WINNING WITH DATA - Alex Simons (2 of 2)

Okay, so another, uh, blog you had is, uh, "When are points mostly won?" And-

Oh, yeah

...

this one, uh, was one of the first ones that really, uh, grabbed me when I first found your, your blog.

So when are they won, and, and did this surprise you at all?

This one surprised me a lot.

I guess 'cause I just hadn't thought about it systematically.

So in women's D1, 51.4% of points are decided on the first possession.

Hmm.

So if you add up, you know, aces plus errors, plus first ball kills, plus first ball errors, plus blocks, right? Like, so everything that essentially happens and decides the point on that first po-possession, that's more than 50% of all the points.

I just...

I was kinda like, "Oh my gosh, that's, um, that's mind-blowing." I'd always just thought about, like, the first ball side out rate, you know, which maybe that's 30%, but there's another 20% in there between all those other things, right? Uh, and then same in women's D1 again, 24%, 24.4% are f- of points are decided on the second contact, right? So if you add those together, it means 76% of all points in women's volleyball are decided in the first or second contact.

And if you...

So you better fricking win in the first two contacts, right? You don't have very many chances to win a point after that.

So how does this-

In men's volleyball, it's even worse.

In men's volleyball, i- 83% of the points are decided in the first two contacts.

So once you saw that, how would that data influence what you spend your time on in practice?

Well, 'cause, you know, so I'm an ecological coach, so we ran a whole bunch of, of different games where if you...

W- my favorite one that the team responded to the best was you didn't get a point if you didn't score on your first ball or the first transition.

Yeah.

You could win the rally and get the ball back and go serve again, right? But you didn't get a point.

You had to always score, and it was amazing to me how that really focused their attention on, we have to pass well, we have to dig well.

We gotta make sure we get a set up every time.

Even if it's the middle setting, we better get a set up every time.