Effectiveness of the Call in Beach Volleyball Attacking Play

Abstract

In beach volleyball the setter has the opportunity to give her or his hitter a “call”. The call intends that the setter suggests to her or his partner where to place the attack in the opponent’s court. The effectiveness of a call is still unknown. We investigated the women’s and men’s Swiss National Beach Volleyball Championships in 2011 and analyzed 2185 attacks. We found large differences between female and male players. While men called in only 38.4% of attacks, women used calls in 85.5% of attacks. If the male players followed a given call, 63% of the attacks were successful. The success rate of attacks without any call was 55.8% and 47.6% when the call was ignored. These differences were not significant (χ2(2) = 4.55, p = 0.103). In women’s beach volleyball, the rate of successful attacks was 61.5% when a call was followed, 35% for attacks without a call, and 42.6% when a call was ignored. The differences were highly significant (χ2(2) = 23.42, p < 0.0005). Taking into account the findings of the present study, we suggested that the call was effective in women’s beach volleyball, while its effect in men’s game was unclear. Considering the quality of calls we indicate that there is a significant potential to increase the effectiveness of a call.

Blocker’s activity at men’s european beach volleyball university championship (Actividad de los bloqueadores durante el Campeonato de Europa Universitario de vóley playa)

“…This is based on a simplification of the actions of the blocker and a better understanding with the defender, as the blocking actions and exits on the line facilitate the work of the defender or the delayed player. Thus, they did not changed positions within the field because these require more communication between players for game points (Künzell et al, 2014).…”

Untitled

“…Part of evolution and development of beach volleyball comes from knowledge acquired through the analysis and study of different technical actions (Busca, Moras, & Rodríguez, 2012), which are blocks (Tilp & Rindler, 2013), attacks (Künzell, Schweikart, Köhn & Schläppi, 2014) or defensive actions (Gea & Molina, 2014). Specifically, it should be noted that blocker role and its relation at game, as it is widely studied and collected in literature (Peña, Rodríguez-Guerra, Buscà, & Serra, 2013).…”

Eye tracking in high-performance sports: Evaluation of its application in expert athletes

“…Different team members possibly apply different gaze strategies and swap ideas on the perceived information verbally (Araújo & Davids, 2016;Fasold, Noël, Wolf, & Hüttermann, 2018). For example, the setter in beach volleyball shouts information on the positioning of the opponent players to his partner, while she/he fixes the ball trajectory before her/his attacking stroke (Künzell, Schweikart, Köhn, & Schläppi-Lienhard, 2014). This implies that in analyzing the players' gaze behavior, especially in team sports, it has to be considered that different useful information cannot only be perceived visually by the athlete herself/himself, but for example also by communicating with team members.…”