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A Review of the Most Important Skill in Volleyball Using Olympic Data
INTRODUCTION
Over the past week I have tried to answer the question: what is the most important skill in volleyball? It is really an investigation into valid performance indicators, i.e. which volleyball statistics is most related to a successful outcome. One approach is to compare what the best teams do and what the worst teams do. That is what I have done using official data at the men’s and women’s volleyball Olympic Games. I have also done the same with the men’s and women’s sitting volleyball Paralympic Games. So what did I found out?
COMPILING IT ALL TOGETHER
Below is a summary of the strength of the skill as associated to a successful team.
Skill | Men | Men – Sit | Women | Women – Sit | |
Attack | Strong | Strong | Good | Strong | |
Serve | Poor | Poor | Poor | Poor | |
Block | Poor | Strong | Poor | Poor | |
Setting | Good | Strong | Good | Strong | |
Reception | Poor | Poor | Strong | Strong | |
Dig | Poor | Poor | Poor | Poor | |
Point-Scoring | Good | Strong | Good | Strong |
Across the board, it looks like attack is the strongest indicator of performance. This supports current research. It makes sense because to win games, you need to score points and most points are scored via the attack. The next strongest performance indicators are setting and point-scoring. I have not seen any research that has tested setting and point-scoring as a valid performance indicator. However, the result would make sense because the setting percentage is a close function of attack success. I was surprised point-scoring isn’t the strongest indicator of performance because of the reasoning explained above.
Serve and dig are poor performance indicators. Dig was not a surprised and is reflected in the literature. However, I would have thought serve would have some impact because it is a scoring skill. Block has an effect but only in the men’s sitting volleyball code. This may be because of the ability to block serves but it is not reflected in the women’s sitting volleyball code. A separate code for blocked serves may be able to ascertain whether it is true. Reception is a strong performance indicator but only in the women’s game. This surprised me because none of the literature had reception as a valid performance indicator.
It looks like there are similarities between the two volleyball codes but it is gender specific. That is, attack, setting, reception and point-scoring are performance indicators in the women’s game for both volleyball codes. Attack, setting and point-scoring are performance indicators in the men’s game for both volleyball. The only exception is block has an effect in the men’s sitting game. The strength of the performance indicator is stronger in the sitting code. This is a surprise because I would have predicted more similarities between the codes rather than between the genders.
MONEYBALL APPROACH TO VOLLEYBALL?
I am interested in this because it is like a Moneyball approach to volleyball. As a coach, I would like to know which skill determines success so I can select players on this basis. It can also inform a coaching philosophy (whether focusing on attack will lead to success is another question). As a result, my dissertation is based on this very question so it would be interesting to find out what I find out (with detailed analysis of course).
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