Serving Methods in Beach Volleyball According to Time in the Game

In the sport of beach volleyball the choice of which opposing player to serve is a highly strategic consideration for teams at all levels of competition.  In most beach offenses the player receiving serve will also be the team's primary attacker, so the serving team can use its serve to dictate (or at least heavily influence) the opponent's offense.  Serve choice may turn on the receiving player's perceived offensive skills, her partner's setting ability or by other conditions such as wind direction or sun location - and the choice may be revisited several times throughout a game.  As the choice of who to serve is the first opportunity to expose an opponent's weakness, it properly occupies a high strategic priority for competitive beach volleyball teams. 

Serving Methods

A separate but related question involves not who to serve but what type of serve should be utilized.  The predominant serves in beach volleyball right now are the standing float serve, the jump float serve[1] and the jump spin serve.  Game planning a match requires some consideration of which of these serves to use, which in turn requires players and coaches to agree on some principles for making this decision.

Researchers in Spain have recently continued a growing trend toward studying the serve in beach volleyball and in a paper published in the Journal of Human Sport & Exercise,[2] concluded that that fatigue and risk management dictate how beach volleyball athletes choose their methods of serving early and late in competition.  The study was limited to the professional men's game so its application to the women's beach game - where jump spin serving is less prevalent, and to other levels of play, awaits further study and experience.

Participants & Procedures

Participants in the study were ten professional male beach volleyball players comprising five teams competing in the 2005 European Beach Volleyball Championship.  Researchers recorded each serve according to type of serve and time in the match.  Serve types recognized were the standing float serve (SF), the jump float serve (JF) and the jump spin serve (JS).  Games were divided into three periods:  Period 1 (points 1-7); Period 2 (points 8-14) and Period 3 (points 15-21).  A total of 327 serves were recorded and the Chi-square test confirmed the significance of the data within a margin of five percent error.

Results

For all periods, the researchers found that overall the standing float serve was used 11.6%, the jump float serve used 26.0% and the jump serve used 62.4 %.  Examining the results by period in the game, there were significant differences in player's service methods from early to late in the game with lower risk serving generally becoming more predominant as games progressed toward the final period.

As indicated in Tables 1-3, the jump float serve increased from only 4.0% frequency during the early period of games to 49.4% in the latest period.  The higher risk jump spin serve with more velocity and an error rate of 17% was utilized with less and less frequency as the game progressed into later periods.  The jump spin serve decreased from a high of 89.7 % in the first period to 27.3% in the final period.

TABLE 1 (Service Methods by % for Points 1-7)

6.3% - Standing Float
4.0% - Jump Float
89.7% - Jump Spin

TABLE 2 (Service Methods by % for Points 8-14)

9.7% - Standing Float
33.9% - Jump Float
56.5% - Jump Spin

TABLE 3 (Service Methods by % for Points 15-21)

23.4% - Standing Float
49.4% - Jump Float
27.3% - Jump Spin

Discussion

According to the authors, the data suggest that players' choice of serve was driven by a risk analysis favoring more balls in play late in the game.  Fatigue was also cited as a factor.  As players fatigued and the risk of error associated with the jump spin serve was perceived as more costly late in the game, players became more risk averse and served more conservatively.   

Coaching Implications

So what does this contribute to our knowledge of the game and how we coach our beach athletes?  For this coach, the topic of study alone is a reminder that match preparation should involve principled decisions about our strategic choices and methods we employ in the game.  While players commonly consider the question of who to serve, the related strategy of which type of serve to use is given far less consideration.

So let's begin by at least considering the question and identifying some factors relevant to making a principled decision.  The present study identified cost/benefit and fatigue as two prominent reasons for players' choice of serving methods.  Other reasons for the decision undoubtedly could include (1) skill in one serve but not in another; (2) confidence in one or another serve; (3) opponent's inability to receive one or another serve; (4) strategic fatigue for a primary blocker; and (5) wind direction suggesting one method over another.  This list is far from exhaustive and coaches should continue to work with their athletes to identify other factors that may be relevant for their levels of play.  As we grow our athletes' knowledge of the game they will become better positioned to make their own informed decisions about how best to serve in a game, when and why.

NOTES:

[1]  We do not distinguish here between the jump float serve with an approach and the jump float serve without an approach. 

[2] Jimenez-Olmedo, J.M., Penichet-Tomas, A., Saiz-Colomina, S., Martinez-Carbonell, J.A., Jove-Tossi, M.A. (2012), Serve analysis of professional players in beach volleyball.  Journal of Human Sport & Exercise, 7:3, 706-713.

Scoring by Offensive Zones in Men's and Women's Beach Volleyball

Born as a game of recreation, beach volleyball has evolved from a casual past-time to an international sport played by elite athletes with its own world tour and prominent place in the Olympic Games.  In the United States, beach volleyball is now supported by the national governing body for volleyball, is officially an emerging women's collegiate sport, and is currently experiencing unprecedented organized growth at the junior level.

As the sport evolves so grows our need to better understand the game and use that knowledge to develop efficient training programs responsive to the games' unique challenges.  One of the most reliable sources of information concerning the training demands of beach volleyball is in scientific investigations of its action sequences.  Action sequence studies have long been utilized to predict opponent behavior and develop sport-specific training programs across a variety of sports.  Only recently have researchers begun studying the game of beach volleyball in this way.  Future research holds promise to better inform our understanding of the game and raise both the level of play and effectiveness of coaching.

In the first published study of its kind, researchers from the University of Alicante in Spain studied differences by gender in the use of offensive scoring zones in beach volleyball.[1]  Studying gender-based differences in the indoor game of volleyball has previously lead to a better understanding of how to improve performance through efficient training emphases.  The contribution of the instant study seeks to extend the research-based approach to improvement into the discipline of beach (or "sand") volleyball.

Participants were 20 athletes (10 men and 10 women) who competed in the European Beach Volleyball Championship in 2005 and 2006.  Results were culled from 659 points scored in 18 sets over 8 matches.  The court was divided into 6 zones as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1:

Findings

The researchers found that there were indeed differences by gender in the zones used to score points in beach volleyball.  Men used zones 2 and 4 most often to score while women athletes scored most often in zones 1 and 5.

Interestingly, both men and women rarely scored in the deep middle zone (zone 6).  Men scored in the deep middle at a rate of only 5.26% while women scored 5.67% of the time.

The zone least utilized to score by men was zone 3 where male athletes scored just 3.44% of the time.   By adjacent zones, areas 3 and 6 were the least utilized areas for scoring in both the men's and women's game with men utilizing those zones to score at a combined 8.70% and women scoring there at a combined rate of 13.40%.

Attack Error Rates & Types

Researchers also identified gender related differences in attack error rates and types.  In the men's game, out-of-bounds attack errors were committed at a rate of 15.53% compared to 27.38%  in the women's game.  The frequency numbers were reversed for attack errors into the net.  Men's net errors occurred at a rate of 7.73% while women committed net errors only 5.53% of the time.  Comparing attack error frequencies, it appears that there is a greater frequency of points scored without a rally in the women's game (32.73%) than in the men's game (23.26%).

Significance & Further Research

The significance of these findings for beach volleyball athletes and coaches remains to be seen.  Certainly, knowledge of zone use tendencies has coaching implications both for scouting and training athletes, but our "knowledge" of such tendencies must await further studies.  A question for future research will be whether these zone usage findings are consistent with the tactics employed in amateur levels of beach volleyball, for example, in the women's collegiate sand game.  As sports science research continues to expand into beach volleyball we all can be excited about its potential to improve our understanding of the game and, in turn, assist us to coach our athletes more effectively.


NOTES


[1] Chinchilla Mira, J. J., Pérez Turpin, J. A., Martínez Carbonell, J. A., & Jove Tossi, M. (2012). Offensive zones in beach volleyball: differences by gender.  Journal Human Sport & Exercise, 7:3, 727-732.

Perception and Motor Skill in Reading Shot Location in Beach Volleyball - Part II

Participants, Method, Stimulus and Procedure

The VU team invited 32 participants who were 8 expert beach players, 8 expert beach coaches, who formerly were expert players, 8 expert referees, who had not reached expert levels of play, and an inexperienced control group of 8 novices to participate.  Each group watched video clips of attacking sequences and predicted the depth and direction of the shot at various times before the attack.

All of the clips were culled from 25 women’s World Tour beach volleyball matches and included a pass, a set and an attack.  They were recorded approximately 6 meters behind the end-line, from the perspective of a defensive player.  Videos were progressively occluded at three different times:  (a) at setter-ball contact, (b) when the set was half-way to the hitter, and (c) at hitter-ball contact.[5]  Sequences were balanced for attacks from the left- and right-side, and in all sequences the blocker stayed at the net.   Also, because the defender was in view, clips equally balanced correct and incorrect anticipatory movements by the defensive player.  After viewing each sequence, participants had three seconds to decide whether the ball was attacked to the short or deep line or to the short or deep angle.[6]

Motor Experience Contributes to Reading Ability

Analysis of overall performances revealed that the expert players and coaches predicted shot location more accurately than novices, while the referees did not.   In addition, players outperformed both referees and novices in the latest occlusion condition.[7]  Accordingly, since “the group with the highest perceptual-motor expertise (and, notably, less watching experience) outperformed experience watchers,” the findings suggest that perceptual motor experience does contribute to anticipatory skills in beach volleyball.

An issue for further research, according to the authors, will be to study whether players were better readers because they more efficiently utilized cues from the video frame showing hitter-ball contact (3^rd occlusion point) or because they were superior at culling information from the entire offensive sequence.

Reading Depth and Direction

Comparing results on depth and direction the results indicate that reading the shot depth in beach volleyball is significantly more difficult than reading shot direction.   Overall accuracy scores were higher for direction predictions than depth judgments in the latest occlusion condition with players, coaches and referees all outperforming novices in reading whether the ball was attacked cross-court or down the line.  The available evidence therefore suggests that coaches should include more opportunities in practice for players to read cues indicative of short and deep shots in the game.  Knowledge of this weakness may also counsel in favor of positional adjustments to defensive players and movement training to improve overall small area quickness and account for potential depth related mis-reads in the game

Conclusion

Like the indoor game, the sport of beach volleyball is overwhelmingly played between contacts.  While those contacts are extremely important indicators of success, the ability to anticipate opponent’s intentions and prepare for the next contact is a proven skill variable separating the most accomplished players from their less skilled counterparts.

Over a decade ago, sports science determined that “[t]here is little doubt . . . that the ability to extract and use the information available from an opponent’s movement pattern is a limiting factor to successful performance for less skilled performers.”[8].  The results of the present study provide experimental evidence that motor experience gained from playing beach volleyball contributes to the ability to anticipate opponent shots both directionally and for depth.  The findings also suggest training emphases and strategies for improving performances in the game.

Since its birth on the shores of southern California, the sport of beach volleyball is now an emerging collegiate sport in the United States, has enormous worldwide popularity, and is an official summer sport of the Olympic Games.  As research science continues to teach us how great readers anticipate we coaches have an obligation to learn the science of the sport and develop principled methods for training the next generation of beach volleyball athletes.  

NOTES

[1] Aglioti, S.M., Cesari, P., Romani, M., Urgesi, C. (2008).  Action anticipation and motor resonance in elite basketball players.  Nature Neuroscience, 11, 1109-1116; Schutz-Bosbach, S., Prinz, W. (2007).  Perceptual resonance: Action-induced modulation of perception.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 349-355.

[2] Aglioti, S.M., Cesari, P., Romani, M., Urgesi, C. (2008).  Action anticipation and motor resonance in elite basketball players.  Nature Neuroscience, 11, 1109-1116.

[3] Urgesi, C., Savonitto, M. M., Fabbro, F., & Aglioti, S. M. (2012). Long- and short-term plastic modeling of action prediction abilities in volleyball.  Psychological Research, 76, 542-560.

[4] Canal-Bruland, R., Mooren, M., Savelsbergh, G. (2011).  Differentiating expert’s anticipatory skills in beach volleyball.  Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 82:4 667-674.  I am grateful to Professor Canal-Bruland for providing me with a copy of the research.

[5] For an excellent discussion of the possible limitations of occlusion paradigms, see van der Kamp, J., Rivas, F., van Doorn, H., & Savelsbergh, G. (2008).  Ventral and dorsal contributions in visual anticipation in fast ball sports.  International Journal of Sport Psychology, 39, 100-130.

[6] Two stimulus conditions of the study have limiting effects.  First, it is unclear what impact, if any, visible blocker’s movements played in the participant’s predictions.  Also, anticipation ability was measured as a function of viewing randomized progressively occluded clips of offensive sequences.  Therefore, anticipation scores did not account for participant’s abilities to utilize other cues that commonly inform defensive reads in beach volleyball such as situational factors, opponent’s recent history and pattern recognition. 

[7] Only in the latest occlusion condition (at hitter-ball contact) did participants predict shot location more accurately than chance.

[8] Farrow, D., Abernathy, B. (2002).  Can anticipatory skills be learned through implicit video-based perceptual training?  Journal of Sports Sciences 20, 471-485.

Perception and Motor Skill in Reading Shot Location in Beach Volleyball - Parts I & II

Elite sports performers possess the twin abilities to repeatedly execute complex actions and anticipate the behavior of other players.  Indeed, anticipatory skill is one of the most clearly established variables distinguishing highly successful athletes from their less accomplished counterparts.

In the sport of volleyball, anticipation is a key ingredient in successful performance.   Blockers who can read setter and hitter intentions, passers who can read servers and ball flight, and defenders who can anticipate shot speed, depth and direction all have an advantage over players whose anticipatory skills are less developed.

The ability to read is likewise critical to success in the beach game.  With more court to cover and fewer teammates to help, defensive success in beach volleyball is inextricably intertwined with the ability to anticipate an opponent’s offensive intentions.   The growing dynamics of beach volleyball offenses, fewer blockers at the net compared to indoors and a playing surface that constrains small area quickness highlight the need for beach defenders to develop acute reading abilities.

How Do Great Readers Anticipate?

We’ve all seen volleyball players who just seem to know where the ball is going.  So how did they do it, and why are some athletes better than others in figuring out their opponents?  As it turns out, athletes with superior reading abilities do some rather than unique things that less capable readers do not. 

Principles garnered from scientific literature show that elite athletes: (1) make superior use of anticipatory visual cues, (2) utilize unique perceptual strategies, (3) employ efficient visual search patterns, (4) exhibit fast information-movement coupling (integrating vision and action); and (5) demonstrate superior pattern recognition ability.  Essentially, superior readers see the game in a very unique way from others -- but their perceptual expertise is not the whole story.

While we know that elite athletes are better than novices at reading, and we know a lot about how they do it, we still don’t know everything that contributes to the why?  Why is it that some athletes see the game so uniquely, extracting information from everything that’s going on, and thus are better able to accurately predict what is about to happen?  

Perceptual vs. Motor Experience

One of the most important questions scientists are studying to better understand the skill of reading is whether elite athlete’s motor skills in addition to their perceptual experience contribute to anticipation abilities.

There are two related accounts.

In one view, anticipation ability is a function of perceptual experience.  In this view, elite level athletes’ extensive exposure to the game enhances their sensitivity to the relevant cues that reveal what other players intend to do.

Another view says that athletes’ motor skills also have something to do with it.  This view links perceptual experience with motor experience by positing that skilled athlete’s motor experience contributes to their superior anticipation abilities. 

The developing idea is that athletes are perceptually better attuned to actions within their own motor repertoire.  Thus elite athletes are better at identifying the kinematic cues that indicate in others an intention to perform the same or similar skills the athletes themselves are capable of performing.[1]  Research comparing the anticipation ability of elite level athletes with those possessed primarily of perceptual experience alone (e.g., coaches, referees and fans) seems to support this view.   

For example a team of Italian researchers found that expert basketball players were able to predict the success of free throws more accurately and quickly than coaches and journalists who lacked playing experience.[2]  Evidence published this year similarly found that volleyball athletes were better able to utilize kinematic information to predict the fate of float serves more accurately than expert watchers and novices who did not play the game.[3]

Anticipation in Beach Volleyball Defense

A new study from researchers at the VU University in Amsterdam recently contributed to our understanding of elite reading ability in the sport of beach volleyball.

The researchers brought together beach volleyball players, coaches, referees and novices to compare their performances in a beach volleyball defensive reading experiment.  The VU team sought to isolate participants with perceptual experience (referees) from participants with perceptual and motor experience (players and coaches) in order better to understand the contributions of perceptual and motor experience to action anticipation in beach volleyball.

Based on current research suggesting that motor experience does contribute to anticipatory skills, the team predicted that the players and coaches would perform better than the referees and novices.  The research was published in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport.[4]

[Continued in Part II - click here]

The Role of Observation and Motor Experience in Reading a Float Serve in Volleyball

The importance of service reception in women’s volleyball is well established.  Statistical data consistently have confirmed the close correlation of multi-option passing and winning.  One of the most basic elements of success in serve receive is the ability to predict the flight of the ball.  Misjudgments in ball flight commonly produce poor passes and single option passes are extremely inefficient events in the game.  Thus, developing players with the skill to accurately predict the flight of the ball during the serve receive phase of the game should be a high coaching priority.

So how do we get our players to make these predictions?  Do we recruit players that we think have an innate ability to track a ball?  Do we wait for players with excellent reading skills to just walk into the gym?  The answer is we train them.  Action prediction ability in sport is neither a magical quality nor an innate talent.  It’s a learned skill, and like any skill, it should be trained from the earliest stages of a player’s development and continuously honed throughout her career.  As reading is perhaps the most important skill in the game, the more we know about it the better we can teach it.

A recent study published in Psychological Research offers valuable insights into the elements that contribute to successful service-reading abilities in volleyball players[1].

Action Prediction Abilities in Volleyball

A team of Italian researchers examined the role of visual and motor experience in the ability of athletes to predict the action of float serves in volleyball.  The authors compared the reading abilities of three groups of adult, right-handed females in their mid-twenties.  Group 1 consisted of 12 volleyball athletes with about 15 years of playing experience (experts).  Group 2 was comprised of 12 supporters who had no experience playing volleyball but who had regularly attended to watching volleyball for at least 10 years (watchers).  Group 3 was comprised of 12 adults with no volleyball experience at all (novices).

Participants were shown video clips of two experienced players performing a series of float serves.  Videos showed a front- and back-view of the server.  Clips were shown using a modified temporal occlusion in which only the body movements of the server or only the ball was shown.  Half of the clips showed the beginning of the action to the point of the server’s contact with the ball, thus showing only the server’s body kinematics; the other half showed the moment of contact to the initial falling trajectory of the serve (when it was approximately at the height of the net), thus showing only the ball trajectory.

   

Participants were asked to view the clips and predict as fast as possible whether the ball was served in our out of the court.  Notably, in the front-view perspective the ball was not fully visible in the last part of ball trajectory – when the ball was falling to the floor.

Study Results

What the researchers found was a mix of predictable and not so predictable results.  The volleyball athletes outperformed the novices in predicting serves both from reads based on the server’s body kinematics and the ball trajectory – regardless of the viewing perspective.  These results confirm years of research consistently showing the superior action-prediction abilities of elite athletes in their sports, including volleyball.

So what about the watchers?  Did their visual experience contribute to accurate predictions although they had no playing experience?  The evidence suggests that it did.  Although watchers were again outperformed by athletes, the watchers outperformed novices in one important phase - predicting the serve when viewed from behind the server.    

According to the authors, since the late stages of ball flight stayed in view only for the back-view clips, the watchers’ visual experience seems to have improved only their ability to read the serve by using this late ball flight information.  In contrast, the volleyball athletes showed proficiency in utilizing both early and late cues from ball trajectory which were visible in both the front and back view videos.

Significance for Coaching

The participant-athletes’ superior performance in predicting ball flight based on the server’s body movements confirms again the profound implications of teaching players how to read.  With serve reception playing a critical role in winning volleyball matches coaches should be eager to incorporate ways to improve players’ serve-receive reading skills.

So how do we do this?

Serve Receive Actual Serves - Reading the Server

Serving and passing must occupy a significant portion of practice time.  Passers should be passing live serves – and lots of them.  Success in predicting ball flight in volleyball comes in part from the twin abilities to recognize cues in the server’s behavior and then link those cues to results.  When coaches toss balls to players or chip balls in from the sideline, players are robbed of the cues they need to learn from actual servers and consequently are deprived of valuable opportunities to link cues with results.   Only through receiving served balls from real servers do players have an opportunity to identify and interpret the kinematic cues of real servers and develop the motor experience that is essential to predicting the flight of served volleyballs.

But we can’t just set up serving and passing games.  Like all training, serve receive practice should be accompanied by effective feedback.  We should coach players what cues to look for, ask them what they see, and guide them to understand the connection between what they see and how the ball reacts.  Practice with feedback is the only principled basis for teaching the skill of reading.

Importance of Early Ball Flight - Reading the Ball

In addition to planning lots of serving and passing games coaches must emphasize the value of early preparation in serve receive.  The instant research suggests that athletes’ advanced reading abilities are tied to their unique skills in reading both kinematic cues and the initial phase of ball trajectory.  In other words, athletes draw heavily from what is happening on the other side of the net.  Emphasizing early visual preparation teaches athletes that much of their success in service reception can be determined long before their “technique” comes into play.

NOTES

[1]   Urgesi, C., Savonitto, M. M., Fabbro, F., & Aglioti, S. M. (2012). Long- and short-term plastic modeling of action prediction abilities in volleyball.  Psychological Research, 76:542-560.

The Home Court Advantage in Volleyball: Fact, Fiction and Mystery

Playing and Coaching at Home

Everyone knows there are advantages to playing at home.  You get to sleep in your own bed, eat your own food, and you don't have to pack a bag.  No airports, airplanes or bus rides.  When you arrive at the gym you're in familiar surroundings.  You know the locker room, the gym, the lighting and the floor.  You know the space around the court and the height of the ceiling.  Friends and family watch and support you.  You're as comfortable as you can be before a match.

Life is good. . . .  

The Home Advantage in Sports

But wait, it gets even better.  If there are advantages to playing at home there's also a home court advantage.    Depending on who you listen to home teams win 52% of all baseball games, 58% of football games and 66% of basketball games.[1]  Whatever the reasons (nobody seems to know why) home teams win more often than visitors[2].  Could there be a home court advantage in volleyball too?  Some researchers say yes. 

Home Advantage in Volleyball

In the first research study of its kind researchers in Portugal examined whether there is a home court advantage in volleyball by analyzing 275 volleyball games played in the 2005 Men's Senior World League.  They concluded that home teams in volleyball have a greater probability of winning across all sets and have a greater advantage at the beginning and end of a match.  The study is published in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine.[3]

While there are many great benefits to playing and coaching at home, it's still not clear why home teams have more success.  Across sports the research is ambiguous and unfortunately the current study sheds little more light on the subject.  

While stopping short of offering "causes," the authors posit varied possible explanations for their findings including: (a) a perception of social support for the home team reduces stress and promotes performance; (b) home teams' greater familiarity with "situational variables" allow them to outperform opponents who need more time in a match to adjust; and (c) support and familiarity factors maximize home teams' advantages in the most critical points in a match (the 1st and 5th sets), justifying a higher probability of winning those sets.

The precise reasons for the home advantage, and whether it extends beyond the men's senior world league in volleyball, awaits further exploration.  Until then, players and coaches, enjoy those home matches and train to get better on the road.


NOTES

[1] Albert, J., Bennett, J. (2003)  Curve ball: Baseball, statistics and the role of chance in the game. New York: Copernicus Books.

[2]  For an interesting discussion of possible reasons I recommend Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim's new book, Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behnd How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won.

[3]  Marcelino, R., Mesquita, I., Palao, J., Sampaio, J. (2009).  Home advantage in high-level volleyball varies according to set number.  Journal of Sports Science and Medicine. 8, 352-356.