How to Understand Volleyball Statistics

Volleyball game statistics are used by coaches to evaluate a player's and a team's strengths and weaknesses. The focus of team practices and workouts are based on these numbers. Statistics help coaches devise match strategies and determine player lineups. Understanding volleyball statistics requires an in depth knowledge of the rules and terms and practice with calculations.

Things You'll Need

  • Official volleyball rule book
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Instructions

    • 1

      Learn and understand the basic volleyball terms and symbols: attack attempts (ATT), kill (K), attack error (E), zero attack, assists (A), serve (S), service ace (SA), service error (SE), service reception (SR), reception error (RE), digs (D), ball handling errors (BHE), blocks (B), block solo (BS), block assist (BA), and blocking error (BE). During a match, totals will be kept for each one of these and used to calculate individual and team statistics.

    • 2

      Become familiar with the kinds of statistics kept in volleyball. There are six categories of statistics: attacks, setting, serving, passing, defense and blocks. In the attacks category are statistics for kills, errors, total attacks and hitting percentage. Statistics for assists and ball handling errors are in the setting category. Service aces and service attempts are in the serving category. In the passing category are statistics for reception errors and reception attempts. Digs statistics are in the defense category and in the blocks category are statistics for block solos, block assists and block errors.

    • 3

      Learn and understand how an individual's hitting percentage is calculated. For this statistic you will need to know the number of kills (K) a player has, the number of errors (E), and the player's total attacks (TA). The formula for hitting percentage is K - E / TA. For example, if a player has 10 kills, 6 errors and 20 attacks, the hitting percentage would be 10 - 6 / 20 or .200.

    • 4

      Practice calculating a player's blocks per set (B/S) statistic. To calculate this statistic, you will need an individual's total number of blocks solos (BS) and the total number of blocks assists (BA) and the number of sets the individual played. The formula is (total BS) + (total BA) / S. A team's B/S is calculated be adding the team's total BS and 1/2 the total BA then dividing by the number of sets played.

    • 5

      Learn how per set statistics for kills (K), assists (A), service aces (SA), and digs (D) are calculated. These are calculated by simply dividing the total for each one by the number of sets. For example the formula for kills per set (KS) is (total K) / S.

    • 6

      Learn how to calculate the points per set (PS) statistic. This is found by first adding together the total kills, total service aces, total block solos and 1/2 total block assists then dividing this sum by the total number of sets played.