Winning With A Terminal Serving Weakness
This week is Beach Week. Typically I dedicate the first 3 weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the fourth to beach, but I’ve rearranged the schedule slightly to synch up with the NCAA Beach Volleyball National Championship, which takes place this week. So this is April’s Beach Week. And I’ll pull forward the May Beach Week to next week. Two Beach Weeks in a row. Coaches who only care about indoor: see ya in a couple weeks!
I’ve talked in previous posts about using the Triangle analysis framework for beach volleyball:
I’ve outlined the different elements as they apply on the beach
And we’re starting to get into Team Profiles now. Last week we looked at a Terminal Serving Strength profile and this week we’ll look at the Terminal Serving Weakness profile.
What Does Terminal Serving Weakness Mean?
You can read the nitty-gritty of these details in the indoor profile, but the quick answer is: a Terminal Serving Weakness means that you score fewer (or allow more) points in the serve/pass game than your opponents do- relative to your overall level of play.1
You win a Terminal Serving point when you serve an ace or the other team misses a serve. They win a Terminal Serving point when they serve an ace or you miss a serve. Everything else is a Live Rally.
If you’re taking a fix-your-weakness approach, the inclination is, “work on your serve/pass more.” Coach it better, plan your training with this in mind, get your players to appreciate the importance of this skill, Spotlight it, etc. Certainly that’s all valid and important.
But a part of this Team Profile exercise has to been to point out that any of the 7 profiles can be winning profiles. There are successful teams that win by dominating the serve/pass game. And there’s successful teams who win despite consistently losing (or perhaps just washing) the Terminal Serves and being strong in the other areas of the game.
This is one of the primary decisions we make as a coach. Do we fix our weaknesses or focus on our strengths? That decision affects a lot about how we train and how we approach competition.
Ways To Have A Terminal Serving Weakness
Most personal finance advice comes down to, “earn more, spend less, increase the difference.” The two halves of that equation are a lot different. If you’re in debt because you don’t earn enough, the actions you’re going to take are a lot different than somebody who is in debt because they spend too much.
Likewise, there’s actually 4 ways you can fall into Terminal Serving debt:
You opponents don’t miss serves.
You miss too many serves.
You don’t serve enough aces.
You get aced too much.
And obviously combinations of the four. What I’m interested in here is taking each of these four aspects and assuming it to be a fact of life that you can’t change. How would that affect the way you needed to train and compete in order to still win?
If Your Opponent Doesn’t Miss Serves
This is obviously what you have the least control over. Some teams are going to serve aggressively and miss a bunch of serves. The challenge there is likely that you have to fight off some tough serves, keep the ball in play, and accept that you might give up an ace or two. Other teams are going to play a “keep it in” style where they might not serve as aggressively, but they’ll give you the ball and trust their block and defense.
And lots of teams might adopt either style depending on the conditions of the day and which side they’re on.
If your opponent is serving in a lot, the key metric here is First Ball Kill. FBK is important anyway, but if I’m imagining a “keep it in” serving team, we should be able to get in rhythm as attackers quite a bit, we should have the option to go on-2 if we want, and we should be putting a lot of pressure on their block/defense. If I’m an NCAA beach team, I can’t win against a team that’s serving everything in if I’m only putting up 40% FBK. Plus 4 is a good drill here:
If You Miss Too Many Serves
The good part about missing a lot of serves: it takes pressure off your block! But seriously, if I’m serving tough and aggressively then (a) I’m missing some serves so I literally have fewer defensive opportunities and (b) I’m probably serving tough enough to knock the other team off the net a fair bit.
I probably don’t need to be the world’s best blocking team, but I do need to be really good in Transition. I’m knocking them off the net and I should get some chances to dig. But if I’m already giving them free sideouts by missing a bunch of serves AND I can’t score in Transition? My overall point-scoring is going to be too low to win tough matches. If I have a team that I know serves tough, I want to make sure my blockers are good pullers and we can take advantage of opportunities to pull and kill the ball in Transition.
You Don’t Serve Enough Aces
This is sort of the flip side of missing too much. I’ll take “not serving enough aces” as a general proxy for, “not serving tough enough,” although they aren’t perfectly correlated. But either way, even if I’m serving fairly tough, the fact that I’m not serving many aces (and maybe I’m not missing much either) means the other team is going to have to block and defend a bit more in First Ball.
Two teams can serve 20 times in a set and one team might have to defend 19 or 20 times and another team might only have to defend 15 times, depending on ace and error frequency. (Affected by court conditions too.)
So if this is the Team Profile I’m looking at, I want to pay a little extra attention to my ability to get First Ball stops. Is my blocker capable of stuffing a few balls? Do I have the ability to scout and know when to take chances running some 4s to dig and turn a shot when I think they might do it? I need to think of this not just in terms of “playing defense” but in actively generating a point- either stuffing the ball or digging and killing the ball immediately in Transition. Low-ace serving teams need to be good at this in order to win at a high level.
You Get Aced Too Much
This is the hardest one!
I don’t know if you can win at a really high level if you’re getting aced too much, because the Win % of teams that don’t Make Them Play are not good:
But teams do win matches even when they give up a couple extra aces. It happens throughout the regular season and it will happen a couple times in Gulf Shores this week. What that tends to look like is that these teams are highly terminal. Think about a prototypical Big that is going to kill a ton of balls, but you still might serve because you think you can crack him or her from the service line.
If that player gives up a couple aces in a set but also kills 12 out of the 20 balls they get served, they’re still likely to win.
As coaches, our natural inclination is to want to fix weaknesses. But sometimes, especially as you get into the most critical competitions, you have to play the hand you’re dealt. I hope this framework gives you some ideas for how to help some of your teams highlight their strengths and pull out some tough matches, even if they have a disadvantage in this area of the game.
The “relative to your overall level of play” is important to remember. A team that is very strong in First Ball and Transition and merely above-average in Terminal Serving might profile as a Terminal Serving Weakness despite the fact that they were still decent in that area.