Behind the Laptop Week 4
Behind the Laptop Week 4
Golden Spike week and HAPER
If you’re interested in watching any of our matches, all of them (except at Colorado State) are on ESPN+
Thursday 9/19
Another quiet morning in the office but this week it’s because we have a match tonight instead of Wednesday night. It’s Golden Spike week, which is when we play Colorado State twice, with the winner of the second match receiving the Golden Spike trophy to commemorate the victory. We drive up to Fort Collins tonight to play at CSU and they’ll make the trip to Boulder tomorrow night. All the scouting and preparation are complete and all that remains is to line up and wait for the whistle to blow.
I’m apprehensive about our chances to win tonight. While much of that apprehension can be categorized in typical ways, like “we had a bad prep practice” or “I don’t like our energy”, I’d like to focus on the nerdy source of my concern. I’ve often said that standards are great for practice but the only meaningful standard in a match is the opponent. To that end, I created a worksheet to compare us to our opponent during a match. I call the sheet HAPER for Home/Away Point/Error Ratios.
I’ll admit upfront that this data is not actionable, just descriptive. What are coaches going to do after looking at this sheet, tell the players that they need to score more? But what the sheet describes is interesting. Points are the currency of the game because you win and lose based on the number or points you score. For this reason, I pay a lot of attention to when and how points are scored. To some extent, I care about when and how errors occur as well but, in my world, points far outnumber errors so they get more of my attention. The sheet pictured below shows the different ways that teams can earn points and commit unforced errors. To compare teams to one another, I show the number of points earned or given away by each team in each category. I also calculate the ratio of the home team compared to the away team in each category. If the home team has earned more kills than the away team has, then the kill ratio will be greater than one. If the home team has earned fewer kills than the away team, the ratio will be less than one. The top lines are match totals, while the lines below show totals in each set. The sheet below shows the grand totals for all matches we played last week, in which we went 2-2 (9-8 in sets). The per-set statistics are less interesting when looking at multiple matches because there was no consistent difference in strategy in sets across matches, meaning that we didn’t go into the week saying, “in set 2 this week, we’re going to set mainly middle/right but set mainly left in all other sets”. I’ll stick to the top-line totals here but I include all the data so you can get a fuller picture.
Here’s what I see in these numbers…
We are losing the kill comparison. Even though it isn’t by a large margin, because this category contains more than three times as many events as any other category, it carries much greater weight.
We are ahead in almost every other category, but it almost doesn’t matter because our leads in other areas aren’t quite enough to compensate for the difference in kills.
We are also trailing in the B- category, which is how often an attacker is blocked. I tend to split the points for blocks between the blocker and the attacker in this case, acknowledging that the blocker earned the point but the attacker still had a part in creating the point as well. So, it’s not like we’re just giving away points when we are blocked, but it’s something that we should take at least some responsibility for.
We are losing the kill comparison. Did I say that already? Yes, but, to me, it’s the most important race going on in any match in my world.
I am concerned about our chances of winning tonight because I am concerned about our ability to score. When that kill ratio is less than one, it becomes hard to win. You have to rely on other parts of your game to compensate. But, as the totals in the other categories show, you have to win those categories convincingly because they account for so many fewer points. It’s nice to out-ace your opponent, but it won’t win you many matches (see more below). Out-blocking your opponent is also nice and it contributes to winning a bit more, but mainly because it happens more often than aces and because it takes away from your opponent’s kill total and not because it adds to your earned points.
When the kill ratio is close to one, whether above or below, a team must become reliant on scoring in other areas, which is much more challenging, or they must get lucky that natural variances in performance favor them in a given set. This, along with some consistency issues, may be why half of our matches so far this season have gone to a fifth set, neither team can consistently get enough kills to avoid having other scoring areas or chance be larger factors. Further, in the 41 sets we have played so far, 9 have been decided by two points and 3 have been decided by three points. That means that one out of every two or three sets we play may be determined by any of a long list of things, instead of how successful our attacking is relative to our opponent in that set. That means that we’re averaging one set like that in every match we play. Do that enough and you’re bound to lose quite a few of those sets, which is exactly what we’ve done so far.
As I said before, HAPER is good at describing but it isn’t good at predicting or prescribing. There are lots of ways to evaluate our attacking and see where there are improvements to be made. HAPER is just suggesting to me that we better make some improvements in that area if we want to win more.
Sunday 9/22
A quick follow up after we played our two matches against CSU. We split the two matches, but both went four sets. We played three more deuce sets so close to 31% of sets have been decided by three points or less. Pictured below are a cumulative HAPER, including the CSU matches, on the left and HAPER for just those two matches.
Here’s two things I see in these numbers…
Relative to our opponents, we are scoring lots of points with our serve, both overall as well as just against CSU. We put tons of service pressure on CSU, but they dealt with it better in the second match than the first.
We closed the kill ratio gap but we still didn’t outscore our opponents in the two matches we played.
I’m happy that we won one of the two matches but I’m not surprised that we lost one as well.
In other news, I want to take some space to write about a student-athlete on the team at CU. Her name is Rian Finley and she likes to paint shoes. She’s an amazing human and the world is a better place because she’s in it. You can see her shoe work on her Instagram page. I asked her to design a pair of shoes for me and I’m going to wear them for the first time tonight. September 15th marked the beginning of Latin and Hispanic Heritage Month in the U.S. and I identify as Hispanic American because I was born in Honduras to a Honduran father and an American mother. I wanted to have some shoes that would reflect my Honduran heritage so I asked Rian to design a pair for me. Her design is based on the Honduran flag and I think the shoes look amazing. Here’s a picture of Rian and her final product.
The shoes are awesome. Rian is awesome. ¡Vamos Búfalos!