Why Do We Need Volleyball Statistics?

Prologue

I was watching a Netflix documentary called Memory Games, which focused on four memory athletes and their participation in the 2017 World Memory Championships.  It was pretty good and this lead me to watch the first episode of The Mind, Explained on Netflix, entitled Memory.  It looked into how remembering works and the ways memory can fail us.  A classic example they gave us was how eyewitness testimonies can be highly unreliable.  It reminded me that it was the same example they gave in sports performance analysis in why we need sports performance analysis, i.e. what a coach observes may not be accurate.  I even wrote it back in 2012 when I wrote about why we need performance analysis (see link).  I thought it was time to update this with a slant on volleyball statistics.  If you want to read how volleyball statistics can help you then click on this link.

The Coaching Process

A simplified coaching process (see below) is to observe a performance, recall the performance to identify strengths and weaknesses, provide relevant feedback to the team or player, plan to exploit strengths and correct weaknesses and the process repeats itself with an observation of a second performance.  This is a simplified view as you can probably add more steps to the coaching process or add mini-steps to each major step.  Whichever way you want to outline the coaching process, observing and recalling a performance are probably the first steps.  A big issue with this process is observation and recalling a performance do have limitations.  These limitations will affect the subsequent analysis, feedback and planning that happens in the coaching process.

Simplified coaching process (click to enlarge)

Limitations of Observation and Recall

You Can’t Remember Everything

There’s a limit to how much you can recall a performance.  There could be somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 discrete actions that occur in a single volleyball match and that is too much information for any coach to remember entirely.  Chunking the information will help but you will still only remember a percentage of the match performance.  What percentage that is I don’t know.  Research suggests that football coaches can remember approximately 50% of critical events that occurred in a match.  I’m not sure what they mean by critical events but whatever the percentage may be in volleyball, if the recollection of the whole match performance is only partial then the subsequent analysis will be based on incomplete information.  This can be dangerous because analysis of incomplete information can lead you to give incorrect feedback to the players.

You Will Recall Less the Longer it Happened in the Past

The ability to recall is diminished the longer the point of observation and the point of recall.  That is, the longer the match happened in the past, the harder it is to remember what happened in the match.  This means a coach will not really know if the team is improving over the course of the season because s/he is unlikely to accurately remember how well they played in the first match of the season (you might even have trouble remembering who you played) so you can compare it to the most recent match (although that itself is only a partial recollection of perhaps 50% of critical events).

Not Everybody Remembers the Same Thing

How you remember things is influenced by a number of factors.  A simple one is we tend to remember match highlights (or lowlights), especially if they happened at critical parts of the match.  I still remember one of my star players serving the ball into the net at match point to lose the BUCS South Eastern Conference Cup Final.  Another major influence is personal bias.  You will have a proclivity, based on your personal experiences, beliefs and knowledge, to observe and remember certain aspects of performance and ignore other aspects.  For example, I know I have an absolute blindspot for anything blocking.  Players ask me for feedback on the block and I don’t have a clue.  Mood and attentional focus will also have an effect on memory.

What You Recall May Not Have Happened

What you recall may not actually have happened.  The classic example is the unreliability of eyewitness accounts.  In sport, a study showed that experienced gymnastic coaches, compared to inexperienced coaches, were more likely to report differences when there was none and did not identify actual differences in performances any more successfully than the inexperienced coaches.  This means you may analyse a match performance based on events that never occurred.  I remember a coach informing the team that an opposition outside hitter, the main threat, liked to hit his pipe attacks to zone 5 because he had a tendency to follow his spike with his thumb forward for an inside-out spike.  I quickly checked his attack directions and saw that most of his pipe attacks went to zone 1.  The coach may have seen it happen twice in a row and extrapolated that it was a tendency, not remembering or misremembering the other pipe attack attempts.

So Why Do We Need Volleyball Statistics?

The first step of the coaching process is to observe and recall a performance.  If the observation and recollection of a performance is faulty then the subsequent analysis and relevant feedback given will be faulty too.  There are limitations in how much you can remember, when you need to remember it, what you remember and whether what you remembered actually happened.  Volleyball statistics can help overcome these limitations of using observation alone by providing additional information.  This information, along with other information that may be available, will assist the coach to make an informed decision to enhance performance.  This is why we need volleyball statistics.

Now you know why we need volleyball statistics, click on this link to read how volleyball statistics can help you.