Our First Article! AVP Stats part 1.
Beach Volleyball season may be over but do you want more beach volleyball? You came to the right place! We view and tackle beach volleyball from an analytical point of view to find hidden interesting information through data.
This is our first article and today, we will look at 2021 Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) stats.
Due to COVID-19 and Tokyo Olympic, we had a very short season in 2021 but that doesn’t mean we had an unexciting season. In fact, I would say it was a very memorable year.
The legends Jake Gibb and Phil Dalhausser are now retired after leading the US beach volleyball for many years. Their last match was at Chicago Open and it was a very emotional moment and an honor to see the last match, hugs after the last point, and a great interview afterward.
On the other hand, it was a year of new stars. The TKN, Taryn Kloth and Kristin Nuss, won their first AVP tournament together in Atlanta. You may say it’s because the A team didn’t play in Atlanta. Yes that’s true and the A team beat the young LSU team multiple times in the rest of the season, but they played a 40–38 set against them in Chicago. It is no doubt this young team will be (if not already) a threat to many teams including the A team. Aside from the TKN, many recent graduates and/or current NCAA players played this year including 3 Olympians, Kelly Claes, Sarah Sponcil, and Tina Graudina. Beach Volleyball is still a relatively new sport and it’s gaining popularity very rapidly.
On the men’s side, we have multiple youngsters too. Miles Partain/Paul Lotman and Billy Allen/Andy Benesh played amazing and they had many upsets throughout the year. Even though there are no men’s Beach Volleyball in NCAA, new talents are coming and with Jake and Phil retiring, the spots to represent the US in Paris are definitely up for a grab for anyone.
Well, I can keep talking about players but let’s talk about data! This week, we will start with AVP stats. These stats only include Winners and Contenders brackets and qualifiers are excluded. I also only included players who played at least 6 matches (because if you BBQ’ed every tournament, you would still play 6 matches.) Okay, let's dig in.
There are 61 female and 59 male players who played in at least one main draw this year and let’s see who played the most matches.
Is it a surprise that the TKN and the team Slaes are the top 2 teams on the women’s side? Right behind them is another legend Liliane Maestrini. The A team finished the season undefeated this year and hence they are not on this list but you can see that every player on the list is a solid player and it’s because they may have gone to the contender's bracket once or twice but they fought hard and always came back.
On the men’s side, we don’t have a team as dominant as the A team and it shows. The top 2 teams are the only teams that won this year. In fact, neither of them won a tournament undefeated. That tells you how competitive it is and any one of them on the list can win the next tournament.
Now, let’s look at one more stat this week. Unarguably, one of the most exciting parts of volleyball is kills. You need to get kills to win and therefore, it’s often a great indicator of good teams/players. Below is a scatter plot of Sets Played vs Kills. Blue and orange dots indicate female and male players respectively.
It appears that there are no significant differences between women and men. Let’s fit a linear regression model.
Errors are slightly bigger for players with more sets played, however, it looks like that the majority of players follow the line.
Mean Absolute Error (MAE) is on average, how off predictions are and it is ~16 for this model. It seems that it is not as simple as the more you play the more kills you get. It makes sense as one player typically gets more opportunities to hit than their partner even they played the same number of sets.
Let’s see where the top players are placed in the plot. Players who played in one of the championship matches are labeled in the plot below.
Let’s look at Casey Patterson/Chase Budinger. Even though they played the exact same matches, Casey got 106 more kills than his partner Chase. It is very interesting that most of the teams have one with many more kills than their partner except for Tri and Trevor Crabb.
However, does it meat that Chase is a much better attacker than Casey? Not necessarily. Let’s take a look at attacks vs kills? It shows who are more efficient at scoring.
I fitted another line and below is the result.
It is no surprise that every player that won is above or right on the line. When both players hit well, it definitely makes it difficult to beat them. Maestrini, Liliane, Sarah Sponcil, and Emily Day are below the fitted line and it is no coincidence that they didn’t have a victory and that may be the key for them to get one more win for the gold.
Hope you enjoyed our first article! We will publish one article about volleyball from the data point of view every week.
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Until next week, volley on.
