The Triangle

ScoutVB is now Smarter Volley on Substack! And: what do I do with all those stats?

People ask me about stats. Players want to know how stats affect their ability to win a match, or their chances of being in the starting lineup. Coaches want to know what stats they should keep for their teams. What stats should they keep for practice? What stats should they track in-match? What stats should they review after the match?

I built a whole Stats App to help answer these questions.

But it’s worth diving a little more into some of this stuff. We want to get it right. Almost as importantly, we want to get it right without spending hours and hours poring over our stats. Well, at least you do. I’m perfectly happy staring at spreadsheets for hours on end.

Stats Are Hard, Aren’t They?

When I was an assistant for the USA Women’s National Team, our staff had a lot of resources. At the 2016 Olympics myself and JJ Van Niel both scouted every single match live. We used DataVolley to tag every single contact, double-checked it against the video (but let’s be serious, I got it right the first time) and compiled the information for the rest of the staff and players to use. My job was to help Karch marry the instincts he honed as a gold medalist player to the moneyball revolution that is now necessary in elite athletics.

But, it wasn’t always that way.

I started off coaching like most of you did: in high school and juniors club volleyball. My parents were coaches, so stats were an early part of my coaching education. I like to say I graduated from ball boy to water boy to stat boy between 5th and 8th grades. Little did I know that years later, I’d start volunteering for the USA National Team, go back to being the ball boy, and start working back up to stat boy again. But Olympic stat boy has a lot better ring to it, don’t you think?

Doing More With Less

When you coach high school or juniors volleyball, you wear a lot of hats. If you’ve ever done it, you know that you often have to be the head coach, the statistician, the trainer, the bus driver, and the sports psychologist all at once. While some people enjoy diving deep into the statistics, most coaches just want to know what to do with them. And even if you do enjoy the stats, it’s important to remember what stats are for.

There’s a lot of stats apps available nowadays, and coaches have more tools than ever before. Some of those stats are descriptive, almost journalistic. Susie had 10 kills and Johnny had 8 digs. Great. We send those scores in to our SID or into MaxPreps or the local newspaper. Parents like to know those things.

But as coaches, we want to know how to make our team better. So we need a framework that we can apply to produce results.

Application

Early into my coaching career, I was writing and running practices for lots of teams. I learned pretty quickly that the hardest question coaches tend to ask themselves is, “what should we do at practice today?” Answering this question is important. Answering it in order to write practice in a reasonable amount of time is the key to life satisfaction for coaches who have lives outside of volleyball.

The framework I used back then wasn’t exactly the same as the framework I use now. But I always used the concept of triage. What’s most urgent? Or, put another way, what aspect of the game can we get better at in order to get better the fastest?

Most coaches have an intuitive understanding of what is important, generally, at certain levels of game. That’s what experience teaches you. But if we can use our statistics to streamline and amplify that intuitive understanding, we set ourselves up for success.

Enter The Triangle

My primary framework for analyzing an individual match, or a season as a whole, is called The Triangle. In this framework, I highlight three aspects of volleyball, and place them at the points of the triangle. These three aspects are:

Terminal Serves

First Ball

Transition

These three aspects are related, but distinct areas of the game. They affect each other, but teams have strengths and weaknesses in each of them. These three aspects interact with each other to form what I think of as Team Profiles: the unique characteristics that teams develop over the course of the season. By understanding our Team Profile, we can shape our coaching to address our weaknesses and highlight our strengths.

An Olympic Triangle

Here’s what the Triangle looked like when the USA beat Brazil to win the women’s indoor gold medal.

(Just a side note, this newsletter will find as many examples to highlight the USA winning a gold medal as possible. Get used to it.)

It’s not the world’s most exciting analysis when you win big in 3 sets. But you can see here that the USA dominated in First Ball, had a solid advantage in Transition, but that Brazil had a small edge in the serve/pass game.

I’ll get more into this in future posts, but I break each category down in these ways:

Terminal Serving - Aces and Service Errors.

First Ball - A kill on the first opportunity to attack out of serve receive, or an error or stuff block on that same opportunity.

Transition - Anything beyond the First Ball opportunity.

This isn’t the only lens I use, but it’s a really useful one. Let’s take the Gold Medal match from the men’s side of the 2021 Olympics:

A very different distribution of the Triangle. France won their first gold medal ever largely by dominating the serve-pass game. Russia scored 7 more points when the ball was in play, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the whole their serving put them in. France served 9 aces and missed 19 serves, a strong ratio in high-level men’s volleyball. Meanwhile Russia missed 23 serves while earning just 1 ace on France.

The 2021 NCAA Women’s tournament will be starting soon. As we go I’ll introduce statistical concepts, tie them into aspects of training, and breakdown video to see these concepts in action. I hope you enjoy!