For this match, I created the two figures below (one for each team), which convey two aspects of offensive attack: players' hitting percentages (on the vertical axis) and number of hitting attempts (horizontal axis). Players are arranged left-to-right in descending order of hitting percentage. You may click on the figures to enlarge them.
The ideal would be to have rectangles that were both tall and wide, indicating that a player maintained a high hitting percentage over a large number of attempts. The Gators' Kelly Murphy epitomized this combination. Undesirable shapes are tall-and-thin (a player who hits well, but gets few attemps) and short-and-wide (a player who hits for a low percentage, but gets a lot of attempts). I've depicted these suboptimal situations in the figures with paler shades of red and blue.
Whether volleyball coaches and analysts find these graphs useful remains to be seen. One immediate application of the graphs could be in goal-setting. Players with large numbers of attempts but low hitting percentages could be shown the graph, with the coach setting the goal of some specific, higher hitting percentage for the player to work towards.
3 comments:
I really like this idea. Seems like a good way to graphically show players how they're doing offensively. What kind of app did you use to create the graphs? I'd like to give it a try. Cheers.
I just did it in PowerPoint manually, creating rectangles of varying sizes. There very well could be some software that allows you to type in height and width of rectangles to generate them automatically, but I'm not aware of any.
Alan,
Cool idea. One thing I have done is to do a similar sort of graphical presentation, that I have used to help setters understand set distribution.
I keep the width of the rectangles the same for all hitters, but I use two rectangles, overlaid on top of each other, for each hitter. The first rectangle is what % of the team's kills that hitter produced. Then, overlaid on top of that in lighter color is what % of the team's sets went to that hitter. Ideally, those two rectangles should roughly "match up."
If the lighter color rectangle (sets) is shorter than the darker rectangle (kills), then that hitter probably needs to get set more. If the lighter color rectangle is taller, then they are not producing enough kills for the amount of sets they are giving.
Your method definitely is a better representation of a hitter's overall performance, but I have that graphical technique useful for introducing younger setters to the ideas of controlling set distribution.
Cool stuff, I enjoy your blog a lot!
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