Modeling Skill Importance in Volleyball

• Activity Number: 1
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 3, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports
• Author(s): Gilbert W. Fellingham*+
• Companies: Brigham Young University
• Keywords: Bayesian models ; logistic models ; Bernoulli likelihood

Abstract

Volleyball, like baseball, offers a rich environment for data collection. In the 1960's volleyball coaches began to collect information on every touch of the ball made by team members. Such data are gathered now by virtually every university and national level team. In this talk, we will review work done using data of this type to show differences in the importance of various skills between women's (Florence, et al, 2008 and Miskin, et al, 2010) and men's (Fellingham and Reese, 2003, and Montague, et al, 2013) volleyball teams. We will also demonstrate how such data may be used to rate the importance of an individual player, a player's position, and different line-ups. The presence of team chemistry (better performance by a collection of players than the strength of the individual players would suggest) will be shown (Fellingham, et al, 2013).