I am from California, and I think it’s pretty great! I can go to the beach in the winter, it’s not humid, and there’s great volleyball. What I don’t like, however, is changing time zones when we go East for travel tournaments. At Triple Crown a few weeks ago, I had two 7:30am games, which is totally normal. Except Kansas City’s 7:30am is my 5:30am in California, and I had to wake up at 5:30am for the game (to get to the court by 6:30), so it felt like I was waking up at 3:30am California time. This might seem like a small thing, but apparently I was not the only one who felt at odds with the time zone differences.
I was pretty curious to see if time zone differences would have any effect on the results from Triple Crown, so I decided to look at how all of the West Coast teams did at 7:30am games. I categorized a team as being from the West Coast if it came from one of seven USA Volleyball regions (Aloha, Alaska, Columbia Empire, Moku O Keawe, Puget Sound, Northern California, Southern California) which were all two or more hours behind Kansas City at the time of Triple Crown. At Triple Crown, 7:30am matches are the first match of the morning pools, which in four-team pools are all matches between one seeds and three seeds.
To put it lightly, West Coast teams did not perform their best at 7:30am. West Coast number one seeds playing at 7:30am only won 38% of their matches against non-West Coast three seeds! Yes, they won less than half of their games early in the morning. Even though West Coast one seeds should have been favored in all of those matches, they lost nearly two-thirds of them. And if you dig deeper into the data, you’d find that most of the West Coast one seeds that managed to win did so after underperforming in the first set.
Now, some of you might be thinking, “Oh, West Coast teams were just over ranked by the committee that did the seeding for the tournament.” If we look at how the West Coast one seeds did against non-West Coast three seeds in the afternoon pools, however, there is certainly a different story. In matches that were played at 3pm, West Coast one seeds won 75% of their games against the three seeds, the same rate that non-West Coast one seeds won their 1v3 matches. So, West Coast one seeds were twice as likely to win their first match in afternoon pools than they were in morning pool, which is crazy. Not only did the one seeds from the West Coast underperform in the morning, but if you look at West Coast three seeds vs. non-West Coast one seeds, you see that West Coast three seeds also underperformed in the early morning matches. At 7:30am, West Coast three seeds upset non-West Coast one seeds only 22% of the time. But at 3:00pm, West Coast three seeds upset non-West Coast one seeds 33% of the time.
I have always loved traveling far for tournaments, but after looking at the data, I’m glad USAV Nationals are in Vegas this year! But if we decide to go to Orlando for AAU Nationals, we might have one more thing to worry about!
Data Notes:
- All the numbers above are taken from the first matches of four-team pools played in the morning and afternoon waves, at 7:30am and 3:00pm. I did this to make sure that all the matches I was looking at were as comparable as possible. It does mean that I had to exclude the power pools and bracket play from these calculations. Assessing those matches properly would require a more complicated statistical approach to account for differences in how much we expect one team to be favored in each match. But having looked through the results for the power pools and bracket play, my sense is that West Coast teams were more likely to be upset early in the morning in those matches as well. One could collect more data on those matches, and from other years of the tournament, and do more analysis to see if the pattern I’m reporting above holds more generally.
- Coast-18 Ozhan managed to overcome the curse and win the 18 Elite Championship despite the challenges of playing in early morning pools! Coast-18 Ozhan was the only West Coast team to win the overall championship for their age group this year at Triple Crown. They lost their first 7:30am match on Day One in Power Pool A, and they even lost the first set in their Challenge Match at 7:30am on Day Two before coming back to win the match in three sets. They won comfortably in their 7:30am match on Day Three against a strong non-West Coast team. Maybe their bodies had fully adjusted to the time zone difference by Day Three? How long it takes to adjust might be something that could be looked at in the data, although the analysis would definitely have to be done very carefully since the quality of a team’s opponent depends on how well it performs earlier in the tournament.
- Apparently there is a lot of research on how jet lag and time zone differences can affect sports team performance. A few I came across that seemed particularly interesting include this old research article on NFL team performance, this research article finding that while there used to be an effect on NBA teams in recent decades there is no effect, and this recent ESPN story focused on how NHL teams try to handle the challenges of changing time zones and jet lag.
- If the results I found at Triple Crown hold more generally, it seems like something club directors might want to think about carefully. More directors seem to be looking to send their teams further afield to give their teams the chance to compete against different teams across the country. However, it may be the case that sometimes sending your teams further afield may have unforeseen downsides if your teams end up a step slow from time zone differences!
- Although my team had 7:30am matches on two of the three days in Kansas City, at least our hotel was close by and we could walk to the convention center in the morning in less than five minutes. The picture below was taken from my hotel room at 6:15am. If you look closely you can see volleyball players walking to the convention center on the sidewalk in the picture. The mornings are early, but the city and convention center are beautiful at that hour!
Photo Credit: Header image from Cal Poly Athletics