By Matt Stolz, Southeast Missouri State Women’s Volleyball Assistant Coach

We all know, volleyball is a simple game – first to 25, win by two. But how to reach that score before your opponent is where the fun begins.

As coaches, we are always trying to motivate our team to score and earn more points while never relying on the opponent to give you anything. That being said, do you know how many points your team needs to earn to maximize your chance of winning the set? Or do you have a general idea of what you think you need to earn? In our program, we consider the following as ways to earn points for our team: a kill, an ace, and/or a block. We consider giving away points as a hitting error, a service error, a reception error, a setting error, and/or a blocking error.

For our program, our 2020 season goal was to earn 18 points per set while giving away under 8. We knew that if we could achieve this, our set win percentage probability would be high. However, if we weren’t earning 18 points or were giving away more than 8 points, our set win percentage probability would drop. That’s not to say we still couldn’t win, but it was going to be a lot closer of a set.

We wanted to earn 14 kills, 2 aces, and 2 blocks per set. However, if we had 12 kills, 3 aces, and 3 blocks per set we still hit our target number of earned points per set and that is ultimately what really mattered.

We introduced and challenged our team to meet these marks and it immediately became a focus in the gym. Whether it be in a 6-6 scrimmage or a drill, we could measure what part of the game we were hitting our target numbers and which skills needed more refining. We utilized multiple scoreboards in our gym during practices to display what we saw from our team.

We like to use the Virtual Scoreboard App on our iPhone/iPad, but any scoreboard is a valuable tool to keep track of this information. By utilizing this, coaches can specifically target a skill or area of focus to show the team how many points we are earning vs giving our opponent. For example, a head coach may want to reduce unforced hitting errors, (who doesn’t right?) while simultaneously assistants are keeping track of serving, reception, blocking, and other featured skills.

After a drill is done, coaches can compare and add up all earned points vs. given points. We believe the feedback and instant data we receive helps us better prepare for the next drill or our upcoming opponent.

For our season, the final numbers averaged at 17.32 earned points per set and 8.71 points given away per set. While we did not always hit our target numbers, we found that our opponents were giving us a lot more points than we had anticipated (a great problem to have!).

This cut into our potential to earn that 18th point of the set. While opponent’s unforced errors sound great on paper, no team wants to rely on your opponent to always create unforced errors to get you to your 25th point of the set. Not only is it stressful, but it’s inconsistent.