r/volleyball

Just looking for general tips, ideally on form and technique.

On a recent trip to Tokyo, my daughters and I played 4v4 ビーチボール (beachball not beach volleyball) at an Open Gym in Koto City.

Beachball is a volleyball variant developed in Japan in 1977 as a less intimidating version of volleyball. It's played with custom made beach balls which are well balanced, bouncy, and strong. The game is 4v4 and played on an indoor doubles badminton court (smaller than a beach volleyball court) with a 1.8m/5'11" net.

Last time I was in Tokyo, a beachball player explained all the rules to my daughter and I so when we went to this open gym, we knew most of the rules. As with many open gyms, the players were a bit wary of us at first, considering we didn't speak Japanese, but they warmed up to us quickly when they realized we knew all the etiquette around shoes (courts are considered indoors so you only wear indoor shoes or socks on courts, no outside shoes) and we clearly understood the basics of volleyball.

For warmup, we played 2v2 then 4v4. Since we had 9 players, the 4v4 game was played with the player who made the last mistake being subbed out. There were many polite arguments about how we should be subbing out but as foreign visitors and my daughters being kids, they often allowed us to stay, taking the blame for our mistakes.

The players were diverse: A younger 20 something to some older players in their 50s. One player had only played 3 games before another had been playing for 30 years. One interesting thing about all Japanese open gyms is that a player who is sitting out refs with a scoreboard and electronic whistle and is expected to actively call nets and other violations. I haven't seen this in open gyms where I live.

Because of the low net height, I got to block! Turns out even if I can get over the net, I suck at blocking. I got tooled multiple times and had the ball dribble down on my side. To be fair, beachball has a rule that you cannot contact the ball with any of your body parts crossing the plane of the net so you have to be more conscious when blocking. Because of the low net, fat ball, and no breaking the plane rule, some of the jousts were really cool with both players standing there, pushing the ball, trying to make the ball go to their opponent's side.

It was a blast smashing downballs as slow dropping sets let me read the defense and choose my targets. Coach's half arm swing hits worked brilliantly with that ball and the ball can be hit really hard and fast but it slows down at the end of flight. My daughters, who have not played much with beach balls or badminton birdies, had a harder time adjusting to the suddenly slow down of the ball but I adapted quickly.

Serves were wild. Spin serves dominate though one guy demonstrated float serves which also gave me fits. Sadly, the best players were all holding back to make the game more fun but I saw some practice serves that moved 3-4 feet horizontally left and right and some top spin serves that dropped like they were rocket propelled.

Overlap rules are simplified with 2 players having to be left of the mid-line of the court and 2 players to the right but front back overlap is the same as volleyball. Serves must occur behind the service line and serve receivers must start behind their service line which is the badminton service line. Serve Receive formation is roughly a rotated rectangle. The general strategy was to have 3 players blocking at the net and only 1 player playing back row defense, though, watching higher level play on YouTube, it looks like they have 2 blockers and 2 defenders. Middle blocker is the setter, the other two blockers are generally the hitters but the back row defender can also attack without restriction.

The game is a blast with the beach ball generally being slower and lighter (one handed passes are easy) and thus more forgiving, leading to some crazy fun plays, but expert players can generate some insane offense and serves.

I would love for beachball to take off in other countries, especially for beginners, as it's just easier to play than volleyball. It's kind of like pickleball versus tennis. Players would need a badminton court, a modified net that allows it to be raised higher, and beach balls (which are super cheap: The high end ball is under $4.00 USD.)

After we finished playing, we learned that almost half the players spoke quite good English and we chatted about how we found the game, how long we had played volleyball, and chatted about beachball tournaments. During the game, I don't think we realized how much English everyone spoke, so we mostly used pointing and simple words like "setter" and "hitter" and "defense" and a lot of pointing but even that worked out well.

Overall, playing beachball was one of the highlights of our trip to Tokyo. We had only meant to play for an hour and we stayed for all 3 hours. The other players were very kind and welcoming and I was glad to play something so fun and uniquely Japanese while being able to tap into our love of volleyball.

EDIT: Sorry I couldn't film our gameplay! Filming was prohibited at the Sports Center. Here's some random YouTube footage of the game played at high level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uN8TQ6VwvQ

Hey gang, I want to propose the club I am coaching a sponsoring framework so we could get more funds for coaches, team shirts, merch etc.

I am thinking of using these stand-ups (in the image) for home game days with the publicity of the sponsor. I just don’t know how much to charge.

The reality in our country is that volleyball is a growing sport and specifically in our region the league isn’t very long so we don’t have much games happening.
Next year will have at least 3 teams competing with total of games around 60 (I am ball-parking 20 games per team) - so if we assume that half of those games would be at home we’re looking at 30 games at home.

Our audience isn’t huge, between 10-15 people up to 40-50 people per game.

How much should I charge per season per sponsor??

Okay so I'm 51🔄 (F) & a sophomore in high school. I've been playing volleyball since 7th grade, & yet I STILL can't overhand serve. I'm able to serve underhand perfectly fine, but when it comes to overhand, it barely even touches the net. My mom says that I need to work on my upper body strength to build muscle, which I really do, but I have like a MAJOR issue with that.

I naturally have the "model" or "athletic" build (inverted triangle) & I HATE it because I love wearing tighter clothing. To try and appear more feminine than my body makes me look, I've tried everything to keep my shoulders slim while working the lower half of my body, including NOT working out my arms. It's not like I'm overweight at all either, I'm 5'1 & weigh 137lbs & wear a size small in adult size, so its literally just my shoulders being the problem.

What sucks worse is that recently, I've been happy with my appearance because of how small my shoulders have gotten. I don't feel embarrassed to wear spaghetti straps or tanktops anymore, but now I'm gonna have to loose that security JUST so I can serve overhand... I can't do this brooo I'd rather serve underhand forever its allowed for jv & hs varsity anyway 💔

Not just that but it's so embarrassing trying to learn your overhand in a gym full of girls who know how to do it perfectly 😭 like I feel so embarrassed being there trying to practice when its not going over at ALL & the girls who play at my school are honestly really judging, so any mistake & they'll laugh or stay silent. I would practice outside but the daily average rn is 115°F & BEYOND. So yeah thats not happening anytime soon. I've also played outside of my school with other girls, I get the SAME reaction... it sucks.

(This is my first reddit post so maybe this was supposed to go to a different group but idk)

Don't know how many volleyball fans are in this sub, but I wanted to share an analysis I've been working on!

The question: in Major League Volleyball (MLV, or formerly PVF), given the quality of the preceding pass, how often does the attacking team actually get to attack, and how often does that attack end in a kill?

The data and the pipeline: the raw play-by-play data (via the pyvolleydata package) is action+outcome graded (VolleyStation notation, single letter codes for contact types and single symbol codes for contact evaluations). Reconstructing each contact sequence within each rally seemed easy; just track each contact and forward-fill each pass grade (within each rally) until the next pass or until the point ends, right? But it also required accounting for overpass kills (which don't have a preceding pass) and block recycles, where the ball stays alive off a block touch.

That last part ended up being quite the quirk of the data: for block recycles, the pass involved is rarely tagged in the data; it's just implicitly included in the block touch tag. This made tracking the passes off of blocks quite the annoying task (because how the hell do you validate your logic on something that doesn't explicitly exist in the data?). So my solution was to only track the blocks where the next touch was from the attacking team, not the blocking team - if the next touch after the block was from the attacking team, then there inherently was a block recycle pass.

However, one fact that made this worth mentioning was that, based on the quality grade of the block touch, the ball would go back to the attacking team at varying rates:

• Actual block recycle grade (!): ~99.8% of the time, the attacking team gets the next touch (this is the only grade that VolleyStation's public criteria says block recycles exist)
• Hard-contact grade (+): ~99% of the time, it's the blocking team's recovery (assumed to be hard contact; VolleyStation doesn't have public criteria for this grade)
• Soft-contact grade (-): split almost evenly, ~50% of the time is goes back to the attacking team, and vice versa

This made reporting our first number (probability of an attack happening, given the pass quality) unreliable for the hard and soft contact block grades based on my attacking team conditional logic: the denominator wouldn't end up being "block recycle passes that go to attacking team", it would be "general blocks that may go to the defending team". As such, I only calculated the attack rate for the confirmed block-recycle grade, and did the kill rate (which is calculated from passes that attacks happen) for all three.

The results (full tables in my writeup):

• Bad serve receives still get attacked ~92% of the time; bad digs only convert to an attack ~73% of the time - implying that the "transition between defense to offense" has a quantifiable penalty on setters/attackers in the face of bad passes.
• Kill rate spread from perfect -> bad pass: 18 points for serve receive (45.9% -> 27.9%), narrower and generally lower for digs (29.9% -> 22.5%).
• Confirmed the trend is statistically monotonic (not just "different") with a Cochran-Armitage test per pass type. Showed the trend is strongest for receives, weakest for freeballs.

Limitations: Obviously, MLV is a relatively new and small league; the data points across three seasons are magnitudes smaller than something like NCAA data. Additionally, I found and removed 9 rows of data corrupted by mid-rally stoppages (injuries or challenges, which messed with the logic of my pipeline), all video-confirmed (but I can't rule out similar issues elsewhere that I didn't detect).

Full writeup with more tables on Medium (or Substack if medium tries to paywall you)

Open to any and all feedback in the comments! Let me know if anything doesn't make sense and I'll do my best to explain everything!

They did so by being undefeated the whole tournament!! 9 3-0 wins! Impressive is an understatement.