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Analysing Passing Stats By Body Location
Passing By Body Location
Ally Jack, Scotland Men’s Senior National Team Head Coach, tagged me on Twitter a while back to alert me about a post on passing stats by body location. It was interesting because I know you can have passing stats by body location in DataVolley but I never used it. I’ve certainly never seen much data on it. Based on that, I decided to analyse the data and see how it informs where you should serve.
Passing by Body Location – NCAA Data
Sanky Sanny, Morgan State Women’s Volleyball Assistant Coach, collated 8,718 passes from all 64 teams in the 2019 NCAA Division 1 Women’s tournament. The data shows total reception attempts, passer average (max. 4.00), positive pass % (percentage of 4 and 3 passes or perfect and positive passes) and reception error % based upon where on the body the passing took place, i.e. overhead, left, midline, right or low. Click here for the original article. The chart below shows that passing is worst when passing low on all performance indicators measured. It is probably no surprise that passing is best when passing from the midline.
Sanky Sanny also separated the passing by body location data by court location too (right, centre, left). He originally compiled it as three separate charts but I compiled that data into one chart for ease of viewing (see chart below). Passing low for the right and left passer is a lot worst compared to the centre passer. You can also see that when the serve hits the sidelines, passing is also bad, especially for the right passer. You can see that passing is best when the centre passer passes the midline of the body.
Passing By Body Location – VNL and Olympic Data
It was quite good timing that César Hernández González, Head Coach for South Korea Women’s National Team and Assistant Coach for VakıfBank Spor Kulübü, recently posted on Facebook passing by body location data from the VNL 2021, Olympics (played in 2021) and some VNL 2022 up to 14 June 2022 (see link). All matches come from the women’s game only. Performance indicators used in this data are perfect passes % (%#), passing errors + overpasses % (%=/), and positive passes % (%# and %+ together, shown in the black circle). Based on these performance indicators, passing is still worse when passing low, especially for the right and left passers. Passing is also bad when serves hit the sidelines. Again, it should be noted that passing is best in the body’s midline and for the centre passer. This mirrors the data seen in the NCAA.
Limited Super League Data
I did recently do some stats on passing by body location for a scout of the opposition team. This was the only time I statted data on this. I compiled that data in the chart below. It shows that passing is worst when passing low and passing is best when passing in the midline. Although it is only based on 411 passes of one team, the data does support the data above. The data does shows that passing is actually the worst when passing high, which is not really seen in the above data. However, the data is only based on 20 passing attempts so there could be a lot of variability in the data.
Serving by End Destination
I feel that this data really supports one of my earlier posts that serving short (mid-court really) is highly effective if you want the opposition team to pass badly (see link for full analysis on that). In the chart below, I reworked the data in that blog post to show passing by court location (short, mid-court, deep) in the 2019-20 Women’s Super League. You can see that passing is worst on all performance indicators when serving to the mid-court. This is when the serve dies and drops in front of the passer, i.e. they have to pass low. You might think that serving short to zones 2-4 should result in the worst passing as passers are probably diving for the ball but the stats indicate otherwise. I suspect it is because the front row middle players help out as they transition to attack.ou might think that serving short to zones 2-4 should result in the worst passing as passers are probably diving for the ball but the stats indicate otherwise. I suspect it is because the front row middle players help out as they transition to attack.
Discussion
The evidence is pretty clear that players pass best from the midline of the body and passing is worst when passing low and from the sidelines. There could be some inter-reliability issues, i.e. different scouts may use slightly different definitions of what is a low pass. However, the data is based on 35,400 passing attempts so that does reduce the variability. (NCAA: 8,718 total passing attempts, VNL/ Olympics: 26,271 and Women’s Super League: 411). There are also 2,474 serving attempts if you want to count that in too. The huge amount of data should balance out all of the variability.
So while you can view the data as to the need to improve passing low, I tend to look at it from the other side as the need to serve short so players have to pass low. All of this data supports my original analysis that serving short/ mid-court is highly effective if you want the opposition team to pass badly. You will also find success if you serve the ball to the sidelines.
All the data above comes from the elite women’s game only so it would be super interesting to see data from the men’s game and at lower levels. It could be that men can handle passing low so it’s not a problem. It would be interesting to know what the rally win/ sideout percentage is when passing high, low etc. It’s demonstrated above that the good passing %, error % and passing average are poor when passing low but it could have very little effect on whether you eventually win the rally or not. I have previously written how the Expected SideOut % is a better performance indicator to measure passing performance.
In Practice
Although I did mention it to my teams a few times in the past season to serve mid-court, I never had specific drills to serve mid-court so it wasn’t that important to me. Based on the above data, I will definitely start to. I probably won’t train serving to the sidelines as they are riskier serves. You are asking players to serve a seam that is around 1 to 1.5 metres wide. I can imagine it will probably result in more errors. Serving mid-court is probably a little safer as I’m not asking players to serve inside the 3 metre line. This would increase the likelihood of net serves. In any case, you can read my coaching reflection next season to see how it went.
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