{"id":107175,"date":"2024-04-23T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-23T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coachingvb.com\/?p=107175"},"modified":"2024-04-23T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T13:00:00","slug":"the-things-that-drive-winning-and-losing-in-volleyball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/23\/the-things-that-drive-winning-and-losing-in-volleyball\/","title":{"rendered":"The things that drive winning and losing in volleyball"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve previously posted on the subject of correlations to league success<\/a>. In that post I used NCAA volleyball data to look at how the major reported related to how a team did in their conference. As you can see from the table below, Hitting Efficiency [ (Kills-Errors)\/Total Attempts ] had the highest correlation to match wins, with Kills\/Set not far behind. Aces\/Set and Blocks\/Set are lower, and Digs\/Set comes last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a similar timeframe, Kyle from SoloStats did his own analysis<\/a> using matches from a variety of levels entered using that platform. Here is a slide from a presentation he put together about his observations. It’s one of a few showing multiple different levels of play. You can find the whole slide deck on the linked page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As you can see, Kyle went a bit broader than my analysis did. Yes, he has Aces, Kills, Blocks, and Digs per set. He also has errors\/set for Serves, Blocks, Attacks, Digs, and Receptions (which is basically the other team’s aces). He’s got Point Scoring % (pt_sc_pct) and Sideout % (so_pct) as well. The former is when you win a rally as the serving team (also sometimes referred to as a break point) while the latter is winning the rally as the receiving team. You’ll also see figures for pass ratings<\/a> and pass attempts (# of times the other team served). In some places there’s also the number of sideouts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’ll probably come as no surprise that the scoring % figures correlate the best to winning. And, of course, the error tallies mostly correlate negatively. The big exception there is service errors, which shows a small positive correlation. That speaks to the requirement for aggressive serving<\/a>, especially noting that service aces ranks #3 or #4 in positive correlation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Related to that, I doubt anyone’s surprised that Aces rank higher than Kills for the lower levels of play. We’ve all seen how much good serving can dominate there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I’ve written before, I don’t put much stock in the fact that blocks tend to not correlate highly with success<\/a>. Good blocking isn’t just (or even mostly) about stuff\/kill blocks. Similarly, a high dig tally can simply mean the other team is attacking you a lot. Potentially, that’s because you can’t score against them, giving them transition swings back at you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I suspect will surprise a lot of people is how low the pass rating correlates to winning. It’s 0.2 or lower in all four cases above. That’s because a good pass isn’t a point scoring event. It only potentially leads to a point being scored via a kill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I encourage you to go check out Kyle’s analysis. There are some interesting takeaways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Examination of a broad set of statistics provides a potentially useful set of findings as to what drives winning in volleyball.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[467,468],"class_list":["post-107175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-volleyball-coaching","tag-volleyball-statistics","tag-volleyball-stats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}