Team Profile: Transition 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. Here are the first 7 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 Transition Strength
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 Weakness?
A team with a Transition Weakness is a team where their ability to score points in Transition lags behind their ability to win the Serve/Pass battle and their ability to win the First Ball out of serve receive. In general, as “strength” profile means that you have one area that exceeds the other two, and a “weakness” profile means that you have one that lags the other two.
An important note is that this is relative to the overall strength of the team. For example, a team that is merely average (or even above-average) in Transition might show up as a Transition Weakness team if they are dominant in Serve/Pass and dominant in First Ball attacking or First Ball block/defense.
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 Weakness?
Of the 63 teams in this database1, 8 had a Transition Weakness profile.2
Transition Weakness was a relatively common profile this year. Something to note again is that “weakness” doesn’t mean you are bad at it, it just means that your First Ball and Terminal Serving numbers were further from the mean than your Transition numbers. And weirdly, your Transition numbers can appear to be the same! For example, both Nebraska and Pitt has Transition Winning % numbers that are similar to their First Ball numbers, yet they profile as Transition Weakness. What gives?
The deal is that there were wider variances (at least this year) in Transition Winning % than in First Ball Winning %. Or put another way, a smaller change in First Ball was needed to classify as “strength” or “weakness” compared to Transition.
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 Pitt was not as relatively weak in transition as some other teams.3
How Successful Are Teams With A Transition Weakness?
I included (conference) winning % in the above graph, so you can see that for yourself. Talk about running the gamut! Two winless teams and two Final Four teams.
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. So in theory, it’s probably better for your Transition Index to be positive than negative. 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, 2 of them were a Transition Strength profile. Since there’s 7 profiles5, that’s in line with what you’d expect. I don’t think it tells you too much either way. First Ball Strength and Balanced profiles were a bit over-represented in this year’s Sweet 16, but I’m not sure that will have predictive power going forward.
So What Do I Do If This Is My Profile?
Here’s my takeaways of this profile exercise:
My first take is that Transition Weakness is a relatively simple profile from a broad macro view. If you want to work on that weakness, you shift more of your practice from drills initiated only with a serve, to drills that are going to have a guaranteed Transition element. So less First Ball Kill and Good Pass Sideout and more Transition Wash.
My second take is that I don’t think Transition Weakness is necessarily a bad profile, especially if that’s your profile while your Transition Win % is average to above-average. If you look at Nebraska and Pitt, they are just really good in other areas of the game, and even though their Transition Win % weren’t as high as some other elite teams,6 it’s still good enough to keep them in the running, given how good they are in other areas of the game.
My theory was always that teams that are tempo-driven tend to get a First Ball bump at the cost of a Transition penalty. For example, when I was on the USA staff, we were known for pushing the speed of our offense and, according to Volleytalk consensus7, we needed to know when to slow down and just throw the ball up there.8 But when you’re establishing a faster-tempo offense, your players get fired up and start to take pride in “running speed from anywhere,” and things like that. It’s almost inevitable you will over-set some balls in Transition that you could have just thrown up high and taken a big rip. The more Euro-style teams with slower offenses tended to not be as good in First Ball (when you’re in-system more often than not) but as good or better than us in Transition- when things are the other way around.
That said, when I look at the list of teams by Transition % in this year’s NCAA, I don’t necessarily see that borne out. I see a mix of tempos toward both the top and bottom.
I see a pretty heavy cluster of teams who are high-knockout servers9 toward the top of the most successful Transition teams. So beyond the obvious answer of, “do some transition drills,” if I’m a Transition Weakness team, the first thing I’m going to look at is our serving. If we’re serving for KOs, we’re going to get more balls that are transition-able.
I also want to look at making “better zeroes.” Nate Ngo had a nice wonky statistical article about this on the GMS blog, but half of the attacked balls at most levels aren’t terminal. If you are following a Make Them Play philosophy, you are going to have balls that you probably won’t kill, but you can’t just snap a downball to middle back. Work on expanding your hitter toolkit. If you’re going to get dug, make sure you get a defendable ball back.
There’s a scouting element to this too, especially if you are more on the higher-end of the game. I always ran numbers on transition efficiency for teams when the setter dug the ball vs non-setters. Some teams have no problems scoring in transition when their setters dig. Okay, good to know. Some teams do, and then we really can’t go wrong tipping on their setters. In addition to their setters, what’s their high-ball defensive scheme like? Do their off-blockers hang back, waiting to get tipped to the ground? Is their pipe attack effective in this situation? If it’s not, that’s an easy way to win a transition battle.
Finally, I’d look at my high-ball blocking. I do see a size element to the teams in the NCAA that skew better in Transition. It’s not a guarantee, but size certainly helps in high-ball blocking. You can’t do anything about the size of your team10 but you can upgrade the fundamentals of high-ball blocking. Don’t give up easy tools down the line, teach your middle blockers to drop in on inside sets, be great on your handwork, etc.
I’ll be adding some extra articles over the next 5 weeks while I coach in the Athletes Unlimited pro league, and drawing some data and analysis from the matches as they happen. I’m curious to see how the Triangles profile out, compared to what we’ve seen from the NCAA women.
Next week we’ll wrap “Transition Month” with some more data from the NCAA, as well as some defensive video.
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. Transition Weakness is full of them! Cal, Alabama, Georgia, and Syracuse also profile as Terminal Serving Strength, and Nebraska and Pittsburgh also profile as a First Ball Strength.
Pitt was not far off being a classified as a “balanced” team this year.
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.
Texas, Louisville, etc
Which we know is always right!
But seriously, there probably were times early on in that quad when we errored going too fast and I think USA in its Olympic gold medal run in 2021 struck a good balance.
Meaning, they knock the other team out-of-system a lot.
Recruit better!