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Friday, August 06, 2010
Reader Mail of the Week: Volleyball strategies
Dear Tom,
I recently took a coaching clinic with Carl McGown, former Team USA Head Coach and top scout for the men’s team that won gold in Beijing. I was impressed with the statistical analysis the team used to inform their game plans. For example: they have hired PhD statisticians to figure out which individual and team stats most correlate with winning.
One key team stat seems to be side out %, how often a team successfully receives an opponent’s serve and converts it for a kill. In Beijing, when the serve was neither an ace nor an error, team USA won less points than their opponents. Because of their higher rate of Aces to serving errors, however, they won gold.
Apparently the team developed a way to input the opponent’s side out % (counting only the serves that were neither aces nor errors) and learn their break even point for Ace/error ratio.
Until recently, serving had been an area where many teams were way too conservative - too worried about the cost of service errors (any fan can tell you how many points you lost by serving errors) and not fully appreciating the difficulty in stopping the spikers of the other team on conservative serves.
Team USA’s gold medal showed the benefits of moving away from that thinking and now almost any high level match consists of banging huge serves at your opponent. The Americans have a big head start in this arena.
Just thought you might be interested,
- Eric
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