Pre-season tournament: what are you really measuring?

Five short matches on a Saturday in August, and at five o'clock you know exactly one thing: whether you won. That is the most expensive way to use such a day. A pre-season tournament is the only moment in the year when variety in opponents is free — five teams in one afternoon instead of one per Saturday. Only those observations don't come out by themselves: you have to plan them in advance.

Why a tournament day measures more than three friendlies

Three friendlies give you three opponents, usually from the same region and often from the same division. A tournament gives you four or five in a single day, nearly always from different divisions: the team that plays a level higher, the side with that one server, the club still missing half its squad. That spread is what you need in August — you don't want to know how you do against one opponent, but where your system breaks down.

There is a second advantage coaches rarely work out: the number of observations. In a set to 25 both teams together play roughly forty-five rallies, and your team receives serve in about half of them. That is twenty to twenty-five side-out chances per set. A short set to 21 gives you about eighteen. Five matches of two short sets therefore come to around a hundred and eighty received serves in one day. A league Saturday of four sets brings you ninety to a hundred — against a single opponent. In volume, one tournament is two league Saturdays, with five times as much variety inside it.

Do watch the format: short sets to 21, sets to 25 with a time limit and pools of three or five teams all occur, and what is customary differs per organiser and per federation. Convert your measurement plan once to the format of your day. How to organise such a day and keep it running administratively is in planning a tournament; where the tournament fits in your year is in organising the volleyball season. This article is only about what you measure that day.

The measurement plan: five matches, five questions

The rule is simple and almost never followed: per match you test one thing. Not one thing five times, and not five things at once. Put in a different setter and a different reception formation in the same match and afterwards you won't know which of the two made the difference.

1. Match 1 — no experiment. Your first six, your normal system. This is your baseline; without that reference the four matches after it say nothing.
2. Match 2 — the system. The second setter, or the alternative system you have doubts about. Two full sets, even if the first set goes badly.
3. Match 3 — one position change. The outside hitter as opposite, the player stepping up from youth as second middle. Everything else identical to match 1.
4. Match 4 — the toughest serving. Choose the opponent you saw serving hardest in the first three matches, and put the reception you want to play in the league up against it.
5. Match 5 — the question that came up. Deliberately leave this one empty: what happened in the first four determines what you test here. Your only second chance of the day.

Write every test question down beforehand as one sentence with a criterion in it, not as a loose thought. Not "see how Lars does as setter", but: "test — Lars two sets as sole setter; criterion: does he use the middle attack at least five times per set". Without a criterion everyone votes on their own feeling afterwards. Actually recording that sentence with the match instead of keeping it in your head is described in setting up a friendly; what belongs to a tournament day is that you have the five sentences finished in the car that morning.

Move the starting rotation one place per set

If you start every set in the same rotation, you watch your team play in the same order all day. You only rotate when you win the rally on your own reception, and in a short set that is going against you that happens eight or nine times. You then pass through your sixth rotation once, somewhere around 6-9, and never in the closing phase.

The solution costs nothing: move the starting rotation one place per set. After six sets every rotation has been your opening rotation exactly once, and on a day with ten short sets you have four left over for the rotations you have doubts about. Take the toss into account too: choose to receive and you measure your starting rotation straight away in the side-out phase, choose to serve and you see it first in the serving phase. Alternate that across the day. This is explicitly about the rotational order of the six on court, not about your bench rotation — you agree that beforehand in the day plan.

One reception experiment per set

Reception gives you the most on a tournament day, because within a couple of hours you face four or five serving styles. Use that, but never switch halfway through a set: then your count is worthless. One experiment per set, in this order:

• Two passers versus three. The classic choice: libero plus one outside hitter, or the whole back row. Look not only at the number of errors, but at whether your middle attack still runs.
• The libero on the other side. The same formation, mirrored. The seam moves with it, and that is where most teams win or lose it.
• The setter hidden. Put him behind a hitter in reception so he comes out closer to position 2, and count how often that opens a gap the opponent serves into.
• The new player in. Save this for the match with the toughest server of the day — judging a new passer against a soft serve costs you the points in October anyway.

Score it with a three-point count instead of a feeling. Per received serve you note: 3 if everything is on (your setter has all his hitters available), 2 if only the outside attack is left, and 1 if no attack comes out of it or the ball is lost immediately. In a set of eighteen received serves you have eighteen numbers, and an average of eighteen observations is usable; one of six is not. Which formations exist and when you choose which is in reception formations.

The three numbers you can believe that day

On a tournament day almost every number is too small to mean anything. Three are not, and those three are worth putting someone on the bench to record.

1. Side-out per rotation. A hundred and eighty received serves divided by six rotations is thirty per rotation. That is enough to see differences, provided they are large: across thirty chances one extra won rally is more than three percentage points, so a rotation on 58 per cent and one on 62 are simply equal. A rotation sitting at 40 while your daily average is 60 is a signal. What side-out is exactly and how to read it per rotation is explained separately.

2. Serving pressure, not aces. Aces are too rare for one day; pressure isn't. Count each serve in three columns: pressure (a point, or the opponent can't set up their normal attack), neutral and error. A team serves eighteen to twenty times per set, spread over six servers: three per player per set, so thirty to forty across the whole day. That is by far the largest personal sample of your day. Four errors in thirty serves is an acceptable price for pressure; nine in thirty is a leak.

3. Error load per set played. Here is the trap of a tournament day: playing time is unevenly spread, so absolute numbers lie. Always divide by the number of sets played. Player A makes eight errors in nine sets: 0.9 per set. Player B makes seven in four sets: 1.8 per set. On the sheet A looks the sloppier; per set B is twice as expensive. What an expensive and a cheap error are, and how to have the conversation about it, is in error load per player.

If you record the matches in Koach, the errors per player are in there automatically and you only have to divide by the number of sets played. The serving pressure and the reception count you do with pen and paper on the bench — no app needed for that, but you do need a volunteer who stays seated all day.

The three numbers that mean nothing that day

Just as important is what you must not say that evening, however tempting it is.

• The tournament standings. You played teams from different divisions, in short sets, with a scoring system the organiser invented. A serving run of five points is a quarter of a set to 21; in a set to 25 the better team has time to come back. Short sets reward a good start, not the better side. And if the standings go on set ratio, one 21-8 against the weakest team weighs more than two narrow losses to the strongest.
• The hitting percentage. Work it out for a player who hit twelve balls that day: four kills is 33 per cent, five is 42 per cent. One ball moves the figure by nine points. A number in which one observation carries that much weight says nothing about a player. What the figure is worth across a whole season is in hitting percentage; on a tournament day you leave it alone.
• "Who was the best?" Ask three people on the sideline and you get three names, nearly always from the last match: a day is remembered from the end backwards. So note one observation per set instead of one verdict afterwards — then at five o'clock you have a list of ten observations rather than one memory.

New players and step-ups: the pairing matrix

In August there are nearly always new faces in the hall: someone stepping up from the youth, someone from another club, a player coming back after two years. The question you want answered that day isn't "is he any good" — you can see that at practice too. The question is who he works with: next to which passer, with which setter, in which blocking pair.

Make a matrix of that on paper in the morning. Two new players and two setters are four combinations. If you also want to see each new passer for one set next to the libero and one set next to the other outside hitter, it is eight. Eight boxes, and you cross them off as you see them. At the end of the day you immediately see which box stayed empty — that is the combination you go into the first league match blind.

The short sets make that possible. Ten short sets are sixty player-sets: ten times six positions. With a squad of twelve that is five sets per player. A league Saturday of four sets gives you twenty-four, and in practice those go to seven or eight people. A pre-season tournament is therefore the only day on which your whole squad gets real match minutes without it costing you anything.

What the day tells you about your fitness

After a summer with little volleyball a tournament is the first real load peak, and that makes it a usable fitness measurement — provided you measure and don't just look. Looking doesn't work: by four o'clock everyone looks tired. So compare three counts from matches 1 and 2 with the same counts from matches 4 and 5:

• Serving errors per set. If they double in matches 4 and 5, that isn't about technique but about fatigue.
• Balls given up per set. Balls nobody went for: the most honest fatigue figure there is, and trackable with one tally mark per ball.
• Jump volume. How many jump serves quietly turn into standing floats in match 5, and does your middle stay on the floor for the third ball where she was still jumping that morning?

Take one precaution seriously with this. Five matches in one afternoon can produce more jumps and landings after a long summer than a complete training week. So don't schedule such a tournament in the week after the first practice but after two or three build-up weeks, and keep the week afterwards light. What else you can do to absorb that peak is in injury prevention.

The dressing room: a result is not a season forecast

This is where it goes wrong most often. A team that loses five times at a pre-season tournament gets in the car thinking it is going to be a hard season, and by September that thought can no longer be talked away. The reverse is just as risky: a tournament won in August against half-strength squads produces a team that goes into the first league match too lightly. You need three sentences, and you say them before anyone gets in the car — not the following Tuesday, because by then the story has already been written.

1. "We tested four things today." Name them, all four, out loud. That immediately makes clear it wasn't a random afternoon.
2. "Here is what we know now that we didn't know this morning." Two concrete findings, from your counts: rotation four leaks, the serve from these two players creates pressure.
3. "The result wasn't on that list." Short and without apology. Anyone who tries to talk the result away only confirms that it mattered.

And don't attach a decision to it that day. Wait forty-eight hours, lay your counts side by side and only then decide about the line-up or the system. A verdict you deliver in the dressing room is a promise; a verdict you back up on Tuesday is a choice.

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