I want to share something from the 2022 Radford season that speaks to strategy – particularly serving strategy. It’s an example of how simply looking at passing stats doesn’t give you the full story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What if I told you that we regularly served the libero in conference play?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sounds crazy, right? “Why would anyone do that?” you might be thinking. It certainly goes against conventional wisdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, in some cases a team’s libero was statistically their worst passer based on the standard 3-point passer ratings<\/a>. Of course they are a target in that case (see the calling service targets<\/a> post for more on the topic).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s the thing, though. The libero from one of the top teams in the league passed a 2.43 against us (according to VolleyMetrics). That didn’t stop us serving her, though. Why? Because they only sided out on the first ball (FBSO) at 11.6% when she received the serve. That’s WAY lower than for any other passer on the team (the next worst was >30%). In other words, we got a lot more transition opportunities serving her than anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, if you’re not good at scoring in transition, then maybe something like this isn’t ultimately beneficial (which is why overall SO%<\/a> is important). In that case, you may need to serve more aggressively<\/a> to score more points from aces, create better opportunities for your block to score, and the like. Very little in volleyball can be looked at in isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s why it’s important to not just take a surface view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Volleyball coaches look at the ratings of opposing team passers to decide who to target with the serve, but that might mask opportunities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[445,449,450,467,468],"class_list":["post-89918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-volleyball-coaching-strategy","tag-volleyball-scouting","tag-volleyball-serve-receive","tag-volleyball-serve-reception","tag-volleyball-statistics","tag-volleyball-stats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89918","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=89918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testsite.coachingvb.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}