Have you ever watched a men’s volleyball game, and it feels as though the serves are all only aces or errors? Men’s volleyball generally focuses on power, as well as a high-risk high-reward mentality. The women’s game has often been thought of as more finesse. Is this all changing? I took a look at the serving from the NCAA Division I semifinals and finals from this season, and at trends in the data from the last decade, and noticed an uncanny resemblance to the men’s game. Let’s take a look!
As one might expect, the more aggressive a team serves, the more likely they are to make an error. If you look at the scatterplot below, there is a strong correlation between aces and service errors, with a team averaging 1.0 aces a set averaging 1.0 errors a set, and those with 1.5 aces per set averaging 2.5 errors per set. Generally, the more aces a team gets, the more errors they have as well. A team’s willingness to get a couple more errors in a set in order to get more aces is often a coaching choice, with different coaches prioritizing different things. A prime example of this is how Kevin Hambly, the head coach at Stanford, wants his players going for their serves no matter what. While this is a great way to get your opponents out of system, you will also rack up more service errors, which can be a momentum crusher.
While there is not any easy “right” answer, the numbers show that DI women’s serving has become substantially more aggressive over the past decade. The line chart below shows that in 2013, DI volleyball teams had, on average, 1.8 service errors and 1.2 service aces per set. In 2023, an average DI team had 2.1 service errors and 1.5 service aces per set. As the women’s game evolves, is it beginning to resemble the high-risk high-reward aspect of the men’s game?
Texas volleyball, the NCAA Division I champions for this season, showed how important serving is in collegiate volleyball. In their semi-final and championship games, Texas had 23 aces and 14 errors across the two matches (7 sets total). Their aggressive serving certainly paid off, especially since they were able to keep their errors lower than their aces even though on average teams have more errors than aces. In the championship match alone, Texas had 12 aces (5 of which were from their middle blocker, Asjia O’Neal) and 8 errors. That is an average of 4 aces and a little over 2.5 errors per set! On the other hand, Nebraska had 2 aces and 6 errors in the championship match. In their semifinal match, Nebraska had 5 aces and 6 errors, a much better ratio, while their opponent, Pittsburgh, had 3 aces and 8 errors. In the second semifinal match, Texas had 11 aces (6 from outside hitter Madisen Skinner) and 6 errors. Wisconsin had 4 aces and 11 errors. Now I’m not saying tough and consistent serving is the only reason why these elite teams win games, but you can see a strong correlation between a strong ace to error ratio and winning these playoff games.
Getting your opponents out-of-system is such a crucial part of winning games, and aggressive serving is the way to do that. And while high-risk high-reward serving was particularly prominent for winning teams in the semifinals and finals of the D1 tournament last year, the past ten years of data show a clear and consistent trend toward more aggressive serving across all of D1 volleyball.
Will this trend continue even more in the future? It certainly seems that many successful teams are serving aggressively, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see the trend continue.
Data Notes:
- This article provides a look at the overall trends in serving in D1 volleyball, but there’s more to look at in future. For example, the relationship between serving aggressiveness and team success is more complicated than I can fully cover in this first article on serving. And while I can’t use NCAA stats to do a more in-depth look at type and location of serve, using other data to examine the evolution of serving strategy would be very interesting.
- Have you ever watched video of early volleyball, even at a high level, like in the 1964 Olympics? There are a lot of differences when you look at the game 60 years ago compared to today, but serving is one of the things that has changed the most.
Photo Credit: Dartmouth Athletics