Overview of Serving and Serve Receipt

Today, let's take up serving and serve receiving, which appear to be two sides of the same coin. Box-score statistics tend to be quite limited, generally reporting only service aces and errors, and serve reception errors. Jim Coleman's chapter in Shondell and Reynaud's Volleyball Coaching Bible (which I've referenced previously) summarizes some schemes for grading serves and serve reception.

The schemes appear to have both a spatial component -- with short serves, in the center of the receivers' court on the left-right dimension, being considered poor for the server and advantageous for the receiver, and deep serves the opposite -- and a component for how likely the receiving team would be to generate an attack for a side-out, given the placement of the ball.

Consistent with calls for better statistical graphics in volleyball, I had been thinking of serve placement/receipt charts, modeled after shot charts in basketball (see examples here and here).

After searching Google Video with the keyword "volleyball," I found an archived full-length video of a 2006 women's Pac-10 match between Arizona and Oregon, from the Ducks' "O-Zone" broadcasts (video, box score). As shown below, I came up with a coding system, which I applied to Oregon's serve receptions in Game 1 (the availability of a freeze-frame option unquestionably increased the accuracy of my plottings). You can click on the graphic to enlarge it...


It would have been good to add the uniform number of the receiver to each little circle, but the resolution of the video clip wasn't sharp enough for me to see the numbers. Adding the server's number might also be helpful. It wouldn't surprise me if some software packages could generate plots similar to what I've done, but I'm not aware of any.

Going back to the Oregon-Arizona chart, the lack of deep serves stood out to me. This pattern may stem, in part at least, from rule changes in recent years that now allow serve receipt with a setting motion (back in junior high in the mid-1970s, I first learned that setting an incoming serve was a no-no). If, as before, a receiver could only field a serve from a digging position, serves presumably would travel further back in the court, as they could not be cut-off with a set at a higher point in their trajectories.