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Polonia 2013/14 Season Reflected
So the end of the season for Polonia IMKA London has ended. As with last year, we managed to reach the Play-Off Finals. It was great to be there for a chance to win it all but we couldn’t get past Team Northumbria (again) despite all of our efforts. We did one better this year by reaching the semifinals of the National Cup but Team Northumbria was in our way. This is a learning blog so what did I learn?
What Did I Learn?
* . Things can be missed in real time data collection so by having a delayed feed, you can pick up on some of it. I mainly used it for point ending actions, e.g. who got the block kill. On match day, I have StatEasy and Kinovea open on my laptop as demonstrated below. Obviously, it would not be my face on the delayed feed but of the volleyball action via external webcam. I organise the stat report so the most important live statistics are shown first, i.e. point scoring and attack. The other stats, e.g. serve and reception rating etc, are shown when the StatEasy window is maximised. Another advantage is I can record the feed so this allows me to have another angle of the action when I do the motivational video.
* . Having video feedback sessions, where the players and coaches all meet, is an important part of performance analysis. Statistics holds a lot of information but video is truly the king. It is such a powerful feedback tool for players and coaches. However, it was quite difficult to achieve on a regular basis because players work full time and when they commit two evenings a week on training and Saturday for match day, it is hard to ask for them to commit another evening to volleyball. Asking the players to come before or stay after training is unworkable too due to logistical reasons. So in lieu of video feedback sessions, I decided to create feedback videos and upload it to YouTube so players and coaches can watch it in their own time. It was a mixture of video of myself talking and screen recordings.
*I created my own analysis system where each eight technical skills are rated on a five point scale. This has allowed me to take very detailed statistics, create new performance indicators and it makes fact checking a lot easier. A disadvantage of using this system is it takes a very long time to collect data (up to six hours) and I don’t actually use a lot of that data in practice to get all the pertinent information. For example, for attack performance I look at hitting percentage and sometimes kill percentage. So all I need to calculate that are kills, attack errors and attack continuations. This means I don’t need to rate the attack continuation (excellent, good, poor). By not having to rate the attack continuations, this saves so much time when collecting data. There are other examples where I could simplify the system so I still have all the pertinent information but it’ll cut down on my data collection time.
What Could I Improve On?
* . I wanted to have a session what the beginning of the season to fully explain to the players what the statistics actually mean, how performance indicators are calculated and why they are critical to success. However, due to a number of reasons, this did not happen. I did explain it where appropriate in my match analysis of the matches, e.g. “we had a points efficiency ratio (PER = points scored/ points lost) of 1.21 which is higher than our opponent’s PER of 1.11. PER is important because the team with the higher PER, with very few exceptions, will win the match”. I would explain things like this in my match analysis but I know some players still don’t fully understand what I mean by certain terminology. I feel it is my job to educate the players.
* We did have a number of video feedback sessions, especially towards the end of the season, but I would have liked to have had regular video feedback sessions such as the Monday after every match. The feedback videos I uploaded on YouTube did fill a gap but it misses out on the important coach-analyst-player interaction of the real thing. As I noted above, it was difficult to do.
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