A Study in Passing Locations

By Sanky Sanny, Morgan State Women’s Volleyball Assistant Coach

Passing is a critical part of any volleyball team’s success, but just how important is it?

I decided to study passing by researching matches from 2019 NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship. I looked at serve-receive passes executed by all 64 teams from the 2019 tournament, and my sample size includes 8,718 serve-receive passes.

The criteria I chose to evaluate were the percent of good passes and the passer rating based upon where on the body the reception took place. I broke this down by zone as well as specifically if the reception was overhead, low to the floor, on the left side, on the right side, or in the midline of their body. I then provided an aggregate of the data for all zones.

From this study I am not interpreting or hypothesizing anything. This is just to provide some data and provoke critical thinking on passing in general, and how athletes pass in various locations relative to their body. I think as coaches, we should be training our athletes to get practice reps from all possible locations around their body and from all different zones on the court.

Keys for each category below is:

GP% – Good Pass Percentage (percentage of 3 passes and 4 passes)

E% – Reception Error Percentage

Total Events – Total # of Passes

ALL ZONES

Total # of passes: 8,718

Passing rate: 4.0 Scale

Chart detailing serve-receive passing from the 2019 NCAA Division I Volleyball Tournament