Volleyball – game 3

Tonight my team played a team coached by an old volleyball teammate of mine. Terry is a real fireball. Lots of energy, good understanding of the game, and she’s a 6th grade teacher, so she probably has an edge over me in ability to relay information to 10-12 year old girls.

We lost the first game close, 24 to 26. Then my girls got on fire and started servering up a storm. We won the second game 25-14. Which put us into a third game to decide the match. I tired to convince my girls that the third game was only to 15 points so we couldn’t let the other team get any easy early points. Well they proved me wrong. My girls stood around and let them run up an early 7-1 lead before rallying to a 15-12 victory.

So we’re 3-0 at this point.

I started keeping track of some statistics for this game. Since I’m also using this season as coaching practice for myself I figured I needed to try something new also. Most volleyball coaches keep track of things like service aces, spikes (kills), and assists (sets). Well I have a bunch of beginners who if they serve an ace it’s usually because the other team messed up not because it was a particularly good serve. We haven’t spiked yet in a game. We’re working on it in practice, but they’re not confident enough to try it in a game.

So I decided to just keep track of number of serves that were good – over the net and in bounds, also the number of SAWIBs (Standing Around Watching It Bounce). I have to find a better acronym for that, but essentially it’s the number of times that a ball hits the floor with one or more girls just standing there watching it. If someone is lunging or diving for that ball and others are watching it’s not a SAWIB it a good effort.

Here’s the service record for this game. Special note should be taken that I had 5 ladies that were perfect serving:

M – 3/5
A – 9/10
K – 7/7
B – 12/12
J – 2/4
S1 – 8/8
K – 4/4
D – 3/3
S2 – 4/5

Total – 52/58

Remember this counts just good serves. If it’s a good serve that gets returned and the opponent scores a point with it, it’s still a good serve. So some of the girls only get to serve once or twice per service rotation. The ones who get into double digit severs are usually the ones who are serving well enough that its not being returned. This night each girl got at 3 rotations at the service spot.

Keeping track of SAWIBs showed that we had 10 of them in 3 games. Not as high a number as I would have thought it would be. But more than 1 is too much in my book. I keep telling this team that I’d rather see you hit the ball out of bounds than stand there and watch it fall to the floor.