I am very excited to announce the launch of Volleyball By The Numbers (VolleyBTN)! This website will publish data-based analyses of what is and has been going on in collegiate volleyball over the past decade. So far, we have collected and analyzed the statistics of 332 Division I programs from 2013-2022 and includes 48,999 player-years of data! Although the website is only launching now, the work going into this actually began last summer, when I started to learn the basics of data science and statistics. Using the program R, I scraped data from the NCAA stats archive and from hundreds of individual team websites.
Today’s launch includes 5 posts that analyze height (“Am I Tall Enough to Play Div I Volleyball” and “What Happened to the 5’11” Volleyball Players”), jersey numbers (“What are the Most Popular Jersey Numbers”), and the players that make up the data (“The Evolution of Division I Volleyball Rosters” and “5th Year Seniors: A Freshman’s Worst Nightmare?”). The data for these articles was collected from the official NCAA statistics archive (stats.ncaa.org). We are still in the process of cleaning up the data from each collegiate website, but hope to incorporate our findings from the websites into articles soon! We are also planning on adding Division III data into our set, which I expect will have some different patterns from Division I (which is exciting!).
I also want to write more using the geographic data in the dataset (players’ home towns and high schools), which I find fascinating. We have a lot planned out, and I am looking forward to doing so much more in the weeks to come!
If you have any questions, or ideas for future articles, please reach out to info@volleybtn.com!
Nessa Nyblade
January 1st, 2024
Los Angeles, CA