Yahoo Group: VolleyStats

A while back, I joined a Yahoo discussion group called VolleyStats. As a result, I've been receiving e-mails from the group that fall into two categories: junk messages and serious reports of statistical analysis from someone named Leo van Hal. Because van Hal's reports are written in Dutch, I really didn't learn anything more about volleyball from them than I did from the junk e-mails.

That situation recently changed, however. I found a new Google application website (new to me, at least) called Google Translate, which is quite easy to use. You simply type (or copy and paste) text from the originating language into a box, select the "from" and "to" languages, and click! van Hal's reports often contain graphs, so rather than copy and paste his entire paper into Google Translate, I do it a few paragraphs at a time, avoiding the graphs. The translations aren't always perfect, sometimes leaving me with odd English constructions. With a little inference ("reading between the lines"), however, I'm confident that I'm picking up the key points.

One message I received was titled "[volleystats] Digest Number 447 [2 Attachments]," dated May 17, 2009. The two attached analyses were titled "Punten verdeling" (Distribution of points) and "Winst Kansen" (Profit Opportunities). Both reports have to do with testing different probabilities of teams' winning points on their serves, and how this affects the probability of different point totals in the games and teams' probabilities of winning the games. (In the English translations, the Dutch word "opslag" appears in English as "storage," but apparently "service" is another synonym; the passages will read much easier in English if you substitute "service" for "storage.")

If you would like English-translated copies of these two van Hal reports, please e-mail me via my faculty webpage in the upper-right portion of this page.