The April $7 Study

Where I come to no conclusions and tell you it's helpful

The theme of this spring for SmarterVolley is Teaching. I’m stepping back from the heavy statistical emphasis of the past several months and highlighting ideas that are more teaching-orienting, training-orienting, etc. The How more than the What.

But… let’s not get too far out of our lanes, eh? So, I’m starting a new feature here on SmarterVolley. Let’s call it The $7 Study. The idea here is that I’ll come out with one clean study each month. I’ll aim to answer some specific, small-but-useful questions and package it into a short, easily-digestible study. I’d argue that, if you’re serious about coaching, spending 10 minutes to unlock 1 small upgrade for your team is worth $7 by itself.

That’s my value proposition for either (1) existing subscribers who care more about the statistical stuff than the learning/teaching stuff or (2) people thinking about going from free to Premium. Each month I’ll offer one (or more) evidence-based potential upgrades for your team, for the price of $7.

February: Modified Efficiency
March: Blocking Effectiveness

Transition Efficiency

In this study I’m looking at Transition efficiency. In February, I looked at Modified Attack Efficiency to look at what routes were getting set “too much” or “not enough.” The comparison here was, does this route score more or less often than other routes, equalizing for pass quality.

Attack Efficiency judges terminal contacts. Kills - Unforced Errors - Times Blocked. But in many levels of volleyball, about half of attacked balls are continues- neither kills nor errors nor blocks.¹ I wanted to investigate what happened with those continues. Specifically, I wanted to look at the Efficiency or Kill % from the defending team after the dig a sideout attack and transition out of it.

Put another way:

If we set left side out of serve receive and get dug, how often does the other team kill it in transition against us?

If we set middle? If we set right? Pipe?

There’s some tactical implications here; maybe two routes have similar efficiencies, but opponents are more effective in transition after digging one or the other. There’s some technical implications as well; what kind of continues are more or less likely to be transitioned? Let’s go below the paywall to find out what I learned.