Hitting % is Important

I’m sorry for the obvious headline there. I’ll try to do better in the future.

I had done some research a couple of years back looking for trends among the NCAA Division III volleyball champions since 2010. Why 2010? Well, that’s as far back as the NCAA statistics go on their website and I was too lazy to figure out how to find older statistics. What ended up jumping out is that every champion over the last 7 years has finished in the top 10 in hitting percentage. There is not another category that this holds true. Here is the data:

Year	Champion	Hit %	Rank	Runner-Up	Hit %	Rank
2010	Calvin	0.313	1	Emory	0.290	2
2011	Wittenberg	0.277	8	C. Newport	0.266	12
2012	St. Thomas	0.270	7	Calvin	0.270	6
2013	Calvin	0.293	2	Cal Lutheran	0.256	15
2014	Hope	0.258	5	Emory	0.275	3
2015	Cal Lutheran	0.253	4	Wittenberg	0.220	45
2016	Calvin	0.274	2	Wash-St. Louis	0.245	16

I guess another headline could be “Calvin is Good”…but maybe I’ll save that for another day. According to the chart, no champion in the last 7 years has hit less than 0.253. Pretty impressive!

I then wanted to know how many teams to finish in the top 10 in hitting percentage didn’t make the NCAA tournament. Out of the 70 possible teams, here are the unlucky ones:

Year	School	Hit %	Rank	Record
2010	Austin College	0.287	3	29-10
2011	Emmanuel	0.274	9	21-16
2012	Maranatha Baptist	0.272	5	23-5
2012	Millikin	0.263	10	25-10
2014	Hiram	0.289	2	24-7
2015	Messiah	0.257	6	29-3
2015	ETBU	0.252	9	20-8
2016	Cornell	0.256	5	22-7

So, we average around one team a year that doesn’t make it into the tournament. You’ll also notice that a top 10 hitting percentage seems to lead to a guaranteed 20+ win season.

Now what can we learn from this? Well, go recruit a bunch of 6 foot outside hitters and ignore defense and setting and you’ll be golden. In all seriousness, I did find it interesting that there wasn’t another dominate statistic that showed itself.

Oh, in case you want to put an early bet down on this year’s winner, here are the only teams that stand a chance (current leaders in hitting percentage):

Rank	School	Hit %
1	Johnson & Wales (RI)	0.315
2	Mount Union	0.306
3	Baldwin Wallace	0.297
4	Pacific (OR)	0.288
5	Stockton	0.287
6	Calvin	0.278
7	Wesleyan (CT)	0.277
8	Nazareth	0.268
9	John Jay	0.267
10	Otterbein	0.267