VolleyMetrics

2012-01-22T12:01:00.000-08:00

Because conference play gets underway very quickly in men's college volleyball (usually just after an early-season tournament or two) and the top teams tend to be concentrated in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF), fans don't have to wait very long for marquee match-ups to take place.

Just this past weekend, No. 1 BYU hosted No. 5 USC for a pair of matches (BYU and Hawai'i always play a given opponent in a two-match home series or road series, presumably to cut down on travel). Also, No. 3 UCLA hosted No. 4 Stanford.

I will focus on the BYU-USC series, as better inferences can be made from two matches than from one. BYU won both matches, but each was highly competitive. The Cougars took Friday night's first match in four games (sets), and Saturday night's rematch in five (15-13 in the fifth, in fact).

As is customary, I stress hitting percentages and the teams' allocation of spike attempts. The following graphic (on which you can click to enlarge) presents this information for the Cougars' and Trojans' main hitters.

As can be seen, the stalwart for BYU was Taylor Sander, a 6-foot-4 sophomore outside (left-side) hitter who hit .419 and .383 in the two matches, taking an average of 45 swings per night. Robb Stowell, a 6-7 senior opposite (right-side) hitter, hit .375 the second night on 40 attempts, after hitting only .200 the first. Russ Lavaja (6-7, junior) contributed .364 and .455 offensive outings, although as is common for a middle blocker he had relatively few spike attempts.

I watched the latter parts of Friday night's match on BYU TV and I can tell you that Sander and Stowell were just pummeling the ball.

'SC was led by two pillars of last year's team. Tony Ciarelli (6-6, senior) and Steven Shandrick (6-7, senior). Ciarelli was very steady, hitting .351 and .364 in the two matches; on Saturday, he took a Herculean 55 spike attempts. Shandrick hit .500 and .375.

The Trojans also feature a number of frosh players, led by setter Micah Christensen. Fellow newcomer MB Robert Feathers led USC with 8 block assists on Friday, but didn't do much (statistically at least) on Saturday. MB Ben Lam, who played only in Saturday's match, recorded an error-free 7 kills on 8 attempts, for an .875 hitting percentage.

By Game 5 of Saturday's match, the two teams' offenses were firing on all cylinders, with the Cougars outhitting the Trojans, .545 (13 kills and only 1 error, on 22 swings) to .474 (10-1-19).

BYU outblocked USC, 15-11 in total team blocks Friday and 13-9.5 Saturday. (There really is no such thing as a half-block in the aggregate; what happens is that on a triple-block, each player is credited with a half-block instead of a one-third block, resulting in the "phantom" half-block in the totals.)

Keeping with the theme of hot-hitting, UCLA registered a .376 percentage in sweeping Stanford. Leading the Bruins (among players with 10 or more swings) were MB Thomas Amberg (.600), OH Gonzalo Quiroga (.538), and MB Weston Dunlap (.333). The Cardinal's Brad Lawson, star of the 2010 NCAA championship match, hit .333, but Stanford as a whole hit only .179. UCLA also enjoyed a large blocking advantage, 8.5-2.

A couple of days ago, the Los Angeles Times had a feature article on UCLA coach Al Scates, who is retiring at the end of this, his 50th, season at the Bruin helm.

2012-01-12T22:29:00.000-08:00

Science News has just published an article on research by German and Austrian investigators purporting to document a hot hand in volleyball spiking, and the reporter was nice enough to contact me for comment. (I operate another blog, on the statistical study of sports streakiness, and even have a book out on the subject.)

A hot hand in this context would mean that a player who has successfully put away a few kills in a row would have a higher likelihood of a kill on his or her next spike than the player's long-term kill percentage would suggest. A cold hand would represent the opposite, that a player whose last few spike attempts have resulted in errors (e.g., ball hit out of bounds) would have higher than usual odds of an error on the next attempt than his/her long-term percentages would suggest.

Within the constraints of the data set to which the authors had access (partial game-sequence data from top players in a German men's professional league), the analyses were conducted with full rigor and in a manner consistent with previous hot hand research. However, as I elaborate below, I feel there was at least one major limitation in the available data.

One type of analysis done by the authors used the runs test. This statistical technique requires the researcher first to list the sequence of events, in this case, a given player's order of kills (K) and errors (E). A "run" is an uninterrupted sequence of the same outcome, either all K's or all E's. The following hypothetical sequence, with few runs, would indicate streaky performance (i.e., clustering of K's and of E's):

KKKKEEEKKKKK (3 runs)

Another hypothetical sequence (with the same number of total attempts), this time with many runs, would indicate less (or absent) streakiness:

KKEKEEKKKKEK (7 runs)

According to the Science News piece:

An analysis of playoff data from the 1999/2000 season for 26 top scorers in Germany’s first-division volleyball league identified 12 players as having had scoring runs that could not be chalked up to chance. Hot-handed players’ shots contained fewer sequences of consecutive scores than expected by chance, the result of a small number of especially long scoring runs.

As we know, however, there is a third category of outcome for spike attempts, namely the ball is dug up (or otherwise kept in play) by the defense, and the rally continues. As I told the reporter, I definitely think those hit attempts should have been included in the analyses, but they apparently were unavailable in the data set the authors received. Hitting errors were very rare in the data, so balls kept in play may have been a better measure than errors of unsuccessful spike attempts.

(Cross-posted with Hot Hand in Sports.)

2012-01-01T21:37:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! I wanted to close out discussion of the 2011 NCAA women's volleyball tournament by examining the effectiveness of my newly developed Conference-Adjusted Combined Offensive/Defensive (CACOD) ranking system at predicting the outcome of tournament matches.

Details of the formula and the full set of CACOD rankings are available here. In short, however, for each team in the NCAA field, the CACOD took the "ratio of its own overall [regular] season hitting percentage (offense) divided by the overall hitting percentage it has allowed the opposition (defense)." This ratio was then multiplied by an adjustment factor based on a team's conference (the stronger the conference, the more the adjustment factor raised the team's ranking).

For each of the 63 matches in the tournament, I simply looked at whether the team with the higher CACOD rating won or lost. The CACOD's record is shown below, along with those from other leading rating systems (shown in a screen capture from a VolleyTalk discussion thread). You may click on the graphics below to enlarge them.

The CACOD successfully predicted the winner of 45 tournament matches, which means it generally did as well as the more established ranking systems did. (The reason some of the above records include only 62 matches is that the captured image was from before the final match.* I suspect that, in cases where other systems' records don't add up to 62, it's because some matches featured teams that were tied in the rankings.) What's unique about the CACOD is that teams' win-loss records during the regular season play no role in formulating the rankings, just offensive and defensive hitting-percentage statistics.

During the Sweet Sixteen round and beyond, the CACOD seemed to outperform the other systems, as the CACOD didn't do so well regarding the 48 matches of the first two rounds (32 in the first round, 16 in the second). The results of the two initial rounds are shown in the next graphic.

Indeed, the CACOD trailed the top performing system (Pablo) by five matches after the first two rounds. However, the CACOD went 10-5 the rest of the way to catch up. The results of the last 15 matches are listed below, with teams' CACOD rankings at the close of the regular season shown in parentheses. Successful predictions appear in black, unsuccessful ones in red.

Sweet Sixteen

Texas (7) d. Kentucky (39)
UCLA (11) d. Penn State (12)
Florida St. (28) d. Purdue (2)
Iowa St. (9) d. Minnesota (31)
Illinois (14) d. Ohio State (25)
Florida (10) d. Michigan (33)
USC (5) d. Hawai'i (6)
Pepperdine (29) d. Kansas St. (40)

Elite Eight

UCLA (11) d. Texas (7)
Florida St. (28) d. Iowa St. (9)
Illinois (14) d. Florida (10)
USC (5) d. Pepperdine (29)

Final Four

UCLA (11) d. Florida St. (28)
Illinois (14) d. USC (5)

Championship

UCLA (11) d. Illinois (14)

For next year, I may tweak the formula a little to, for example, place greater weight on hitting-percentage statistics from later in the season than earlier. Seeing how the CACOD did in the end, however, any revisions will likely be more minor than I had expected would be the case after the first two rounds!

---
*I overlooked this point in my original posting, but have now added it.

NCAA Women's Final Four Wrap-Up

2011-12-19T00:27:00.000-08:00

Illinois entered this past weekend's NCAA Women's Final Four with an interesting proposition. To win the national championship, the Fighting Illini would most likely have to win the championship of Los Angeles. USC stood as the opponent in Thursday's semi-finals, with UCLA up next in Saturday's finals provided the Bruins could handle Florida State (which UCLA did, via sweep).

The Illini passed its first test, besting USC in a five-game classic. On the final point of the Illinois-USC match, shown here on YouTube, the ball crossed the net 20 times, before the Trojans hit it out to give the Illini a 15-10 win in the closing set.

Unfortunately for Illinois, its difficulty in putting the ball away on the final point vs. USC foreshadowed troubles it would have doing so two nights later against UCLA. The Bruins had the upper hand for most of the championship match and won in four, 25-23, 23-25, 26-24, 25-16.

Thanks to a pair of Illini spurts -- outscoring UCLA 12-3 to take Game 2 after trailing 20-13, and 5-1 to get two set-points in Game 3 -- the match could have gone in a different direction (see box score/play-by-play sheet). The Illini couldn't close out Game 3, however, as their spike attempts while leading 24-22 and 24-23 were dug by UCLA. The Bruins won both rallies to tie the score at 24-24 and then won the next two points as well (if you check the match video at the ESPN3.com archive, the final stages of Game 3 appear at the 1 hour, 50 minute point).

The two teams' final hitting percentages were very similar, .218 for UCLA and .215 for Illinois. Rather, the Bruin win seems mainly attributable to defense, with UCLA outblocking (15-11.5) and outdigging (87-76) Illinois. The serving game was also important, with the Illini committing 11 errors to none for the Bruins; despite Illinois's seemingly more aggressive serving approach, it racked up only two more aces than did UCLA (4-2).

The Illini's powerful offensive game was limited to a .215 hitting percentage by UCLA, in contrast to the .279 Illinois was able to generate vs. USC. The following graphic (on which you may click to enlarge) compares what happened on all of Illinois's total spike attempts (TA) vs. USC (left column) with what happened on all of the Illini's swings vs. UCLA (right column).

Whereas Illinois got kills on 39.1% of its hitting attempts vs. USC, the Illini succeeded only 32.6% of the time vs. UCLA. A team is officially credited with a block when the ball goes rocketing back to the floor on the hitting team's side of the net for a defensive point. UCLA scored via block on 8.3% of Illinois's swings, whereas USC did so on only 4.6% of them (USC more frequently induced the Illini to commit the other type of hitting error, hitting the ball out of bounds, than did UCLA, 6.6% of the time compared to 2.8%). UCLA also dug 48.1% of Illinois's spike attempts, compared to the 44.2% of Illini hits that USC dug.

UCLA dropped only three sets in its six NCAA tourney matches, one each to San Diego, Texas, and Illinois. The Bruins are fortunate the championship match didn't go to five games, as the Illini's record this season in matches going the distance was 7-0...

NCAA Women's Regional Round-Up & Final Four Preview

2011-12-11T21:16:00.001-08:00

This year's tournament has to be right up there for the volume of upsets, near-upsets, and all-around strangeness. UCLA appeared to be floundering towards the end of the regular season, losing three of its last five matches. Florida State, playing in the relatively low-profile Atlantic Coast Conference, certainly didn't seem like Final Four caliber during the season. Yet, the Bruins and Seminoles will be playing each other this upcoming Thursday night in one national semi-final.

The other national semi will feature two teams that each looked dominant for most of the season, but also had some unexpected losses, USC and Illinois. The mighty Big 10 conference, which had six of its member teams advance to the Sweet 16 round, ended Friday night's regional semi-finals with the minimum number of surviving teams it could have, one (because Illinois played Ohio State and someone had to win!).

In the remainder of this entry, I summarize developments in the four regions and discuss what to look out for in the Final Four.

LEXINGTON, KY REGION

A night after sweeping four-time defending national champion Penn State out of the tournament, UCLA ousted the national No. 1 seed Texas, 19-25, 25-22, 25-22, 25-21 (box score). Texas's decline after Game 1 is evident in many ways. As shown in the following graph, the Longhorns' hitting percentage fell from a torrid .517 in Game 1 to roughly .200 in each of the remaining games.

As perhaps a microcosm of the match, Texas's Haley Eckerman amassed 4 kills in Game 1, and 5 in Game 2, but only 1 more the rest of the contest (fairly late in Game 4 with UT down 15-12). Eckerman sat for the middle stages of the match, leading the ESPN-U announcers and other observers to wonder what might have been going on.

Texas outblocked UCLA 10-7 for the match, but the way the Longhorns' blocks were distributed among the four games shows why UT didn't gain a bigger advantage from its blocking.

The Longhorns recorded 5 blocks in Game 1 (including 3 straight to advance their lead from 17-15 to 20-15). However, UT had no blocks in the second set, 2 in the third, and none for most of the fourth. Only after the Longhorns had fallen behind 20-13, did they somehow put together 3 more blocks, but it was too little, too late. (These game-specific statistics come from looking at the play-by-play sheet on the archived CBS Sports gametracker.)

For UCLA, Rachael Kidder provided the offensive lift against Texas, hitting .417 from 26 kills and 6 errors on 48 swings. As seen in the graph above, the Bruins experienced what seems to be their customary Game-3 dip in hitting percentage, but still won the game.

MINNEAPOLIS REGION

Twelfth-seeded Florida State stunned No. 5 Purdue and No. 4 Iowa State, the latter in five sets, to advance to the Seminoles' first volleyball Final Four. Blocking appeared to play a large role in FSU's win over Iowa State. Florida State outblocked Iowa State 16-8, as well as outhitting the Cyclones .245-.204 (box score).

It was blocking that arguably turned around Game 5, as the Seminoles stuffed the Cyclones at four key points (to tie the game 8-8, and boost their leads to 10-8, 12-10, and 14-11). If, instead of being blocked, Iowa State could have made good on most of these spike attempts, the match could well have had a different outcome.

FSU junior middle-blocker Sareea Freeman personally played a large role in thwarting the Cyclones' attack, contributing 2 solo blocks and 8 block assists for the match, while hitting .500 (12-2-20). Jekaterina Stepanova also hit big for the Seminoles in a workhorse role (.378, 20-3-45).

GAINESVILLE REGION

In the regional final, Illinois withstood a Florida team that was hot and playing on its home court, 25-22, 23-25, 25-14, 25-20 (box score). Colleen Ward, who once played for Florida before transferring, led the Fighting Illini with a .500 hitting percentage against the Gators (23-2-42). The error-free hitting of middle blockers Anna Dorn, .600 (6-0-10), and Erin Johnson, .562 (9-0-16), also paced the Illini.

Illinois won the first game, in which both teams hit very poorly (UI .068, UF .024). The Illini then perked up to hit .455, .394, and .514 in the final three games, for a .338 night overall as a team. The Gators hit .405 in Game 2, below Illinois's average, but enough to win the set.

The Gators' overall hitting percentage against Illinois was .225, with team leader Kelly Murphy registering only a .205. In sweeping Michigan the night before, Florida hit a whopping .439. Betsy Smith (.700), Chloe Mann (.533), Murphy (.517), and Kristy Jaeckel (.435), led the Gators (all four of these hitters took at least 10 swings).

HONOLULU REGION

Just as Illinois had to contend with playing an opponent on its home floor, so did USC. In this regional, the Trojans faced host Hawai'i in the semi-final, winning in five, 19-25, 29-27, 19-25, 25-23, 15-12 (box score). The teams were very balanced in their overall hitting (UH .220, USC .211) and blocks recorded (UH 15, USC 14).

The Trojans managed to turn up their offensive intensive in the fifth set, when they needed to, hitting .400 (12-2-25) and siding out (winning points on the Rainbow Wahine's serve) 69% of the time. Seven of those kills were by Alex Jupiter. The fact that 'SC scored 12 of its 15 Game-5 points on kills (with the others on an ace and two blocks) is noteworthy in that Hawai'i wasn't exactly giving things away with errors.

Some may have expected a Trojan cakewalk over Pepperdine the next night (I did), but instead, USC was again extended to five games, 25-16, 26-28, 19-25, 25-19, 15-10 (box score). The Trojans outhit the Waves, although neither team hit that well in an absolute sense (.223-.175). USC's blocking advantage was much more one-sided, 14-6.5.

SUMMARY

The four teams that will be competing for the NCAA title all have shown great resiliency, overcoming deficits, hometown crowds for their opponents, and the pressures of fifth games. Interestingly, Florida State, the team I would give the least chance to win it all, may have the best balance between hitting and blocking. Illinois probably has the most consistently strong hitting, whereas USC can dominate with the block (which is not to say the Trojans don't have some fine hitters, when they're on). UCLA's problem this season has been closing out matches (squandering 2-set-to-1 leads at Pepperdine and Arizona, and a 2-0 lead at Oregon, to lose all three of these matches). Lately, however, the Bruins have shown no trouble closing the deal.

Round-Up of NCAA Women's Tourney Opening Weekend

2011-12-04T13:23:00.001-08:00

The headlines from the first weekend of this year's NCAA Division I women's volleyball tournament would have to be upsets, in general, and the poor showing of the Pac 12 conference, in particular. In the following chart, I summarize the performances of teams from the three major conferences (Big 10, Big 12, and Pac 12), other seeded teams, and any other teams that advanced to next weekend's Sweet 16. You may click on the graphic to enlarge it.

The highest-seeded upset victim was No. 2 Nebraska, which fell at home in Lincoln to former conference rival Kansas State in five games, 25-22, 22-25, 31-29, 22-25, 15-11, in the second round. The Cornhuskers' downfall appeared to be on defense. Offensively, Nebraska hit exactly at its regular-season percentage (.262) against the Wildcats. However, whereas the Huskers held their regular-season opponents to a collective .143 hitting percentage, K-State hit nearly .100 better, registering a .241 evening (box score). The Huskers still slightly outhit the Wildcats (.262-.241), so one must look further for possible explanations of Nebraska's loss. Leading candidates are blocking (where K-State held the edge, 13-10) and serving (where the Wildcats had 4 aces and 7 errors to the Huskers' 2 and 11, respectively).

The second-highest seeded team to lose was No. 6 Northern Iowa, to Florida, also in the second round. Despite the 33-1 record UNI brought into the match, its loss to the Gators would probably not be considered such a stunner by most observers, as the Panthers' schedule is not the nation's most challenging in the Missouri Valley Conference. Florida mainstay Kelly Murphy led the way with a spectacular .452 hitting night, on 15 kills and 1 error on 31 spike attempts. Fellow senior Kristy Jaeckel did Murphy one better on error-avoidance, hitting .333 (13-0-39).

Florida will next take on Michigan, which ousted 11-seed Stanford on the Cardinals' home court (the Wolverines did the same in 2009). The resurgence of Michigan's senior OH Alex Hunt, which I coined "The Hunt for Blue December," continues onward, as she hit .341 (17-3-41) vs. Stanford. Claire McElheny also took a lot of swings for the Wolverines and came up big (.410, 18-2-39). In addition, UM kept the Cardinal's recently hot Carly Wopat in check (.250, 10-5-20).

In another previous posting, I wrote about Michigan's "unfortunate penchant for failing to capitalize on game and match points during conference play..." What may have been the turning point for the Wolverines in NCAA tournament play came in Game 3 of their opener against Baylor. Having split the first two sets, Michigan and Baylor went "overtime" in the next game, which the Wolverines pulled out 29-27. UM then closed things out easily in Game 4, 25-17.

There were two other matches in which Big 10 teams defeated Pac 12 teams head-to-head. No. 13-seed Minnesota came back from two games down to oust Washington in a second-round match. The Huskies neutralized the Gophers' big hitter Tori Dixon (.048), but couldn't do the same to Ariana Filho (.357) or Katherine Harms (.356). For U-Dub, Krista Vansant (.327) and Bianca Rowland (.323) hit well in defeat. Also, in a first-round match, Michigan State knocked off Arizona, before getting swept by top-seeded Texas.

Another surprise advancer from the Big 10 is Ohio State, which scored a five-game victory over No. 14-seed Tennessee in Knoxville. In the 1990's, then-ESPN studio host Dan Patrick used to say of various athletes, "You can't stop [name of player], you can only hope to contain him!" (audio clip). Well, the Buckeyes' didn't exactly stop the Volunteers' high-powered offense -- Shealyn Kolosky (.391, 11-2-23) and DeeDee Harrison (.308, 12-4-26) put up some nice numbers for UT -- but OSU contained the rest of the team, leaving the Vols with a .171 hitting percentage for the match. OSU bested this with a .207.

Click here to see the official NCAA bracket and match-ups for the round of 16.

2011-11-29T16:03:00.001-08:00

With the NCAA Division I women's tournament starting Thursday and rampant displeasure at the tournament committee's seedings (believed to be based heavily on RPI ratings), the fans at VolleyTalk are awash in different alternative rating schemes for evaluating the teams.

The major known ranking systems -- the AVCA Coaches' Poll, RPI, Pablo Rankings, and Rich Kern Rankings -- all appear to take teams' win/loss records and strength of schedule into account. As anyone who has read my blog over the past five years knows, my focus has always been on hitting percentage. I think it's a great singular statistic for incorporating many aspects of the game.

If you hit well (not just keep the ball in play, but get kills), your (individual or team) hitting percentage goes up. An attack kept in play by the other team hurts, as does a hitting error (spiking the ball out of bounds or getting stuff-blocked for an opponent's point). In order to hit well, a team must pass and set well. If you block or dig your opponent's spike attempts, that drives down the opponent's hitting percentage.

What I've done, therefore, is create a national ranking metric based heavily on each team's ratio of its own overall season hitting percentage (offense) divided by the overall hitting percentage it has allowed the opposition (defense). A ratio is maximized when a large numerator is divided by a small denominator. For example, hitting .300 for the season and allowing one's opponents (in the aggregate) to hit .100 yields a ratio of 3. Hitting .250 and allowing one's opponents to hit .200 yields a ratio of 1.25.

But that's not all. Teams play in differentially tough conferences, so I wanted to adjust for that. I came up with a very simple adjustment system out of thin air. We'll see how well my rankings predict this year's tournament matches and I can modify my conference adjustments as needed. Here's my current adjustment system:

If a team plays in the Big 10, Big 12, or Pac 12, I multiplied its hitting percentage-to-opponent hitting percentage ratio by 1.25. This way, teams that faced what I (and others) consider the top opposition are rewarded for doing so.
Teams from the ACC, SEC, Big East, Atlantic 10,Mid America, Missouri Valley, West Coast,Big West, Mountain West, Western Athletic (WAC), or Conference USA had their ratios multiplied by 1.00 (i.e., leaving their ratios alone).
Teams from all remaining conferences, whose schools tend to have relatively low athletic budgets and little or no track record of national success in women's volleyball, had their ratios multiplied by 0.75. Teams dominating these smaller conferences could hit really well and keep their opponents' hitting low, so to account for this, I adjusted their ratios downward.

What follows now are my 1-through-64 rankings of the NCAA tournament teams, based on my Conference-Adjusted Combined Offensive/Defensive (CACOD) rankings. You may click on the chart (which is divided into three panels) for an enlarged view.

Nebraska coming out top-ranked seems to give my system a little "face validity." Further, I have USC ranked higher than does the NCAA tournament committee! And if Dayton or Colorado State makes a big run in the tourney, you heard it here first. Like all other ranking systems, mine will stand or fall on how well it predicts tournament games. For any given match, we would predict the higher-ranked team to beat the lower-ranked one. We'll see how it works.

A note on sources: I obtained all teams' (offensive) hitting percentages from the NCAA statistics page (see link in right-hand column). To glean teams' opponent (defensive) hitting percentages, I looked at a variety of conference and team-specific pages. When looking at conference and team pages, I checked whether the listed offensive hitting percentages matched those on the NCAA site, to verify that the statistics were from the same time-frame. As it happened, a few tiny discrepancies appeared between the NCAA and conference/team pages regarding teams' offensive hitting percentages (e.g., the NCAA page said Yale had hit .253, whereas the Ivy League page said the figure was .254).

2011-11-26T12:37:00.001-08:00

Cal came into Stanford's Maples Pavilion last night and upset the Cardinal in a mostly tight match, 24-26, 29-27, 25-23, 25-14 (box score). Cal led 24-22 in the opening game, but Stanford ran off four straight points. Stanford had a couple of opportunities to go up two sets to none, having set points in Game 2 at 25-24 and 26-25. Cal had set points at 27-26 and 28-27, the latter of which the Golden Bears capitalized on.

The Golden Bears outhit the Cardinal, .306-.233. Leading Cal were Kat Brown, .500 (7 kills, 0 errors, 14 attempts); Correy Johnson, .500 (16-3-26); and Shannon Hawari, .375 (12-3-24). (I always confuse Kat Brown with Texas’s Khat Bell.)

Carly Wopat, Stanford's 6-foot-2 sophomore middle blocker, continues to shine. She has committed only 13 hitting errors in her last 234 swings (over the team's last nine matches). With 118 kills during this time, she is hitting .449 during her hot stretch. Here are Wopat's hitting statistics for the second half of Pac 12 play...

Opponent	Kills	Errors	Attempts	Percentage
@Arizona	9	4	20	.250
@ASU	18	7	35	.314
USC	11	0	18	.611
UCLA	7	1	21	.286
@Colorado	14	4	26	.385
@Utah	10	1	18	.500
@Washington	11	1	33	.303
@WSU	13	1	22	.545
Oregon	18	0	26	.692
OSU	12	4	32	.250
Cal	22	1	38	.553

HTML Tables

Elsewhere in Pac 12 play last night...

USC avenged its earlier defeat to UCLA, winning in Westwood 24-26, 26-24, 25-21, 25-20 (box score). Based on the teams' low hitting percentages -- USC's .208 and UCLA's .136 -- it looks like it was a grind-it-out kind of match, with long rallies and many hitting errors. The pattern I identified earlier this season of the Bruins' often experiencing a dip in hitting percentage after the post-Game 2 intermission was again evident: .196 in Game 1, .263 in Game 2, and -.086 in Game 3 (though rebounding back to .143 in Game 4).

Oregon avenged Tuesday night's loss to Oregon State, sweeping the Beavers (box score). OSU was very anemic offensively, illustrated by its .090 hitting percentage for the match (with many unforced errors, as UO had only 5 team blocks) and its never exceeding a 50% side-out percentage in any game.

Lastly, just as I was getting a little excited about my graduate-school alma mater Michigan's improved play of late, the Wolverines lost in four at home to Ohio State (box score). The Buckeyes, led by Kelli Barhorst at .444 (10-2-18), outhit the Wolverines 275-.222.

2011-11-25T12:40:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. Here are a few tidbits from Tuesday and Wednesday nights' action to get caught up on recent developments.

No sooner did I write an entry about how well Oregon was doing than the Ducks got swept Tuesday night by Oregon State. The teams have a rematch tonight in Eugene.

A few weeks ago, the college-volleyball world marveled at the 34-32 game played by Penn State and Wisconsin. Wednesday night, Oklahoma took a 35-33 set over Texas Tech to close out a three-game sweep.

In another Wednesday match featuring overtime games, Tennessee held off Kentucky in Knoxville, 28-30, 25-20, 30-28, 25-18, to win the SEC title. The potent Lady Volunteer offense did not disappoint, racking up a .291 overall team hitting percentage (box score). Leading contributors were DeeDee Harrison, .444 (15 kills, 3 errors, 27 attempts); Shealyn Kolosky, .421 (8-0-19); and Leslie Cikra, .370 (14-4-27). The Wildcats were led by Whitney Billings .367 (14-3-30); and Becky Pavan, .353 (13-1-34). The latter is the sister of former Nebraska great Sarah Pavan.

One additional Wednesday match I wanted to mention, as a Michigan alumnus, is the Wolverines' four-game win over Michigan State. UM's left-handed slugger Alex Hunt (shown in this video from last year) had her best conference hitting night of the season, registering a .361 percentage. Her previous bests had been .353 at Nebraska and .308 at home vs. Minnesota. She has missed (or had her action greatly limited in) five Big 10 matches due to injury, and in her remaining matches has had a lot of lackluster hitting percentages (e.g., -.021 at Northwestern, .000 at Purdue, .083 at Illinois, and .120 at home vs. Indiana).

I try to follow as many UM matches as possible via Internet video or audio broadcasts and I've heard a couple of schools' announcers make the point that Hunt hits the ball as hard as anyone, yet she is inconsistent in her hitting percentages. If she can continue the hot hitting she exhibited vs. MSU, then the Wolverines' journey in the NCAA tournament might be termed the "Hunt for Blue December." Michigan hosts Ohio State tonight to conclude the regular season.

Finally, national No. 4 UCLA hosts No. 1 USC tonight. The Trojans (19-2 in conference) have already wrapped up the Pac 12 championship, ahead of the second-place Bruins (17-4). However, UCLA routed USC in the teams' first match-up. The Trojans will be out for revenge, but perhaps there's something about the Bruins that matches them up well against 'SC.

2011-11-22T18:28:00.001-08:00

The Lincoln Journal Star notes in this piece that Nebraska lately "has gotten off to slow starts, losing the first set in seven of its last nine matches. While Nebraska is 7-2 in those matches, it's something the Huskers hope to get a better handle on before the NCAA Tournament begins next week." (Thanks to "Red in Colorado" for posting the link on VolleyTalk.)

To probe the matter further, I created the following table based on Nebraska's schedule/results page, showing the Cornhuskers' opponents and lost sets/games (in yellow) in the matches alluded to above.

Opponent	Game 1	Game 2	Game 3	Game 4	Game 5
Illinois	24-26	25-18	25-19	25-11	---
@Ohio St.	19-25	25-22	25-19	25-17	---
@Penn St.	17-25	15-25	25-17	17-25	---
Michigan	17-25	26-24	25-20	25-21	---
Mich. St.	25-11	25-18	25-23	---	---
@Indiana	25-19	25-19	25-20	---	---
@Purdue	19-25	19-25	16-25	---	---
Minnesota	17-25	25-18	25-15	25-16	---
Wisconsin	12-25	25-17	25-13	25-22	---

HTML Tables

Here are a few things to note:

Most of Nebraska's Game-1 losses during this stretch were pretty decisive; in six of them, Nebraska didn't even get 20 points.
After five of the Game-1 losses, Nebraska bounced back to sweep the next three sets and take the match.
The two times the Huskers failed to turn things around after losing the opening set were both on the road and against very tough opponents -- Penn State and Purdue.

UPDATE: Tonight the Huskers beat Iowa -- without losing the first game or any game for that matter -- to win the Big 10 championship.

2011-11-21T07:37:00.001-08:00

The Oregon Ducks, who opened the season in August with a shocking win at Penn State, have been making a lot of noise of late. This past weekend, Oregon went down to the Bay Area and knocked off both the Stanford and Cal women. With these latest wins in Pac 12 play, the Ducks have now won 8 of their last 10 matches (game-by-game log).

One feature of the Oregon team -- if not the primary feature -- that appears to give it strength is the number of players who can hit for high percentages on a given night. Below, I've selected four major Duck wins and, for each, the following table displays players' hitting percentages (with number of spike attempts in parentheses). Hitting percentages of .300 or higher, based on at least 10 attempts, are highlighted.

Player	@PSU (8/26)	vs. UCLA (11/11)	@Stan (11/18)	@Cal (11/19)
Bergsma (OH)	.239 (46)	.290 (62)	.234 (47)	.220 (50)
Brenner (OH)	.579 (19)	-.257 (15)	.651 (43)	.043 (47)
Fischer (OH)	.317 (41)	.250 (32)	.143 (28)	.412 (34)
Krstojevic (MB)	.400 (5)	.571 (7)	---	.500 (2)
Paffen (MB)	-.500 (2)	.429 (14)	.100 (10)	.400 (10)
Williams (MB)	.118 (17)	.333 (21)	.194 (31)	.429 (21)

HTML Tables

Junior Alaina Bergsma has been getting the most sets and has recorded respectable, if not spectacular, hitting percentages. Frosh Liz Brenner seems to be getting nearly as many sets as Bergsma lately; Brenner seems to be more of a hot and cold hitter. Junior Katherine Fischer gets fewer sets, but is capable of some big nights. Ariana Williams (Soph.) and Savannah Paffen (Fr.) are the main figures in the middle; they've had some strong matches, but aren't totally consistent. Junior Milica Krstojevic seems to record high hitting percentages whenever she plays, but doesn't get that many attempts per match. Orchestrating the Ducks' young offensive attack is sophomore setter Lauren Plum.

The Ducks have a busy Thanksgiving week, closing out the regular season with two matches against Oregon State, Tuesday in Corvallis and Friday in Eugene.

Other statistical notes from this past weekend...

Stanford soph MB Carly Wopat led her team in its five-game loss to Oregon with an error-free hitting night. With her 18 kills in 26 attempts, she hit .692.

Cal lost not only to Oregon this past weekend, but also to Oregon State. One apparent reason is that the Beavers outblocked the Golden Bears 15-8.

UCLA lost for the second time this season to Arizona, this time via a three-game sweep in Los Angeles. Both teams sided out well, but the Wildcats' percentages for the three games (65, 70, 75) exceeded the Bruins' (60, 66, 60).

Michigan State, which fell to then-No. 1 Illinois in five games in Champaign on October 15, won the return match in East Lansing last Friday, 3-1. The Spartans held the normally powerful Illini to a .165 hitting percentage.

2011-11-16T21:36:00.001-08:00

In sweeping Baylor tonight, Texas committed only one hitting error total in the final two games (box score). In Game 2, the Longhorns had 15 kills and 0 errors on 24 attempts, for a .625 hitting percentage. In Game 3, UT had 14 kills and 1 error in 28 swings, yielding a percentage of .464.

2011-11-13T13:34:00.001-08:00

The nation's top-ranked teams in last week's AVCA poll took it on the chin this weekend.

After taking the two opening games (sets) Friday night on the Oregon Ducks' home court, No. 1 UCLA dropped the final three and rather decisively at that, 25-15, 25-18, and 15-9 (box score).

Whichever team compiles a higher side-out rate (winning points on the opponents' serve) wins the game. Thus, it is not which team had the better side-out rate that is noteworthy, but rather the margin by which the higher team did so. Here's a graph I made of the UCLA and Oregon side-out rates by game.

By Game 2, UCLA's siding-out proficiency had begun to slide, and slide it did for the rest of the match. Siding out in the percentage range of the 40s to the low-50s is not going to win a team many matches.

Also, in a previous posting, I noted a tendency for UCLA to suffer a decline in hitting percentage after the post-Game 2 intermission. That's what happened against the Ducks. After hitting.286 and .226 in the first two games, the Bruins fell all the way to .000 (11 kills with 11 errors, on 43 swings) in Game 3, as Oregon climbed back into the match.

Alaina Bergsma carried the hitting load for the Ducks, taking 62 attempts and achieving 25 kills with only 7 errors, for a .290 evening. Milica Krstojevic (.571), Savannah Paffen (.429), and Ariana Williams (.333) also had strong hitting nights for Oregon, albeit on far fewer attempts.

No. 2 Nebraska's loss at No. 10 Purdue was quick and decisive, 25-19, 25-19, and 25-16. What stood out to me from the box score was Purdue's microscopically low rate of hitting errors: only 6 miscues in 105 attempts (with 49 kills) for a team hitting percentage of .410 for the match. Nebraska recorded only 1 total team block. Three Boilermakers hit at clips of .500 or higher: Catherine Rebarchak (.625), Kierra Jones (.625), and Tiffany Fisher (.500). Cornhusker setter Lauren Cook, who had been suspended for her traffic-related legal problems, played in this match.

No. 11 Washington, which came into the weekend with five losses in its last eight matches, rose to the occasion Friday night with a five-set win over No. 3 Stanford (box score). Stanford outhit (.215-.193) and outblocked (16-8.5) Washington. However, the Huskies had two games, the fifth (.333) and the first (.326), in which their hitting percentages exceeded any game-specific percentage by Stanford. Another area is which U-Dub had the edge was its fewer service errors than Stanford (6 vs. 15). An error-free hitting night by Morgan Boukather (10-0-22, .455) led the Cardinal, whereas a near-error-free night from Bianca Rowland (11-1-22, .455) paced the Huskies.

No. 4 USC was the highest-ranked team to go unscathed this weekend, sweeping both of the Oregon schools. The Trojans have now won 17 of their last 18 matches.

No. 5 Cal swept the two Washington schools. Last year's star outside hitter Tarah Murrey has struggled for the Bears in some of their big matches this season; against the Huskies last night, she registered another lackluster hitting line (17-13-65, .062). Shannon Hawari (12-2-18. .556) and Correy Johnson (11-2-22, .409) were able to provide Cal with some firepower, however. The aforementioned Bianca Rowland capped off an outstanding weekend for the Huskies with a .435 hitting performance against Cal (12-2-23).

No. 7 Illinois, which came into the weekend with three losses in its last five matches, swept No. 9 Penn State in a tight match Friday night, 25-21, 25-23, 28-26 (box score).With the win, the Illini have taken both matches from the Nittany Lions this season, the first time that has ever happened. Erin Johnson (9-0-14, .643) and Liz McMahon (10-1-16, .562) turned in monster hitting nights for Illinois, which finished with a .340 attack percentage as a team (on 42 kills and only 8 hitting errors, on 100 swings). Penn State's Deja McClendon had a big hitting night against Illinois (17-3-40, .350) and then added a .439 performance the next night in a three-game win over Northwestern.

Lastly, I wanted to discuss No. 24 Michigan, a team I follow closely as an alumnus (Ph.D., 1989) of the school. The Wolverines have continued to be ranked nationally, even though they lacked an impressive Big 10 conference win (with a 5-10 league mark) coming into this afternoon's contest at No. 16 Minnesota. Further, Michigan has exhibited an unfortunate penchant for failing to capitalize on game and match points during conference play (here, here, and here).

Somehow, today, the Wolverines managed to keep their focus and sweep the Gophers, 25-21, 25-21, 25-22 (box score). With only one hitting error between them, Claire McElheny (7-0-18, .389), Jennifer Cross (7-1-16, .375), and Molly Toon (9-0-27, .333) powered the Maize and Blue. Whenever the Gophers seemed to be digging themselves out of a hole, either Michigan came up with a timely block (8 total) or Minnesota committed a service error (11 total).

All was not perfect for the Wolverines, however. One problem was serve-receipt, with the Gophers recording 8 aces. Minnesota received strong hitting performances from two of its stalwarts, Tori Dixon (11-1-24, .417) and Ashley Wittman (14-3-28, .393). Michigan's Alex Hunt reportedly suffered an injury in warm-ups and was used very sparingly.

2011-11-09T22:11:00.000-08:00

No. 8 Texas came here to Lubbock and made short work of Texas Tech, 25-16, 25-15, 25-18. Above is a shot I took of the Longhorns walking toward the net to shake hands with the Red Raiders at the conclusion of the match. The contest was the first for Texas without middle blocker Khat Bell, who injured her knee in a weekend match in the midst of an amazing three-match hitting stretch.

How did the Longhorns reallocate their spike attempts without Bell? The most direct comparison would be Texas's statistics in its two matches this season against Texas Tech, with Bell (Oct. 12 in Austin) and without her (tonight). Here are links to the box scores of the first and second matches. Looking at only two matches is not ideal, but it's a start. Additional matches can be examined as the Longhorns' season moves toward a close. Here are graphs of the Horns' hit allocations in their two matches against the Red Raiders (the first column doesn't add to 100%, due to rounding).

The Longhorns seemed to compensate for Bell's absence tonight by increasing their outside sets to Haley Eckerman. The move worked well, as Eckerman hit .595 on 23 kills with only 1 attack error, on 37 spike attempts (UT as a team took 106 swings, hitting .396). Rachael Adams also exceeded .500 tonight (.556), albeit on far fewer attempts (6-1-9). One reason Texas was able to hit so well tonight was that Tech had only 1 total team block for the match.

The Red Raiders hit only .126 tonight. A bright spot for them, however, was junior right-side hitter Miara Cave, who hit .471 for the evening (10-2-17).

2011-11-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

Texas frosh MB Khat Bell is out for the season with a knee injury, it was announced today. I was actually getting ready to do a posting on her recent error-free hitting. Bell's statistics lines (Kills, Errors, Total Attempts, Percentage) for hitting in her last three matches were:

Oct. 22 vs. Missouri: 11-0-12, .917
Oct. 28 vs. Iowa State: 13-0-16, .812
Nov. 5 at Kansas: 6-0-8, .750

I'm sure all VolleyMetrics readers will join me in wishing Ms. Bell a speedy and healthy recovery. I had been looking forward to seeing her (and her Longhorn teammates) play Wednesday night here at Texas Tech, but we'll just have to wait till next year.

2011-11-06T21:32:00.000-08:00

For drama in a regular-season match, it would be hard to top today's Penn State-Wisconsin battle in Madison. In the end, it was the unranked Badgers pulling a five-game upset over the No. 6 Nittany Lions, 26-24, 25-19, 32-34, 14-25, 15-12.

The set score that probably jumps out at you is that for Game 3, won by Penn State 34-32 in preventing a Wisconsin sweep. As gleaned from this statistics sheet (which includes the box score and play-by-play) and shown in the following table, the Badgers had five game (and thus match) points in the third set, and the Lions also had five game points.

Held Game Point	Score	Held Game Point
Wisconsin	24-23
	25-24	Penn State
	26-25	Penn State
	27-26	Penn State
Wisconsin	28-27
Wisconsin	29-28
Wisconsin	30-29
Wisconsin	31-30
	32-31	Penn State
	33-32	Penn State*

HTML Tables

*Won game 34-32.

Penn State outhit Wisconsin for the match, .212-.173. One game about which the Nittany Lions are probably kicking themselves is the opener. Despite outhitting Wisconsin .250-.182, Penn State dropped Game 1 to the Badgers, 26-24, thanks in part to five Lion service errors.

For the match, total team blocks were essentially even, 15 for PSU to 14 for Wisconsin.

Side-out rates (i.e., winning points on the opponent's serve) are instructive. In any particular game (set), whichever team records the higher side-out percentage will win. As seen in the graph below, Wisconsin was the steadier team at siding out, registering in the .60s in four of the five games, whereas Penn State jumped around a bit more.

In the closing stages of the match, Wisconsin built a 14-10 lead in Game 5 (which is played only to 15). Fighting till the end, as always, Penn State held off two more match points, cutting the Badgers' lead to 14-12. At that point, Wisconsin finally got the game-winning kill from Bailey Reshel.

2011-10-30T20:05:00.000-07:00

You could call it "Rematch Weekend," as several match-ups of the top teams in the top conferences took place Friday and Saturday for the second time this season. The following chart lists the match-ups, who won the first time, who won the second time, and some brief statistical notes on the rematch (CAPS = home team, lower-case = visitor).

Teams	Winner Match 1	Winner Match 2	Statistical Notes on Second Match
Nebraska- Penn State	NEB 3-2	PSU 3-1	PSU outhits (.194-.116) and outblocks (14-8) Neb. Hancock (PSU) records 6 aces (box score).
USC-Stanford	USC 3-0	STAN 3-0	Stanford outhits (.339-.161) and outblocks (13-4) USC. Wopat (Stanford) hits .611 (11-0-18); 2 additional Cardinal players hit .290+ on 20+ attempts (box score).
USC-Cal	USC 3-0	usc 3-0	USC outhits (.319-.147) and outblocks (9-5) Cal. Trojan trio hit .368+ on 19+ attempts. Cal's Hawari hits .435, but Murrey held to .185 (box score).
UCLA-Stanford	UCLA 3-2	ucla 3-0	UCLA outhits Stanford, .226-.140, led by Aquino's .444 (10-2-18). Bruins side-out at 90% in Game 3 (box score).
UCLA-Cal	UCLA 3-1	ucla 3-1	Sharp hitting by UCLA’s Nightingale (.421, 10-2-19), Aquino (.350, 7-0-20), and Love (.345, 14-4-29) . Cal’s Murrey held to .049 (box score).
Illinois-Minnesota	illinois 3-2	minnesota 3-0	MN outhits IL .162-.087. MN 7 service aces, IL none; IL more service errors, 11-5 (box score).
Texas- Iowa State	texas 3-2	TEXAS 3-0	UT outhits (.390-.179) and outblocks (9-4) ISU. Bell (UT) hits .812 (13-0-16); 4 additional Horns hit .300+ on 10+ attempts (box score).

HTML Tables

This weekend's results reinforce the idea that there's not one dominant team this year. One any given night, Nebraska, Penn State, Illinois, UCLA, USC, or Stanford might look like a good bet to win the NCAA championship. Many of these same teams, however, also have gone into a "funk" for part of the season.

USC had some early struggles, as epitomized by its 3-0 loss to Central Florida on September 2. Currently, two slumping teams are Illinois and Cal. The Illini's Michelle Bartsch is quoted as follows in this article about her team's three-game loss to visiting Minnesota:

"I think it reflects our whole week of practice.... It was kind of a weird vibe all week and we aren't playing together by any means. We're talking about it and trying to fix it but it's not there."

Minnesota hardly looked poised to go into Urbana-Champaign and sweep the Illini, after being swept itself the night before at Northwestern.

Cal coach Rich Feller said this about the intermission, after his team dropped the first two games to USC (article link):

"I threw down the gauntlet... I admitted to being unsure of who I should start in the third set because it didn't seem like anyone wanted to play hard enough to win..."

Cal played more competitively in the third game, but still lost, 25-22.

Team Hitting Percentage by Game (Set)

2011-10-26T16:17:00.000-07:00

Even a casual reader of box scores would probably realize that the same team on the same night can record vastly different hitting percentages in different games (sets). I was curious if there were systematic differences, so I decided to conduct an analysis. Why might there be such differences?

As a match progresses, coaches may devise adjustments to take away a source of offensive success the opponent had been enjoying. Or coaches may come up with ways to overcome the opponent's defensive approach to increase their own team's spiking success. Some coaches may be able to implement adjustments between Games 1 and 2, but if not then, perhaps between Games 2 and 3, when there is a full-fledged intermission.

I looked at the Pac 12 conference, as it appeared to reach its halfway point of league play faster than other major conferences. The Pac 12 plays a full home-and-away round-robin, meaning that each member team plays 22 conference matches. I started compiling the statistics about a week ago, when every Pac 12 team had completed 11 or 10 conference matches (the latter is the result of the Arizona-ASU, Oregon-OSU, and Washington-WSU rivalries playing back-to-back matches at the end of the season, instead of once during the first half and once during the second half of the conference schedule).

Pac 12 matches before my cut-off date predominantly were three-game sweeps (43 out of 63 total matches; 68.3.%); 16 four-game (25.4%) and 4 five-game (6.3%) matches occurred. Note that, in any given match, both teams produce hitting statistics, so there were 126 three-game data sequences from the 63 matches. I used data from all matches, so if a contest went four or five games, I took hitting statistics from only the first three games.

Averaging over all teams in all matches, hitting percentages did not differ statistically between the first (.210), second (.228), and third (.198) games. (For those with some statistical training, I used repeated-measures Analysis of Variance.) To probe further, I plotted the results separately by team, as shown in the following graphs (the three panels were created for ease of viewing; you may click on the graphic to enlarge it).

As can be seen, there is no consistent pattern. Some teams -- particularly UCLA, Cal, and Arizona -- started fast and then declined in their hitting percentages. Others -- such as Stanford, Washington, and Arizona State -- started off relatively low and then increased their hitting prowess. Other teams appeared to peak in Game 2.

Because of the small sample sizes, it is hard to know if these are random fluctuations or substantive trends. If a given team experiences the same type of trend in the second half of the Pac 12 season as it did in the first half, then there really may be something going on. With UCLA, for example, the intermission after Game 2 conceivably could take the Bruins out of their offensive flow (more so than other teams, who also, of course, have the intermission) or perhaps allow opposing coaches to make defensive adjustments to the Bruins' attack.

On the other hand, the Stanford and Washington coaches look like they may be taking advantage of the intermission to find ways to take their respective teams' offensive attacks to higher levels. (ASU's improvement seemed to occur between Games 1 and 2.)

The larger the number of data points, the more reliable the statistical analysis. However, if a coach wanted to show his or her team how it was hitting by game in order to motivate improvements, the coach probably wouldn't want to wait too long to start doing so. Thus, in practice, most of the data compilations would end up being based on relatively few matches. The 11 or 10 matches on which the above averages for each team were based may therefore be a reasonable number.

2011-10-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

We'll likely have a new No. 1 team in the national women's college rankings this week, as No. 4 Nebraska (17-1, 10-0) handled the previously top-ranked Illinois (20-1, 9-1) relatively easily, 24-26, 25-18, 25-19, 25-11, to mark the halfway point in Big 10 conference play.

The Illini came out on fire in Game 1, hitting .429 and siding out 72% of the time, but only won the opener 26-24, as the Cornhuskers weren't far behind in these two categories (.412, 68%). Illinois never hit better than .179 nor sided-out at better than 58% in any of the next three games, whereas Nebraska continued to side-out well in the final three games (78%, 63%, and 83%, respectively) and hit particularly well in Games 3 and 4 (.400 and .696). See box score here.

Individually, the Huskers had four players who exceeded hitting percentages of .300 on 22 or more spike attempts: Morgan Broekhuis, .444 (17 kills and only 1 error on 36 swings); Hannah Werth, .407; Brooke Delano, .318; and Gina Mancuso, .306. In addition, Hayley Thramer hit .300, on 10 attempts.

For Illinois, senior outside hitters Colleen Ward (17-5-39, .308) and Michelle Bartsch (22-5-58, .293) recorded solid percentages, but Nebraska stymied Illinois's middle-hitting attack.

Nebraska outblocked (11-5) and outdug (70-50) Illinois.

If there's one reservation about Nebraska at this point, it is that most of its best wins this season -- over Illinois, Penn State, Purdue, and Iowa State (non-conference) -- have been at home. The Huskers will play a return match at Penn State next Saturday, October 29, and at Purdue on November 12. However, last night's was the only Nebraska-Illinois match of the season, unless the teams meet again in the NCAA tournament.

2011-10-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

Tonight, No. 1 Illinois (20-0, 9-0) visits No. 4 Nebraska (16-1, 9-0) in a key Big 10 match. As I've written previously, I feel the Cornhuskers are worthy of being ranked as high as No. 2 in the nation, already. With Big 10 teams playing a 20-match conference schedule (where a completely balanced home-and-away schedule would require 22 matches), tonight's match will be the only one this season between the Illini and Cornhuskers, unless they meet in the NCAA tournament.

Based on Nebraska's and Illinois's pregame notes (plus the Illini's box score from its most recent win, over Northwestern), I've plotted the hitting percentages Nebraska and Illinois have achieved offensively, and allowed defensively, against their conference opponents so far this season.

Nebraska clearly seems to be the better hitting team. Having played eight common opponents in conference thus far (DNP = Did Not Play), the Huskers have outhit the Illini against six of them. The only exceptions are the teams' matches against Michigan and Ohio State, and the Illini edges are slight in both cases.

Defensively, the teams appear a bit more equal. In their respective matches gainst Michigan State (both five-game affairs), the Illini held the Spartans to a .200 hitting percentage, whereas the Huskers allowed them to hit .296. However, vs. most opponents, Nebraska has been slightly better than Illinois in keeping the other teams' hitting percentages down.

Some readers may consider my focus on hitting percentage to be overly narrow. However, hitting percentage appears to take other team skills into account indirectly. Good blocking and digging will contribute to keeping opponents' hitting percentages down. Blocks can lower hitting percentage by causing errors directly (i.e., a ball stuffed back down to the hitting team's floor for a defensive point) or indirectly (i.e., hitting a ball wide or long in an attempt to avoid the block). Blocking and digging also lower hitting percentage by keeping spiked balls in play. Tough serving can further depress opponents' hitting percentage by taking them out of their offensive system and possibly making them attempt less aggressive spikes than originally intended.

I don't usually make predictions. However, given that Nebraska appears to have somewhat of a statistical edge and is playing at home, I'd have to favor the Huskers.

Under the Radar, Part II: Tyler Henderson (Tulsa)

2011-10-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

As described in Part I of the "Under the Radar" series, these postings are an outgrowth of a VolleyTalk.net discussion of players from outside the power conferences who might nevertheless be worthy of national honors (e.g., All-America). Tonight, I present my analyses of Tyler Henderson, a 5-10 junior outside hitter for Tulsa.

Henderson has certainly put up some big numbers so far this season, recording hitting percentages of .457 vs Albany; .655 vs Texas-Arlington; .452 vs. North Dakota State; .593 vs Arkansas-Pine Bluff; .433 vs Cal-Davis; .435 vs. Middle Tennessee State; .500 vs. Rice; and .421 vs. UAB. She's also had some underwhelming matches, such as when she hit .167 vs UTEP and .154 vs. Houston.

My focus, however, is on four Tulsa matches -- vs. Illinois, Kentucky, Florida State, and Central Florida. These four opponents have achieved varying amounts of national prominence, plus each has played some top opponents this year, allowing us to compare Henderson's hitting percentages against these teams to those of other leading outside (or opposite side) hitters. This "common opponents" method thus holds constant quality of the opposition when comparing Henderson to her peers.

The September 10 match against current No. 1 and undefeated Illinois -- which Tulsa nearly won -- almost certainly would be Henderson's most impressive. She hit .377 in this match, on 61 swings. Two big-program players, Penn State's Nia Grant and Minnesota's Brianna Haugen, each hit for a higher percentage vs. the Illini, but based on far fewer attempts (see graphic to the right).

Henderson's .377 also comes off looking good when considering Illinois's ability to hold top hitters Ariel Turner (Purdue), Alex Hunt (Michigan), and Deja McClendon (Penn State) under .200.

The .441 hitting percentage Henderson achieved vs. Central Florida also stands out, especially considering UCF held Michigan State's Jenilee Rathje to .162 and USC's Alex Jupiter to .000.

As shown below, however, Henderson did not do well against a couple of teams that have shown a propensity to give up big hitting nights. Against Kentucky, a team that was torched by several outside and right-side (opposite) hitters from Florida State and Florida, Henderson hit only .188. Also, against Florida State, which had given up big hitting performances against Michigan and Florida, Henderson hit only .213.

On the whole, Henderson has had a nice season to date. However, there are a few matches in which I would have expected her to hit for higher percentages.

2011-10-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

No. 1 Illinois (19-0, 8-0 in the Big 10) and No. 5 Nebraska (15-1, 8-0) each pulled off five-set wins last night to set the stage for a head-to-head showdown next Saturday night when the Illini visit the Cornhuskers.

In holding off Michigan State, the Illini were propelled by Colleen Ward's spectacular .538 hitting percentage (22 kills with only 1 hitting error, on 39 attempts). The usually steady Erin Johnson had an off-night hittng for the Orange and Blue (-.118; 2-4-17), but did contribute 9 block assists. Kyndra Abron (.367; 16-5-30) paced the Spartans (see box score).

Nebraska dropped the opening two games at Minnesota, before rallying for a 28-30, 19-25, 25-10, 25-12, 15-11 win. For the Cornhuskers, it was the balanced offensive attack we're accustomed to seeing from them, with four players registering solid, if unspectacular, hitting percentages against the Gophers: Brooke Delano, .294; Gina Mancuso, .283; Hannah Werth, .270; and Morgan Broekhuis, .256. Nebraska outhit (.243-.111), outblocked (17-8), and outdug (85-73) Minnesota (box score). Tori Dixon (.286; 12-4-28) led the Gophers in hitting; earlier this season, Dixon was hitting in the vicinity of .400 against some excellent competition, but .286 against Nebraska is quite respectable.

Other than an early-season road match in which Nebraska routed Colorado State 25-12 and 25-11 in the first two games only to see the Rams storm back to take the final three, the Huskers have passed every test placed in front of them. These have included matches against Iowa State (now a non-conference opponent), Penn State, Purdue, and Minnesota. I think Nebraska arguably deserves to be ranked as high as No. 2. A win over Illinois next Saturday would probably vault Nebraska to (or near) the No. 1 slot. An Illini win would obviously bolster its No. 1 status.

In the Pac 12, No. 2 Washington traveled to the northern California schools, but lost to both No. 4 Cal and No. 7 Stanford. Cal middle blocker Shannon Hawari had the offensive formula against Washington, hitting .409 (12-3-22), whereas the Golden Bears’ star outside hitter Tarah Murrey was held in check by the Huskies (.132; 21-12-68). U-Dub was led against Cal by the near error-free hitting of MB Bianca Rowland (.400; 11-1-25) and frosh OH Summer Ross (.333; 14-1-39). No Husky player hit above .182 vs. Stanford. The Cardinal was led against Washington by Carly Wopat (.500; 10-1-18) and frosh OH Morgan Boukather (.400; 7-1-15).

One last note: Texas Tech OH Amanda Dowdy, who virtually always takes a large share of the team's spike attempts, took a whopping 42.6% of the Red Raiders' swings yesterday at Missouri (58/136). She produced quality as well as quantity, hitting .293, which is her best in conference play this year (this news release cites the last time she exceeded .293 as being during pre-conference play). The Red Raiders (14-7, 0-6) are still looking for their first conference win, however. They hung tight with the Tigers, before falling 25-22, 23-25, 25-22, 25-21.

Under the Radar, Part I: Lauren Wicinski

2011-10-13T20:05:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, October 7, user "bucky415" launched a discussion topic on VolleyTalk regarding women's collegiate players who might be considered "under the radar" nationally. Specifically, readers were urged to nominate players "from programs outside of the top conferences that people here see being candidates for national honors this year." Bucky made his own suggestions, to which interested readers added names. Bucky's primary suggestion was:

Lauren Wicinski from Northern Illinois. She is a 6'1" sophomore outside hitter who plays all around and is just putting up ridiculous hitting numbers. The Huskies swept Western Michigan at home tonight, and she had 25 kills and hit .667, following up a four set win over Toledo where she had 39 kills and hit .484. For the season, she is averaging 5.77 kills per set and hitting .341 against some pretty solid competition.

Your VolleyMetrics analyst feels statistics can contribute to the discussion, so tonight we begin an ongoing series on "under the radar" players, starting with an in-depth look at Wicinski's offensive performances in key matches. Quality of the opposition is an important factor. If, for example, Toledo tends to get lit up by a lot of different hitters (which it does), then Wicinski's big numbers must be taken with a grain of salt. Following this logic, I selected several of Northern Illinois's more nationally noteworthy matches, recorded Wicinski's hitting percentage against a given opponent, and then compared it to other outside hitters' (or opposites') hitting percentages against the same opponents.

Let's start with Toledo as an opponent. As shown in the graphic to the right (and also noted above), Wicinski hit .484 against the Rockets. Two Michigan State players, Gina Lang and Jenilee Rathje, also hit above .450 against Toledo this season, and three Ohio State outsides hit in the .300s vs. the Rockets. Nothing in these comparisons should take away from Wicinski's performance against Toledo, but we now know that it's not unusual for the Rockets to give up big hitting nights. I wanted to do the same thing for Western Michigan as an opponent, but I didn't feel the Broncos had played enough quality teams.

Cincinnati, in addition to facing Northern Illinois and Wicinski, has played against what I would consider five nationally prominent teams, so let's next consider the Bearcats as an opponent (see graphic on left). Wicinski hit .550 in her match against Cincinnati, a figure exceeded (very slightly) only by Illinois's Liz McMahon when she faced the Bearcats. Several other hitters registered hitting percentages from the upper-.300s to low-.400s against Cincinnati. Thus, whereas the Bearcats may not be the greatest defensive team, I would argue that Wicinski still acquits herself well in this comparison.

Texas A&M is another common opponent against which Wicinski looks good relative to other leading spikers. Though the Aggies seem to have kept some pretty good hitters in check (or at least under .300) this season, Wicinski's .368 vs. A&M is second only to Texas's Bailey Webster (of the players studied), who torched A&M for a .421 evening on October 5.

As seen in these graphics, Wicinski rarely commits hitting errors (e.g., spiking the ball out of bounds or getting stuff blocked for an immediate point by the opponents).

Not all comparisons are so favorable to Wicinski. As seen at left, she hit only .209 vs Iowa State, a team against which other hitters have recorded much higher percentages this season. Granted these "other hitters" are among the nation's very best: the aforementioned Webster, Nebraska's Gina Mancuso and Morgan Broekhuis, and Florida's Tangerine Wiggs and Kelly Murphy. If the worst that can be said about Wicinski is that she's perhaps a cut below these players, that ain't bad. These analyses, of course, don't take into account other factors, such as setter quality and the presence of sharp-hitting teammates who can prevent other teams from focusing on one prominent spiker.

The remaining comparisons are based on sparser data. Northern Iowa is another team against which Wicinski struggled, hitting only .100. This was one of her most error-prone matches, but she also had 18 of her 40 spike attempts kept in play (40 minus her 13 kills and 9 errors). Northern Iowa seems adept at frustrating hitters in general, though. Of the outside hitters/opposites listed, only Iowa State's Kelsey Petersen enjoyed some success against the Panthers, albeit in a Cyclones' loss. Finally, we conclude our analysis with limited comparisons of Wicinski to other hitters against Creighton and Marquette.

Wicinski hit respectably in both matches. Her .302 against Creighton was exceeded by Broekhuis's .387 when Nebraska played the Blue Jays. Wicinski's .265 vs. Marquette was topped by a .333 registered by Minnesota's Ashley Wittman.

What should we conclude from this exercise? I think Wicinski deserves to be included among the nation's top outside (and opposite-side) hitters, but not quite at the very pinnacle. Being a sophomore, however, she has two more years to get there!

2011-10-09T01:17:00.000-07:00

This weekend's marquee women's college match, played Saturday night, went to No. 1 Illinois over No. 8 (and four-time defending NCAA champion) Penn State, 21-25, 25-21, 23-25, 25-21, 15-12. That the win occurred on the road for Illinois only enhances its impact.

One oddity to notice in the box score is that, of the Fighting Illini's 15 points in the decisive fifth game, only 4 were gained via the kill (the losing Nittany Lions, in contrast, had 10 kills in that game). Similarly, in winning Game 4, Illinois had fewer kills (9) than did Penn State (13).

I suspect that few teams have ever won a 15-point game with only 4 kills. My curiosity was piqued, so I examined the CBS Gametracker play-by-play sheet to see precisely how Illinois got its points in Game 5. I plotted the information in the pie-chart to the right, with the numbers denoting how each Illini point from 1 to 15 was accounted for.

Interestingly, Liz McMahon's kill to put the Illini up 8-7 was the last time an Illinois hitter put away a spike all night. Illinois's blockers contributed points 3, 4, 5, and 9. UI coach Kevin Hambly was quoted in the above-linked match article saying, "I thought... Anna Dorn took over the match blocking late..." Indeed, Dorn collaborated on all four of Illinois's blocks in Game 5.

Most surprising of all, however, is that the Illini's final 6 points came from sloppy Penn State play of one sort or another. Attack errors (hitting the block out of bounds, as the error of getting the ball blocked for an opposing-team point is accounted for separately here) gave Illinois its 10th, 12th, 13th, and 14th points; an Illinois service ace brought it point No. 11; and a Nittany Lion ballhandling error (BHE) gave the Illini their final point.

Dorn added a .556 hitting night (5 kills with 0 errors, on 9 attempts) to her 13 block assists for the match, while teammate Erin Johnson turned in yet another fine offensive night, hitting .417 (11-1-24). As a team, though, Illinois hit only .184.

That exceeded Penn State's .134. Nia Grant paced the Lions at .500 (10-2-16).

2011-10-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

Baylor accomplished what seems to be a fairly rare feat in sweeping Texas Tech 25-19, 25-23, 25-18 tonight in Waco. The Bears had two players who each recorded hitting percentages over .400 on at least 20 spike attempts, namely middle blockers Briana Tolbert, .583 (15 K, 1 E, 24 TA), and Torri Campbell, .476 (11-1-21).

I don't have a comprehensive database of all matches. However, in looking over the box scores from the matches I have written about this season -- which tend to include some of the nation's top-hitting teams -- I found few instances of two players on the same team each hitting .400 in a match on 20 or more swings.

The nation's current No. 1-ranked team, Illinois, has achieved (or nearly achieved) these criteria in a few matches. In the Middle Tennessee State tournament, against Tulsa, Erin Johnson hit .591 on 22 attempts and Anna Dorn went .522 on 23 (Liz McMahon nearly made it a trio, coming in at .421 on 19). Despite hitting .396 as a team in this match to Tulsa's .320, the Illini struggled to win in five games. In the same tournament, against Cal Poly, the Illini nearly pulled off the 2/.400/20 feat, with Johnson hitting .636 on 22 attempts and Dorn registering a .579 on 19 swings.

Minnesota has hit the mark twice this season. Against Oregon in the Penn State tourney, Katherine Harms hit .519 on 27 swings, whereas Ashley Wittman added a .417 night on 48. Then, in what shockingly was a losing effort against Kansas in the Northern Iowa tournament, Tori Dixon hit .500 on 34 attempts, whereas Wittman was .415 on 53 swings.

The Pac 12 offers a couple of near-misses. USC came close at Washington State, with Lauren Williams hitting .571 on 21 tries and Katie Fuller, .579 on 19. Stanford just missed against Duke, with Carly Wopat hitting .424 on 33 attempts and Jessica Walker, .421 on 19.

If you know of other teams who had two players in a single match hit .400 on 20 or more spike attempts, please list them in the Comments area. A web link to the box score to document the occurrence would be nice.

Instances discovered after initial posting:

Texas Tech (vs. UConn) in the TCU tournament: Breeann David .500 (24); Miara Cave .476 (21); and Amanda Dowdy .417 (36). A triple .400!

Courtesy of James at TennesseeVolleyball.net: "Tennessee has done it three times this year -- once with three players meeting the criteria in one match:"

vs Virginia Tech: Leslie Cikra (14-3-23) .478; DeeDee Harrison (12-1-21) .524; Kelsey Robinson (24-6-44) .409

vs Florida: DeeDee Harrison (12-3-22) .409; Carly Sahagian (19-4 -35) .429

vs Arkansas: Leslie Cikra (11-1-22) .455; DeeDee Harrison (15-3-26) .462

HTML Tables

2011-10-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

This past weekend's major matches appeared to be concentrated in the country's mid-section. Your VolleyMetrics analyst is always happy to see statistically oriented graphics during volleyball telecasts. This includes the one below from early in Game 2 of last night's Nebraska-Michigan match, even though it conveys bad news for my graduate-school alma mater. The Cornhuskers won in three, a night after being taken to five games by Michigan State (screen capture from ESPN3.com broadcast of game, with the actual statistical display enlarged below the original picture).

No. 1 Illinois, playing at home last night, survived a tight match with the nation's only other heretofore undefeated team, Purdue, 26-24, 25-20, 23-25, 25-23. Tiffany Fisher lit things up for Purdue, scoring 16 kills with only 2 hitting errors on 24 spike attempts, for a hitting percentage of .583. However, of her teammates with at least 10 attempts, nobody hit higher than .181. Purdue actually outhit Illinois .191-.168. Erin Johnson, who I previously described as Illinois’s steadiest hitter, led her team in hitting percentage at .333 (11- 3- 24). The Illini benefited from fewer service errors (7 vs. 13) and more total team blocks (11-8).

It was not a good weekend for another Big 10 squad, Minnesota. The Golden Gophers got swept in both matches of a road swing through Ohio State (25-23, 25-20, 28-26) and Penn State (25-15, 26-24, 25-15). The Buckeyes failed to build on the Minnesota win, dropping their final weekend match to Wisconsin, however.

In Big 12 play, Texas scored an impressive five-game win at Iowa State. As shown in the graph below, Texas's Bailey Webster and ISU's Jamie Straube essentially cancelled each other out with their plus-.500 hitting, whereas the Longhorns' Rachael Adams and the Cyclones' Tenisha Matlock did the same with their hitting in the mid-.300s. The key difference was in the teams' depth, as Texas's spikers beyond the top two (.194 hitting percentage on 124 attempts) outshined their Cyclone counterparts (.043, 117).

Finally, in other Big 12 action, Oklahoma survived two match points to win 17-15 in the fifth against Texas Tech. For the Red Raider program, which only a year ago snapped a 64-match conference losing streak, to now give a nationally ranked team all it could handle (the Sooners were ranked No. 25) shows the rapid strides being made. Aubree Piper had a breakout night for Texas Tech, hitting .455 on 10 kills with no errors on 22 attempts, whereas Sallie McLaurin (.303, 12-2-33) and Suzy Boulavsky (.277, 17-4-47) paced the Sooners. The Red Raiders, with 5 aces and 7 errors, appeared to serve more aggressively than they had in the past.

2011-09-26T23:37:00.000-07:00

Late Sunday afternoon, Tennessee upset Florida 25-21, 20-25, 25-21, 19-25, 18-16, ending the Gators' 24-match winning streak in SEC play. Florida had won its first two conference matches this season, after going a perfect 20-0 in the SEC a year ago and winning its final two league matches of 2009 (UF volleyball archive).

Not that it's been a terrible season for Florida, but the Gators already have two home losses thus far, the Tennessee match and a September 5 setback to Iowa State (Florida's only other loss was at Stanford in the final of the Big Four Classic).

Senior Kelly Murphy, a setter in Florida's two-setter offense and a powerful left-handed hitter from the right-hand side of the court, has been the Gators' leader in recent years. She was down against Tennessee, hitting only .171 on 10 kills and 4 errors in 35 spike attempts. That prompted me to see how Murphy was doing overall thus far into the 2011 campaign.

As seen in the graph below, Murphy is not hitting as well (statistically) as she did a year ago, but it's all relative. Last year, she hit a stellar .374 and this season has fallen to "only" .342. Her share of the Gator hit attempts is the lowest it's been in any of her four years, by a small amount.

An optimistic note for Gator fans is that Murphy has the potential to raise her already high hitting percentage and (pending the strategizing of coach Mary Wise) her number of hit attempts.

2011-09-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

Texas Tech faced its first major challenge of the season yesterday, at home in its Big 12 conference opener with No. 16 (tie) ranked Iowa State. The Red Raiders came in 13-1 -- a tremendous improvement already, considering last year's team was 4-25 -- but had played a schedule consisting heavily of schools in Texas and Louisiana from non-power conferences.

With my camera and my clipboard, I was amongst the 881 spectators in attendance. One thing I noticed in person that I had not noticed on television is how physical Iowa State is (pictured above on the right; you may click on the photos to enlarge them). It's not entirely height -- Tenisha Matlock (17) and Jamie Straube (14) are each 6-2, but many top teams have players taller than that. Rather, it's that the Cyclones are stout (as in "Strong in body; sturdy" and "Powerful; forceful"), yet also capable of executing some very effective quick sets down the middle.

Texas Tech played well... in spurts, early in Games 1 and 2. But in the end, Iowa State had way too much, sweeping the match, 25-16, 25-18, 25-16. Through two games, the Raiders held their own in blocking (4 total team blocks to the Cyclones' 6). At the end of the day, however, ISU dominated the box score, just as they did the action on the court.

The Red Raiders apparently opted for a low-risk serving strategy, which led to only 1 service error, but also only 2 aces. Further, the Cyclones were rarely taken out of their offense by Tech's serve, siding-out at a quite high 76% clip. Iowa State, in constrast, served very aggressively, exemplified most prominently by Caitlin Mahoney's high-toss jump serves. The Cyclones collectively had 4 aces and 5 service errors, but held the Raiders to a 51% siding-out rate.

The Cyclones greatly outhit the Raiders, .277-.049. ISU was led by Matlock (.444), Hannah Willms (.375), and Straube (.333). Iowa State also dominated digging, 66-45, which would be one of the reasons for Texas Tech's low hitting percentage.

...

Elsewhere around the nation last night, USC scored what might be called a "nailbiter sweep" over Stanford, 25-23, 26-24, 25-23, while across town in Los Angeles, UCLA took down Cal, 3-1.

Over in the Big 10, there was another nailbiter sweep (for the first two games at least), as host Purdue stopped Michigan, 26-24, 26-24, 25-15, in a battle of previously unbeaten teams. Tiffany Fisher’s .571 hitting performance (9 kills and 1 error on 14 attempts), along with Catherine Rebarchak’s .333 (8-3-15) led the Boilermakers.

No. 3 (and possible heir apparent to No. 1) Illinois completed a successful weekend Sunday afternoon, sweeping Wisconsin in Mad-town.

2011-09-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

In last night's key matches...

No. 3 Illinois passed its biggest test of the season, winning 3-2 at Minnesota to remain undefeated. Both teams feature a number of high-percentage hitters, but last night the big guns were held in check, the Illini outhitting the Gophers only .201-.174 (box score).

Erin Johnson was the only Illinois player to record a really high hitting percentage, clocking in at .435 (11 kills with 1 error, on 23 attempts). Brianna Haugen, who had taken only 11 swings for the Gophers thus far all season, hit .500 (7-0-14), while Minnesota's stalwart, Tori Dixon, hit only .182 (13 -7- 33).

Illinois outblocked Minnesota 16-4, although the Gophers had the advantage on digs, 77-70.

On the West Coast, USC continued to look like the team people expected the Trojans to be, sweeping No. 1 Cal, while UCLA held on in five against No. 2 Stanford. For the Bruins, Rachael Kidder registered 30 kills (with 10 errors) on a make-your-arm-fall-off 77 swings, for a .260 hitting percentage.

I'm off to campus to see Iowa State at Texas Tech this afternoon!

2011-09-23T18:09:00.000-07:00

This weekend's top women's college action appears to be in Los Angeles -- where tonight Cal plays USC, and Stanford meets UCLA, before the teams switch opponents Saturday -- and in Minneapolis, where Minnesota hosts No. 3 and undefeated Illinois tonight.

I've written a ton about USC so far this season (most recently here), some about Stanford and UCLA, and a little about Cal. I've also written a lot about Minnesota, so I will concentrate on Illinois in the rest of this entry.

The Fighting Illini are 11-0, but only one match has been against a ranked team, No. 21 Dayton. The Dayton match, as well as ones against Tulsa and Louisville, went five games. Based on this Illinois pre-match release, I created the following table about the Fighting Illini's top hitters in their last six matches. Individual hitting percentages above .300 -- and there are a lot of them -- are highlighted in white font.

Hitting % (# Attempts)	Dayton	Middle Tenn St.	Cal Poly	Tulsa	Cincinnati	Louisville
M. Bartsch OH Sr.	.197 (71)	.303 (33)	.188 (48)	.286 (49)	.417 (24)	.043 (46)
Anna Dorn MB Fr.	.529 (17)	.571 (7)	.579 (19)	.522 (23)	.500 (8)	-.167 (6)
Erin Johnson MB Jr.	.407 (27)	.353 (17)	.636 (22)	.591 (22)	.444 (18)	.348 (23)
Liz McMahon OH Fr.	.500 (4)	.800 (10)	.222 (18)	.421 (19)	.556 (9)	.576 (33)
Colleen Ward OH Sr.	.327 (55)	.385 (26)	.185 (27)	.324 (34)	.188 (16)	.311 (45)

HTML Tables

The gaudiest hitting percentages have been put up by the two frosh, Anna Dorn and Liz McMahon. Illini coach Kevin Hambly apparently increased Dorn and McMahon's hit attempts gradually, with the latter rising to the point that she maintained a .576 percentage on 33 attempts against Louisville.

Of the two outside-hitting seniors who have been expected to lead the team, Colleen Ward, a 2010 transfer from the University of Florida, has shown greater offensive consistency in doing so than has Michelle Bartsch. Most consistent of all, arguably, has been MB Erin Johnson.

Dorn is the only Illini player within the conference's Top 10 in blocks/set (game) with 1.14, whereas two members of the Orange and Blue, Jennifer Beltran (3.85) and Bartsch (3.49), are in the Top 10 of digs/set.

2011-09-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

Last night's first-ever Big 10 conference match for Nebraska, as the Cornhuskers hosted none other than four-time defending national champion Penn State, lived up to its billing, as Nebraska won in five, 25-18, 25-16, 23-25, 19-25, 15-10 (article, box score). The Huskers actually seemed to be on their way to a sweep, leading (as best I recall from listening to the online radio broadcast) 16-11 in Game 3. However, Penn State got hot for the next game and a half, before Nebraska regrouped in Game 5.

One noteworthy statistical element of the match was that Nebraska outblocked Penn State, 11 to 9. The Nittany Lions very rarely get outblocked.

The Huskers also outhit the Lions, .229-.182. Many times on this blog, I've plotted players' hitting percentages by how many spike attempts they've taken, the idea being that a team presumably would want players with high hitting percentages (which makes the bars in the graph higher) to also be taking a lot of attempts (which makes the bars wider). Previously, however, I've only plotted one team per graph (example from last year).

For last night's Penn State-Nebraska match, I thought it would be interesting to view the two teams together, with the bars arranged left-to-right from highest to lowest player hitting percentages (you may click on the graph to enlarge it).

For whatever it's worth, Nebraska (red bars) seemed to have a core of players who took a lot of spike attempts and hit in the high .200s. Penn State's hitting, in contrast, was concentrated among some players who hit really well and others who didn't.

Weekend Round-Up (Sept 16-17, 2011)

2011-09-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

USC, which a week ago was routed on its home floor by UCLA, went into Seattle on Friday night and shocked the No. 4 and heretofore unbeaten Washington Huskies, 25-20, 28-26, 25-20. The Trojans did it not so much with scorching offense, hitting .240 as a team, but to a large extent with defense. Natalie Hagglund contributed 30 digs against Washington, one of the reasons the Huskies hit only .128 as a team. The Trojans completed a perfect weekend by also sweeping Washington State on Saturday, hitting .447 as a team along the way.

If one were to pick out USC's most significant matches of the season thus far, they would probably be the opening-tournament contests against Minnesota and Penn State (at Penn State), the loss to Central Florida in the Florida Gulf Coast tourney, and the three Pac 12 conference matches. I thought it would be interesting to see how the Trojans' leading hitters have fared in those six matches in terms of hitting percentages, so I created the following table:

	Minn	PSU	UCF	UCLA	@UW	@WSU
Burnham	-.083	.452	.188	.105	DNP	0 Att.
Fuller	.160	.185	.000	.300	.231	.579
Jupiter	.327	.200	.000	.056	.097	.308
Schraer	.333	.571	.000	.083	.250	.364
Shaw	.250	.000	.000	.333	.481	.583
Williams	.552	.269	.500	.118	.167	.571

HTML Tables

Legend to table: Wins, Losses. Middle blockers in italics.

Several observations are noteworthy, in my view:

*Nobody has shown a lot of consistency in these matches, with plenty of sub-.200 and sub-.100 percentages in evidence.

*Lauren Williams has had her ups-and-downs, exceeding .500 in three matches, but hitting much lower in the other contests. Middle blockers (of which Williams is one) seem to have higher hitting percentages than their outside-hitting counterparts, which is why I've italicized the names of middles. As commenters on VolleyTalk have pointed out, sets to the middles almost always occur when the offense is running in system, middles rarely face double-blocks, etc.

*Katie Fuller and Sara Shaw have really picked things up with the start of conference play.

*Hannah Schraer has, for the most part been solid, but has had some off-matches, whereas Alex Jupiter has slumped even more.

*Kirby Burnham's big evening vs. Penn State appears to have been a one-off, and she does not appear to play much of a role in the USC offense at this time. Whether she has had injury problems or not, I don't know.

Washington, for its part, bounced back from the 'SC loss with a vengeance yesterday against UCLA, sweeping the Bruins. As this game article notes, the Huskies:

...hit .340 for the match with senior Bianca Rowland getting back into dominant form with 12 kills and a .647 attack percentage. Junior Kylin Muñoz had one of the highest quality efforts of her career with a team-leading 13 kills and just one error for a .429 attack percentage, and setter Evan Sanders was on target all night with 41 assists.

Next weekend, USC and UCLA host Cal and Stanford.

...

Turning to the Big 10, new member Nebraska warmed up for its huge conference-opener this coming Wednesday when Penn State comes to town by slamming its former Big 12 rival Iowa State, 25-23 , 25-15, 25-18. The Huskers sided-out (i.e., winning points on ISU's serve) at a 74% rate for the match, 86% in Game 2.

Four Nebraska players exceeded .300 hitting in the box score: Gina Mancuso (14 attempts, 1 error, 35 attempts, for a .371 percentage); Brooke Delano (6-1-14, .357); Morgan Broekhuis (11-4-23, .304); and Hayley Thramer (6-1-15, .333).

Looking at Iowa State's top hitters from when the Cyclones upset Florida back on Labor Day, only Kelsey Petersen (3-0-13, .231) had even a decent night against Nebraska. Jamie Straube (-.067) and Tenisha Matlock (.000) were definitely kept in check by the Huskers. Carly Jenson, who hit only .053 vs. Florida, did much better against Nebraska with a .275 evening (17-6-40).

The blocking comparison tells it all: Nebraska had 13 total team blocks and Iowa State only had 1. One place the Cyclones held their own was in digging (perhaps because so many Husker hits were getting through the block). ISU had 56 digs with four players in double figures, whereas Nebraska had 55.

This coming Wednesday night (7:00 Central), Iowa State hosts Missouri in a national ESPN-U telecast. If you get the Big 10 Network, you can also watch Penn State-Nebraska on Wednesday

Elsewhere in the Big 10, Michigan swept Texas A&M in a mostly tight match, 25-23, 25-23, 25-17, to win its own tournament and complete a perfect 12-0 non-conference record. With Lexi Dannemiller taking over at setter from last year's senior Lexi Zimmerman, and directing plenty of balls to tournament MVP Lexi Erwin, the Wolverines were able to prevail.

2011-09-13T21:08:00.000-07:00

No. 1 Cal has defeated No. 2 Stanford in Berkeley tonight, in a battle of the unbeatens.

UPDATE: Reader "Hobbes" left a note in the Comments section (below) focusing on Stanford's high rate of hitting errors, but with an interesting twist. Yes, hitting errors were key in Game 3 (after the teams had split the first two), as the Cardinal went from being ahead 10-5 to losing 25-16.

Perhaps even more telling than comparing the teams' overall hitting errors -- Stanford 31, Cal 17, for the match as a whole -- is Hobbes's distinction between unforced and other errors. Eleven of Stanford's errors were blocks by Cal (balls that rocketed back down to the Cardinal side of the floor for immediate Golden Bear points), so 20 of Stanford's errors (31-11) were what Hobbes would call unforced -- spiking the ball out of bounds, into the net, etc. Cal suffered 12 blocks to Stanford, leaving the Bears with just 5 unforced errors (17-12). Here is a copy of the box score.

Focusing on the simple difference (subtraction), Stanford committed 14 more overall errors than Cal, and 15 more unforced errors, essentially no difference. As a ratio, however, 31/17 = 1.82, whereas 20/5 = 4.00. This is all post hoc, of course, and so the ratio looks more diagnostic because we know Cal won.

As some readers may recall, at the end of the 2009 women's college season, I analyzed the merits of Karch Kiraly's assertion that getting blocked was somehow a "better" kind of error to commit than hitting the ball out of bounds. The approach I took is certainly not the only possible one, but I did not find much support for the Kiraly hypothesis.

Weekend Round-Up (Sept 9-10, 2011)

2011-09-11T18:41:00.000-07:00

Stanford won the Big Four Classic on its home floor, beating Penn State in the semifinals and Florida in the final. It was a tightly contested tournament, as three of the four matches went the maximum five games (sets). The Stanford-Penn State tilt went four. As I wrote in my Pac 12 preview:

...the loss of three senior stars from last year leaves doubt whether STANFORD can contend this year at its typical nationally elite level. Gone are Alix Klineman and Cassidy Lichtman, who together accounted for nearly 50% of the team's hitting attempts, plus leading libero Gabi Ailes.

Perhaps I was a bit premature! Stanford soph outside hitter Rachel Williams, who last year hit a relatively low .229 on 14% of the team's total attempts (541 out of 3,811), won tournament MVP honors. After hitting .302 vs. Penn State, Williams hit only .183 against Florida. Perhaps the judges were impressed in the latter match, however, by the Herculean 71 spike attempts she took over five games, on which she registered 23 kills and 10 errors. In 2011, thus far, Williams has upped her hitting percentage to .286.

Other top performances in the Big Four include the following (line scores are of the form kills-errors-attempts, hitting percentage):

Tangerine Wiggs, the junior right-side whose name is a walking billboard for Florida’s citrus fruit industry, hit spectacularly for the Gators in the tournament, particularly against Stanford (18-1-31, .548), but also vs. Texas (13- 4-26, .346).

Kristy Jaeckel also came up big against the Cardinal (20-5-45, .333); according to the Gators’ online radio broadcast, apparently Florida coach Mary Wise moved Jaeckel midway through the match from her usual left-side OH position to a right-side opposite location. Florida junior middle blocker Betsy Smith had a fine night against the Longhorns (5-1-10, .400, plus 8 block assists).

Texas’s Madelyn Hutson (8-1-13, .538), Bailey Webster (10-2-16, .500) and Rachael Adams (9-2-19, .368) recorded stellar hitting performances in the Longhorns' consolation-match victory over Penn State, after no UT player hit over .227 in the semifinals vs. Florida. Adams added a solo block and 7 assisted ones against Penn State, after scoring 10 block assists vs. Florida.

Penn State’s 6-foot-6 sophomore MB Katie Slay compiled impressive lines against both Stanford (11-2-22, .409) and Texas (7-2-15, .333, plus 8 block assists).

Stanford gets only a short rest, opening up Pac 12 play Tuesday night in Berkeley against No. 1 (but largely untested) Cal. The Golden Bears are 10-0 (30-0 in games), but have played no nationally ranked opponents (or even any teams that have received votes in the AVCA poll).

...

Talking about the Pac 12, UCLA went into USC's Galen Center and absolutely destroyed the Trojans, 25-19, 25-17, 25-17. I would call the Bruins' win a mild upset, but the one-sidedness of the match a major stunner.

Leading the Bruins was junior OH Rachael Kidder, who hit .483 (14-0-29), not bad for career .200 hitter (.186 in 2010, .206 in 2009). She was joined in the .400 club by frosh MB Zoe Nightingale (7-2-12, .417). Such sizzling hitting stats seemingly make Minnesota transfer Tabi Love’s .294 (5-0-17) look shabby, which of course it isn’t! As a team, UCLA was .355 on the night.

Other than Katie Fuller’s .300 (8-2-20), no Trojan exceed a hitting percentage of .118 (also excluding players with very small numbers of attempts). Many observers feel the loss of OH Falyn Fonoimoana, who was declared ineligible right before the season began, is a key reason for USC's current disarray. She hit .239 last season, taking a substantial chunk (23%) of the team's spike attempts. There was an interesting exchange on VolleyTalk, in which one person argued:

I can't believe people are still pinning USC's woes on Falyn.....will someone please check her stats, yes she was productive but 3 kills per game at under .250 percentage is NOT irreplaceable. USC's struggles extend A LOT farther than FF, trust me. Even without her they return 3 All Americans and 2 more starters from last year...do you know how many teams would kill for that kind of experience right now? Even with their current roster they should not be getting swept by Central florida, and not reaching 20 points in even a set at home. USC is falling apart, and its not because of Fayln.

but another contended:

Well, if not for [Fonoimoana's] 21 kills (.311) in L.A. against UW last year, USC doesn't pull out that 5-set win (4.2 kills a set). As a freshman, the statistical averages from the second half of the season are a lot more significant than those from the first half. In the first matchup in Seattle, she was much less effective, with 16 kills (.133) in a 5-set loss to the Huskies (3.2 kills a set). I know those are just snapshots, but I do think they are somewhat indicative of the trajectory of her improvement. In USC's final conference game against UCLA, she had 23 kills (.237) in a 5-set win (4.6 kills a set).

...

I'll close by discussing two teams from the Big 10 and one from the Big 12.

For Minnesota, this past weekend contained good news and bad news. On the positive side, the No. 6 Gophers knocked off No. 15 Northern Iowa to win the UNI tournament.

Further, Minnesota soph Tori Dixon (MB) continued her astoundingly hot hitting through the weekend. After piling up hitting percentages of .410, .364, .500, and .444 in matches during the initial two weekends of the season, she hit .421 vs. St. Louis and .500 vs. Kansas in her team's first two UNI-tourney matches, before falling to "only" .286 against the Panthers in the final.

Against St. Louis, senior Gopher MB Ariana Filho had a near-perfect hitting night; other than one ball that was kept in play, each spike she attempted was a kill, giving her a .900 hitting percentage (9-0-10).

The bad news for Minnesota was an upset loss to Kansas midway through the UNI tournament. Against KU, Gopher soph OH Ashley Wittman had a big hitting night (28-6-53, .415), plus she recorded 13 digs. Ultimately, Wittman would win the tourney MVP award, but she and her teammates didn't have enough against the Jayhawks.

KU was paced by the hitting duo of Tayler Tolefree (8-0-21, .381) and Allison Mayfield (19-2-46, .370) in the win over Minnesota. The Jayhawks went 2-1 in the UNI tournament, losing only in five games to the host Panthers. Last season, KU had the dubious distinction of being the team that lost to Texas Tech as the Red Raiders ended their 64-match conference losing streak. The Jayhawks really seem to have rebounded this season!

Finally, Michigan continued its undefeated ways, defeating two ranked teams -- the host Flyers and Florida State -- and a Pepperdine team that may well be ranked in the future, to win the Dayton tournament. The Wolverines hit .410 as a team in their opener vs. FSU; I suspect that .400-plus performances against nationally ranked opponents are not very common.

2011-09-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

The two main attractions of this weekend's play take place on the West Coast. One event is the Big Four Classic at Stanford, beginning tonight with the host Cardinal taking on Penn State and Florida going against Texas. Second, Pac 12 conference play gets under way tonight (sure seems early) with UCLA visiting USC.

I've already written fairly extensively about Penn State, Florida, Texas, and USC in recent weeks. All of these teams have suffered an unexpected loss (or in Texas's matches vs. Minnesota, surprisingly one-sided losses) thus far this season. Stanford has not, to this point, played as high-profile a schedule as some other schools, but the Cardinal owns an impressive win over nationally ranked Duke.

UCLA started out the season 6-0, including wins over Long Beach State, Ohio State, and host Hawai'i in last weekend's Wahine Volleyball Classic. However, on Wednesday night, the Bruins fell at Pepperdine in five games. UCLA led 2-1 in games, before succumbing to a "Pepp rally."

The following table presents a brief statistical overview of tonight's matches. Though the teams' schedule difficulty thus far is not equal, all have encountered at least some degree of quality opposition. Further details on Stanford, USC, and UCLA can be found in the Pac 12 statistical report.

Match	Hitting Edge	Defensive Edge*	Notes
Penn St.-Stanford	PSU (.315-.263)	Stanford (.101-.189)	Wopat averaging 1.79 blocks/ set; Hancock .94 aces/set
Florida-Texas	Florida (.300-.228)	Florida (.091-.202)	Florida 13 more serve errors than opp.; Adams averaging 1.71 blocks/set
UCLA-USC	USC (.291-.205)	UCLA (.129-.202)	Williams hitting .496, atop Pac 12; Todorovic averaging .81 aces/set

HTML Tables

*Hitting percentages holding opponents to.

Two other tournaments are worth looking at, in my view. One is the Dayton Flyer Classic, which includes No. 20 Michigan, No. 23 Dayton, No. 24 Florida State, and Pepperdine, who is likely to be ranked in the future. The other is the Northern Iowa tournament, featuring the host Panthers (No. 15) and Minnesota (No. 6). Tori Dixon leads a powerful Gopher hitting attack.

2011-09-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

Iowa State and Florida, both undefeated and nationally ranked coming into today's Labor Day matinee in Gainesville, played a suspenseful match, with the Cyclones prevailing, 16-14 in Game 5 (box score). ISU had won the first two games and Florida, Games 3 and 4.

For the match, the Gators outhit (.251-.208) and outblocked (16-8) the Cyclones. As shown in the following graph, however, the two teams' game-specific hitting percentages were all over the place.

Junior middle blocker Jamie Straube, one of the Cyclones' top hitters from a year ago, hit .321 against the Gators. Kelsey Petersen, a senior right-side hitter, led ISU with a hitting line of 15 kills and 2 errors on 23 attempts, for a .565 percentage, with soph MB/RS Tenisha Matlock adding a .294 performance.

Florida exhibited a balanced offensive attack, with five players being set 23 or more times. Of the five most frequently set Gators, two hit in the high-.200s, Cassandra Anderson (27 attempts, .296) and Tangerine Wiggs (36, .278). The other three all hit in the low-.200s, Kristy Jaeckel (40, .225), Kelly Murphy (23, .217), and Stephanie Ferrell (30, .200).

The Gators, with 7 service aces but 17 errors, appeared to serve more aggressively than did the Cyclones, who had 3 aces and 11 errors. In the middle-to-late stages of the decisive Game 5, Florida missed 3 serves.

Florida now moves on to the Big Four tournament beginning this coming Friday, along with Texas, Penn State, and host Stanford. Iowa State continues its current stretch of road matches, with two at North Dakota State this coming weekend and then ones at Northern Iowa (Sept. 13) and at Nebraska (Sept. 17). With the Huskers' departure to the Big 10, of course, the ISU-Nebraska match will be of the nonconference variety.

2011-09-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

Even with just two weekends of play on the books, the present season is shaping up to be a weird one. On top of Penn State's loss to Oregon in Week 1, Week 2 has given us a Central Florida sweep over USC and a Colorado State comeback over Nebraska.

Texas, another highly ranked squad, didn't acquit itself particularly well either, failing to take even a game in two matches at Minnesota. The first match score was 25-20, 25-20, 25-17, whereas the second was 25-19, 25-21, 25-22.

Minnesota has been one of the pleasant surprises of the young season, with a five-game loss to USC in the Penn State tournament its only blemish. Leading the Golden Gopher hitting attack is Tori Dixon, a 6-3 sophomore middle blocker. In each of the Gophers' four matches thus far, Dixon has recorded hitting percentages in the .400 vicinity, where .300 would be considered very good (see graph below).

Meanwhile, teammates Ariana Filho (6-2 senior MB) and Katherine Harms (6-2 junior outside hitter) have also been putting up some gaudy numbers, albeit with less consistency.

In Saturday's second match between Texas and Minnesota, the siding-out rates were exceptionally high. The Longhorns' side-out percentages for the three games (in chronological order) were 60, 62, and 68, which usually would win you a lot of matches. However, the Gophers' were 78, 72, and 77!

In the USC-UCF match, the Trojans' Alex Jupiter, whose inconsistencies have been documented on this blog, hit .000. Her 7 kills were cancelled out by 7 errors, in 28 swings (box score). Sometimes Jupiter can be out of this world, and other times, just out of it!

LATE NIGHT UPDATE: UCLA has defeated Hawai'i 3-1 in Honolulu (box score)... Florida will be hosting Iowa State Monday afternoon (2:00 Eastern) in a Labor Day matinee (UF preview). Unless there are restrictions of which I'm unaware, interested volleyball fans should be able to listen via the Internet to the game broadcast on radio station WRUF 850. There is also tape-delayed television coverage, if you get the Sun Sports network.

2011-08-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

The USC Trojans had the tables turned on them last night, squandering a 2-0 lead and losing to Penn State, just one night after 'SC had come back from 0-2 down to top Minnesota. The Gophers, meanwhile, came back on Saturday to defeat Oregon, the opening night's conqueror of Penn State, sending home all four teams in the AVCA Showcase with 1-1 records.

What stood out to me from the Penn State-USC box score was the depth each team had available to call on. For the Nittany Lions, it was frosh OH Nia Grant, whose hitting line consisted of 11 kills and 0 errors on 17 attempts, for a .647 percentage. Another first-year player, Micha Hancock, has taken over Penn State's setting duties for now, and she added a 7-0-8, .875 line on the attack. The former setter, Kristin Carpenter, has now apparently become a backcourt specialist, leading the team with 20 digs. Deja McClendon (.321) and Katie Slay (.320) had solid hitting nights, but Ariel Scott had an off match (-.143).

For 'SC, with Lauren Williams (.269) and Alex Jupiter (.200) cooling off from the night before, it was left to soph OH/opposite Kirby Burnham (15-1-31, .452) and frosh MB Hannah Schraer (4-0-7, .571, albeit with a small number of attempts) to power the offense.

Penn State dominated the total team blocks, 18.5 to 6.0. As I wrote yesterday, the Nittany Lions needed to do a better job blocking against USC than had Minnesota (7.0) and they did.

Looking at Saturday's Minnesota-Oregon box score, the Gophers' Tori Dixon (.364) and Katherine Harms (.519) continued the excellent hitting they showed Friday night, whereas Ariana Filho (.000) fell off. Soph OH Ashley Wittman (.417) was there to take up the slack for Minnesota. The Gopher defense was sharp, outblocking the Ducks 15.0-7.0, with Minnesota's Jessica Granquist contributing 26 digs.

Oregon junior OH Alaina Bergsma took 40% of her team's spike attempts (63/158), hitting .270. Soph MB Ariana Williams (.400) and frosh OH Liz Brenner (.368) wielded the big hammers for the Ducks.

2011-08-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

Last night's opening matches of the AVCA Showcase didn't exactly go as expected. Pre-season No. 1 Penn State lost to Oregon, 3-1, ending the Nittany Lions' 94-match home winning streak. No. 2 USC almost lost, dropping the first two games to Minnesota before roaring back to take the final three.

Tonight's Oregon-Minnesota match certainly takes on more importance than previously thought, as a second win over a ranked opponent (the Gophers are No. 12) would really propel the initially unranked Ducks' national reputation. The PSU-USC match tonight, though perhaps diminished somewhat in luster, nevertheless gives the Lions a chance to bounce back and make a statement.

Looking at the box score from the Penn State-Oregon match, one wonders at first glance how the Nittany Lions lost, given that they outhit (.308-.277) and outblocked (8.5-5.5) the Ducks and had fewer service errors (8-12) for the match overall. However, if we remove Game 1 -- which PSU took 25-16 -- from the equation, things look different.

Overall, Oregon's hitting numbers for kills, errors, and total attempts were 62-23-141. Removing Game 1, in which the Ducks' numbers were 7-6-23 yields 55-17-118. We then take (K-E)/TA, giving Oregon a hitting percentage of .322 for the final three games. Doing the same for Penn State, one starts out with the overall numbers of 48-11-120, which after removing the 14-3-27 from Game 1, leaves 34-8-93 for the final three games, a hitting percentage of .280.

Also, the Ducks sided-out at 60% or better in each of the final three games, whereas the corresponding percentages for the Nittany Lions ranged from 47-58% (after coming in at a torrid 70% in Game 1).

Regarding the USC-Minnesota match, I can't pinpoint the Trojans' main source of power any better than the above-linked game article from the USC athletics website: "Senior All-America middle blocker Lauren Williams... had 16 kills without recording an error for a .552 (16-0-29) performance..."

The Trojans' Alex Jupiter also had a nice hitting line (22-5-52, .327), but as shown in the chart below, her success varied markedly by game (because the play-by-play sheet accompanying the box score shows only how points ended, her spike attempts that stayed in play could not be gleaned, only kills and errors).

As can be seen, Jupiter's hittest was at its most blazing in Games 2 (won by Minnesota 26-24) and 3 (won by 'SC 25-13). Frosh MB Hannah Schraer also delivered offensively for the Trojans (7-1-18, .333).

The Gophers had a power trio of their own in MB Ariana Filho (8-0-17, .471), MB Tori Dixon (22-6-39, .410), and OH Katherine Harms (11-3-23, .348). Still, Minnesota was outhit by USC, .289-.232. How could the Gophers have won Game 2, the way Jupiter was hitting for 'SC? By siding out at an astronomical 75% rate.

For the match, Minnesota committed 13 service errors -- likely in an attempt to serve aggressively and take USC out of its offense -- compared to only 5 for the Trojans. The Gophers recorded only 7.0 total team blocks against USC in five games. Penn State will have to do a lot better to slow down the Trojan hitters.

2011-08-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

The 2011 women's college volleyball season gets under way today, with a slew of tournaments across the country. The marquee event is the annual AVCA Showcase tournament, being held this year at Penn State. The format of this competition brings together four teams, a pair from each of two conferences. This year's conferences are the Big 10, from which Penn State and Minnesota will be participating, and the Pac 12, represented by USC and Oregon.

All matches are cross-conference. Tonight's matches are Penn State vs Oregon and Minnesota vs. USC. Saturday night, Minnesota faces Oregon, plus the pre-season No. 1 Nittany Lions square off with the No. 2 Trojans.

If you scroll down to my conference previews in earlier entries, you can see capsule summaries of the four teams. One update for USC is that outside hitter Falyn Fonoimoana has been declared ineligible. Also, in Trojan coach Mick Haley's "At the Net" video broadcasts (here and here), he has alluded to middle blocker Alexis Olgard apparently having some lingering injury problems, but incoming frosh MB's Eve Ettinger and Hannah Schraer looking ready to contribute immediately.

For Penn State, the storyline for this upcoming season has been framed in terms of sophomore OH Deja McClendon taking over team leadership.

After tonight's matches are over, I plan to scrutinize the box scores to see what I can glean to preview Saturday night's big Penn State-USC match.

2011-08-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

Oakland University (Michigan) women's volleyball coach Rob Beam has an article in the August/September issue of the AVCA journal Coaching Volleyball, on compiling statistics and using them to help one's team improve its performance.

The article, aimed mainly at high school coaches, provides a gentle introduction to volleyball statistics, with definitions of many key terms. Further, rather than presenting his ideas in technical terms (e.g., correlation coefficient), Beam uses a more intuitive form of exposition.

For each type of volleyball statistic, he presents a chart with the terms "absolute correlation" and "strong correlation" to winning or losing. The chart tells the reader how, for the midwestern high school competitions analyzed, performing above or below certain levels on eight different statistical indicators within a given match was associated with winning or losing. For example, teams recording a hitting percentage above .281 always won (an absolute correlation), those keeping their hitting-error rates below 14.2% usually won (a strong correlation), those having a ratio of service aces to reception errors below .33 always lost, and so forth.

With these benchmarks in hard, coaches can then work with their teams to raise (or lower) their numbers on the various statistical indicators. Beam also suggests a number of drills coaches can use in practice to enhance teams' competencies or minimize their deficiencies.

I e-mailed Coach Beam to share some thoughts and get his feedback. The hitting-percentage correlations to winning (.281 absolute, .172 strong) seemed fairly low to me, especially the .172. He attributed these findings to the closely matched competition in the late rounds of the high school tournaments he analyzed, in which teams' blocking and digging would keep down the hitting percentages.

I noticed one minor error in the article, in Chart A, where it appeared to define hitting percentage (efficiency) as ((KE)/TA). The numerator should, of course, be K minus E.

Women's 2011 College Previews -- SEC, ACC, and 9 Other Conferences!

2011-08-17T22:19:00.000-07:00

Today, I present the final batch of 2011 women's college team previews. Having done comprehensive (i.e., every team) previews of the Big 10, Big 12, and Pac 12 thus far, I didn't have time to do the same for all the remaining conferences, with play beginning in a little over a week! What I did, therefore, was look at last season's NCAA bracket and the newly released 2011 AVCA pre-season poll to select a manageable number of teams to preview.

I ended up with 23 new teams, from 11 conferences. If a school made the round of 32 in the NCAA tourney and/or received a substantial number of votes in the new pre-season poll (even if it didn't actually crack the top 25), then that team is included somewhere (either in today's preview or in one of the earlier ones). When today's 23 teams are added to those reviewed earlier, it brings the total to 56 squads for which we now have capsule summaries.

Below is a chart (actually, two charts, given the large number of teams) that summarize the statistics, followed by some narrative commentary. The teams are organized by conference.

For those of you who've read the previous conference previews, the routine is old hat, but here it is for new visitors. In the charts below (which you can click on, and click again on the magnifying glass/plus icon that follows, to enlarge), you'll see information on teams' leading returning and non-returning players from last year. Statistics are based on the full 2010 season (conference plus non-conference), unless you see a pound sign (#) to indicate conference-only stats. To define leading hitters, I generally look for hitting percentages of .250 or higher and for players who took an appreciable share of their teams' spike attempts (generally 15% or more for middle blockers and 20% or more for outside hitters), although I'll post something that looks interesting to me, even if it doesn't fit within the aforementioned parameters. Specific block/set (game) and dig/set statistics are noted next to the names of team leaders either to illustrate a virtual tie between two players or, again, to convey something interesting.

Of course, returning players are not the only personnel on a team. The AVCA high-school All-America list is available here, so you can see which of the schools are bringing in nationally lauded prep players. Tennessee, Tulsa, and Pepperdine successfully recruited first-team All-Americans, whereas several other schools in today's preview are bringing in second-team and honorable-mention awardees.

OK, let's move on!

FLORIDA began the 2010 season on an auspicious note, going into Omaha (Nebraska's home away from home) and knocking off the Cornhuskers in an early-season tournament. A 3-1 loss to Penn State on the Gators' home court followed shortly thereafter. However, a perfect run through the SEC (coupled with some Penn State losses in the Big 10) gave Florida the No. 1 seed nationally in last year's NCAA tournament. Unfortunately for the Gators, they turned out not to be ready for Prime Time, barely surviving against Florida State in the round of 32 and then getting swept by Purdue in the Sweet 16.

Senior Kelly Murphy, who doubles as a setter and right-side (RS) hitter par excellence -- hitting .374 while taking 20% of Florida's spike attempts a year ago -- is back for her final go-round leading the Gators (see this YouTube highlights reel of the left-handed Murphy in action). Cassandra Anderson gives UF strength at the net, although fellow middle blocker Lauren Bledsoe has finished her college career. (Note that, because so many teams are reviewed today, not all players listed in the charts are discussed in the text.)

Also from the SEC, LSU returns a pair of plus-.300 hitters and its leading blocker and digger, whereas TENNESSEE brings back two plus-.300 hitters and someone who hit .298. The Vols also return two setters to feed the attack, plus their leading digger. As an aside, I discovered an excellent Tennessee fan site during my research for this report.

From the ACC, DUKE (No. 12 seed) got to the NCAA Elite Eight, where it took a game off of Penn State. The Blue Devils, in fact, were the only team outside the Big 10, Big 12, and Pac 12 to make a regional final. Duke returns two plus-.300-hitting middle blockers, starting setter, and leading blocker and digger.

NORTH CAROLINA was a conundrum last year, taking second in the ACC, yet hitting only .210 as a team. The loss of Christine Vaughen, who hit .325 during her senior campaign, deprives the Tar Heels of what little offense they had. Setting, blocking, and digging are areas of experience for UNC this year, though. MIAMI, FLORIDA ST., and VIRGINIA TECH joined Duke and UNC in the NCAA field last year. On paper, the most interesting player to me among the latter three schools is the Hokies' Cara Baarendse, who hit .362 in ACC play while taking 20% of her team's spike attempts, unusually high for a middle blocker.

HAWAI'I returns two dynamic players, OH Kanani Danielson who last year hit .301 taking 31% of the team's spike attempts, and Brittany Hewitt who hit .365 and averaged 1.68 blocks/set (where I consider 1.00 to represent excellent blocking).

The Big West Conference's top two teams a year ago were Cal State Fullerton and Long Beach State. The 49ers' Haleigh Hampton was another player who enjoyed a tremendous hitting/blocking year a season ago (.357, 1.58), her reward being a spot on the U.S. Junior National Team.

Two Ohio teams, DAYTON (from the Atlantic 10) and OHIO UNIVERSITY (from the Mid-America Conference) look to continue making inroads on the national scene. Ohio took Duke to five games in an NCAA second-round match last season. Like the aforementioned Hewitt and Hampton, the Bobcats' Katie Post posted impressive numbers hitting and blocking (.334/1.47). Overall, however, Ohio U. was one of those rare squads that did well a year ago, despite hitting only .232 as a team.

NORTHERN IOWA, WICHITA STATE, and CREIGHTON formed a formidable trio from the Missouri Valley Conference last season. Northern Iowa was seeded No. 5 nationally in the NCAA tourney (perhaps a bit generous) and dropped a five-game opening-round match to Missouri. I've been noting plus-.300 hitters throughout this report; UNI takes things a step further, boasting of two returnees, Michelle Burow and Krista DeGeest, whose 2010 hitting percentages were both north of .350. The Panthers' digging last year was delightful, as well, with Amy Braun (4.02, returning) and Ellie Blankenship (5.49, non-returning) racking up enormous digs/set numbers. Creighton's claim to fame is its NCAA first-round upset of Iowa State last year.

TULSA, from Conference USA, swept 13th-seeded LSU in an NCAA first-round match last year, then took intrastate rival Oklahoma to five games in a second-round loss. It almost sounds like a game of "Can you top this?" to state that Tulsa has two returning players whose hitting percentages exceeded .370, Tyler Henderson (.372, taking fully a third of the team's hitting attempts) and Elizabeth Kale (.402, albeit on only 9% of the Golden Hurricanes' attempts).

CINCINNATI and LOUISVILLE are the leading lights in the Big East Conference. Cincinnati loses what ESPN.com writer Dave Reed last year called "[o]ne of the most potent kill-producing combinations in the country," setter Annie Fesl and OH Stephanie Niemer. Both were seniors a year ago. Niemer took a whopping 36% of the team's spike attempts, but came through with a .331 percentage. The Bearcats do return Jordanne Scott, who hit .333 last year.

Over at Louisville, Gwen Rucker hit .414 (though on only 9% of the team's attempts) and averaged 1.30 blocks/set. Rucker and Cardinals teammate, setter Taylor Brauneis, are both part of the U.S. national team's development program. Beyond Rucker and Amanda Simmons, who hit .329 as a senior last year, Louisville was a very balanced hitting team, as four players each with at least 128 spike attempts in conference play hit for averages of .258, .262, .264, and 266.

Megan Plourde will likely be the go-to gal for COLORADO STATE of the Mountain West Conference. The 6-3 junior MB recorded hitting/blocking numbers of .383/1.23 last year in conference play.

Finally, we have the West Coast Conference, with SAN DIEGO, ST. MARY'S, and PEPPERDINE leading the way a year ago. USD, the conference's only NCAA-tournament team, swept Long Beach State and then lost 3-1 to powerhouse USC. The Toreros look to ride Chloe Ferrari, whose name provides irrestible pun opportunities, to success this season. She hit .403 as a frosh for USD last year. WCC runner-up St. Mary's returns MB Gabby Jolly, who hit .328. Finally, there's Pepperdine, who in the recently released AVCA pre-season rankings, had the highest voting point total of teams not in the top 25. The Waves return three players who hit between .280-.329 last year, plus they return their setter, leading blocker, and leading digger.

Done! Between this report and my three previous ones, we now have a repository of basic data on 56 of the nation's better teams. As the upcoming season unfolds, I'll be interested to see if there are some statistical markers that are associated with improvement or decline in the teams compared to a year ago (e.g., returning or losing starting setters; returning or losing players who took 25% or more of their teams' spike attempts and hit .300 or higher).

Let the games begin!

Women's 2011 College Previews -- The Pac 12

2011-08-11T21:33:00.000-07:00

Penn State is obviously the dominant program in women's volleyball, having won the last four NCAA titles. Arguably, however, the second-, third-, and fourth-best teams a season ago were all from the Pac 10 (now 12), namely Cal (national runner-up), USC (Final Four participant), and Stanford (which ended Penn State's 109-match winning streak in September and ultimately lost a tight regional-final match to USC). In addition, Stanford (1st, .319), Cal (3rd, .308), and USC (8th, .290) all were among the nation's most highly ranked teams last season in hitting percentage.

Of the three schools, USC returns the greatest number of key players -- basically everyone -- whereas Cal and Stanford lose some top players. Another three Pac 12 schools -- UCLA, Washington, and Arizona -- were in last year's NCAA tournament, and will seek to improve their conference standing based on returning players and/or strong recruiting classes.

The following chart highlights the most noteworthy returning and departing players for all Pac 12 schools (including newcomers Colorado and Utah), in the statistical categories of hitting percentage, blocks/set (game), and digs/set from last season. As with my previous Big 10 and Big 12 previews, my general criteria for top hitters include an attack percentage of .250 or higher and taking an appreciable share of their teams' spike attempts (20% for outside/right-side hitters and 15% for middle blockers). Readers can click on the chart (and then on the magnifying-glass/plus icon that appears next) to enlarge it. All statistics in the chart are from the overall season (i.e., conference and non-conference matches), unless a pound sign (#) appears by the school's name to indicate the stats are from conference play only. Additional discussion of each team appears below the chart.

In writing these conference previews, I have discussed teams in order of their 2010 finishes in their respective league standings. I will stick to this practice here, but for the record, I would favor USC to win the Pac 12.

CAL loses only one of its leading players from last year -- but it happens to be the AVCA national player of the year! The player in question is setter Carli Lloyd, who during her senior campaign last season not only ran the high-powered Golden Bear offense, but also hit a respectable .265 on 283 tries (7% of the team's attempts) and contributed 1.08 blocks/set. (In the course of writing these previews, I've come to regard an average of 1.00 or greater blocks/set as a marker for excellence in blocking.)

Senior 6-3 OH Tarah Murrey is back to pummel the Bears' competition. Murrey took a whopping 36% of Cal's spike attempts last season. Such a proportion is rare, though not unheard of; what makes Murrey's 2010 season so extremely unique is her ability to maintain a hitting percentage well above .300 while taking so many attempts. Cal also returns 6-4 MB Correy Johnson, whose hitting percentage exceeded even Murrey's (see chart above). Enhancing their hitting depth, the Bears bring in a pair of first-team AVCA All-Americans, Michelle Neumayr, a 6-1 OH, and Lillian Schonewise, a 6-2 (6-3 according to the Cal website) MB.

Leading blockers Kat Brown and Shannon Hawari, and digging dynamo Robin Rostratter, return to bolster the Bears' defense. As of the spring, the starting setter gig (or what might be called the "Lloyd Void") was slated to fall to junior Elly Barrett, who participated in an online chat here.

At the other end of the San Francisco Bay, the loss of three senior stars from last year leaves doubt whether STANFORD can contend this year at its typical nationally elite level. Gone are Alix Klineman and Cassidy Lichtman, who together accounted for nearly 50% of the team's hitting attempts, plus leading libero Gabi Ailes. Lichtman also was a setter in the Cardinal's 6-2 offense, with returnee Karissa Cook. In the just-out Pac 12 coaches' poll, Stanford is picked for an uncharacteristically low fourth in the conference. Over at VolleyTalk, what might be considered a "hand-wringing" discussion thread about Stanford was launched and, at the moment, has reached 75 pages!

Stanford will never be devoid of talent and, indeed, there are strong returnees for the Cardinal. Junior OH Hayley Spelman, at 6-6 one of the tallest players in the country, hit above .300 last season. Further, Stephanie Browne (6-4) and Carly Wopat (6-2) each averaged over 1.00 blocks/set. In addition, Stanford will be adding two high-school All-American players, first-teamer Kyle (MacKenzie) Gilbert, a 5-7 defensive specialist/libero, and second-teamer Morgan Boutkather. The latter is either 6-2 or 6-1 tall (depending on which source one consults) and appears to be a right-side/opposite hitter (she is listed as an OH on the Stanford webpage, but the roster doesn't appear to differentiate between "outside" hitters on the left and "opposites" on the right).

Last year's third-place conference finisher, USC, is a unanimous pick to win the Pac 12 this year in the aforementioned poll (Cal received a first-place vote, but the article refers to the Trojans' receipt of "all 11 possible first-place votes," implying that coaches could not vote for their own teams). USC returns all of its key players from a year ago, including a trio of AVCA All-Americans: Alex Jupiter (6-3 senior OH, 1st team), Kendall Bateman (5-11 senior setter, 2nd team), and Lauren Williams (6-4 senior MB, 3rd team).

OH Falyn Fonoimoana, another tall Trojan at 6-4, was given nearly a quarter of the team's hitting attempts last season as a freshman, recording an attack percentage of .239. If she can improve on that percentage, 'SC will be that much more dangerous. Even the liberos are tall on this team, with 5-9 Natalie Hagglund, leading the team in digs/set last year as a freshman.

As unstoppable as USC looks this year, it also appeared poised to do real damage in last year's Final Four until Cal put the brakes on the Trojan attack. With a single-elimination NCAA tournament, anything seemingly can happen at the end.

Across town in Los Angeles, UCLA will be trying to return to the national elite under second-year coach Mike Sealy. Last year's workhorse hitter, Dicey McGraw, has finished her college career, whereas the Bruins' top statistical returning attacker, junior OH Bojana Todorovic, hit only .230.

Last year's team leader in blocks/set, Katie Camp, discusses her recovery from ACL surgery and prospects for the upcoming season here. Digs/set leader Lainey Gera also returns.

The Bruins have a large and highly touted recruiting class coming in this season, although only 6-3 MB Zoe Nightingale (first team) was on the AVCA high-school All-America squad. Setter Megan Moenoa has also received a lot of buzz. Last year's starting setter Lauren Van Orden returns for her senior season. Whether Moenoa will join Van Orden in a 6-2 offense remains to be seen.

Things appear to be looking up for WASHINGTON, as last year's fifth-place Huskies are tabbed for third in the coaches' poll. U-Dub loses a pair of senior, second-team All-America outside hitters from a year ago, Kindra Carlson and Becky Perry, as well as last year's senior setter, Jenna Hagglund.

Bianca Rowland, a 6-0 MB who last year recorded gaudy numbers in both hitting and blocking, returns for her senior season. She received AVCA honorable mention All-America honors last year. Other returning defensive assets for the Huskies are Lauren Barfield, a 6-5 senior MB, and sophomore DS/L Jenna Orlandini, who led the team in digs/set a year ago.

First-team high-school All-America Krista Vansant, a 6-2 OH comes on board; as noted above, Washington's greatest losses were at this position.

Last year's sixth-place team, ARIZONA, is predicted by the coaches to drop a notch to seventh this year, perhaps not surprisingly given that the Wildcats were a senior-oriented team a year ago. Key losses include Tiffany Owens, who not only carried the Cats' hitting load last season (hitting .262 while taking 30% of the team's attempts), but also led the team in digs/set; and setter Paige Weber. Cursty Jackson, a 6-2 MB who excelled in hitting and blocking last year, returns for her senior year.

Joining Jackson will be an impressive recruiting class that includes four high-school Americans: Chloe Mathis (5-10 or 5-11 setter, height varies by source; 1st team), Madison Kingdon (6-1 OH, 2nd team), Halli Amaro (6-2 or 6-0 MB, honorable mention), and Elizabeth Manthei (6-0 OH who also set in high school, honorable mention).

OREGON's front-court play may be a little weaker this season. Heather Meyers, who hit .285 while taking a quarter of the Ducks' spike attempts during her senior season, moves on. Also, Jocelyn Levig, who led Oregon in blocks/set, is transferring to the University of San Francisco. Leading Duck returnees are OH Alaina Bergsma (6-3 junior), setter Lauren Plum (5-9 soph), and libero Haley Jacob (5-2 junior). Joining Oregon will be first-team high-school All-America Elizabeth Brenner (6-2 or 6-1 tall), who played MB as a prep but is listed on the Ducks' roster as an OH.

ARIZONA STATE's biggest strength appears to be blocking, with MB's Sonja Markanovich (6-1 senior) and Erica Wilson (6-1 junior) returning. Wilson also hit .318, taking 11% of the Sun Devils' attack attempts. Presumably, ASU will go to her more often this season. Setter Cat Highmark had one year of eligibility remaining, but will forgo her senior season due to knee injury.

OREGON STATE returns some promising players, foremost among them 6-4 soph MB Mona Kressl, who averaged 1.16 blocks/set and nearly hit .300 a year ago. Junior setter Megan McBride, who also hit .267, returns, as do 5-11 junior Ashley Eneliko, a productive blocker who has been used at opposite hitter and middle blocker; and sophomore L/DS Becky Defoe, who led the squad in digs/set last year.

WASHINGTON STATE, which went 0-18 in conference play last year, is in a state of transition. The athletic director's first move after last season was to give the volleyball team a greeny -- no, not amphetamines, the slang for which is "greenies," but rather a new coach, Jen Greeny. Also as part of the Cougars' turnover, a few non-senior players from last year are no longer on the WSU roster. Digs/set leader Oceana Bush has transferred to Rutgers, whereas for two other departees, I couldn’t find any articles on what happened with them. Hoping to provide some stability is 6-3 senior OH Meagan Ganzer, who took an amazing 38% of the Cougars' spike attempts last season (albeit hitting only .149) and led the team in blocks/set.

And now for the newcomers. COLORADO made the NCAA tournament in 10 of the first 11 years of Big 12 play (1996-2006), but were a combined 13-67 in that conference the last four years. Moving to the Pac 12 hardly seems like a good recovery plan, but the Buffaloes may be able to compete with some of the weaker teams in the new conference. As seen in the chart above, Colorado returns all of its leading players. However, no one was close last year to (unofficial) markers of distinction such as .300 hitting and 1.00 blocks/set. On a more positive note, soph DS/L Megan Beckwith averaged 4.10 digs/set last year in the Big 12, which placed her 10th in that conference.

UTAH finished third last year in the Mountain West Conference, but did not make the NCAA tourney. Two returning Ute middle blockers, Danielle Killpack (6-3 senior) and Erin Redd (6-3 sophomore), each hit over .300 last year, with Kilpack also leading the team in blocks/set.

Women's 2011 College Previews -- The Big 12 (-2)

2011-08-02T17:57:00.000-07:00

In the history of the Big 12 Conference (and its forerunners, the Big 8 and Southwest Conferences), there have been two nationally elite programs, Nebraska (winner of three national titles, most recently in 2006) and Texas (participant in the last three Final Fours and national champion in 1988). Nebraska is now gone to the Big 10, so for now at least, Texas seems to be in a dominant position in the Big 12.

Let's start with my chart of capsule summaries of the teams, with additional discussion of each team below (you'll need to click on the chart, and possibly on the plus-sign magnifying glass icon that will appear next, to enlarge it). As noted previously in my Big 10 preview, when it comes to teams' leading hitters, I'm generally looking for hitting percentages of .250 or better, and players who take appreciable shares of their teams' spike attempts (20% for outside hitters and 15% for middle blockers).

As hinted at by the high 2010 hitting percentages shown for TEXAS spikers, the Longhorns were one of the best attacking teams in the nation last year. Texas finished fourth, to be exact, with a .306 hitting percentage, behind only Stanford (.319), and last year's NCAA finalists, Penn State (.314) and Cal (.308). In addition, Longhorn MB Rachael Adams, who returns for her senior season, led the nation in individual hitting percentage. Sha'Dare McNeal, who is listed on the team roster as a utility player, perhaps due to her digging, as well as hitting, prowess, is also back.

The Horns lose high-percentage hitter Jennifer Doris and workhorse Juliann Faucette. However, they have a bunch of new (and redshirt-returnee) players who may be able to help take up the slack. Freshman Madelyn Hutson (6-5) received the dual recognition of being named a first-team AVCA high school All-America last year and being selected to the U.S. women's junior national team. Hutson was listed as an outside hitter on the AVCA site, but is referred to as a "utility" player on the Texas site (perhaps she will also be tried at middle blocker). Two other freshmen are first-team All-American Katherine (Khat) Bell, a high school MB who will also be tried at OH (either 6-3 or 6-1 tall, as player heights sometimes differ between official school rosters and other sources, such as the AVCA list) and OH Haley Eckerman (6-3), a member of the junior national team. Other possibilities on the front line are sophomore Bailey Webster (6-3 OH), who is attempting a comeback from missing the 2010 season due to knee surgery, and redshirt-freshman Ashley Bannister, returning from an ankle injury.

Texas is also deep at setter, returning two who saw considerable action last year, sophomore Hannah Allison, yet another Longhorn member of the junior national team, and senior Michelle Kocher. Though a two-setter (6-2) offense might seem a natural for UT, coach Jerritt Elliott's squad seemed to employ mostly a one-setter (5-1) line-up last year.

As a game-show announcer describing a prize-package would say, "...and that's not all!" UT's leaders from last year in blocks/set (game), the aforementioned Adams, and digs/set, senior Sydney Yogi, return as well (Yogi has had injury problems, however).

If this isn't enough Longhorn coverage for you, VolleyTalk has a thread discussing the upcoming Texas season, which has stretched to 10 pages!

Tied for third last year behind Nebraska and Texas was IOWA STATE. Few programs, in any sport, have experienced the kind of overnight turnaround as Iowa State did in 2005 with the arrival of coach Christy Johnson-Lynch. As seen in the graph below, the Cyclones had several 1-19 conference records (along with a 0-20 campaign) prior to Johnson-Lynch's arrival. In her first year, ISU shot up to nine wins, and the team has had a winning Big 12 record each season ever since. In the postseason, the Cyclones have gone as far as the Elite Eight, although last year the team suffered a first-round exit.

Johnson-Lynch and one of her former players discuss what they see as the reasons for the program's turnaround, in this November 2009 video. The statistical information on which I based the chart is available here.

This year's Cyclone squad will be led by junior Jamie Straube, an honorable-mention All-America who put up excellent numbers hitting and blocking last season. However, first-team All-America Victoria Henson, ISU's go-to hitter with 30% of the team's spike attempts, has finished her collegiate career. Star libero Ashley Mass, a third-team All-America, has also finished up. Setter Alison Landwehr, who also hit .370 on 246 attempts (6% of the team's total), returns. Also, Iowa State has added an honorable-mention high school All-America for this season, 6-3 MB Tory Knuth.

Sharing third place last year with ISU was OKLAHOMA, which also made the NCAA Sweet 16 before running into the buzzsaw called Penn State. The Sooners return third-team All-America setter Brianne Barker (a senior), plus their 2010 team leaders in hitting (from both the outside and middle), blocking, and digging. Soph MB Sallie McLaurin hit over .300 and led the team in blocks/set. Suzy Boulavsky, a 6-1 senior listed as both an outside hitter (hitting from the left-hand side) and right-side hitter, took a quarter of OU's spike attempts last season and acquitted herself well, hitting .273. Leading digger Maria Fernanda (junior) rounds out the returnees. The Sooners also bring in 6-2 OH Tara Dunn, a second-team high-school All-America.

MISSOURI, the final Big 12 team to make the NCAA field last year (also making the Sweet 16), will be led by Brittney Brimmage, a 6-3 senior who is listed at both MB and OH. Brimmage hit .331 last season and led the team in blocks/set, and is part of U.S. women's volleyball development program. First-team high-school All-America Jade Hayes, a six-footer who played OH as a prep, is also highly touted defensively and apparently will also be tried at libero, potentially replacing last year's senior Caitlyn Vann. Highly decorated sophomore setter Molly Kreklow, a junior national team player, is back to run the offense.

To the extent the BAYLOR Bear program has left its mark (or in this case, paw print) on women's college volleyball in recent years, it is largely through stunning UCLA in Pauley Pauley in the 2009 NCAA second round, before losing in the round of 16. Baylor failed to build on that success in 2010, and the loss of some key talent may make it difficult for the Bears to reach the postseason in 2011. Elizabeth Graham, who hit .307 and led the team in blocks/set last year has moved on, as has digging dynamo Caitlyn Trice. MB Torri Campbell, a 6-2 junior, hit just about as well as Graham last year. Campbell recorded an average of .86 blocks/set, not too far from the 1.00 per set that top blockers are often able to reach (Graham was way up there at 1.29, third among Big 12 players for the overall -- conference and non-conference -- season). The Bears' two setters, Kate Harris and Brittany Ridenour, are both back.

KANSAS last made the NCAA tourney in 2005. Given how tough the conference has become (even with Nebraska's departure), I don't know if KU can make it back this year, but it has a good young nucleus. The Jayhawks return leading hitter and blocker Caroline Jarmoc (sophomore), leading digger Brianne Riley (sophomore), and setter Nicole Tate (senior). Joining the squad is second-team high-school All-America, Chelsea Albers, a 6-0 OH.

The first nine years of the Big 12 (1996-2004), TEXAS A&M enjoyed steady success, winning between 12-16 conference matches a year (out of 20) and making the NCAA tournament in every season. The past six years, however, the conference win totals have been 9, 5, 10, 11, 11, and 7, with only two NCAA tourney appearances during that time (2005, 2009). If the longtime Aggie coaching duo of Laurie and John Corbelli is to get things turned back around this season, it will probably be through defense. In fact, one could say that team cohesion will be a product of 3M: Miller, Minnerly, and Mellinger. Junior 6-2 middle-blockers Lindsey Miller and Stephanie Minnerly each exceeded 1.00 blocks/set last season. Leading digger Tori Mellinger is also a junior. Finally, sophomore setter Allie Sawatsky appears to use her 6-2 height to good purpose, contributing .48 blocks/set last year.

KANSAS STATE is in a bit of a funk like Texas A&M. After reaching seven NCAA tournaments in the eight years from 2001-2008, K-State has compiled identical 6-14 records each of the last two seasons. In their effort to get things back on track, the Wildcats do have one major force, namely 6-1 junior Alex Muff, who finished second in the Big 12 last year in overall-season blocks/set with 1.31, behind only Nebraska's Brooke Delano (1.42). Big 12 opponents have learned that if you go up against Alex Muff, you're likely to suffer a stuff! Muff's fellow middle-blocker Kaitlynn Pelger (sophomore) hit slightly higher than Muff, but both were only around .250. Junior setter Caitlyn Donahue is back to run the office. (Before leaving the discussion of K-State, I wanted to mention this amazing fan page for the volleyball team.)

Finally, we get to TEXAS TECH, the school at which I've been on the faculty for 14 years. Over the last few years, the Red Raider program has hit rock bottom, losing 64 straight Big 12 matches until finally winning one last October. As well, the midseason departure of then-coach Trish Knight last season contributed to the image of a sinking ship. Into this setting marches new coach Don Flora,* most recently an assistant at New Mexico State (Beth Falls, who went from Texas Tech assistant coach to interim coach, remains with the Red Raiders as an assistant under Flora).

The 2011 Red Raiders' fortunes would seem to be heavily in the hands of 6-3 senior Amanda Dowdy, who toured Europe this summer with one of the U.S. women's developmental squads. Dowdy took an astounding 36% of Texas Tech's spike attempts last season, but hit only .170. That hitting percentage potentially could be somewhat misleading if either (a) opponents focused their block on her because Tech didn't have other big hitters to divert attention; or (b) the huge number of attempts caused fatigue. Dowdy has been switched between OH and MB during her time in Lubbock, but is listed only at OH this year.

One coup for Texas Tech was the signing of honorable-mention high-school All-America Breeann David. Though she apparently did some setting in high school, the 5-11 (or 6-0, depending on which source you believe) David is listed exclusively as an OH by Tech. With her setting ability, however, she may be able to salvage some out-of-system plays.

Karlyn Meyers, who did most of the setting last season, returns for her senior year. However, the team's leaders last year in blocks/set (Barbara Conceicao, 1.03) and digs/set (Jackie Vincent) are gone, as seen in this photo gallery from last year's Senior Day.

As of this writing, the Red Raider roster has 23 players listed, which should spark fierce competition for spots on the team!

---
*I've gotten to know Coach Flora, which I wanted to disclose so readers can take this information into account regarding the tone of my writing about Texas Tech (whether it seems overly favorable or critical).

Women's 2011 College Previews -- The Big 10 (+2)

2011-07-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

This year, I'm introducing a new feature. Beginning with today's preview of the upcoming women's season in the Big 10 (which actually consists of 12 teams, including newcomer Nebraska), I will preview a different major NCAA Division I conference each week (roughly), leading into the season.

The Big 10 seems like a good conference to begin with, as the league not only produced last year's national champion, Penn State, but six additional schools that made the round of 16 or better (Purdue, Illinois, Ohio State, Indiana, Minnesota, and Nebraska). Plus, I went to graduate school at Michigan (which will be evident below from my lengthy preview of the Wolverines!) and have taught a couple times as a visiting professor at Wisconsin.

As seen in the following chart, I start by looking at each school's returning and non-returning statistical leaders from last year, in the categories of hitting, blocking, and digging. To define success as an attacker, I look not only at a player's hitting percentage (which I generally restrict to .250 or higher), but also at whether she took a sizable proportion of her team's spike attempts (which I define, approximately, as 20% or more of a team’s attempts for outside and right-side hitters, and 15% or more for middle blockers). Whether a team returns its starting setter (in a one-setter offense) or setters (in a two-setter scheme) is also noted. Below the chart, I further discuss each team, including its incoming players.

Unless you have amazingly good eyesight, you'll need to click on the chart (and possibly on the plus-sign magnifying glass icon that will appear next) to enlarge it. Information for each team is based on 2010 full-season statistics, unless noted otherwise (# indicates statistics are from conference play only, and @ represents statistics from a pre-NCAA-final press release). All players listed as AVCA high school All-Americans are first-team honorees, unless noted otherwise.

The natural place to start discussion is with PENN STATE, winner of the last four NCAA national championships and defending Big 10 champion. The Nittany Lions lose three key seniors from last year, middle-blocker Arielle Wilson, right-side hitter Blair Brown, and defensive specialist/libero Alyssa D'Errico. However, last year's frosh sensation Deja McClendon (outside hitter), team blocks/set (game) leader Katie Slay, and setter Kristin Carpenter return. Joining Penn State's roster will be AVCA high school All-America Aiyana Whitney (6-5 OH), plus OH Darcy Dorton is attempting to come back from a torn ACL that sidelined her last season (you can follow her "tweets" as she progresses).

Minnesota and Illinois tied for second in the conference last year. The 2011 season promises to be one of great transition for MINNESOTA, as longtime coach Mike Hebert retired after last season and new coach Hugh McCutcheon will not join the team until after completing his stint with the 2012 U.S. women's Olympic team (McCutcheon also coached the U.S. men to an Olympic gold medal in 2008). Minnesota's interim coach will Laura Bush (not that one!). On the court, Minnesota loses hitting and blocking star Lauren Gibbemeyer, seen in her Senior Night ceremony last season. Notable returnees are MB Tori Dixon and Jessica Granquist, the top digging Gopher. Coming to the Twin Cities will be second-team high school All-America Morgan Bohl (6-0 OH).

Last year, ILLINOIS had to cope with the loss of All-America Laura DeBruler much earlier than expected, as the senior OH tore her ACL midway through the season, thus ending her collegiate career. Undaunted, the Illini fought on, making the NCAA Sweet 16 where they lost a five-game match to Texas on the Longhorns' home court. Colleen Ward, who began her Illinois career last year after transferring from Florida, returns in an outside-hitting role, with libero Jennifer Bonilla, a U.S. junior national team selection, roaming the backcourt. Two AVCA high school All-Americans will join the Illini, 6-2 OH Jocelynn Birks and 6-0 right-side Ali Stark.

MICHIGAN, which appeared on its way to a promising 2010 season after beating Minnesota and Illinois early in conference play, faded late in the season and was eliminated in the NCAA first round in a difficult match-up against Washington in Seattle. The Wolverines return all their key players -- except star setter Lexi Zimmerman, who also hit .253 on 458 spike attempts (11% of the team's attempts). Lefty Alex Hunt, a hitting threat from the front and backcourt, spearheads the Maize and Blue attack, along with Claire McElheny. Jennifer Cross, a 6-4 MB, lends hitting and blocking strength, whereas Sloane Donhoff leads in digging.

One of the leading candidates to succeed Zimmerman at setter is another Lexi, high school All-America Lexi Dannemiller, with junior Catherine Yager (who obviously would not have played much behind Zimmerman) also in the running, according to coach Mark Rosen. The Wolverines also feature sophomore OH Lexi Erwin. Apparently Michigan is the place to go if your name is Lexi! Another high school All-America coming to Ann Arbor is 6-2 MB Lauren Teknipp.

PURDUE is coming off what its athletics website terms a "breakout" season, in which the Boilermakers defeated Penn State in a conference match and swept then-No. 1 Florida in the NCAA tourney to advance to the Elite Eight. Two big senior losses from last year are Jaclyn Hart, a third-team All-America at setter, and MB Kristen Arthurs. MB Tiffany Fisher and defensive specialist Carly Cramer do return. Honorable mention All-America Valerie Nichol, listed as both a setter and hitter, joins the Boilermakers.

MB Kelli Barhorst leads OHIO STATE. She hit nearly .300 and (barely) led the Buckeyes in blocks/set last year. Though senior losses are evident at outside hitter, setter, and (second) middle blocker, Ohio State returns DS/L Sarah Mignin to patrol the backcourt. High school All-Americans, setter Taylor Sherwin and OH Alyssa Winner, may be able to help fill the voids at their respective positions.

INDIANA and NORTHWESTERN have a lot in common. Not only did the two schools tie for seventh in the Big 10 last year with 9-11 records, but also both teams lose their top hitting and blocking talent from a year ago (three-time All-Conference player Ashley Benson for IU, and two-time honoree Sabel Moffett for Northwestern). One advantage for the Hoosiers is that they return both setters from a two-setter offense. The Wildcats will be bringing in second-team high school All-America DS/L Caroline Niedospial and honorable mention designee Hannah Crippen, a 6-0 athlete listed as both a setter and hitter.

MICHIGAN STATE, on the other hand, returns most of its team leaders, including All-Conference pick and top MSU hitter Jenilee Rathje. Plus, the Spartans add high school All-America DS/L Kori Moster. MSU was the highest-finishing Big 10 squad not to make the NCAA tournament last year, but the large cast of returnees would seem to give MSU a good chance this year.

WISCONSIN, a school that just a few years ago was making the NCAA Sweet 16 and Elite Eight and, going back a little further, the NCAA championship final, obviously fell on hard times last year. Hitting and blocking leader Alexis Mitchell returns, as does setter Janelle Gabrielsen. Also, the Badgers bring in a pair of second-team high school All-Americans, Crystal Graff (6-3 OH), a hometown player from right in Madison, and Deme Morales, who at 5-7 played MB in high school but apparently will be tried at DS for Wisconsin. We'll see if this year's team can give the (roughly) 4,000 fans per match who have long been coming to the old Fieldhouse something to cheer about.

Not surprisingly for a last-place team, IOWA did not have a lot of big hitters last year. Mallory Husz, who returns as a senior, led the Hawkeyes with a .238 attack percentage (excluding one other player who had a very small number of spike attempts), as well as in blocks/set. Leading digger Bethany Yeager, is one of two Hawkeyes involved with U.S. national team developmental squads, along with sophomore OH Rachael Bedell. Two high school All-America designees, second-team Alexandra Lovell (5-10 OH) and honorable-mention Erin Leppek (6-0 MB) will try to add to Iowa's offensive firepower.

Finally, we get to NEBRASKA, a new arrival from the Big 12 (-2), whose conference championship the Huskers won a year ago. Nebraska will not be strangers to the top Big 10 teams, having played many of them in recent years. From 2006-2010, the Huskers were 7-2 against Big 10 opposition (losing to Penn State in 2008 and to Michigan in 2009), while defeating Illinois, Michigan, MSU, and PSU once each, and Minnesota thrice (here are links to Nebraska's results from 2010 and earlier).

Dominant 6-4 MB Brooke Delano returns for her senior season, although excellent right-side hitter Lindsey Licht has finished her college career. Likewise, libero Kayla Banwarth, who led the team last year in digs/set, is gone. According to a Big Red Today article:

The Huskers ran a 6-2 offense last year with senior Sydney Anderson and [returnee] Lauren Cook sharing time at setter. They do have 6-foot-5 right-side hitter Morgan Broekuis, who also could play setter, but John Cook says they’ll likely go with a 5-1.

“We’re running a 5-1 right now,” Cook said. “We’re trying to get our six best players on the court is what we’re trying to do. We need Morgan to kill balls right now. We don’t have enough outside hitters to run a 6-2.”

The Huskers' hitting depth is likely to be enhanced, however, by three incoming high school All-Americans, Taylor Simpson (OH 6-4), Lara Dykstra (second-team; OH 5-11), and Shelby Winkelmann (second-team; MB 5-9). Winklemann is also a highly touted basketball prospect.

Coinciding with my preview is a discussion thread on VolleyTalk, in which fans of Big 10 teams propose starting line-ups for their favorite squads. Here you can compare the statistical leaders I've identified above with fans' projections of different teams' starting units.

2011-05-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

Tristan Burton, whose work has been discussed from time to time on this site, has launched his own page, which he's calling Volleyball Analytics. I welcome Tristan to the "club" of volleyball bloggers/webmasters and wish him the best with his site.

Buckeyes Triumph to Conclude Bizarro Season

2011-05-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

The NCAA men's volleyball season concluded last night. For UC Santa Barbara, which vanquished powerhouse USC in Thursday's semifinals, the Gauchos' gaudy hitting percentages of late (roughly .400 at the team level and as high as the .800s at the individual level) were (for the most part) nowhere to be found. Instead, it was an Ohio State squad, whose season featured such inauspicious outings as a loss to UC San Diego and a five-game match with Princeton, left standing.

The championship-match scores were 20-25, 25-20, 25-19, 22-25, and 15-9.

The hitting heroes last night were wearing Buckeye red and white (box score). Grayson Overman hit .800 with 12 kills and no errors on 15 attempts (fear the faux-hawk!). Shawn Sangrey played more of a workhorse role, garnering 30 kills (with 9 errors) on 54 attempts (.389). OSU hit .329 as a team, compared to .198 for Santa Barbara. The Gauchos' stalwart, Jeff Menzel, was barely in positive territory (.025).

Obviously, winning Game 2 was important for Ohio State, not only to prevent an 0-2 deficit, but also (at least in retrospect) for how it seemed to shock UCSB. What I thought was key to Game 2 was OSU's high siding-out percentage (76%), which prevented the Gauchos from getting much traction whenever they went back to serve. In the decisive Game 5, the Buckeyes took siding out to a new level, 100%, while hitting .714 for the game.

The Buckeyes had 26 service errors, although a lot of them were at the beginning of the match. Perhaps the risky serving was an attempt by OSU to signal right from the start that it would be pulling out all the stops to try to win.

UCSB Does It Again, Will Face Ohio State in Final

2011-05-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

I was skeptical of whether UC Santa Barbara could replicate its .395 hitting percentage against USC in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation men's tournament final, in the teams' NCAA Final Four rematch last night. Boy, was I wrong! The Gauchos hit virtually the identical percentage, .394, in beating the Trojans again, 29-27, 24-26, 25-15, 25-18 (box score). 'SC hit .333.

As shown in the following graph, the Gauchos' individual hitting percentages varied between the MPSF final and NCAA semifinal. It was as if the Trojans made a concerted -- and successful -- effort to stop Jeff Menzel, but the increased attention on him left openings for other UCSB hitters.

As Trojan Coach Bill Ferguson said in his post-match press conference [bracketed annotations by me]:

When you look at our match last week with them, Jeff Menzel killed us, Scott Slaughter killed us, and [tonight] we did an unbelievable job I thought, keeping Menzel hitting .071. We kept Slaughter under .300. We kept him at .250, which I thought was pretty unreal. We did a real good job there. [Tonight] Cullen Irons killed us and Dylan Davis was nothing short of amazing... Last time we played them, everyone on their team that was on the floor hit over three hundred. This time it was .071 for Menzel and .250 for Slaughter. That was great, but Irons and Davis definitely made up for it. [Trey]Valbuena had big numbers but I don’t know if that was necessarily our downfall.

By many accounts, the main reason why Santa Barbara was able to hang in there early and pull away late was USC's 20 service errors. Said Ferguson, "If you look at the stat lines throughout the night, we were outhitting them until, I believe, the fourth set. We were out-blocking them. But every time we got some momentum, we went back to the [service] line and missed. That gutted us." (Annotation in original transcript.)

Having admitted my erroneous prediction about the Gauchos not being able to match their hitting percentage from the MPSF final, let me mention another claim where I feel I was right. I was in a very small minority among the voting panel for the Off the Block Blocker of the Year award in giving strong consideration to USC's Steven Shandrick, ultimately recommending him for second place. I feel vindicated by the fact that Shandrick recorded a match-high eight blocks in the Final Four match against UCSB.

The Trojans' aptly named Murphy Troy was close behind with seven blocks, part of USC's plan to counteract the top Gaucho hitters (see the press conference question to Ferguson, "Coach can you talk about how you were able to contain Slaughter and Menzel?").

Oh yeah, one other match was played Thursday night, to determine the other finalist in Saturday night's title match. Ohio State beat Penn State on the Nittany Lions' home court. I would make UCSB a heavy favorite to take the title, but given how unpredictable things have been lately, who knows?

UCSB's Stunning Ride to the NCAA Men's Final Four

2011-05-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

Who is the gaucho amigo?
Why is he standing,
In your spangled leather poncho,
And your elevator shoes?

-- "Gaucho," Steely Dan (1980)

So unexpected is the University of California, Santa Barbara's run to the NCAA men's Final Four that many observers (figuratively) will be singing "Who are those Gauchos?" in the spirit of the old Steely Dan song, as the competition gets underway Thursday night in State College, Pennsylvania.

UCSB finished seventh in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF), but put together an improbable run in the conference tournament that included successive wins over second-place BYU, sixth-place Long Beach State (which had eliminated third-place Stanford), and first-place USC for the championship.

Because the powers that be in college volleyball (as well as other sports) apparently deem it more appropriate to award an automatic NCAA tournament bid to the winner of a one-week conference tournament rather than a three-month conference season, UCSB received the MPSF's automatic bid to the Final Four. USC, as the nation's top-ranked team all season, received the single at-large berth, with host Penn State qualifying for the Final Four via the Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association and Ohio State, via its counterpart league for the Midwest.

On Thursday's opening night, No. 1 seed USC gets an immediate rematch with No. 4 UCSB, and No. 2 Penn State faces No. 3 Ohio State. The championship match is Saturday night.

Considering my build-up in the above paragraphs about Santa Barbara, my statistical focus in this posting naturally examines the Gauchos' play in winning the MPSF tournament. As I frequently do, I put the spotlight on hitting percentage. In this instance, I compare UCSB's hitting percentage to its opponent's in nine specific matches: the Gauchos' MPSF tournament wins over BYU, Long Beach State, and USC, and their MPSF conference-season matches (two apiece) against those same schools.

My first chart below (on which you may click to enlarge) plots the numerical value (UCSB hitting percentage - opponent hitting percentage) for each match. A positive value, of course, means that the Gauchos outhit their opponent; the neutral point (.000) is depicted as a heavy white horizontal line to aid viewing. A negative value means that UCSB was outhit by its opponent in a particular match. The W or L displays whether the Gauchos won or lost the match.

As an example, the first time Santa Barbara played USC this season (January 26), the Gauchos hit at a healthy .337 clip, but the Trojans attacked at a torrid .493 rate, leaving UCSB at negative .156 relative to USC. At the teams' second match (April 16), the Gauchos narrowed the gap to negative .066 (.327 vs. .393). When UCSB and USC met for the third time, in the MPSF tourney final, the Gauchos turned the tables on the Trojans, outhitting them by positive .080 (.395 to .315).

The main conclusion I would draw from this first chart is that, particularly when facing Long Beach State and USC, Santa Barbara's hitting success relative to its opponent steadily went up from the Gauchos' first match against a given team, to their second match, to their third (MPSF tourney) match.

Hitting .395 in the MPSF tourney final against USC was no easy task for the Gauchos. As seen in the next chart, four of UCSB's five most frequently called upon hitters recorded attack percentages ranging from .396 to .500, and the fifth hit a perfectly respectable .312. The Gauchos' workhorse, 6-6 outside hitter Jeff Menzel, took 41.1% of his team's spike attempts (53 of 129) in the MPSF final and still maintained a superb .396 average, with 28 kills and only 7 errors.

Even with such great overall hitting in the MPSF final, UCSB still barely beat USC, 16-14 in the fifth game. It seems unlikely the Gauchos can replicate such a performance against 'SC tomorrow night, but that's what they play the matches for.

To get a feel for USC's season to date, a couple of earlier postings of mine should be helpful (here, here, and here). I don't really have too much to say about Penn State and Ohio State at this point, other than that they split two matches with each other during the year (each winning on its home court). Ohio State went 2-4 against MPSF teams (Pepperdine, Cal State Northridge, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego), whereas Penn State went 3-4, including a win over UCSB (the Nittany Lions' other MPSF opponents were UCLA, Hawai'i, Irvine, Northridge, and Long Beach State).

I will chime in during the Final Four with statistical analyses. My fellow volleyball blogger Vinnie Lopes at Off the Block has been providing excellent general coverage in previewing the men's Final Four and I have no doubt he will continue to do so throughout the tournament.

2011-04-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

The winner of the 2011 men's collegiate Blocker of the Year award, bestowed by the blog Off the Block, has been announced. It is Futi Tavana of BYU. I was a member of the voting panel of coaches and writers, with each of us being able to vote for our top three candidates and the winner being determined on a point system. In my previous message (directly below the present one), I explained both the statistical process I followed in arriving at my votes and the particular players for whom I voted.

As shown in the following table, my vote for first place matched dead-on with the larger panel, my vote for third was in the same ballpark (or in this case, gym) as the panel, and my vote for second was nowhere close to the panel!

Player	My Vote	Official Results
Futi Tavana (BYU)	1st	1st
Steven Shandrick (USC)	2nd	Tie 10th
Austin Zahn (USC)	3rd	Tie 4th

Why did Shandrick receive so little support from the other panelists? He amassed a nice total of blocks, with some of his highest individual-match numbers coming against USC's most proficient-hitting opponents. Is there some factor I overlooked that made Shandrick's totals artificially high? I'd be very interested to see people's views of the issue in the comments.

My Ballot for Men's College Blocker of the Year

2011-04-14T23:03:00.000-07:00

The men's college volleyball blog Off the Block has started an award for the top (what else?) blocker of the year. I was invited to be a voter and agreed to do so. Naturally, I decided to apply statistical techniques to help me determine my votes (for first, second, and third place). The simplest thing to do would be to examine the official NCAA men's statistics on blocks per game (set) and just take the leaders. However, several factors make the unfiltered, mechanical use of this statistic unacceptable to me, thus requiring procedural adjustments to make the blocking statistics more meaningful.

REFINING THE ANALYSIS

First and foremost of variables to consider is the varying quality of competition. The Mountain-Pacific Sports Federation is the dominant conference, with teams from the MPSF (or its West Coast forerunners) winning 38 of the 41 NCAA men's volleyball titles that have been contested to date (further 32 of the 41 finals have been all-MPSF/forerunner affairs). The cream of the Midwest (MIVA) and East (EIVA) conferences, such as Ohio State and Penn State respectively, might be comparable to mid-upper MPSF teams, depending on the year, but many MIVA and EIVA teams would not be on a par with the MPSF. Some schools that field men's volleyball teams are so small, I have not heard of them.

Even within the MPSF, however, there is considerable variation in quality. Though teams' fortunes shift year-to-year to some extent, squads such as USC, Stanford, BYU, UCLA, and UC Irvine have generally been a lot tougher than UC San Diego and University of the Pacific. I will get into the details later, but my key point is that quality of competition is something that needs to be taken into account. A strong blocking night against USC or another top MPSF school should receive more credit than one against a bottom-dwelling MIVA or EIVA team.

Second, length of matches should be considered. Using blocks per game prevents players from racking up the best totals just because their teams have played more five-game and fewer three-game matches than have other teams. However, the per-game basis is not perfect either, as there are more opportunities to record blocks (and other statistical accomplishments) in, say, 25-23 than in 25-10 games. Opponent quality is thus a mixed bag, as it's presumably easier to register accomplishments against a weaker (rather than stronger) opponent, but the match may not last that long!

Third, block statistics (either per game or total) only tell (defensive) success stories. Statistics are also compiled on blocking errors (i.e., touching the net or committing other technical violations while attempting to block an opponent's spike). Calculation of hitting percentage involves subtracting hitting errors from successful kills (before dividing by attempts), so why not subtract blocking errors from successful blocks?

A final factor I considered is home-away location, but it ended up having no correlation to blocking success in my analyses.

STEPS TAKEN

To account for quality of competition, I did two things. First, I restricted my list of contenders for the blocking award to MPSF players. When I began work on my analyses, the top five teams nationally were all from the MPSF, so it seemed clear that all (or most) of the top blockers leading their respective teams into NCAA title contention would be included. Second, each candidate player's game-by-game blocking statistics were evaluated in the context of each opposing team's season-long hitting percentage (as of March 27, the most recent statistics available when I began work on this analysis; based only on conference matches). Thus, the fact that a given player recorded X number of blocks against USC (hitting percentage .368) rather than against Cal State Northridge (.225) would be duly noted.

Also for each match played by a Blocker of the Year contender, I recorded the total number of points in the match (e.g., if a match went 25-20, 25-21, 25-19, there would have been 135 points played). One of the key variables I derived for each player in each of his matches was successful block rate, calculated as:

(Blocks - Block Errors) / Total Points in Match

(Consistent with NCAA stat-keeping, I simply added a given player's solo blocks and block assists to obtain his total blocks. Solo blocks were pretty rare, in any case.)

Who were the contending players in my analyses? To keep the scope of the analysis manageable, I ended up selecting players who (a) played for a national top five team, and (b) were in the national top 50 in blocks per game. The players who fulfilled these criteria (listed alphabetically) were:

Antwain Aguillard, Long Beach State
Gus Ellis, Stanford
Ryan Meehan, Long Beach State
Eric Mochalski, Stanford
Steven Shandrick, USC
Otavio Souza, BYU
Futi Tavana, BYU
Austin Zahn, USC

RESULTS

One thing I did was create for each player, with a data point for each of his MPSF conference matches, a plot of successful block rate by opponent offensive quality (hitting percentage). Because of the deadline for when votes are due, I could not include the final weekend of play, so players will tend to have fewer than the 22 possible data points. Let's look at a couple of examples (you can click on the graphics to enlarge them).

In the upper-left for BYU's Futi Tavana, a leading contender, is a data point for his team's second match at University of the Pacific (due to travel considerations, BYU plays each MPSF opponent either twice in Provo or twice on the road, on back-to-back nights, whereas most other teams alternate home-and-away with each opponent; Hawai'i does the same as BYU). Tavana had a net +9 blocks (10 blocks - 1 error), which when divided by the 127 total points played, yields .07 on the vertical axis; on the horizontal axis is Pacific's team hitting percentage of .233. Selected other matches are similarly identified in the graph.

The same kind of graph is shown for USC's Steven Shandrick, another top contender. As labeled on the graph, Shandrick came up big in matches against the Trojans' best-hitting opponents.

In the next figures, I no longer show individual data points, instead just the trend lines for the eight contenders. Nearly all the lines slope downward, consistent with the expectation that blocking performance would decline as one faced better-hitting teams. One apparent exception is Shandrick, whose line slopes upward. As shown above, however, Shandrick had a particularly poor blocking match against weak-hitting Cal State Northridge. Without that match, the upward trend would be diminished or eliminated.

CONCLUSION AND MY VOTES

Tavana and Shandrick were the top blockers against the best-hitting opponents, under my criteria. According to their trendlines, each would block at around a .025 level against a hypothetical .400-hitting team (USC's .368 was the conference's best hitting for a team, as of when I observed the data). At all other levels of opponent hitting percentage, Tavana outblocked Shandrick. On this basis, I award my first-place vote to Tavana, and my second-place vote to Shandrick. The battle for third-place was a close call between a few different players, but ultimately, I thought the results pointed to USC's Austin Zahn for third.

If, as I suggested earlier, one had simply looked at the official NCAA statistics, the case for Tavana as the top blocker also would have been strong, with a lot less work involved! At 1.50 blocks per game, Tavana was second (at this writing) to Shaun Sibley of George Mason University (1.55), but the latter would have faced less challenging opposition, playing in the EIVA.

However, Shandrick (tie 25th) and Zahn (19th) would not have immediately stood out in the national rankings as being worthy of top 3 votes on my ballot. For that reason, I think my more elaborate analysis was warranted.

2011-04-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

Playing at home, the Stanford men made things much more competitive against No. 1 USC last night than in the teams' first meeting back in February, but the Trojans still prevailed, 25-22, 21-25, 25-22, 25-22. As noted in the linked article, "The Cardinal outhit USC (.305 to .290) and had more digs (45 to 39), but the Trojans posted 14 blocks (to Stanford's 6.5) and served 5 aces."

Among the teams' big hitters I discussed in yesterday's preview (below), the offensive star was USC's Tony Ciarelli, with a .500 attack percentage (21 K-4 E-34 TA). Steven Shandrick, a 6-7 middle-blocker amidst an attack oriented toward the outsides, added a .474 performance for the Trojans (10-1-19). Stanford managed to contain two of USC's other weapons, Murphy Troy (.059) and Tri Bourne (.222), but fell victim to the Trojans' depth and balance (box score).

For Stanford, Brad Lawson (.297, 17-6-37) and Spencer McLachlin (.267, 14-6-30) made solid contributions, with Eric Mochalski (.571, 9-1-14) coming up big. Brian Cook did not play.

Another thing I noticed in the box score was the high rate of siding-out (i.e., winning the rally on the opponent's serve) by both teams, which I have thusly plotted (you may click on the graph to enlarge it):

As I noted three years ago in an analysis focused on side-out rates, "Of necessity, the team that achieves a higher side-out rate in a game will win the game." Stanford was steady, for the most part, at a side-out rate around the mid-.60s. 'SC exceeded .70 in two of its game wins, an incredibly high rate. As seen for Game 2, the Cardinal was victorious only when it held the Trojans to a .58 side-out rate, a tall-order for any team.

2011-03-31T20:50:00.000-07:00

One of the marquee matches of the current college men's season will take place Friday night, as No. 1 USC visits No. 3 (and defending national champion) Stanford. Before we get to the statistical analysis, here's some background on each team. USC and Stanford have some common denominators: Each has had its ups and downs in recent seasons, each team relies on some big power-hitters, and tempo appears to be a major factor in each team's success.

This year's Trojans have a lot of the same core players as their 2009 squad, which lost a five-game national championship match to University of California, Irvine. One would have thought that 'SC would contend strongly for the 2010 NCAA title considering how many top players it returned, but for whatever reason, the Trojans floundered badly, finishing the year 16-11 and nowhere near title contention.

USC has righted the ship this year, however, currently standing at 16-1, with its only loss coming February 11 at Pepperdine in five games (the Waves are presently 8-12, making it seem incredible that they could beat 'SC). In an interview with the blog "Off the Block," Trojan Coach Bill Ferguson attributed this year's resurgence to improved defense setting the stage for a more effective offense. As Ferguson stated in one of his answers:

Our personnel has largely stayed the same from last year. … We had a libero by committee last year, and we now pass the ball much better than last year. That is one thing that is allowing us to do more on offense. We are playing a system that goes faster, and I think that helps. I think also we are just more athletic and mature. We got two juniors, four seniors and a sophomore and a freshman in our starting lineup. We got a pretty veteran lineup, but our passing is the biggest factor.

For the Trojans, senior Riley McKibbin in third year as starting setter, with three towering outside/opposite hitters for him to go to: senior Murphy Troy (6-foot-8), junior Tony Ciarelli (6-6), and senior Tri Bourne (6-5). In the aforementioned Bill Ferguson interview, the 'SC coach cited Bourne as an attacker who tends to fly under opponents' radar screens, as they concentrate on Troy and Ciarelli.

This year's Stanford squad features junior outside hitter Brad Lawson (6-7), who had a dominating NCAA title match a year ago as the Cardinal routed Penn State. Lawson and his fellow Stanford spikers -- who match the Trojans for height thanks to outside hitters Brian Cook (6-5, frosh) and Spencer McLachlin (6-7, senior) -- have not had the luxury of working with an experienced, returning setter, however. According to this article from when the Cardinal visited Hawai'i this season:

Stanford also has tweaked its strategy to compensate for the departures of setter Kawika Shoji, the nation's best player in 2010, and opposite attacker Evan Romero. With Erik Shoji's consistently accurate passing and Kawika Shoji's placements, the Cardinal ran the NCAA's quickest offense en route to a national championship.

Now their offense is a little more measured, due in part to the new system. Most rotations have an outside hitter follow the setter. Against Brigham Young, Stanford's rotation placed freshman middle blocker Eric Mochalski after setter Evan Barry.

Stanford currently stands at 16-6, including a loss to California Baptist, an NAIA school (the Cardinal rested some top players for that match, though). When 'SC and Stanford met for the first time this season on February 17, it was a decisive sweep for the homestanding Trojans (25-15, 25-14, 25-21).

For my statistical analysis, I decided to plot the hitting percentages for each team's three most frequently set spikers, both in the February 17 USC-Stanford match (box score) and in each team's other matches (aggregated) this season. For USC's "non-Stanford" matches, I used the Trojans' most recent cumulative statistics (removing those from the Stanford match), and for Stanford's "non-USC" matches, I used the Cardinals' cumulative stats (removing those from the 'SC match). You may click on the graph to enlarge it.

As can be seen, the Trojan rout over Stanford in the teams' earlier 2011 match was powered by Bourne and Ciarelli exceeding their hitting percentages for the rest of the season. In fact, Bourne and Ciarelli combined had only one attack error against the Cardinal (their Kill-Error-Total Attempt profiles were 10-1-18 and 12-0-18, respectively). It presumably would have been frustrating for Stanford to hold Troy well below his typical hitting percentage, yet still get pounded. Meanwhile, Lawson hit well below his usual against the Trojans and Cook definitely was not cooking (0-3-12).

Needless to say, Stanford will have to reverse these trends to beat USC Friday night.

Miscellaneous note: When I covered the UCLA men's team in 1982 for the Daily Bruin, one of the UCLA players who I interviewed and wrote about was Dave Mochalski. Now, Dave and his wife have a son on each of the teams in tomorrow's big match, USC's Steven Mochalski and Stanford's Eric Mochalski.

2011-03-24T14:16:00.000-07:00

Ball State University newspaper reporter-turned-blogger Vinnie Lopes has an excellent site for men's college volleyball, called Off the Block. Vinnie's reporting includes statistical analysis, although stats are not necessarily the major focus. Because men's volleyball has far fewer teams at the college level than the women's game and television coverage of the two varies accordingly, it takes some effort to stay informed about the men's game. Vinnie does a lot of the work for his readers, however, with weekly previews of key men's matches (including links for following them on the Internet), article compilations, and discussion of national rankings.

2011-02-18T14:54:00.000-08:00

The most recent issue of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports includes an article entitled "Study of the Technical and Tactical Variables Determining Set Win or Loss in Top-Level European Men’s Volleyball," by David Rodriguez-Ruiz and colleagues. The abstract is available here; full-text access requires a subscription, but guest privileges to view an article are available. Based on study of the 2009 European Men’s Volleyball Championship, the central finding appears to be that whereas "attacking [tended] to be the highest point-scoring technical action," the block took on greater importance the closer the match.

NOTE: Leo van Hal was kind enough to share his reaction to the aforementioned study, in the Comments section (link below). Leo also had a graph to accompany his comments, which doesn't work in the Comments section. I am thus reproducing his graph here:

Penn State Over Cal in Final -- An Unexpected Rout

2010-12-19T17:13:00.000-08:00

I don't know that there's a lot to say about last night's three-game sweep that gave Penn State its fourth straight NCAA women's volleyball title. Other than in Game 2, in which Cal had a pair of set points, there was very little drama.

The statistical issue that got the most attention on ESPN's broadcast was how the Golden Bears' Tarah Murrey was getting nearly half of her team's hit attempts (she ended with 46% of them, 56/121), thus letting Penn State devote its attention to stopping her. And stop Murrey the Nittany Lions did, holding her to a very uncharacteristically low .143 hitting percentage (box score). In the semifinals against Texas, in contrast, Murrey hit .413.

For Penn State, middle-blocker Arielle Wilson exhibited her usual blend of steadiness and power, hitting .391, and right-side hitter Blair Brown punched in at .316. Outside-hitter Deja McClendon, though hitting only .250 on the night, got off to a fast start; of her 16 total kills, she recorded six each in Games 1 and 2 (play-by-play sheet).

Cal actually outblocked Penn State, 11 to 7, but the Lion block was there when they needed it, on both of the aformentioned Golden Bear set points in Game 2.

It's Penn State and Cal in Saturday Night's Final

2010-12-17T13:58:00.000-08:00

Below, I've circled what I think are some key numbers from last night's two NCAA women's semifinal matches (I did screen captures of the official box scores, then annotated them in PowerPoint). One thing that's clear right off the bat is that the two winning teams, Penn State and Cal, each sided-out extremely well. With those kinds of side-out percentages, teams will very rarely lose games (sets).

In my Penn State-Texas preview, I had concluded that, "Blocking may provide Penn State with a decisive edge in holding down Texas's hitting effectiveness." I don't often make such spot-on predictions, so when I do, I like to toot my own horn a little. As seen in the following boxscore, the Nittany Lions dominated the blocking and slowed down two Longhorn hitters who had been very productive of late, Rachael Adams and Jennifer Doris. Throw in a torrid hitting performance from Penn State's Deja McClendon and a three-game romp is the result. (You may click on the images to enlarge them.)

Similarly, Cal accomplished what I thought it needed to, in order to finally break through and beat USC this season. Adrienne Gehan, who struggled mightily in both Bear-Trojan matches during Pac-10 play, recorded a .393 hitting percentage last night, complementing Bear star Tarah Murrey (.413). Defensively, Cal slowed down nearly the whole SC team, but especially middle blockers Alexis Olgard and Lauren Williams, who had punished the Bears in the the teams' earlier meetings. Alex Jupiter never aligned with Mars (a music lyric reference) nor with Trojan setter Kendall Bateman very much, for that matter.

So, who wins the final? Both teams have been dominant in the postseason, dropping only one game combined (Penn State vs. Duke). Cal has faced tougher competition, including having to play Washington in the Seattle regional. Still, one can never count out Penn State. The old football cliche about teams that "don't rebuild, they reload" seems quite applicable to the Lions. I'll predict a five-game match and leave it at that...

NCAA Women's Final Four Preview II: USC vs. California

2010-12-16T14:11:00.000-08:00

Tonight's second semifinal match of the NCAA women's Final Four will be an all-Pac-10 battle, with the University of Southern California (USC) taking on the University of California, Berkeley. What gives this match a little extra intrigue is that these teams have already met twice this season in conference play, with USC winning both times. The Trojans actually had a harder time holding off the Golden Bears -- 17-15 in the fifth game -- October 9 in Los Angeles (boxscore) than up in Berkeley, where USC prevailed in four games (boxscore).

As usual, I've been focusing a lot on hitting percentage during the tournament, and the following table tells us which players have (and have not) done well in this season's USC-Cal head-to-head match-ups.

As discussed in yesterday's preview of tonight's other semifinal between Penn State and Texas, middle blockers will often have higher hitting percentages than outside hitters, because the latter likely receive a greater number of impromptu, desperation sets when a team is out of system. Having said that, though, USC's two giant middle blockers, Alexis Olgard (6-foot-5) and Lauren Williams (6-4, a third-team All-America), have attacked extraordinarily well against Cal this season, with hitting percentages of .389 and .349, respectively.

On the other hand, the Trojans' outside-hitting corps, led by first team AVCA All-America Alex Jupiter, has been held in check against Cal. As can be seen above, Jupiter, Falyn Fonoimoana, and Katie Fuller have all hit in the range of .222-.235 in the two matches against the Golden Bears. One important task for Trojan setter Kendall Bateman, a second-team All-America, will therefore be to get her outside hitters going.

Cal OH Tarah Murrey, powered by her fellow Cal first-team All-America, setter Carli Lloyd, has overcome any difficulties outside hitters have in recording high hitting percentages, going .364 in the Bears' two matches against the Trojans.

Middle blocker Kat Brown has held her own against SC, hitting .312, while opposite hitter Correy Johnson, an honorable mention for All-America honors, has hit .250. Adrienne Gehan (OH/opposite) and Shannon Hawari (middle) have been almost totally neutralized by USC, compiling virtually as many hitting errors as successful kills.

So there you have what I think are the key questions for tonight. Can the Golden Bears limit the damage from the Trojans' middle blockers, while still keeping the SC outside hitters under wraps? And can Tarah Murrey get a little help from her friends, as Cal tries to match SC offensively?

NCAA Women's Final Four Preview I: Penn State vs. Texas

2010-12-15T14:43:00.000-08:00

The first of Thursday night's two NCAA women's national semifinal matches presents a rematch of last year's championship contest, Penn State vs. Texas. The nightcap will feature two Pac-10 foes, USC and Cal. The present write-up will focus on Penn State and Texas, with another one tomorrow for USC and Cal.

My starting point in analyzing the Nittany Lions and Longhorns is to examine to what degree, if any, the teams have changed over the past three months in their allocation of sets to different hitters and these players' hitting percentages. Back in early September, on the eve of the Big Four tournament -- with Florida hosting Penn State, Texas, and Stanford -- I presented graphs of each team's leading hitters.

The key elements of these graphs are as follows. Each team gets its own graph. The graph consists of several bars, one for each hitter. A bar's height represents that player's hitting percentage (based on some reference timeframe) and its width represents the player's share of the team's hitting attempts. For convenience, a given team's bars are arranged, left to right, from the player with the highest hitting percentage to the one with the lowest. One wants to see rectangles that are both tall and wide, signifying that players with high hitting percentages are taking the most attempts.

What we're going to see is a comparison of "old" and "new." The old graphs are the ones from September, based on matches prior to the Florida tournament. The new ones are based on teams' statistics from the first four rounds of this year's NCAA tourney, the four matches a team won to reach the Final Four.

To create the new graphs, we of course have to look at each team's tournament matches, one-by-one, before aggregating the statistics. In the first table immediately below, we see the statistical hitting lines (kills, errors, and total attempts) for each of Texas's and Penn State's main hitters, match-by-match. Together, the five listed Longhorn players accounted for 95.4% of UT's spike attempts in the first four rounds of the NCAA tournament, whereas the listed Lion players accounted for 86.5% of Penn State's spike attempts. As always, you can click on the graphics to enlarge them.

One Texas player immediately jumps out at me, namely middle-blocker Jennifer Doris, who has only one hitting error in the entire postseason (on 58 hitting attempts). In the regionals, Doris had 8 kills and no errors in 14 swings against Illinois, and 10 kills with no errors in 18 attempts against Purdue. I'll discuss Doris and other Longhorn hitters further when I get to the team's graph (below).

Among the Nittany Lions in their table, middle-blocker Arielle Wilson has performed well in most of the team's tournament matches, outside-hitter Blair Brown (who hits on the right-hand side, in contrast to most prominent OH's) excelled vs. Oklahoma, and OH Deja McClendon exhibited her most sustained productivity against Duke.

Let's now look at the graphs. The larger (light-orange) graph represents Texas in the current postseason, with the September graph (smaller, burnt-orange) shown for comparison.

Middle-blocker Rachael Adams, who was just named first-team All-America by the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA), comes out as the Longhorns' highest-percentage hitter in both graphs. In what seems like a wise move (as seen by Adams's light-orange bar being wider than her burnt-orange one), UT has increased Adams's share of the team's spike attempts, from 11.6 percent in September to 18.8 percent presently.

Sha'Dare McNeal has seen her proportion of Longhorn hit attempts shrink from 17.0 to 11.3 percent, perhaps as a way of increasing Doris's swings (from 8.6 to 12.4 percent). Of course, I have no way to know if such changes are intentional or just coincidental.

Juliann Faucette (OH), who has taken about one-third of UT's swings in the postseason, joined Adams on the AVCA All-America first team. Faucette's hitting percentage is lower than those of her aforementioned teammates; however, as an outside hitter, she may be called upon to take a greater number of improvised swings to bail the team out of danger, in contrast to middle-blockers whose quick attempts tend to be by design. (See my earlier posting on out-of-system play and the related commentary on VolleyTalk.)

For Penn State, the larger (lighter-blue) graph shows the current postseason, whereas the smaller (dark-blue) graph is from September.

The Nittany Lions have featured a "big-three" attack this season, with the aforementioned Wilson, Brown, and McClendon. All three also received AVCA All-America honors, with Wilson and Brown making the first team and McClendon, the second (also being voted Freshman of the Year). Other than somewhat of a shift from September from when McClendon and Brown took about the same share of Penn State's hit attempts to the postseason, where Brown has been getting more attempts than McClendon, the Nittany Lion offense looks structurally pretty similar at the two stages of the season.

On the whole, in fact, I'm struck by both teams' consistency between their respective September and postseason graphs, even though the games comprising the September and postseason graphs are mutually exclusive.

Blocking may provide Penn State with a decisive edge in holding down Texas's hitting effectiveness. I've gone on for a long time, but let me just conclude with the observation that Penn State ranks fifth in the nation in blocks per set, whereas Texas is 35th.

2010-12-08T22:16:00.000-08:00

Today's entry falls under the rubric of, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." While watching last Saturday night's webcast of the UCLA-Texas women's NCAA second-round match, I decided to create what, to my knowledge, would be a novel type of play-by-play sheet that visually depicted the trajectories of each team's initial sets in mounting an attack from serve receipt.

Being able to check, at a glance, whether a team was varying its attacks between high and outside (a "4 set"), quick middle hits (a "1 set"), and other varieties of plays, and its success in siding-out with the various types of attacks, would seem to be valuable information. Further, because the webcast was shown entirely from an "end zone" camera, it was relatively easy to observe the arcs of the sets.

What I didn't bargain for was that, even graphing merely a single game (Game 2, which ended up being the only one taken by the Bruins), the process of manually creating the following PowerPoint slides from my original written notes and verifying them as best as I could against the conventional play-by-play sheet consumed several hours over the next few nights. If there is to be a future for this type of diagram -- and I'm eager to see if people think there should be -- we have to hope that someone creates special software for this purpose.

Before discussing the diagram (which actually consists of four stacked images, due to space limitations for any one image), some limitations must be acknowledged: (1) only the teams' plays directly off of serve receipt are shown, not any sets from continuing rallies; (2) the arcs and ultimate results of each play are based on my handwritten notes taken live, as there did not appear to be a way to save a file of the completed video to watch it multiple times; and (3) as a result of the second limitation, I just plain missed some serves (for example, I may have still been writing from the previous play).

OK, here are the diagrams. I would urge readers to click on each frame to enlarge it. The rectangles at the top for each team are meant to symbolize a net, relative to which the arcs of the sets can be seen. The camera was behind UCLA's end, so the charts for the Bruins are a direct reproduction of my hand drawings. For the Longhorns, I initially drew the arcs as they appeared to me and later flipped them horizontally to reflect how they would look from the UT side of the net.

As can be seen, UCLA frequently went to outside (left) hitter Dicey McGraw and she often produced kills for quick side-outs (I did not record the identity of the hitter while watching live, getting the names from the play-by-play sheet for kills and hitting errors). In contrast, Texas seemed to sport a more diversified attack, setting several different hitters at various locations along the net.

Unfortunately, conclusions and inferences are limited by having a record of just one game. Manual production of such diagrams for three or more games per match, even aided by the copy-and-paste functions, would be prohibitively time-consuming. Here's hoping that someone comes up with a way for an observer to enter minimal raw data into a software package that can generate visual diagrams similar to (or even better than) the ones above.

UPDATE: In response to a note I put on VolleyTalk about this posting, one of the discussants suggested DataVolley as a software program for recording and plotting information from volleyball matches. There apparently is a free version one can download, as well as more elaborate versions for purchase.

2010-11-30T18:14:00.000-08:00

For pretty much the entire four years that I've maintained this blog, I've extolled the importance of hitting percentage as a measure of a team's overall ability. To win games (sets) and matches, teams need points. Hitting percentage is based heavily on teams' productivity in winning points via kills, but penalizes teams for hitting errors, which of necessity give points to the opponent. Dividing (kills - errors) by total attempts further weakens teams' hitting percentages if a lot of their attempts are kept in play by the other team. If a team compiles a high hitting percentage and limits its opponents' hitting percentage, it will probably win a lot of matches.

Last year in previewing the start of the NCAA women's tournament, I showed that there was a strong correlation where the highest seeded teams also had the highest hitting percentages. I used teams' overall regular-season hitting percentages, however, which don't take into account degree of schedule difficulty, both across teams and within different parts of the season for any one given team.

To refine the methodology, I've done similar calculations on the eve (approximately) of this year's tournament, but looking only at seeded teams' hitting percentages against other seeded teams they played during the regular season. (You may click on the table below to enlarge it, noting also that the table appears in separate upper and lower blocks due to space limitations within a single block.)

If we were going purely on teams' average hitting percentages against other teams that ended up being seeded, then Stanford at .290 and Cal at .280 would be undervalued in the seedings (see blue circles in the right-hand column). Cal's average is based on only four matches, however, and in two of them (against Stanford) the Golden Bears hit at sizzling levels around .350. Northern Iowa really looks out of place as the No. 5 seed with its .171 average hitting percentage, which came only against some of the less higher-seeded teams.

Defense (i.e., holding opponents to low hitting percentages) appears to align better with seeding. As can be seen (literally) in the bottom line, the top five seeds each held their seeded opponents to hitting percentages around .200 (this may be Northern Iowa's saving grace).

Between the No. 6-12 seeds, nearly all of the teams held their seeded opponents to roughly .250 hitting. The one exception was No. 10 seed Minnesota, which held its seeded opponents to a paltry .185 average hitting percentage (see red circle). The Golden Gophers did allow Penn State to approach .300 in both Big Ten matches between the teams, but shut down other teams such as Duke (.044) and Dayton (.117).

The No. 13 and 14 teams, LSU and Dayton, respectively, held their seeded opponents to roughly .260 hitting. Lastly, we have No. 15 Hawaii, which played only one match all season against a team that ended up being seeded, and No. 16 Purdue. The Boilermakers were pretty "lights-out" (to borrow a baseball expression) in shutting down opponents' offenses, including in one of two matches against Penn State. The only problem for Purdue is that it hasn't hit that well itself against top competition.

We'll soon see the effectiveness (or lack thereof), in terms of prognostic success, of looking at the teams through this lens.

2010-11-26T14:58:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of the online Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports includes the article "Relationship between the Opponent Block and the Hitter in Elite Male Volleyball," by Rui Manuel Araújo, José Castro, Rui Marcelino, and Isabel R. Mesquita. A brief summary (abstract) is available here. Full-text access is by subscription, but the journal has guest viewing privileges for individual articles.

This study is based on observations from the 2007 World Cup of men's volleyball. The authors studied setters' allocation decisions in relation to two features of the opposing block: the spacing of the blockers along the front row at the start of the point, and the type of block being faced (none, single, double, triple; the latter two also categorized as "compact" or with open spaces between the blockers). Analyses (via chi-square) were entirely two-way (allocation vs. spacing; and allocation vs. type of block), with no three-way analyses.

Because the article refers extensively to the six zones of the court often used in coaching, I created the following diagrams of the blocking team's side to illustrate the different types of initial block spacing described in the article (click here for more information on the zone system). The distinctions among the blocking arrangements mainly boil down to whether one or both outside blockers are "spread" (i.e., positioned toward the sideline) or "pinched" (i.e., positioned toward the middle blocker).

Overall, 41.2% of the sets went to teams' two left-side or "ace" hitters; 32.1% to teams' opposite (right-side) hitter; and 25% to teams' two middle hitters. The setter himself took the remaining 1.7% of attacks. Of the findings relating set allocation to characteristics of the block, here are what appear to be the main ones:

A "lower [frequency] than expected between ... pinched starting points and attack of the 1st middle hitter..." (of the team's two middle hitters).
"The individual block happened more than expected when the attack was performed by the middle hitters..., because most attacks of this player are fast and executed on the central zone of the net close to the setter ... not often allowing the double or triple block formation..."
"...the opposite player performed the attack against the double block situation... more than expected..."
"Concerning the [left-side/ace] outside hitter [both of a team's two], this player faced the individual block lower than expected and the triple block, the open triple block and the compact double block more than expected."
"...the open triple block was more used than expected against the [1st] left-side hitter..."

The article concludes, in part, "This study highlighted that the blockers’ 'starting points' are taken in consideration by the opponent setter to create the best conditions for the offensive players (hitters)" and that the game "at the elite male level is characterized by a constant adaptation between setter’s options and the opponent block tactics and strategies."

The article was, for the most part, straightforward to follow. However, a few little things were confusing, such as some percentages in one of the tables that should have added horizontally to 100% (where the total at the end of the row even said 100%), but the numbers didn't in fact sum to 100. This kind of research is difficult to do, however, with extensive videotaping and coding of matches, so I commend the authors for their work.

2010-11-09T21:58:00.000-08:00

Increasingly, it seems, one hears of volleyball teams getting "out of system" or having to recover from same. According to Bonnie Kenny and Cindy Gregory's book Volleyball: Steps to Success, "Out-of-system play occurs during a rally when something happens to take the team away from the preferred pass, set, hit or dig, set, hit sequence" (p. 141). I decided several weeks ago that, while watching several upcoming matches on television, I would keep some statistics on women's college teams' ability to stay in-system on their serve receipt, and how this would relate to their likelihood of ultimately winning the rally (i.e., siding-out).

I coded one game (set) each from the following matches: Illinois at Minnesota (box score, ESPN 3 video); South Carolina at Florida (box score); Nebraska at Texas (box score); Oklahoma at Texas A&M (box score); and Penn State at Michigan (box score).

As teams attempted to run their offense in immediate response to the opponent's serve, it was usually pretty easy to classify whether they were in or out of system. Certainly, if someone other than the setter made the second contact, or if the team was aced or made an overpass, it was out of system. I also considered a sequence to be out of system (although not as egregiously) if the setter had to tip (with one hand) or bump the ball to the hitter. In addition, I recorded whether the receiving team successfully sided-out (not just an immediate side-out, i.e., serve, pass, set, kill, but all side-outs, regardless of how long the rally lasted).

I clearly expected teams to exhibit greater side-out success rates when their initial response to the opponent's serve was in, as compared to out of, system. To get an idea of the magnitude of the difference, however, we needed some empirical data, hence the following analyses. The following chart (which you can click on to enlarge) contains the key information. The data should be considered only an approximation, as I sometimes missed a play or two per game (sometimes it was my fault due to a momentary lapse of attention, but other times things were outside of my control, such as a TV replay interrupting the beginning of the next point). Because the numbers for any one team would be too small for statistical analysis, I added up the data for each column for all the teams, thus producing aggregate figures.

When teams mounted an in-system (i.e., pass, set, spike) response to the opponent's serve, they sided-out nearly 63% of the time (102/163). In stark contrast, when the serve-receipt got out of system, the team sided-out only around 10% of the time (4/39). For statistically trained readers out there, this difference in percentages is highly significant via a chi-square test (X2 = 34.5, df = 1, p < .001).

It did not surprise me that teams rarely win the point when they start off out of system. It surprised me a little bit, though, that teams did not side-out more frequently when they mounted an in-system response to serve. A spike cleanly set up and delivered is no guarantee of winning the point, however, as the ball can be blocked or dug. As anyone who saw this past weekend's Penn State-Michigan match knows, there was a sequence in Game 1 during which the Wolverines consistently mounted in-system attacks -- and consistently got stuffed by the Nittany Lions!

Another thing I found interesting, albeit which must be qualified by the small number of observations, is the variation in how often teams got out of system. National No.1-ranked Florida never went out of system in the game I coded, whereas the Gators' tough serving knocked South Carolina out of system a whopping 10 times. On average, teams got out of system 3.9 times within the span of one game (set).

This investigation, like many of my previous ones, aimed to provide an initial look at a phenomenon, in this case out-of-system play, and put some ideas out there for operational measures and statistical analyses. Further research could examine whether particular servers are adept at getting the opponent out of system, as well as probe in/out-of-system status not just in response to the opponent's serve, but also to spikes and free balls.

UPDATE: This topic has generated some interesting discussion at VolleyTalk. Here's a link to the thread.

2010-10-02T21:37:00.000-07:00

Texas Tech University's women's volleyball team tonight ended its 64-match losing streak in Big 12 conference play, with a five-game win over Kansas. I'm on the faculty at Texas Tech, so I've eagerly been awaiting this day! The Big 12 schedule is 20 games (Oklahoma State doesn't field a volleyball squad, so each team has 10 opponents, each played home and away). The Red Raiders won their conference opener in 2007, then dropped their remaining 19. Seasons of 0-20 followed in 2008 and 2009, and then the team started off 0-5 in the Big 12 this year.

Tonight's win seemed less a matter of Texas Tech raising its overall team hitting percentage compared to the previous five losses (black bars in the graph immediately below), than dramatically curtailing the opponent's hitting percentage (blue bars in the second graph).

The Red Raiders recorded 17.5 blocks against Kansas to contain the Jayhawks' offense (Texas Tech's block total is, of course, going to be high simply due to the five-game length of the match, but even prorating for number of games, it's still one of the team's best blocking efforts of the season).

There have been at least two other favorable signs for the Red Raiders, of late. One is the improved hitting of offensive workhorse Amanda Dowdy (who has taken roughly one-third of the team's spike attempts this season), as shown in the red bars above. Dowdy injured an ankle in the Baylor match, but showed no ill effects tonight.

Texas Tech also had nine aces against Kansas. I attended an earlier Raider match this season, a three-game loss to Kansas State, where Texas Tech had only one ace. It seems the team is serving a lot more aggressively now, which should make it harder for the opponent to side-out.

2010-09-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of this weekend's Big Four tournament -- bringing No. 1 Penn State, No. 2 Stanford, No. 4 Florida, and No. 5 Texas to Gator country -- I've created hitting proficiency/attempt (P/A) graphs for each of the teams. I first introduced these graphs in my August 30 posting, with statistics specific to the Florida-Nebraska match; in contrast, the ones presented today are based on each team's cumulative season-to-date statistics.

For each of a given team's hitters (excluding those with small numbers of attempts), the player's hitting percentage is depicted as the height of a vertical bar, with the bar's width representing the number of spike attempts. Whereas I used the actual number of hit attempts as the horizontal-axis units for the Florida-vs.-Nebraska graphs, I'm now using percentage of the team's hit attempts. As you'll see, for each team I've arranged the players left-to-right from highest to lowest hitting percentages.

The ideal is for the tallest (leftmost) bars to also be the widest. That means the players with the highest hitting percentages (i.e., the most proficient) are also getting the most attempts. Here's how the four teams (listed in order of national ranking) stack up, heading into the Big Four event (you may click on the graphics to enlarge them)...

Penn State is unique in getting such a large proportion of its swings from just four players. Beyond that, however, the Nittany Lions successfully limit the number of hit attempts by their weakest attacker (in terms of hitting percentage). Penn State's article archive and stats page are excellent resources on the team.

Stanford does a good job of getting 6-foot-4 senior outside hitter Alix Klineman a lot of attempts, but might benefit from getting 6-2 frosh middle blocker Carly Wopat more sets.

Florida was, of course, led in its opening-weekend victory over Nebraska by hitting/setting double-threat Kelly Murphy, a 6-2 junior. Murphy continues to hit well and see a large share of sets in her direction. Lauren Bledsoe, who last weekend hit .533 (10 kills and 2 errors in 15 attempts) against 15th-ranked Colorado State and .625 (5-0-8) against Bowling Green State, now leads the Gators in hitting percentage. Tangerine Wiggs, who hit .833 (5-0-6) in the BGSU match and .500 (5-1-8) against Albany, has also improved since the Nebraska match. Gator stats are available here.

Finally, we have Texas, last year's national runner-up to Penn State and the only team in the Big Four to have lost a match this season (to Illinois, who is now ranked No. 3). The Longhorns' graph above appears to show the undesirable pattern of the most hit attempts going to players who do not have the highest hitting percentages (wide bars on the right). One of the players in that category, however, is senior outside hitter Juliann Faucette, a highly decorated All-America and All-Big 12 player. Faucette doesn't appear to be off to as hot a start as some of the other players, but her current hitting percentage of .292 is perfectly respectable.

Penn State, with its active 108-match winning streak, opens with Florida in the Big Four. This contest is a rematch of when the Lions and Gators met in last year's NCAA Sweet Sixteen round, a three-game sweep for Penn State (article, box score). Of note is that Penn State completely neutralized Florida's Murphy in this match, holding her to a .000 hitting percentage (2 kills, cancelled out by 2 hitting errors, in 12 attempts).

***

Other Notes: Dave Reed's ESPN.com women's volleyball column is back again this season. That's where I found one of the preview articles cited above and other miscellaneous pieces of information, including the following... You've probably heard of Sunday Night Baseball, Monday Night Football, and Friday Night Lights (high school football). Now make room for Wednesday Night Volleyball on ESPN-U, the schedule for which is available here. Most of the Wednesdays will feature doubleheaders! These telecasts will offer great opportunities for volleyball stat-heads (leatherheads?) to keep our own statistics and conduct analyses.

2010-08-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

This past weekend saw the opening of women's college play in the U.S., with the nationally televised (on CBS College Sports cable channel) Runza/AVCA Showcase from Omaha, Nebraska taking center stage. Each match featured a Big 12 school (either Nebraska or Iowa State) taking on an SEC school (Florida or Kentucky). As it turned out, tournament organizers saved the best for last, as yesterday's closing match between Florida and Nebraska came down to an exciting finish, with the Gators prevailing 15-12 in the fifth (boxscore).

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.

2010-07-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

I recently received an e-mail from Alexis Lebedew of the Australian Institute of Sport, bringing to my attention some of his writings. Lebedew's focus is the evaluation of setting, a skill that has gone relatively unanalyzed over the years. The statistic of a setting "assist" exists, but because it represents the number of balls leading to kills, it overlaps considerably with hitting statistics.

In a piece entitled, "A Reconceptualisation of Traditional Volleyball Statistics to Provide a Coaching Tool for Setting" (link), Lebedew proposes a way to rate the quality of sets by taking into account not just the spike attempt following the set, but also the pass preceding the set. In short, setters are most rewarded for making "lemonade" from a "lemon" pass. As Lebedew states more technically, "...the combination of a [high-quality] spike and a [poor] pass has the top Rating... within the ‘Excellent’ outcome."

In fact, sets can be graded on a scale of 0-12, based on combinations of quality ratings for pass and spike. Lebedew notes that coaches who are used to grading passing and hitting performances on a metric different from his own (e.g., rating hit attempts on a 3- rather than 4-point scale) will still be able to construct a meaningful scale for setting, although the top value may differ from 12.

Lebedew also attempted to validate his setting metric in two ways. He first showed that computer software designed to link passes and hit attempts within the same sequences to derive set attempts only rarely missed a set attempt when compared to video footage. Second, he charted teams' percentages of sets (games) won for different averages of setting proficiency. For example, teams won roughly 95% of time when their set quality averaged 9 or higher, roughly 90% of the time when it averaged 8.5 or higher, etc., down through roughly 55% when averaging 6 or higher on setting. Lebedew encourages coaches and setters to strive for setting-proficiency averages of around 7.5-8.

All of the data were from international beach volleyball, which qualifies the generalizability of the findings in some important ways. With two-person teams, of course, there's no way to assess the setter's savviness in choosing which hitting-eligible teammate to set (as noted by Lebedew). Also, at levels of play beneath international caliber, more realistic setting-proficiency aspirations than the aforementioned 7.5-8 may need to be established.

2010-07-04T15:16:00.000-07:00

A recent issue of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports(Volume 6, Issue 2) contained an article by Michelle Miskin, Gilbert Fellingham, and Lindsay Florence entitled "Skill Importance in Women’s Volleyball." Access to articles is by subscription, but the journal has guest-visitor privileges for single articles.

Miskin and colleagues analyzed data for a particular women's Division I team (not identified by name) during the 2006 season. When the team played at home, play on its side of the net was videotaped and later coded. Serves, passes, and digs were rated by judges on quantitative scales (e.g., 0-to-5), sets were evaluated in terms of their distance from the net, and spike attempts were coded by area of the court from where they were hit.

Essentially, the authors appear to be looking at correlations (or associations) between characteristics and quality of skill performance, and likelihood of winning the point. As they state on page 2:

The importance score incorporates not only the impact of a specific skill..., but also the uncertainty associated with the performance... Thus, a skill whose association with scoring a point is less certain will be penalized when using this metric when compared to a skill where performance at a given level is more closely associated with a positive outcome.

The article throws a barrage of statistical terms at the reader (e.g., Bayesian analysis, Markov Chains, Dirichlet prior, Gibbs sampling, gamma distributions), some of which I was familiar with, but many of them not. Fortunately, the authors translated the complex statistical results into plain English recommendations for the team that was investigated:

1. Keep sets and passes away from the net.

2. Force the attack to the middle and right side if at all possible.

3. Devote a considerable proportion of practice time to transition offense.

4. Get to blocking positions more quickly following a serve.

Presumably, if a team wanted to apply the analytic tools described in the article in their full glory, it would need to hire a pretty high-powered statistical consultant (in addition to acquiring the videotaping and coding resources). Perhaps similar analyses could be done via more basic correlational and regression techniques, but I suspect that the resulting conclusions may be somewhat imprecise, compared to those from the fully sophisticated analyses.

2010-05-08T20:23:00.000-07:00

Stanford's Brad Lawson had an incredible offensive night as the Cardinal blew out Penn State for the NCAA title, 30-25, 30-20, 30-18. Lawson, a 6-foot-7 sophomore outside hitter who was one of four players from the state of Hawaii to take the court for Stanford tonight, compiled the following line: 24 kills with only 1 hitting error, in 28 attempts, for a remarkable .821 percentage (box score). For those who don't follow volleyball closely, a hitting percentage in the .300's would be considered very good and in the .400's, outstanding. For the season (including the championship match), Lawson hit .387 (522 kills and 143 errors on 980 attempts).

This NCAA men's volleyball records page (current only through 2006) presents two championship records, for a single match and for both games of a tournament combined:

HITTING PERCENTAGE, MATCH (MIN. 15 ATTEMPTS)
.867--Jeff Nygaard, UCLA (3) vs. Ohio St. (0), 5-7-93.

HITTING PERCENTAGE, TOURNAMENT (MIN. 20 ATTEMPTS)
.788--Rick Tune, Pepperdine, 1998 (.833 vs. Princeton, 10-0/12; .762 vs. UCLA, 17-1/21).

Nygaard's record, based on a 13-0-15 line, was achieved in a semifinal match, arguably making it slightly less impressive than a comparable hitting percentage in a championship match. Also, Nygaard was a middle blocker, as was Tune.

A couple of other notes:

*Interestingly, this year Stanford also saw an .800 hitting performance on the opposite side of the net. On February 19, Pepperdine's Cory Riecks recorded a 17-1-20 night against the Cardinal.

*As a follow-up to yesterday's posting (immediately below), Penn State managed only 4.5 total team blocks against Stanford in the title match.

2010-05-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of tomorrow night's (7:00 Eastern) NCAA men's championship match between Penn State and Stanford, the Nittany Lion athletic department has put out a press release that includes some interesting statistical facts.

According to the release, Penn State is 21-6 when two or more players record double-digit kills, 7-3 when two or more players record double-digit digs, and 13-2 when achieving 10 or more blocks (among other things). Such statistics can potentially provide useful insights in assessing a team's chances of winning a particular match. However, caution should be exercised for a few reasons. Before I go any further in my comments, though, I want to state that I am thrilled any time I see statistically oriented writing in the coverage of volleyball and that I intend my remarks in a constructive spirit.

First, the presented statistics do not make use of all the known information. Using the last statistic given above, the Nittany Lions are 13-2 when getting 10 or more blocks. What is their record when getting fewer than 10 blocks? As shown below, we can fill out the picture by knowing that the team's overall record is 24-7.

With all of the cells filled in, we can thus see that Penn State has a pretty good record, too, when getting fewer than 10 blocks.

Second, there is considerable variation in the quality of Penn State's opposition during the season. Playing other eastern (or midwestern) schools presumably is not as difficult as going against the traditional Mountain Pacific Sports Federation powers the Nittany Lions faced during the regular season (USC, Hawai'i, UC Irvine, BYU, Cal State Long Beach, UC Santa Barbara, and Cal State Northridge). As accessed from Penn State's game-by-game log, here are the Nittany Lions' total blocks (in red) and match outcomes against MPSF opponents:

USC 4 L(0-3)
Hawai'i 16 W(3-2)
UCI 9.5 W(3-2)
BYU 6 L(1-3)
CSULB 5 W(3-0)
UCSB 6 L(3-0)
CSUN 8.5 L(3-0)

As shown, only once in these seven matches did Penn State achieve 10 or more blocks, and it happened in a five-game match, which provides more opportunity to accumulate blocks (and other statistical markers). Blocks per game might be more appropriate to cite.

Of course, though, in a stunning turnaround from Penn State's 0-3 loss at Cal State Northridge on April 10, the Nittany Lions turned things around on Northridge in last night's NCAA semifinals, winning 3-0 on the strength of 11 blocks. Eleven blocks in three games yields a robust 3.67 average. Penn State's opponent in the championship game, Stanford, piled up 12 blocks in a three-game sweep over Ohio State.

Lastly, as is drilled into the heads of all students taking social-science research methodology courses, correlation (i.e., that two things co-occur) does not by itself prove that one thing has actually caused the other. In basketball, for example, one might find that when a given team makes under 10% of its three-point attempts, it loses the game a high percentage of the time. One might intuitively interpret such a statistic to mean that poor shooting caused the team to lose. However, the team could have been trailing in some of its games for reasons having little to do with three-point shooting and then taken a lot of desperation threes (that were missed) in an attempt to get back into those games. In other words, it may have been the losing that caused the missed shots from behind the arc. Similar examples for football are discussed here.

I could envision a volleyball scenario where a team would have a poor won-loss record in matches in which it committed a large number of service errors. Maybe the service errors cost the team a lot of points early and paved the way to eventual defeat. But, it could be that the team fell behind for reasons unrelated to serving and then decided to serve aggressively in an attempt to catch up, only to have the high-risk/high-yield serves mostly fail. Something to think about.

2010-04-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

Prompted by a re-airing of last December's NCAA women's final between Penn State and Texas, fellow volleyball blogger Chuck Rey has produced a statistical analysis of the match. Interested readers can compare and contrast Coach Rey's analysis to the one that I did.

2010-01-21T18:32:00.000-08:00

There are two main types of hitting error. According to the NCAA volleyball statistical manual, one type of error involves hitting the ball somewhere other than in-bounds on the opponent's side of the court (i.e., "Hits the ball out of bounds" or "Hits the ball into the net resulting in a four-hit violation"). The other major type of hitting error is when the attacker is stuff-blocked (where the ball is "blocked down by the opposition to the same side as the attacker, and cannot be kept in play as a direct result of the block"). There are additional types of attack error such as the hitter contacting the net, back-row attack violations, and “thrown”/double-hit balls; the present analysis is not all that concerned with this last set of errors, however.

Of the two main types of error -- failing to hit the ball in bounds, and getting blocked -- ESPN commentator and former UCLA and Olympic great Karch Kiraly feels that one of these types of error is more encouraging for the team committing the faux pas and the other, more discouraging. During the Hawaii-Penn State NCAA women's semifinal broadcast about a month ago, Kiraly referred to "the better kind [of hitting error], getting blocked" (the remark occurs at roughly the 4:00 mark on this video).

In other words, given that you're inevitably going to commit errors, it's better to do so by getting blocked than by hitting out of bounds (or into the net), according to this line of argument. As the writer on College Volleyball Coach.com puts it, "I rarely get upset with my hitters when they are blocked, because I view it as the responsibility of the rest of the team to cover the hitter…" Stated differently, when an attempted spike gets blocked back toward the hitting team, the latter possibly can dig the ball back up and run another play. On the other hand, a spike attempt hit long or wide loses the attacking team the point immediately, with no chance to recover. Further, spraying a lot of balls out of bounds may indicate general shoddiness on the part of a team.

Getting blocked a lot wouldn't necessarily reflect positively on a team's offensive attack, either, though. It could mean a team's hitters and setters aren't all that adept at reading the block or taking steps to counteract it (e.g., "tooling" the block). It could also mean that a team's player's are not especially quick at getting to a ball that's been blocked back (i.e., covering the hitter).

Ultimately, it's an empirical question whether teams that commit larger shares of their hitting errors by getting blocked do better over the long run than do teams that commit a smaller share of their errors that way. We'll call this proposition the Kiraly Hypothesis. In testing the hypothesis, it's important to hold constant the number of errors made by a team, in order to focus exclusively on the type of errors.

To address the Kiraly Hypothesis (using the 2009 women's season), I first examined the final statistics for several conferences to find two (or more) teams in the same league that committed the same number (or virtually the same number) of hitting errors. One example, shown in the table below, is that Cal and Arizona St. each committed 368 hitting errors in Pac 10 competition (in all cases, only conference play is used). By going through a team's box scores, I could record the opponent's total blocks for a given focal team (e.g., when Cal played Stanford, I would record the Cardinal's total number of blocks, which indicate how often the Golden Bears got blocked; when Cal played Oregon, I would record the Ducks' total blocks; etc.). I did this for each of a focal team's conference matches and summed up the total number of times a focal team got blocked. If one wanted to, one could subtract this number from a team's total number of hitting errors in conference, to arrive at how often the focal team hit the ball out of bounds or into the net, touched the net, violated the back-row-attacker rule, etc. The latter step is not necessary for present purposes, however.

What we're left with is six paired comparisons (plus one trio). Within each pair (or trio), the teams committed essentially the same total number of hitting errors in conference play. One of the teams in a given pair would generally have a greater number of "got blocked" errors than the other. I then checked whether the team with the greater number of "got blocked" errors finished higher in the conference standings than did the team with fewer "got blocked" errors. That's what the Kiraly Hypothesis would imply, to me at least. Let's look at the following chart (which you can click on to enlarge):

As described above, Cal and ASU were paired together because they each amassed the same number of total hitting errors. Cal got blocked (i.e., erred in the "better" way) 160.5 times, whereas ASU got blocked only 151.5 times. By this logic, the Golden Bears should have finished higher in the Pac 10 standings than did the Sun Devils and, indeed, this is what happened. Score one for the Kiraly Hypothesis. (As an aside, I cannot understand how a team -- as opposed to an individual player -- can finish a match or a season with a total ending in half-blocks.)

In the fourth comparison, I grouped Utah St. and Nevada together, due to their similarity in number of times getting blocked and in their WAC win-loss records, and compared them jointly to Louisiana Tech. In all, four comparisons supported the Kiraly Hypothesis -- the team that more frequently got blocked during conference play also finished higher in the standings than its comparison school (note that the colors in columns two and three are the same in these cases).

As also shown in the chart, three comparisons contradicted the Kiraly Hypothesis. New Mexico St. is an interesting team. The Aggies finished 13-3, second in the WAC standings only to Hawai'i. Yet, despite compiling one of the highest hitting-error totals (363) in the WAC, NMSU didn't get blocked very much (see the box scores of the Aggies' matches hosting San Jose St., blocked 1 time; hosting Boise St., blocked 3 times; and hosting Nevada, blocked 3 times; NMSU additionally had three matches in which it was blocked 4 times).

Seven comparisons, of course, do not make for a very large sample. It is possible that if, say, 50 or 100 comparisons were done, the Kiraly Hypothesis would receive greater support. However, it is time consuming to compile the data for these comparisons. The most that can be said at this point is that the Kiraly Hypothesis is not so overpowering a phenomenon that its existence can be documented with only a small number of tests.