Dear dimwit on the phone

That kind of sounds like something that a coach may have come up with so he can see how many times a defender happened to block a shot (Blocked shots were a stat in the original MISL, if I remember right).

The volleyball coach seems to trying to say there's a difference between, say, a player blocking a ball that was hit kind of soft and one that was hit really hard right at the net. I don't know, but I'm just going to drop "stuff" from it when I write about them.

 

Apparently it is a term, or so says Google.

 

Lots of coaches do that stuff in an effort to quantify productivity for players who don't normally have statistics.

Did a story a few years ago on a college football offensive lineman from Podunk playing at State U and the offensive line coach showed me how he graded every single lineman on every single play and our guy was grading quite well. Not an official stat, of course, but made for an interesting nugget to throw into the story.

 

The thing I always find kind of odd about "custom" stats at the high school level is that it's kind of hard to find a baseline. John Smith might get 20 "stuff" blocks in a season... But how do you know how good that is? I guess if you've been logging stats for a dozen years, you can compare him to other players at your own program, but how do you know how good that is as compared to the rest of the league? How does it correlate to winning? It's nice that they're making the effort to collect different stats, but I doubt they're that useful without context.

 

Seems like volleyball coaches are more guilty than anyone about making up their own stat categories. It seems like every coach's set of stats has variations.

 

Which is sort of ironic because volleyball already has a ton of stats compared to most sports: assists, digs, kills, blocks, hitting percentage, etc. My first year as a collegiate volleyball SID I remember thinking "Crap, this sport not only moves too fast, but has too many numbers to keep track of."

 

New one today from one of the rural volleyball coaches: "Block assists." I have no idea what she could mean by that. And it's a term she's never used before today. These, too, shall go down as just "blocks" when it's time for me to put them in.

 

This is a real one, actually.

A block assist is technically half a block (which is how volleyball players end up with 4.5 blocks in a game), and is credited to each player when more than one goes up on a ball that is eventually blocked to a floor. So if there are two or three girls shoulder to shoulder on a block, they each get a block assist, even if only one of them touched it. If there's just one, it's a solo block and credited as one block rather than a half.

As for a stuff block, I don't think it's a legitimate stat so much as descriptive term. Hearing that when taking stats would worry me because I'd be concerned the coach is calling something a "block" that doesn't result in a point for her team. I've known a lot of high school coaches who would try to call basically everything a block.

 

Yep, block assist is like half a sack in football.

 

So there IS such a thing, eh? Is it probable for a player to end up with 19 block assists (which count as 9.5 blocks, right?) in a match and report no solo blocks, as this coach said? I'm wondering how much I can trust her stats.

 

That's anyone guess how good her stats are. But I can confirm a block assist is an official NCAA stat. You should, however, always have them add up to an even number. (Like rebounds = missed shots in basketball).

 

kind of like 11.5 sacks?