Overview of Setting

Following up on the previous entry about hitting, we now take up another indispensable part of the offense, the setting.

This Daily Californian article from about a year ago describes the setter's role through the eyes of Cal-Berkeley setter Samantha Carter, who at the time was finishing up her four-year career leading the Golden Bears' offense. The following excerpts give an idea of what being a setter entails:

“You have to be one of the better athletes — you’re doing more running and jumping than anyone else on the team,” says Bears coach Rich Feller... “You have to be a sponge and be able to absorb other players’ mistakes and take it upon yourself to make things better.”

...

Before each play, Carter will make eye contact with all of her hitters and signal to them to designate where they’ll each be going and what the play is. Throughout the play, she vocally communicates with her teammates on the court.

“First thing, when I give my calls I basically try to think, ‘Who do I want to set?’ and ‘How can I best get them the ball?’ Then I conjugate the plan and give the signals,” explains Carter. “I will look where the blockers are going and try to set away from them. It’s all about baiting the blocker and try to make them bite the hook.”

The playbook of a setter is extensive. The sets range in height and tempo: A one set is a fast ball to the middle, normally coming off of good passes; a four set is a high ball set for the outside. The list goes on.

“There are endless options of what I could run,” says Carter. “There are so many options, and I have so many hitters, that it makes my job a little bit tougher.”

The toughest part, of course, comes from reacting to unexpected and difficult attacks. A setter, more than anyone else on the team, must react immediately to anything from a bad pass to a surprising move by an opponent and make adjustments to the play accordingly.

The richness of the setter's role, as illustrated in these excerpts, stands in stark contrast to the paucity of quantitative metrics related to the position. The only setting statistic that appears to be widely available in box scores and NCAA compilations is the assist. According to the AVCA statistical definitions, an assist is "awarded to the player who passes the ball to a teammate who attacks the ball for a kill."

As evidenced by this definition -- and also through common sense -- the setter's assist and the hitter's kill are heavily intertwined. A good set, right in the hitter's "wheelhouse," enhances the likelihood of a kill, whereas the presence of hitters who pulverize the ball and have the savvy to overcome the block will increase setters' assist totals. Statistically, a team's number of kills and of assists will be virtually identical; the only discrepancies would occur when a kill came off of something other than a set, such as an overpass by the opposing team.

Within the 2002 book The Volleyball Coaching Bible (edited by Shondell & Reynaud), the chapter on "Scouting Opponents and Evaluating Team Performance" by the late Jim Coleman offers some interesting observations.

Coleman cites the need to go beyond box-score assist statistics and compile one's own, more elaborate, set of ratings (e.g., perfect set, mediocre set, set leading to free ball to opponent, and set giving opponent a direct point or rally). Even these more elaborate stats are not free of problems, however. Among the complications cited by Coleman are, "The perfect set to one spiker is not perfect for another spiker," and "The statistician is often influenced by whether the attacker kills the ball rather than the absolute quality of the set." He also notes that setter ratings are only weakly correlated with winning.

More generally, Coleman feels that, "A statistical system for setting is probably the most difficult system to create," and "The evaluation of setting seems to be more of an art than a science."

A couple of ideas I have for studying setters are as follows:

1. Similar to measuring fielders' range in getting to hit baseballs -- which some sabermetricians are interested in -- setters' range in chasing down passes gone awry could also be assessed. Further, their ability to put up serviceable sets on the run could be evaluated.

2. On an historical basis, collegiate setters' contributions to teams' offensive prowess could be estimated by looking at situations in which most of a team's top hitters return from one season to the next, but with different setters each year. Assuming relative constancy of hitters, difficulty of schedule, etc., from year to year, any difference in a team's aggregate hitting percentage might be attributable to the setter. Year-to-year improvement in hitting ability -- if there is any -- would have to be taken into account.