The Romo Effect and the Coming Evolution of Volleyball Storytelling - part 1
Creating Building Blocks That Change How We Watch the Game
This is an adaptation of the presentation I gave for VolleyStation at the 2025 AVCA Convention. Slides and presentation video can be found at the bottom of this post. All data is taken from NCAA tournament semifinals and finals, 2015-2025 and the 2025 NCAA tournament regional semifinals and finals.
Where Volleyball Fandom Is and What It Needs
There's been a lot of talk lately around the growth of volleyball attendance and viewership. In the last few years, women's indoor college volleyball has done things like this...
And this...
The question becomes...
Actually, the question becomes, "How do we fulfill the potential we’re showing?"
To answer that, it's helpful to consider where all the fans are coming from. While networks talk about "casual viewers", fulfilling volleyball's potential will require more than just casual fans. How do fans go from casual to something more? They connect to the game and people who love it. This doesn't mean having interesting factoids about players. It means feeling something. It means knowing something. Like this guy...
Tony Romo doesn't just know football, he feels football, and he shares both his knowledge and his emotion when he broadcasts. When you watch a football game Romo analyzes, you notice his excitement for what’s happening and you might even notice how he points you towards where it will happen.
What's special about how he does his job?
He loves not just the game, but the analysis and the insight.
He demystifies the game by connecting what we see (the context/situation) to what is about to happen.
He increases engagement by directing fans towards where the important stuff will happen.
He helps fans understand not just what happened tactically but why it happened.
He understands not just how the game is played, but how it is contested.
But volleyball doesn't need its own Tony Romo. Volleyball needs to create the framework that supports people like him as they nerd out for fan learning and enjoyment. Volleyball needs a better understanding of how volleyball is contested. Volleyball needs to give people that love and understand the sport better tools to share that love and understanding with a larger audience.
The Tools We Have
To better understand how volleyball is contested, you should first notice which tools are commonly used now to describe the game. The stats listed below are examples of tools that limit the stories that can be told about our sport.
Attack efficiency/Hit percentage
Assists
Errors
Match-level data
Attack Efficiency/Hit Percentage
How does attack efficiency limit storytelling? The same way batting average limits storytelling in baseball, where attack efficiency came from. In baseball, getting a hit is a step towards scoring a run, which is a step towards winning a game. Batting average tells you something about how good a hitter is, but it doesn't tell you nearly enough. That's why baseball has turned to other stats. Volleyball should do the same. Attack efficiency tells you something about a hitter, but it doesn't make the hitter's contributions to winning points very clear. Unlike batting average, attack efficiency subtracts points for errors, which means fans can't use it to tell how often their favorite players are scoring.
Assists
How do assists limit storytelling? They don't describe what a setter is actually doing to direct their team's offense. They don't describe how well a setter is actually setting, they're just a stat that early statisticians took from basketball because someone setting an outside hitter looked enough like a point guard passing to a forward. But basketball assists tell you something about how special certain players are, whereas volleyball assists do not. When Nikola Jokić, a center, accounts for 1/3 of his team's assists per game, he's a unicorn. If a setter gets less than 1/2 of their team's assists, their team has some serious problems. That means assists don't describe anything useful about a setter's performance.
Errors
How does talking about errors limit storytelling? While errors can sometimes make the difference between winning and losing, they typically aren't what makes the difference, even when the score is close. When you watch the NCAA tournament, teams are earning three times as many points as they are giving to their opponents via unforced errors. Focusing on errors means less time spent on what actually drives winning: earned points. Further, since unforced errors occur so much less often than earned points, they should be discussed relative to earned points, rather than in isolation.
Match-level Data
How does match-level data limit storytelling? In other sports, when teams run back out of the locker room after half time, the score is the same as when they ran into the locker room. That means their efforts from one period of play to the next are cumulative. But the score keeps resetting in volleyball. If a player scores 10 points in the first set and doesn't score another point in the rest of the match, fans are missing some important context about that player's performance that can't be seen if they only know that a player scored 10 points in the match. Only having match-level data makes it hard to tell stories that compare one set to another, which is often key to understanding how and why teams win.
Just Having Stats Is Not Enough
People like Tony Romo use stats to help them explain what they see happening during play. But if the stats don’t connect to what they see, then it isn’t the expert who needs to change, it’s the stats available to them. That’s why volleyball isn’t waiting for its own version of Tony Romo. Volleyball is waiting for stats that allow experts to adequately explain what they’re seeing.
The stats you’re waiting for aren’t even that fancy or advanced. That’s what makes these building blocks so useful in storytelling. They’re simple and intuitive. They can be used alone or layered into other metrics. They’re universal because they help describe the game wherever it’s played, not just by the pros.
How Volleyball Actually Works
Perhaps surprisingly, volleyball works a lot like a hurdles race. Even better, volleyball is like a series of hurdles races. A team has to win three races to 25. In hurdles, the winner doesn't have to run the cleanest, the winner is who runs the fastest. In volleyball, the team that wins is the team that beats the other to 25, regardless of how neatly they get there. Then both teams go back to the starting line and race again and the outcome of the next race can be very different to the last one.
Unlike teams in other sports, volleyball teams can’t patiently wait for the game to be over once they have a sufficient lead. Just like in a race, if a competitor stops racing, they will be caught. Volleyball teams have to keep scoring in order to win the race to 25, just like runners have to keep running to get themselves across the finish line. Hoping your opponent will stop racing and push you across the finish line doesn’t work in hurdles. It almost never works in volleyball either.
If that’s a better way of understanding how volleyball is contested, then what kinds of stats would help experts tell better stories about volleyball matches?
That’s where part 2 of the series will start.
To view video of the presentation as well as the slides, click this link:
