dr.ricky online

Tag: volleysensei

  • Court behavior beyond the game

    Court behavior beyond the game

    When people picture beach volleyball culture, they usually just think about just the game. People don’t seem to have to think about how the ball, or the net, or the court itself got there. Like the illusion of cooking shows on TV, these things didn’t actually magically appear – specially in public parks and areas, someone had to lug all the equipment there. Someone had to lay down lines, set up the net, bring out the balls. And someone has to break it all down and clear it away at the end of the day.

    In many venues, that someone is one person, or a very small group of people. The same dedicated people who will usually come week after week, spend the money out of their pockets to sustain the active social gathering. Oddly, though, this labor quickly becomes invisible. Players come to a venue simply assuming that they are entitled to challenge onto the courts, and fight to hang on to the courts. The commonly used “challenge” system can mean that those who have worked hardest to maintain a venue can end up using it the least.

    The unspoken injustice shows up in the gambit where players try to find that optimal timing to arrive late enough to avoid helping with set up, and leave early enough to avoid breakdown, while conspiring to form stacked teams to play as much as possible. Or in some cases, openly await the availability of the court set up to “steal” it from the ones who have worked on it. Anecdotally, I’ve observed self-professed “advanced” players disdainful to assist in these matters, more concerned about spending time warming up or stretching out — with the unspoken implication that the this is the appropriate burden for novices.

    Many communities have these selfless organizers and abused leaders, who do this for the love of the game. Afford them a bit more respect, and help to sustain the community. Offer to play with them, specially if you are borrowing their equipment. And at the very least speak your gratitude. Curb the entitlement, for those who rise in recognition often do so on the shoulders of the dedicated silent lovers of the game.

    Dedicated to the memory of Sammy delaSchott.

  • Improving Quads 1: The net is not a player

    Improving Quads 1: The net is not a player

    Although a great deal of the instruction describes beach volleyball primarily as a doubles game, many, if not most, people are exposed to it in the 4v4 format. These articles focus on tips and discussions that improve the quads game.

    Conventionally, the quads game is treated as a novice version of the sport, with many players thinking that they can “graduate” to the doubles game. But the number of variables and potential plays are much greater with four players than two, and thus, it is a far more complex game to master. It combines many of the potential strategies from indoor volleyball, and couple it with the environmental challenges of beach volleyball, and while it can appear to be less daunting to a novice due to the greater number of people supporting any one player, communities of quads teams fall into limited set strategies and seldom progress to more sophisticated plays.

    Given the opportunity to teach quads players, I ask teams to let go of their ball control orientation with the net, a system that I also apply to beginning doubles players. Many quads teams fall into this idea of the diamond formation, where a setter is situated at near the middle of the net, and the other three players attempt to pass the ball to that spot near the net. This is derived from the indoor volleyball 4-2 passing formation, and thus appears to be relatively easy to communicate specially among players who have had exposure to indoor volleyball culture.

    But this approach demands precision passing to a set location on the court. This effectively creates a very high bar of body control, and is also poorly adaptable. By pegging the plays to specific coordinates on the court, the players are often taken off balance by factors like the weather, or just a strong float situation.

    If the team moves their coordinate system from having one team mate pegged to the net, and instead shift their passing focus to the area bounded by the imaginary boundaries formed by the four players, less precise passing becomes acceptable. This also frees the entire team to move as a unit, gaining confidence in having assistance nearby as they track the ball, instead of trying to change the distance constantly as the action moves nearer or farther from the net. Moreover, setting is also simplified, since the ball is brought to the attacker, rather than trying to coordinate interception of a ball being forced to the net.

    Adopting a team oriented control strategy as opposed to a court oriented one is more easily implemented when the athletes aren’t coming from a conventional indoor volleyball cultural background, where this more malleable passing formation can appear confusing.

  • Teaching growth mindset

    The best way to teach a growth mindset is to practice it. Demonstrate that you accept challenges and work to grow.

  • Training Day: 26 May 2018

    Training Day: 26 May 2018

    Fundamentals of Beach Volleyball

    Done in cooperation with Sideout Volleybar.

    26 May 2018 at 10:30am. Click for more details.

  • Fundamentals of Beach Volleyball

    Hosted by Sideout Volleybar. Register in person at the bar.

    Learn the sport from the *ground up*. No prior knowledge of the game is expected, beginners are welcome.

    Intended for adults 18 and older. No juniors please, but seniors are encouraged.

    The focus is on beach volleyball doubles and quads (4s). Participants should be prepared for a physical workout, but we will adjust the program to fit almost all fitness levels. The program is 1.5-2 hrs long, and class size is capped at 8.

     

  • 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.

  • 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