Stats for Spikes-Serve Effectiveness

Service errors has become a heated topic when whether to  too grip-it and rip-it in our service games, especially in the men’s game. Girls, women’s coaches and coaches of beginning players have always complained about the service error and have questioned the grip-it-and-rip-it philosophy. Whereas boy’s and men’s  coaches maintain that is it a different game from the girl’s, women’s, and beginner’s game, and those who complain  just don't understand that an easy serve almost always end up an easy serve receive point for the receiving team.

This discussion came back today in one of the postings on VCT. I offhandedly gave a pseudo statistical comparison. I thought about it for a while and came up with a calculated metric that coaches can use to evaluate their team’s service game rather than relying on errors and aces.

I'm pretty sure this is not a universally original idea but it is original for me. I do think this might be an effective metric for teams to track so that they could see where their service game stacks statistically.

The idea is simple, it just uses the points scored statistic, which is ubiquitous. But we would also need to count those points that weren’t scored: the null result from a serve.

First,  we need to count the negative point scoring on our serve

•        Opponents first ball serve receive points
•       Our service error points given to the opponent.

Second, we count the positive point scoring on our serve.

•        Our first ball transition attack points after the opponent’ serve receive attempt.
•        Opponent’s serve receive attacking error points that we gain.
•       This element is where it gets a little amorphous. We need to  count the negative points avoided because the opponent was not able to score on the first ball serve receive attempt. It could be thought of as a neutral play because the opponent did not score off of the serve receive. Since the argument is that a less aggressive serves mean a sure serve receive point for the opponent, we should be credited with a positive because the serve played an decisive  role in affecting the serve receive attack. It should be a plus for us because we avoided losing a sure point regardless of who won the point because of the serve. (These points can be weighted as being less than a full point if necessary.)

We can use simple percentages with the sum of the negative points, plus the positive points, plus the neutral points as the denominator. They should sum up to all the serves we executed.

We can use something similar to the kill percentage formula by putting our positive points we gained minus the negative points we gave to the opponent as the numerator. If the percentage is low or if it is negative, we know our service game is not effective. If it is overwhelming positive, then we know that our service game is effective.

Or we can just look at the positive point percentage versus the negative point percentage.

We might call it the service effectiveness percentage. Coaches can calculate this using their team’s historical statistics in this regard, if they have the data for the neutral points, and assess their service  effective for their season and/or for each game or match. Indeed, you can use this for the general service effectiveness of the team, it doesn’t have to be just about grip-it-and-rip-it.  

Just thinking out loud.