Why is There “Statistics” in Volleyball Statistics if We Are Not Performing Any Statistical Tests?

To me, statistics is testing two or more sets of variables to see whether there is a significant difference or relationship between them that did not come about by chance.  It is that pesky p = 0.05.  (If you ever done a dissertation in the sciences then you definitely know what I’m talking about).  Thus, I was perplexed as to why volleyball data is often referred to as “statistics” because no statistical testing is involved.  We are just presenting raw data and some percentages.  We are not performing Chi-Square, T-Tests or ANOVAs tests or checking for normal distribution parametric assumptions (below).

Anyway, I looked up the definition of statistics to answer this perplexity.  Vincent (2005, p.2) define statistics as:

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We do actually do this for volleyball data (although very simply) so I can see why they put “statistics” in volleyball statistics.  Question answered!

REFERENCE Vincent, W.J. (2005)

*** Update 4th June 2022 ***It’s funny I got to this page.  I have since learned that there are descriptive statistics (summarise the characteristics of a data set) and inferential statistics (allows you to test a hypothesis or assess whether your data is generalisable to the broader population).  So what I generally do when I’m analysing performance is use descriptive statistics whereas the inferential statistics is what I would use in my dissertations.