profile, LSU was much more reliant on their Transition game than NC State
How Successful Are Teams With A Transition Strength?
I included (conference) winning % in the above graph, so you can see that for yourself, but with it only being 3 teams, there’s not a ton of takeaways.
A second way of looking at it is to correlate Transition Index with Win %. The correlation in this sample was 0.21. That’s pretty low, although it’s non-zero. Transition Index had more predictive power than Terminal Serve Index or First Ball Index, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in it as a predictive measure.
A third way is to look at tournament success this year. Of the 18 profiles in the Sweet 164, none of them were a Transition Strength profile. Since there’s 7 profiles5, that’s a little surprising, but within the range of random chance, rather than a strong predictive measure either way. Certainly, I’d want to analyze this over multiple years before making firm conclusions either way.
So What Do I Do If This Is My Profile?
Here’s my takeaways of this profile exercise:
I wish I had more takeaways, because the sample size of only 3 teams is pretty small!
I’m puzzling over the fact that Transition Index showed a decent winning correlation despite not having any teams go deep into the tournament with a Transition Strength profile. It could just be a bit of a quirk of this year. Stanford, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Minnesota, Miami, and Ohio State were all fairly high in Transition Index this year, but didn’t meet my cut-off to fit that profile.
In terms of actionable information, I’d want to see why I’m doing well in Transition but not in First Ball. One possibility is that my digging is ahead of my blocking. I’m trying to figure out how to break that down statistically using Volleymetrics data (which isn’t great on digging), but my opinion has always been that First Ball defense relies more on blocking and Transition defense relies more on digging. YMMV though.
Another possibility is that I’m pin-dominant. I talked about this in the First Ball Weakness profile as well. Middles get set a lot more in FB than Trans, so if I’m Transition-dominant, it could be that my middles are underperforming in First Ball and I’m leaving some FBSOs on the table.
Shifting from “fixing weaknesses” to “exploiting strengths,” if I know that I’m capable of dominating transition, I need to make sure I give my team the chance to do that! I should be minimizing First Ball Errors by knowing when to Make Them Play, and giving my team the chance to get into Transition.
Down the stretch with a Transition Strength team, I want to keep focusing on how good we can be at winning all these little chaotic points. Make sure our coverage is sharp, my setters know the times to dump, we’re good at stepping in and taking a second ball when the setter doesn’t get there, etc. We’re probably already good at this stuff if we have a Transition Strength, and I want my team confident that this is going to be the area where we’re going to scrap out an extra point in the 20s to finish out a tough set.
I’ll continue to share some training implications for Transition (Strength) profiles and bring in some real-world examples in the Match Analysis threads. What I want to highlight with this series is not necessarily, “here’s what the best Team Profile is,” but, “if you have the personnel to be this type of team, here’s what successful (and unsuccessful) teams look like within that profile.”
Hello Texas!
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.
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.