Winter Wrap-Up Mailbag Pt1

Whiteboard alternatives; Stat apps; Lib or MB for DPoy; Last Ball Bounce

The past few months at SmarterVolley have been dedicated to juniors club volleyball-related posts. I focused a lot on the planning aspect, as that’s one of the most challenging aspect for most club coaches; the season is long and most club coaches aren’t full-time coaches who have office hours for planning and review. In case you haven’t seen all those posts, here they are:

Planning Your First Training Block
Getting Started
The First 12 Practices
Getting Into It
Practice #3
Another Week Of Practices
The Halfway Point
7 ate 9
Wrapping Up Preseason

Adapting As The Season Goes
Tournament Review Pt1
Tournament Review Pt2
Planning The Next Block

A cool thing for me to see has been the amount of engagement on these posts. I can’t find a simple way to sort total comments and shares per post in Substack’s app, but my guess is I’ve had more comments in the past 3 months than in the previous 2 years combined. I love it!

I’ve also gotten some questions or thoughts sent to me via email or other messaging platforms that are worth sharing here. I’ll wrap up the club stuff with a multi-part mailbag series before we shift to a new content series for the spring. Enjoy!

Winter Wrap-Up Mailbag Pt2
Winter Wrap-Up Mailbag Pt3

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From Gerald M in the If I Had $130 post:

I just started club practice with my girls this evening and one issue I’ll have for the winter months is no access to a whiteboard (my club is renting from a local university and so far there’s no spot to hold the whiteboards between practices).

A random solution that came up during a trip to target was to use gift wrapping paper as the board and painters tape to hang it up against a wall. I plan to write on it all the things I want to carry over from week to week, and I figured anything that needs erasing or is updated I would cover it up or cross it out. And the nifty thing is I can roll it up and take it with me. I thought I would share this with others who might have an issue storing a whiteboard.

I love it.

Remember that the purposes of having a whiteboard at practice are:

1. Keep information accessible from one practice to another.

2. Publicize to your team information about what happens in practice. (ex: scores of games, individual records, etc)

3. Do (1) and (2) quickly and easily.

Sure, is a roll of paper going to tear and need to be re-written eventually? Sure. But as a quick and easy solution that can keep the information for 3-6 consecutive practices visible to your players? Absolutely viable.

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Multiple readers have emailed or commented to me something similar to this:

Hi Joe,

As I sit here manually inputting my team's stats for the season....I truly miss the GMS stat app.

Do you have a stat program you recommend? Or will there be a stat app available from you all soon? I hesitated to buy another app until I heard from you about which one will be endorsed.

I appreciate any advice!

Yeah, I really liked that app too!

Right now I don't have any plans to build another app. I can't necessarily recommend a specific one, but I want to test some of them out a bit more. Right now in Korea we're primarily using DataVolley but when I get back to the club scene I want to test the stat apps a bit more.

Readers: give me some suggestions for which apps you like and would like me to evaluate for compatibility with metrics like The Triangle.

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Email from a college coach who wanted to analyze her All-Conference Voting:

I appreciate your blog - your statistical analysis is inspiring and helps me think differently about many factors in the game.  The question I am going to ask might seem pretty elementary, but I figure you'd be the best person to ask!

We are doing all-conference voting today and we have both liberos and blockers nominated for defensive player of the year.  While I think the spirit of the award was to honor a libero, I want to take an evidence based approach to this decision.  What kind of blocking stats would demonstrate a stronger defensive presence than digging stats (also acknowledging that the standard NCAA box score is pretty terrible at providing data about that differentiates liberos)?

Here is my thought process:

Get blocking and digging to a common number - points/skill
The team nominating the blocker is 39% kill overall.
4 digs/set x .39 = 1.57
5 digs/set x .39 = 1.97
So, on this team, a blocker who gets 2 blocks per set would be equivalent (on the scale of contribution to points earned) to a digger getting 5 digs per set.

Does this math work?  What am I missing (aside from more cohesive data describing these players)?

Cool email, I like it! Hope I'm not responding too late to this but, here's my thoughts: