Have you ever been told by your coaches to check collegiate rosters to see if you’d fit in with their players? To see if they take people around your height, or whether they are on a two-year recruiting window for your position? Well, there are certainly a lot of benefits to looking through rosters and seeing patterns. While I was looking through all the Division I rosters in the past decade, I noticed something quite interesting. Let’s take a look.
In 2013, the average Division I collegiate women’s volleyball roster had 14 players. This came as a shock to me because both my high school and club rosters have been bigger than this. Investigating further, I saw that in 2021, an average roster had almost 16 players on their team. First, let’s take a step back. This is not the exact number of rostered players; this is the NCAA’s data on how many people, on average, played in at least one set that season. So, what this tells us is that more people are contributing to their teams on the court than they were a decade ago. Let’s look at several reasons why this could be.
The first possibility is that there are just more people on collegiate volleyball teams than there were in 2013. This is the most likely explanation, but it still does not entirely explain where these people are coming from. Division I programs still can only give out up to twelve scholarships for their team. This has not changed in the past decade. Are there more walk-ons rostered now than there were previously?
A second possibility is that more people are getting more playing time now than they were in the past. If only 14 players ever got into a match in 2013, even if the roster size was a lot bigger, the NCAA data would say they had a 14-person roster. This seems rather unlikely to me, since volleyball is only getting more specialized.
After thinking about these explanations, I decided to check out how playing time has changed over this time period. The NCAA doesn’t report full play-by-play data, but it does report the number of sets played. In 2013, on average, rostered athletes in my dataset played in 68% of their team’s sets. In 2022, it was only 62%. While there may be more rostered athletes, they are playing, on average in fewer sets. Since you can only have 6 players on the court at a time, bigger rosters inevitably mean that there will be more athletes sitting on the bench than there were on Division I teams in the past.
Data Notes:
- Average sets played varies by experience as well, not surprisingly. In 2022, rostered freshmen in my dataset played in an average of 49% of their teams’ sets whereas seniors played in 73% of their teams’ sets.
- There have been some interesting and dramatic changes in Division I collegiate volleyball roster patterns that are somewhat masked by the simple overall trend to larger average roster sizes in the data. This is not surprising, perhaps, given Covid and the transfer portal. I have written a bit more on that in this post.
- In assessing the possible explanations for the roster sizes in this NCAA dataset, it will be interesting to see if there is a similar pattern for Division III teams (which do not have athletic scholarships), and whether the pattern is at all different for the rosters on team websites (which are more likely to include athletes who play in zero sets). More on that to come in future posts.