What is SAVR? How did it come to be?

My name is Cal Pringle. I’m currently the graduate assistant coach at Earlham College Volleyball. I’ve been playing volleyball since I was 9, I played 8 years of junior club volleyball at Maryland Volleyball Program, four years of club at the University of Richmond, and am in my second season of player-coaching the club volleyball team at Earlham College. I also coached two seasons of junior varsity volleyball at Douglass Southall Freeman High School in Richmond, VA, two seasons of North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament summer-league women’s volleyball for the Chinese Youth Club in Rockville, Maryland, and am in my second season assistant coaching varsity at Earlham. 

This project came together through a confluence of my interests and happenstance along my coaching career path. I’m a baseball fan and as I’ve reinvigorated my fandom over the last few years, I’ve developed an interest in the innovations happening in advanced statistics in baseball. I’m gripped by how sabermetricians see the game and have grown increasingly frustrated with how people who are not well-versed in sabermetrics talk about baseball. In 2021, I started at Earlham as a volunteer assistant coach. Among my duties that season was keeping stats; I did the usual hitting percentage stats, kills, errors, attempts. At the beginning of the 2022 season, I talked to Lauren Horton, the head coach, about not keeping stats anymore. I wanted to be able to be present in the games and having to tally all the outcomes was taking too much of my attention. Lauren said we could give it a try and we ended up liking it, so I didn’t keep stats anymore. 

At most of our matches we get handed live stat sheets in between sets that have traditional statistics on them, tallying information about hitting, setting, receptions, digs, serves, and spitting out percentages for individuals and team side out percentages. My mind is drawn to statistics, so I took to perusing these in between sets. Sometimes, Lauren or AC (Annemarie Chin, the assistant coach), would ask me while I was looking at the sheet, “what do you got?” to see if I had any changes we needed to make in light of the stat sheet. I almost never did, because I don’t really like any of the stats on the sheet that we get. For example, in the 2022 season we had 4 outside hitters on the team who we constantly had difficulty making decisions on which to start. In some matches, Lauren would ask, do we need to make a change at outside? We’d look at the hitting percentages and one of the outsides would be hitting under .100, but we’d say “no, she’s been good, she’s taken a lot of out of system swings,” or “no, she’s not been set well.” After looking at all these stat sheets and having them not be very useful in making decisions, I started to feel like there had to be a better way. I thought about baseball and all the good work statisticians do with describing the game and lamented that volleyball didn’t have a similar body of work. So, I decided to make it. 

In baseball, SABR is the Society for American Baseball Research. When Bill James, who is regarded by many as the godfather of scientific baseball statistics, wanted a name for the more sophisticated stats he was creating, he chose sabermetrics, as a nod to SABR. In the same spirit, I’ve named my project the Society for the Advancement of Volleyball Research, SAVR.