As a volleyball player, you have certainly heard coaches or other recruiters stress how important height is in the game. For better or for worse, volleyball is a game that lends itself to height. This is different from many other sports, since being 5’4” takes away your chances of being a hitter in a way that being 5’4” would not hinder your ability to play soccer. Usually, when a coach tells you no, it is because of a skill you need to improve upon, or some other aspect of your game. But for volleyball, coaches can easily cross you off their list without even watching you because of your height. While this might not seem fair, it is the way of the game, especially now, since volleyball is only getting bigger and more specialized.
This hard truth may be demoralizing for some, but the data we pulled gave me, a 5’9” setter, some hope. While there are tons of role models for shorter athletes in collegiate volleyball, like Jhenna Gabriel, Charitie Luper, Whitney Bower, Jill Gillen, and Gabby Blossom, it is often hard to picture yourself up there with some of the best young volleyball players in the country. This is why I pulled the data on the heights of every collegiate Division I volleyball player from the past ten years in order to see for myself where I would land height-wise. Let’s take a look!
Looking at the graph, the most common height of a collegiate Division I volleyball player is 6’0”. 6’1” is the second most common height, and 5’10” is the third most common height. When using bar graphs for height distributions, we usually see a bell curve showing a normal distribution. Interestingly enough, that is not the case for this data set, since it shows that it is more common to have a 5’10” player than a 5’11” player. See why this is in our article “What happened to the 5’11” Volleyball Players?”
I find it more interesting to look at the positional data, since that is where you can see how you individually would fit. For liberos and defensive specialists, the average height is 5’7”, which is just 0.2% more common than 5’6”. While some people may think that 5’7” seems awfully tall, remember that some of the highest level liberos, like Justine Wong-Orantes (who lists herself as 5’6”), played other positions and then switched to libero because of their height.
The average height of collegiate Division I setters is 5’10”. Surprisingly enough, it is more common to have 5’9” and 5’8” setters than 5’11” or 6’0” setters. This felt somewhat comforting, but also misleading because most of the setters we watch on TV are way taller than that. In a future post, I am very interested in comparing the heights of volleyball players over the last decade, since I think that would account for why the average height for setters seems shorter than I would have expected. Volleyball is a growing sport, and the game is becoming more targeted at taller women. When I pull the data from just the 2022-2023 season, I expect that the average height will be taller, since the game has grown so much.
Both collegiate Division I outside and opposite hitters have an average height of 6’0”. For outsides, however, 5’10” and 5’9” are the next most common heights, whereas 6’1” and 6’2” are the next most common heights for opposites. Since having the opposite block the opposing outside is an arguably more important aspect of an opposite’s job, it makes sense to me that opposites would be, on average, taller than outside hitters. Similarly to the setter data, however, I assume that if we only looked at the last few years of collegiate volleyball, the average heights may increase by at least an inch.
Last but certainly not least, we have our middles. The average height of a collegiate Division 1 middle over the last decade is 6’1”, followed closely by 6’2” and 6’0”. Again, I do feel like these numbers are not representative of what collegiate volleyball looks like right now, but it is still interesting to see the distribution of heights merged together from the past ten years.
Looking at this data, hopefully you see that you can play collegiate Division I volleyball! Even if you do not feel that you fit into the data set, there are tons of anomalies, and you could be one of them!
Data Notes:
- The figures above include data from 332 Division I teams for 2013-2019 and 2021-22, but only 306 teams for 2020–the data does not include the teams that did not compete that year. Overall, the graphs summarize 48,999 player-years of data.
- The height data for the graphs above are drawn from the NCAA Stats archive for all full Division I collegiate volleyball teams that competed for the 2013-2022 period. Schools that transitioned divisions during this period (such as Old Dominion, Merrimack and UCSD) or are in the process of doing so have been excluded from the figures above, even though they competed at the Division I level. At some point I may write more about the schools transitioning divisions, but for these first few posts, I’m focusing solely on those that were Division I for the past ten years.
- I limited the graphs in this post to student athletes with heights from 5’0″ to 6’6″. Yes, there are a few student athletes whose height is shorter than that and a few who are taller than that. But the numbers are very low, and because the graphs represent nearly 50,000 player-years, even if I widened the axes, there wouldn’t be any blue bars for any other height–the bars round down to zero, so would be invisible on charts like this.
- So even though she doesn’t show up on the graph, Anna Smrek–all 6’9″ of her–is definitely in the dataset!