dr.ricky online

Category: Volleyball

  • “Was that going out?”

    I hear a number of common phrases during volleyball play which I discourage athletes from using. This is why. 

    “Was that going out?”

    This phrase is most commonly uttered right after a player contacts a ball during defense and shanks it out of team control. It’s a peculiar question to ask of a team mate, because the outcome is already done. One cannot rewind to that specific situation again. What it does represent is a deflection of perceived responsibility. If the ball was indeed perceived to be going out, then I’ve seen the shanker blame her teammate for not warning her sooner. If it wasn’t, then the shanker was making a good effort play to just touch the ball. Using the phrase is a means of externalizing the issue instead of actively learning from it.

    The key here is developing good judgement to decide to play the ball so that it is in system, regardless of whether it was going out or not. It works best when the digger chooses to embrace the responsibility of taking the ball, confident in the team’s ability to convert the play, or accepting the heat for gambling the outcome of the rally for a potential quick point. Either way, the lesson is to accept and learn, rather than deflect and deny.

  • The Math and Consequences of Rally Point Scoring

    The Math and Consequences of Rally Point Scoring

    The adoption of rally point scoring fundamentally changed the strategy in beach volleyball. The original mintonette borrowed scoring from baseball with nine innings — but few people even remember that. Some, though, can probably remember the sideout scoring system, where a team must have served the ball to earn a point. Rallies won by the receiving team didn’t change the score – resulting in unpredictably long games. In the two man version of beach volleyball, the game evolved into a marathon, where grinding down your opponents by sheer endurance is a viable strategy.

    The modern rally point scoring system awards a point for the team winning the rally, regardless of who serves the ball. This small change ensures that with each rally the game proceeds towards the end point, which results in a more stable prediction of match durations. But what has remained unchanged is the need to earn the two point advantage to end the set at 21.

    The team receiving the serve usually has the first chance to attack and terminate the rally, earning the first point (“siding out”). Players settle into practicing this scenario often: it’s fairly easy to reproduce in isolation, can be made predictable, and for the attacking player, a feeling of strength crushing the ball against an imagined defenseless opponent. The components can be simplified into modular training parts: passing the ball to a set location on the court, setting with recognizable biomechanics, and attention paid to the velocity of the attack. But assuming that a team is proficient at siding out, the next point, they would have gained the responsibility of serving the ball – and handed the advantage of first attack to the other team.

    The equalizing nature of this rule means that the way to win is to earn your points without needing that service receive advantage at least twice. Not counting unforced errors, the three primary ways to earning the point advantage are:

    1. A service ace

    2. A stuff block (and its variants)

    3. A defensive conversion

    Of these three, the last is most common, and requires effective transition setting and smarter attacking. In general, practice should be weighted to focus on these play scenarios, but these are greater challenges for both coach and athlete. These do not easily break down into reproducible modules, nor does effectiveness arise exclusively from homogenous biomechanics. But learning to adapt to more chaotic conditions makes for a more effective team.

  • FIVB Doha 2018

    FIVB Doha 2018

    The news about the FIVB Katara Beach cup in Doha that has people agog is that Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb managed to defeat Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena in the second round match of Pool A – which earned them a first round bye in the elimination bracket, but doesn’t really eliminate Phil and Nick. In other notable developments, this is the first appearance of the new team of Adrian Carambula and Gabriele Pasquale playing for Italy, although they didn’t make it out of the qualifier. Other interesting participants in the qualifier are Indonesia and Scotland. American teams in general did well, all of them except for Phil and Nick earning first round byes — yet only Phil and Nick survive to make it to the semi finals.

  • Another One Bites the Sand

    Another One Bites the Sand

     

    New season, new team for Tuesday night at Third Coast. Here is the shirt design, comments are welcome. You can order the Tanktop version There are also regular T-shirt versions.

  • A simple lesson

    A simple lesson

    Dust off the ball before tossing it to someone. This simple act should be automatic. It avoids a great deal of distress.

  • The mythical 300 jumps

    The mythical 300 jumps

    This article has moved to a new location.

    Wilson, the sporting goods company, posted an ad on Instagram declaring

    DURING A MATCH, VOLLEYBALL PLAYERS ON AVERAGE JUMP 300 TIMES.

    The ad is accompanied by an illustration that depicts female beach volleyball players, which implies that this number applies to beach volleyball specifically. This number appears unusually high, so I inquired as to the source of the number.

    https://instagram.com/p/BedVH6rAMp0/

    Michelle Magsamen checked with the marketing department of Wilson, and provided three links that are the alleged source of this figure:

    1. From Redbull.com – 8 stats that show why beach volleyball is the best

    A beach ’baller jumps on average 300 times per game.

    In this article, the author Jonno Turner reports an average of 300 jumps per game – not per match as reported by the advertisement.

    1. From Schoolgamesfinals.org – this is an article written to encourage people to watch indoor volleyball at the school games of Loughborough University. The stat is reported at 300 times per match, but with indoor volleyball, there are up to five games per match, unlike the three set maximum for beach volleyball.
    2. A contributing article in Volleywood.net – written as “10 fun facts about volleyball”, it is a direct reprint from an article Ten fun facts about Volleyball from the website 10-facts-about.com. Fact 4 is listed as:

    Most volleyball players jump about 300 times a match.

    In all likelihood, this last link is the main source of this number, and was continually misinterpreted by the other writers to fit their current narratives. I tracked 10-facts-about.com to a company in Sweden called NanOak Technologies, appears to be a “content farm” – they produce these sites and brands like 10-facts-about and Wisefacts – ostensibly pouring out random interesting “facts” to attract page views, and therefore sell advertising. There is no verifiable vetting of this information, but they are cherrypicked to most likely to appeal to confirmation bias.

    In effect, this is fake news – unvetted information that is twisted just to profit from the misinformation. Though Wilson may have citations, those sources are ultimately unreliable at best.

    So what is the real number?

    Is there real data on the number of times beach volleyball athletes jump on average in a match? Much more peer reviewed data studies the indoor game, but there are some data on beach volleyball.

    1. Loren Anderson of Rise Volleyball Academy did some research on this during a discussion on the Facebook group Beach Volleyball Coaches. He tracked the all the jumps during the gold medal match at the FIVB 4-star beach tournament in the Hague between USA and Brazil. He counted 201 total jumps for all players, averaging 50 jumps per player over the match (~25 jumps per set).
    2. Loren also found a 2009 report from Slovenia (Turpin et al, 2009) that tracked the number and types of jumps during four matches of elite beach volleyball players during a tournament in 2006. They report a total average of 167.5 jumps per match (with a very large variance of 38.5), which comes down to about 40 jumps per player per match, or 20 per set.
    3. Perhaps most useful is that the FIVB report The Picture of the Game, last produced to statistically analyze 12 men’s and 12 women’s matches, and provides some pretty detailed stats and heat maps of defense. On page 37, it reports an average of 405.8 jumps per match (162.3 per set) for women, and 396.8 jumps per match (158.7 per set) for men. Dividing between the four athletes on the court, that comes down to ~40 jumps per set – which is consistent with the Turpin et al report.

    Granted, these are for elite volleyball players playing in high stakes tournaments, but it’s still nowhere near the 300 jumps per match average per player. In fact, only if you account for the jumping of all players on both teams in beach volleyball can you come close to this average number.

    Based on this research, the average number of jumps per player per match in beach volleyball seems to be between 40–80.

    Follow on Twitter and Instagram as @volleysensei

  • Sharing Volleyball Courts

    Sharing Volleyball Courts

    The abundance of public beach volleyball courts in Southern California is a pleasant anomaly. Locals usually do not have to compete for the availability of a court, but in most other places, beach volleyball courts are relatively rare, and communities have to share them. Very often, a park may only have one court, and cliques and alliances are often formed to defend priority in access.

    In civil interactions, though, the challenge court system is the most common traditional way for beach volleyball teams to share in the use of a court. When a pair of teams are playing against each other, waiting teams form a queue to challenge the winning team on the court. A winning team stays on the court, and a particular strong team can continuously play in theory. It’s also a source of great rancor when the list of teams waiting expands beyond around four waiting teams; the delays can be intolerably long for even the first attempt at using the court. For example, if six teams were sharing a court, the last team in line will have to wait for five entire games to be completed. Assuming an average 20 minutes per game, that is almost two hours.

    In practice, however, is that the wait is usually much longer. In traditional challenge court systems, the court itself is unused for significant periods of time, sometimes because the challenging team hasn’t warmed up in preparation – but most often because of delays caused by the winning team. After a set, the winning team requires a period of time to hydrate, catch their breath, use the restroom…in the meantime, the court is unavailable to any of the sitting teams. These delays add up, specially if the winning team has continuously won several games in a row.

    A solution

    I propose a skip-challenge system. Let’s assume there are six teams, A-F sharing the court. In the first set, team A plays team B. Assuming team A wins, both teams immediately step off the court at the point of victory, to allow an already warmed up team C and team D to begin playing. Teams A and B can share pleasantries at this time, and hydrate as needed, and prepare for the match between teams A and E (B goes to the end of the line). Assuming team C wins, both teams get off the court right away for teams A and E, and the next game is between teams C and F. The challenge then iterates from that point on.

    1. In the above example, team F gets on the court a full game earlier than in the standard challenge court system. Plus time saved from not having to wait for the recovery of the winning team makes it even faster.
    2. Every team sits at least one game after playing. Winning teams earn the right to limit this to one game, losing teams go to the end of the line.
    3. There’s no delay in getting teams to using the court, this maximizes the use of the facility and daylight.
    4. The desire to get on the court quickly incentivizes adoption of shorter, lower point games, since it shortens sitting times for everyone, although this is entirely optional.

    For large groups of teams, the skip challenge system may be a more equitable way of distributing a scarce resource, and keep volleyball communities healthy.