If you read my last post in which I showed that there has been a huge increase in seniors on Division I volleyball rosters, then you know that freshmen have had a harder time getting on rosters in recent years. More playing time has gone to “super-seniors”, and fewer freshmen are making it on the court. If you haven’t read the article, go check it out (5th Year Seniors: A Freshman’s Worst Nightmare?)! In the article I speculated that, given the strong showing of freshmen in the Final 4, maybe 2023 would be the year the freshmen came back stronger.
Well, last weekend I scraped all of the 2023 data, and it turns out I was wrong. 2023 was not the year of the freshmen. In fact, there were even fewer freshmen playing collegiate Division I volleyball in 2023 than there were in 2022! On average, there were 4.25 seniors on a D1 volleyball team in 2023, and only 3.6 freshmen! Remember, before Covid in 2019, there were on average, 4.5 freshmen and just over 3 seniors on collegiate rosters.
While I do love the maturity and heightened level of play these super-seniors bring, the impact of Covid still seems to be throwing off the previous order of women’s collegiate volleyball. Hopefully we will see a resurgence of freshmen this fall!
Data Notes:
- If you recall my earlier data notes, I previously collected data for 332 DI teams from 2013-2022. Sadly, it was only 331 teams for 2023, as St. Francis College in Brooklyn dropped it’s volleyball team, along with its entire athletic program. My updated 2013-2023 DI dataset includes 3,624 team-years, and 54,180 player-years.
- In January I also scraped, parsed and cleaned the DIII volleyball data for the 2013-2023 period. This new dataset has data from 399 DIII schools over 11 years, including 4,128 team-years and 65,232 player-years. While some things look very similar statistically across DI and DIII volleyball, others–like the rise of super-seniors I wrote about above–do not! I’m excited to write posts about DIII volleyball soon.