“We’re missing too many serves,” “Next one needs to be in,” “We’re better than this team, we just need to keep the ball in play.” How many times have you or someone on one of your teams said something like these things? On today’s blog, I want to introduce a series I’ll be doing on serving approach and analytics. Over the next set of posts, I want to answer the following questions:
What is a good server? What makes a good server? What should our serving approach be? How should we talk to our athletes about serving approach? How should we think about service errors? How should we talk to our athletes about service errors? How should we teach our athletes to think about service errors? How should we look to shape the way our athletes serve? Can you miss too many serves? How should we practice in light of our serving approach?
My thesis for the series is that the conventional wisdom in volleyball is too risk-averse when it comes to serving. There are almost certainly athletes on every volleyball team who are too risk-averse from the service line, to the detriment of their production. There are almost certainly athletes on every volleyball team who would be more productive servers if they were to adjust their serving approach in such a manner that they would miss more serves.
I believe that part of this risk aversion is caused by cognitive bias created by the aesthetics of serving outcomes. Putting an easy serve into the court is a slightly better outcome than missing a serve. But, putting an easy serve into the court feels much better than missing a serve. These aesthetics make people make bad decisions about how they serve, and talk to each other in destructive ways about how they should try to serve in the future.
Although “we’re missing too many serves,” may be true, it is never the most precise description of the problem. In this series, I’ll be looking for a more precise description of the problem in the cases where teams are missing too many serves, and looking for an explanation for why there isn’t a problem at all in the cases where teams only think they’re missing too many serves.
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