Book Review: Moneyball

I just finished reading the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. While it is very much about professional baseball, there are lessons that any coach for any sport can learn. I really don't like baseball at all, but I really enjoyed this book. It is one of my favorite books I have read in quite a while.

It is written in a manner that is reminiscent of documentaries. It begins with the early life of Billy Beane as a high school baseball player who pro scouts drooled over. According to conventional wisdom he had all the tools. Psychologically, he wasn't equipped to be a successful professional athlete. He ended his playing career to work for the organization as a scout.

The bulk of the book is about Beane's work as the general manager (and his assistant, Paul DePodesta) of the Oakland Athletics, one of the "poorest" professional baseball franchises. They didn't have the money to compete with the "richer" teams for free agents, and often had a very tight budget for players, but they were able to put together a competitive team out of draft picks, trades, and the castoffs from other teams. The island of misfit toys was alluded to in this regard. The author often asked Oakland staff what was wrong with a particular player when he would see the value of the player, but wanted to know how he landed there.

Beane and DePodesta used statistical theory and analytics to get to the heart of what stats were true indicators/predictors of team success and what players are undervalued based on what they are good at versus conventional baseball wisdom. They used this knowledge to make personnel decisions and to craft a team strategy within games. Conventional wisdom valued batting average, but they valued on base percentage. Conventional wisdom valued runners who could steal bases, but they favored advancing runners through subsequent batters. Other teams would leave players in minor league ball because they didn't look right, but they would see what the objective stats suggested they were capable of accomplishing.

As I was reading, I thought about sport psychology. While it is primarily about the use of stats and analytics, there is a lot of indirect discussion of psychology. Beane's own failures as a player informed his decisions as a general manager, and in some cases made him more successful. Their team approach encouraged players that others didn't believe in. One particular quote speaking about individual player psychology,

“If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.”

Every player we coach is going to be a little different upstairs. The systems we employ will take care of a lot of situations and players, but there will always be individuals that need their own brand of encouragement and motivation.

The big lessons, however, are in the statistics and analytics discussion. Beane and DePodesta based their work largely on the contributions of Bill James. They determined what stats correlated with team success. I have seen college volleyball stats and which ones correlate with winning percentage (hitting efficiency and serve receive errors had the strongest correlation), but the last time I looked at that data was over ten years ago. In the spirit of always evaluating what we do, I need to look into this more, and with more recent data to see if and how things have evolved. There is also a lot of talk in the book about how James (and others) would try to glean more information from the stats that were available. Reading this book has renewed my desire to look into what stats correlate with team success. I'm also thinking about looking at the typical stats and trying to see what other ways we can look at volleyball stats that will give us similarly important, or even more important information. Ideally we can find a simple statistical measure of quality play and success. There is possibly some simple piece of information that a coach with a pen and paper can collect easily that will give a good idea of performance that can inform decisions in practice and matches.

I think Moneyball is a great read, and even though it is about baseball, it can give some great food for thought for any coach in any sport. I will approach player psychology and motivation in a different frame of mind in the future because of it. I know I'm going to spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to improve the statistical measures I use and value. I enjoyed the movie, but the book made me want to put a lot of work and effort into improving these areas of my coaching and as a student of the game. I highly recommend this book, and I will revisit/reread it in the future.

Focus on the Right Things

Make each day your masterpiece. You have control over that. - John Wooden

I recently came across this blog post by John Forman. In it is the notion that the goal of defense is to score points. This is a shift in focus from the expected idea that defense is about preventing the opponent from scoring points. I think the distinction is important.

In Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success, legendary basketball coach John Wooden says that when he taught rebounding, he told his players to get in between your man and the ball, and to go and get it. The traditional way to teach rebounding is to get between your man and the ball and "box them out". The traditional method is about preventing your opponent from doing what they want. It is about being an obstacle. It is passive. The goal is that your opponent doesn't get the ball. Coach Wooden's method is active. You are actively trying to get the ball. Getting the rebound is the goal. Rather than being an obstacle to your opponent, you are competing with them for the same goal.

The conventional wisdom for defense is much like that for rebounding in basketball. You are an obstacle to your opponent, not a competitor. It is passive. You are reacting to what your opponent is doing rather than actively trying to score a point. Your goal is for your opponent to not score a point. If you manage to get the dig only to give the ball back on a free ball, was that successful defense, or was it just delaying your opponent's success? Sure you might get a dig, but the end result of the rally might be the same as if you didn't get the dig.

If we make our goal to score points, we should be actively trying to score on the block. We should be actively trying to dig to a spot on the court where the setter can put our hitters in the best place to score. We are thinking about transitioning from our base defensive position to a place where we are available to make a hitting approach. One of the "little things" I see great players do is to transition from passing the serve, attempting a block, or digging to a hitting approach. Great middles make a hitting approach even when they are almost definitely not going to be set.

The John Forman blog post specifically mentions libero and back row outside hitter positioning on the court when talking about the goal of scoring points on defense. Libero/outside hitter position may be a personnel decision more than a defensive focus decision if our outsides don't hit in the back row. If this is the case, still keep the defensive focus in mind. Train your players (and yourself) to think about scoring points rather than preventing scoring.

Whatever the circumstances, the basic thought processes should be kept in mind. Focus on active goals rather than passive ones. A dig isn't a point your opponent didn't score, it is an opportunity for your team to score. Talk about digs in this context. Track digs in this way and track how much your team scores per dig. Kills per dig would be a more useful piece of information than just total digs per match. Digs per match is almost meaningless without that context. Look to other areas of the game and practice with this same active vs passive approach. Set active goals and talk about doing rather than preventing. Talk about what you have control over and what you can actively do, and make that the focus for improvement. That would be a masterpiece.

Learn the Game By Playing the Game

This question and answer with Golden State Warriors assistant coach Alvin Gentry was just published on ESPN.com. While it is largely about Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors current NBA season and accomplishments, there are a couple gems in there for coaches (and players).

When I was a little shortie, seventh grade, when you were one of my coaches at the Denver Nuggets Summer Basketball Camp, you and Larry Brown taught me something about basketball that I still carry with me to this day. You all had the philosophy that you really only get better at basketball by actually playing basketball. You and Coach Brown were like, 'Just keep playing. Run up and down the court, scrimmage, have some fun, just play. You will learn.'

This comment by the interviewer to the coach leads off the article. There is a tendency in coaches to practice the fundamental skills in isolated blocks. Passing without serves or sets. Hitting without passes. Digging without playing out the rest of the rally. There is some value in this, but there is more value putting those fundamentals in the context of the game. The game is random. It isn't a sanitized stripped down event where everything works perfectly. Even when first learning the skills, put them through the skills in the ugly mess of random that is the game. We can guide that random through engineering the specifics of the game and giving targeted feedback on the skills we are teaching at the time.

I think the way you get better at basketball is by playing 5-on-5. Obviously, the work on fundamentals is important, to work on your skills, but to become a great basketball player, all of the great basketball players that I know, they love playing and they play a lot and they play 5-on-5 basketball. You can drill and you can get better with your fundamentals, but if you are going to become a really good basketball player, you are going to have to love the game and just play.

 This should be obvious. For our players to become great they need to love to play. They need to play 6 on 6. They need to play 6 on 6 a lot. A challenge for volleyball coaches and players is access to court time. Many of the facilities we use for practice and competition are not full time volleyball facilities. A basketball player will be a lot more likely to have access to a ball and hoop. This puts a lot of responsibility on the volleyball coach to give our players the most opportunities to play the game.

That's what I tell all of the young players I coach: For every hour you spend working on your game, spend three hours playing the game. That's how you figure out angles, you figure out cuts, that's the way to figure all of those things out because that's the way the game is played. And that's the only way you get better, I think.

 This is an interesting guideline. Of the teams I have been associated with, the better teams spent less time on the skills in isolation and more on 6 on 6 games. The other teams seemed to spend more time on the skills in isolation and less on 6 on 6 games. The better ones were close to that 3:1 game:skills ratio. The others were closer to the flip side of that, 1:3 games:skills. The best team I've been associated with that spent most of that time in 6 on 6 games also spent more time during those 6 on 6 games doing things to reduce the inevitable downtime that comes with an actual "by the book" organized game.

Holy Cows of Volleyball - Ball Control

When I really started to learn volleyball from college coaches, some with international experience, I soon realized that much of what I was taught on my high school team was outdated and often counterproductive. The new concepts were based on principles of motor learning and focused on improving more in the skills that matter most. It's a very scientific and empirical approach to the game and coaching. What I learned in high school was probably what the coach learned as a high school player. I like to describe it as a holy cow. The high school coach learned it from her coach, who probably learned it from her coach. It wasn't a study of the game that resulted in the drills and philosophies. It was tradition. It was a holy cow. And no one wants to kill the holy cow.

After learning from and associating with exceptional coaches, I became part of another program that was superficially similar. It had a lot of the trappings of the way I learned the game, but it did a lot of things that were not empirically derived. One of the concepts that puzzled me was the concept of ball control. There was a significant amount of practice time invested in these Fake Fundamental(s). I think that's why this recent blog post by John Kessel really resonated with me. It was more of what I learned, and laid out some of why ball control made me scratch my head. It was validation.

Ball control involves a lot of pairs of players facing each other and passing or setting the ball back and forth. It is using a skill of the game, but it is not being used in a game like situation. There are almost no situations in competition where a ball will travel straight to a passer who then passes it straight back along that path. It might happen when a server behind zone 1, or between 1 and 6 serves to a passer in zone 1 and the setter's base setting position is along that service flight path. It rarely happens. Much more often the passer will have to pass the ball at an angle to the setter. All of that time spent on ball control will only have a little transfer to competition in probably less than 5% of serves.

Marv Dunphy said, "the best passing drills are pass, set, hit." For one, ball control drills don't include the setting or the hitting (or the passing and the hitting if they are setting back and forth). Another thing is that ball control drills introduce the ball to the drill in that less than 5% situation. Serving at passers who have to pass to a setting target is going to be much more useful to passers.

I'm sure proponents of ball control drills will talk about how it gives new players a high volume of touches. It gives them a lot of opportunities to practice the skill and learn it. A pair of players performing 100 passes will get 50 touches each. Of course the problem is the skill won't transfer well to competition. If the high volume of touches are important, the players will be better served working in groups of three and passing to the player to the right. That will better replicate what is going to happen in competition than pairs passing straight in front with no angle. Three passers passing to the right will be closer to what happens around half the time in competition. With the way newer players will likely shift from their starting position, this is going to give the passer a random, variable passing angle. The hypothetical 100 passes will still give each passer about 33 touches. It isn't as many touches as with pairs, but the value to the player will be greater.

It's time to put ball control down. Let's kill the holy cow and start practicing more effectively. Teach passing within the context of the game and replicating game like situations, and let's get away from the sanitized, nearly useless passing back and forth between a partner you are facing.

Game Theory and Volleyball

I just saw this write up about John Nash at Five Thirty Eight, and I'm still trying to formulate my thoughts on game theory as it applies to volleyball. I saw A Beautiful Mind, but I never really took that much time looking into game theory. In some small way, it is part of my thought process as I think about offensive and defensive strategies. I have looked a little at set distribution in the past here and here. I like my setters to spread the hitting opportunities around. I especially like this when it is clear that one particular player is going to get most of the points on offense.

In the Five Thirty Eight article there is the specific mention of pass/run decisions in football, and penalty kick direction in the other football. For volleyball there are a few decisions that can be made on offense, and there are two different overarching conditions that govern what decisions can be made. There is the condition of a perfect pass where all offensive options are possible, and the condition where the team is out of system. Even with those two conditions it isn't a simple binary one or the other. There is a continuum of perfect pass with all available hitters an option to a bad pass where there might only be one possible hitting option available.

In the perfect pass, in system situation, there can be 4 hitting options (more if there isn't a libero on our side of the net, or if the setter is on the front row). A first tempo hitting option to the middle should force the opposing middle to make a decision to block the middle, or to block one of the other three available hitters, but it should be impossible to attempt to block both the middle and another hitter. This is an ideal situation where the middle blocker must decide between 4 hitting options. With a front row setter and an opposite hitting from the back row, a wing blocker faces a similar decision whether to attempt to block the setter, or attempting to block the opposite. Here good setting distribution (if I'm getting this right, this is Nash Equilibrium) gives the offense a huge advantage.

Taking it down to the most simple out of system situation where the middle is not a hitting option, there are still three hitting options. The best situation for the offense is three hitters. With Nash Equilibrium neither team has an inherent advantage. There are three hitters and three blockers and the middle doesn't have the same decision of blocking the first tempo or the second tempo. The middle might even be able to see where the set is going and not have to make any decision at all. In this situation it is only a matter of which side executes the skills of the game better, the hitter or the blocker. In many of these situations there is often an obvious setting decision that will be made because of where the setter must be to set and the direction the setter is moving. At this point I don't think there is any possibility for equilibrium.  There are no decisions.

The take home message from this is to train our teams to a) extend the area of the court that the setter can set a first tempo set, and b) give the setters opportunities to set away from the obvious out of system hitters. Extending the area for first tempo hits keeps the defense in a position where the middle has to make a decision, and our team still has the four hitting options. Setting to the non obvious hitters keeps the game in a place where the defense still must make decisions. The offense is always going to be making the first decision. Extending first tempo offense and forcing the defense to make decisions when they aren't expecting to will keep the game in a place where there can be an equilibrium strategy, and keep the probability of success in our favor. Beyond that I have to spend more time looking into game theory as it applies to volleyball.

Trying To Unlearn Bad Habits

Something that frustrates coaches in any sport is trying to fix some problem with a players form or mechanics. Trying to get rid of a goofy foot hitting approach is one that a lot of volleyball coaches might be familiar with. On a college team I worked with, I once took a player aside to try to accomplish this very task. On the surface it is a fairly simple task. It's a matter of getting the player to start his or her approach with the other foot, and then use the same footwork, just reversed. On a four step approach the right handed hitter goes from left-right-left-right to right-left-right-left. That gives the player a better hitting posture, and the extra torque means a harder hit. There is no downside. But then you actually try to accomplish this task.

This is exactly what I had in mind when I watched this video.
Smarter Every Day is a Youtube channel by Destin, an actual rocket scientist. He talks about the science of how a lot of things we might experience happen. He does some hands on experiments, and it is a lot of fun. In this particular video he has a backwards bicycle. When you turn the handle bars to the right, the wheel turns to the left. Superficially learning to ride this bike is the exact same problem as fixing a goofy foot approach. In the video, Destin took 8 months to learn to ride this bike,  or to unlearn how to ride a normal bike. Interestingly, when he got back on a standard bike he had similar problems to first learning to ride the backwards bike. He was able to figure it out much more quickly, but he still had a difficult time trading one set of motor programs for another. Fortunately for the volleyball coach, balancing a bike is a vastly more complex motor skill than a hitting approach. Still the constant reps thinking through the proper application of the skill will get you to establishing the motor program for a proper hitting approach. Once the motor program is established, the proper hitting approach will override the goofy foot one.

The other thing I took away from this is how his young son was able to unlearn in 2 weeks instead of 8 months. Coaches of younger players will have a much easier time teaching the proper performance of volleyball skills. Fixing mechanics problems at an early stage is going to be orders of magnitude easier than fixing them in an adult athlete. Regardless, both athletes are going to need a lot of reps.

Volleyball Basics - Outside Hitters

Outside hitters are all around players. They pass in serve receive, hit and block on the wings (primarily in zone 4) in the front row, and hit and play defense in the back row. Outside hitters are often the outlet, or last resort option on offense. One of the teams outside hitters often gets the most sets of all hitters.

Outside hitters hit and block in zone 4 on the front row. They usually hit and play defense in zone 6 on the back row. Playing defense in zone 6 puts the outside hitter in a good position to transition from playing defense to hitting. When the libero is in zone 6 and the outside is in zone 5, this transition is a little more difficult. Not only does the outside hitter have to move into the proper position laterally to make an approach in the middle of the court, but the base defense position in zone 5 is often closer to the attack line. That will hinder the outside hitter's ability to make a full approach when attempting a back row attack. a further complication is that the libero and outside hitter could cross each others' path during transition and come in contact with each other.

Like the libero, passing in serve receive and in defense are primary skills. Outside hitters frequently will receive the serve and the set as well in the same rally. Some outsides tend to hit at a higher efficiency when they received the serve. Others do not. 

Also important is hitting ability. Outsides often get the most sets of all front row hitters. Especially when the setter is out of position and has few or only one setting option, the outside hitter will see a lot of situations hitting against a double block. The outside hitter should be able to hit reasonably well when the set is coming from all over the court. The ability to see the block and hit a variety of shots is desirable.

When blocking the outside hitter will block the opposing opposite and setter. This gets tricky with front row setters who like to attack on the second touch and opposites who hit from zone 1. In this situation the outside hitter is covering two potential attackers and has to be able to make a quick decision as to who is the blocking priority.

See also:

Zones of the Court

Volleyball Basics are intended to present some of the fundamental volleyball knowledge that everyone serious about the sport should know.