May and Walsh in Women's Olympic Beach Final

Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings have completed their illustrious career as an Olympic beach volleyball duo, winning their third consecutive gold medal, never losing a match in the three Olympiad, and losing only one set (game) the whole time. Below, I review some statistics from their recent triumph in the London Games (referring to them, for simplicity, as May and Walsh).

Box scores were available online (see links below), but some elements readers are used to seeing in U.S. collegiate box scores were missing. These include side-out rates (winning points on the other team's serve) and hitting percentages (with the hitting errors needed to compute percentages). I thus reviewed play-by-play sheets, as needed, to calculate these stats.

In the final against fellow Americans Jen Kessy and April Ross, May and Walsh won points on 26 of 32 balls served by Kessy/Ross, an 81% side-out rate (compared to 62% for Kessy/Ross). Here are the box score and play-by-play sheet from that match.

Hitting percentages, and their component elements, are shown in the following table:

Player	Kills	Errors*	Total Att.	Hitting%
Walsh	11	3	20	.400
May	16	0	24	.667
Kessy	14	6	27	.296
Ross	8	3	17	.294

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*Hand-counted from play-by-play sheet (kills and attempts from box score).

One thing keeping the Kessy/Ross hitting percentage relatively low was May's 15 digs (more digs than the other three players put together).Point-scoring blocks were relatively even (and rare). Walsh had 3, Kessy had 2, and neither of their partners had any.

One statistic available in the Olympic beach box scores, which does not appear in most conventional box scores, is fastest serve speed. Ross and Kessy got the best of this statistic at 77 and 70 kilometers/hour, respectively (about 48 and 43 miles per hour), whereas Walsh and May's fastest serves were at 58 and 51 km/h, respectively (36 and 31 mph). It must be emphasized that these are the players' fastest serves, not averages of all their serves.