The February $7 Study

Or why you should stop setting so much slide.

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 stuff¹ 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.

This Month: Modified Efficiency

So, that said, let’s look at some Modified Efficiency for the NCAA Tournament. What is Modified Efficiency? It’s Hitting Efficiency² but modified based off pass quality. You could imagine this on the team level.

On 10 sideout attempts, Team A hits 0.300 efficiency and Team B hits 0.200 efficiency.

Team A is better at hitting, right?

But Team A passed all 10 balls perfectly, and Team B passed all 10 balls poorly. Who is better at hitting now? Team B. Because 0.300 is about an average hitting efficiency off a perfect pass in women’s NCAA volleyball, Team A did about what they were supposed to. But the average efficiency off a bad (R-) pass is 0.100, so Team B was quite a bit better than average.

So Team B was better at hitting, while Team A was really better at passing.

Okay great, how does that help us?

What I did in this study was take each team and look at the modified efficiency for that team by Type Of Attack. And then I did that for each team and added them all up. In this way, we can see the Modified Efficiency by Type Of Attack for the NCAA Tournament.

Sound interesting? If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, now is a great time to do so. If you’re not on an NCAA coaching staff, it’s hard to get this kind of data! And if you are on an NCAA coaching staff, you might want to run this kind of analysis. And you probably can. But it would probably take you a few hours. So why not just pay me $7 instead and unlock this study, plus lots of other cool stuff.

Okay, blatant plug over, let’s get the ball rolling and see if I can convince some of you (particularly women’s NCAA coaches) to de-emphasize slide hitting.