Stat definitions

The box score columns

The box score on a match page, the per-set tables under it, and the Players table on the Reports page all use the same columns, in this order:

# Player K E TA Pct A SA SE SV S3 S2 S1 S Rtg RE R avg D BS BA BE BHE Pts

S3, S2 and S1 only appear once somebody has actually graded a serve in the match; SV and S Rtg are always shown, since aces and errors alone can make both meaningful.

Rates print as a bare three-decimal number, so a hitting percentage of a quarter reads .250. A rate with no attempts behind it prints as -, never as zero. Percentages that describe a team, such as side-out, print as whole percents.

Attacking: K, E, TA, Pct

• K, kills: attacks that ended the rally in our favour.
• E, attack errors: an attack that ended the rally against us, including being stuff-blocked by the opponent.
• TA, total attempts: every swing. A kill, an attack error, being stuff-blocked, and an attack that stayed in play all count one attempt each.
• Pct, hitting percentage: (K - E) / TA. It ranges from -1.000 to 1.000 and is blank when there were no attempts.

A stuff block by the opponent charges the hitter an error and an attempt, which matches the NCAA box score. Attacks that stay in play are only counted when the match was scored with "track our touches" on; with it off, TA counts terminal swings only and the hitting percentage is computed from a smaller denominator.

Setting: A and BHE

• A, assists: credited to the setter on a kill. Freeball never asks who assisted. It uses the last Set touch of the rally that has not already fed an attack; failing that, on a kill, the setter designated for that rotation.
• BHE, ball handling errors: a handling fault charged to a player, most often a double or a lift on a set.

A setter is never credited with assisting her own kill: an attribution that resolves to the hitter is dropped.

Serving: SA, SE, SV and serve rating

• SA, service aces: a serve that ended the rally in our favour. A reception error charged to the other team also credits an ace to whoever was serving, when the server is known.
• SE, service errors: a serve that ended the rally against us.

A serve that stays in play needs no tap of its own and is credited to nobody unless the match is scored with the Grade serves option on. With it on, the scorer grades each serve 3, 2 or 1 by how badly the opponent handled it:

• 3: they were out of system, or the ball came back over as a free ball.
• 2: their setter had to move off the net to run the offense.
• 1: they passed it perfectly.

SV, serve attempts: every serve touch, plus an ace or a service error in a rally with no serve touch of its own, so SV counts serves even in a match nobody graded.

Serve rating = (1 x S1 + 2 x S2 + 3 x S3 + 4 x SA) / (S1 + S2 + S3 + SA + SE), to two decimals. An ace counts as a 4 and a service error as a 0. Only graded serves, aces and errors are in the denominator: a serve nobody graded is not evidence either way, so it is left out rather than guessed at. A player has no rating until at least one of her serves was graded: aces and errors alone never make one, so a match scored without Grade serves shows a blank, not a zero.

Serve efficiency = (SA - SE) / SV. It needs no grading at all, since it only uses aces, errors and attempts.

Passing: RE and R avg

Serve receive is graded 0 to 3, where 3 is a perfect pass and 0 is an ace against us.

• RE, reception errors: the grade 0 passes, the ones that ended the rally.
• R avg, receive average: (r1 + 2 x r2 + 3 x r3) / (r0 + r1 + r2 + r3), where r0 to r3 are the counts of each grade. It ranges from 0.000 to 3.000 and is blank for a player who received nothing.

Grades 1 to 3 are recorded only when the match was scored with "track our touches" on. With it off, a reception error is still recorded, so RE is right but there is no receive average to speak of.

Defense: D, DE and the blocks

• D, digs: a dig that kept the rally alive.
• DE, dig errors: a dig attempt that ended the rally against us. It is recorded and it goes into the MaxPreps export, but the box score on screen has no column for it.
• BS, solo blocks: a block that ended the rally with one blocker credited.
• BA, block assists: the same, with two or three blockers credited. Each of them gets one block assist.
• BE, block errors: a block that ended the rally against us.

Pts and sets played

• Pts, points: K + SA + BS + BA. Block assists count in full, matching the NCAA box score, which is why a team's points do not add up to the team's score.
• Sets, sets played: the number of distinct sets in which that player has any nonzero counter. It is the denominator of every per-set rate.

Side-out and point-scoring pct

These two describe rallies, not players, and both are reported per rotation as well as overall.

• Side-out pct: of the rallies the opponent served, the share we won. The Rotations table shows it as won over attempted, so "9 / 14".
• Point-scoring pct: of the rallies we served, the share we won.

The rotation a rally is filed under is our rotation at the start of that rally. Rotation numbers follow the setter: rotation 1 is the setter in position 1, and the number rises by one on each of our side-outs, wrapping after 6. With two setters in a 6-2 the numbering is anchored on the first setter named at the start of the set.

First-ball side-out (FBSO)

FBSO pct = first-ball side-outs / serve-receive rallies. A serve-receive rally is any rally the opponent served. It counts as a first-ball side-out when all of these hold:

• we won the rally,
• we made exactly one attack,
• we touched nothing after that attack, and
• the rally did not end on our attack error or on the opponent's block, both of which mean the opponent got a swing in.

A rally we won because the opponent then made an error, with our one swing as the last ball we touched, does count: the point ended off our first ball.

Side-out pct says we eventually won the rally. FBSO says we ended it on the first ball, which is the number that says whether their serve is hurting you. It appears as a team summary card, as a column of the Rotations table, and per set on the match page's Sets headings.

Hitting by pass quality

Every attack is filed under the last receive, dig or free ball our team touched before it:

• Pass 3, Pass 2, Pass 1: the attack followed a receive graded 3, 2 or 1.
• Free ball: it followed a free ball.
• Transition: it followed a dig, so the ball had come back over.
• Unknown: nothing was recorded before the attack. The row is only shown when it is not empty.

Columns are attempts, kills, errors and hitting pct, and the percentage is (K - E) / attempts over just the attacks in that row. A receive graded 0 ends the rally, so it never precedes an attack.

Attack breakdown

When a match is scored with Track attack detail on, each attack may carry an attack type and a zone:

• Hard, Tip, Roll and Back row: what the hitter did with the ball.
• Left (4), Middle (3) and Right (2): the front-row zone she attacked from, as the scorer sees the court. Back row: anywhere behind the line.

Attempts, kills, errors and hitting pct are shown per type and per zone, the same (K - E) / attempts formula restricted to that row. A swing nobody described this way appears as Unknown rather than dropping out, so attempts always add up to TA whichever way they are split. The shot chart draws the same numbers on half a court, kills over attempts and hitting pct in each zone, shaded by that zone's share of the attacks.

Errors by type

Every point you handed the opponent, split by what kind of error it was. The kind comes from the button the scorer tapped and, where she added it, the extra detail button that followed it, so nothing here is entered twice or counted twice.

• Spike, Tip, Dump and Down ball: attack errors, by what the hitter was trying.
• Set error, 2nd ball, 3rd ball, Whose ball and Double contact: ball handling errors.
• Dig and Free ball receive: dig errors.
• Receive, Serve and Block: reception, service and block errors.
• Net, Under, Over the net, Foot fault, Rotation, Back row attack and Other fault: the faults.

An error the scorer did not detail is shown under its plain reason (just Attack error, or just Fault) rather than dropping out, so the kinds always add up to the total. A kind nobody committed is left out of the table entirely. Each row also carries a per set average.

The by player table charges each error to the player it was charged to in the box score. A fault belongs to nobody, so the player rows add up to less than the team does.

Points given away weighs those errors against what the opponent earned: our error points are rallies they won because of something we did, and they earned are the rallies they won with a kill, an ace or a block. Between them they are every point the opponent scored, and the share given away is the first over that total. On a player's own stats page the summary is left off: it is a question about the match, not about one athlete.

Set distribution

For every setter with at least five recorded sets in the filtered window, one table of where the ball went:

• Sets: attacks she fed, resolved the same way as an assist.
• Share: that hitter's sets over the setter's total.
• K and Kill pct: kills off her sets to that hitter, over the sets to that hitter.
• R1 to R6: the same set counts split by the rotation the rally started in.

Setter and hitter

Set distribution says where a setter puts the ball. This says how that pairing hits. Every setter is a row, every hitter she fed is a column, and each square holds three numbers you can switch between with the small buttons above the table:

• Volume: how many sets she gave that hitter.
• Kill pct: kills on those sets, over those sets.
• Hitting pct: kills minus errors on those sets, over those sets - the same formula as the box score, for just that pairing.

The shading is always hitting pct, whichever number the squares are showing, darkest where the pairing hits best. It is a hint; the number is the answer, and how many sets it came from is printed under it.

The row of buttons underneath picks which sets to count: all of them, or only the ones that came off a 3 pass, a 2 pass, a 1 pass or free ball, or out of transition after a dig. This is the thing to look at when a pairing that looks good all season keeps disappearing in tight sets - often it is a combination that only works when the first ball is perfect.

A setter needs five sets in the window to be a row at all, counted before you pick a kind of pass, so choosing "after a 1 pass" narrows what is in the squares and never makes the table disappear. On a player's own page the same thing appears as one slice: a setter sees her row, a hitter sees who has been setting her.

This needs touch tracking switched on for the match.

Free ball and transition conversion

What you do with the balls that come back at you. Two situations, kept apart because they are two different problems: a free ball the other side handed over, and a transition ball off a dig, where they swung and you have to build something out of what is left.

Every free ball your team handled and every dig it made counts as one chance, credited to the player who passed or dug it. Each chance is followed through to three things, all out of that same number of chances:

• Attack produced: you got a swing out of it.
• First-attack kill: that first swing ended the rally in your favour.
• Rally won: you won the rally in the end.

Rally won is the whole team's doing, not the passer's - the point can be won ten touches later. It is here because the other two do not mean much on their own: a team that rarely gets a swing off a free ball but keeps winning the rally anyway is in a very different place from one that does neither.

Serve receive is not counted here. What happens off a serve is first-ball side-out and hitting by pass quality, further up this page. This needs touch tracking switched on for the match.

Per-set rates and leaders

Each of these is the counter divided by sets played:

• K/set: kills.
• A/set: assists.
• D/set: digs.
• B/set: solo blocks plus block assists, the box-score block total.
• SA/set: aces.
• Pts/set: points, that is K + SA + BS + BA.

A player with no sets played has no rate at all rather than a zero, and is left out of the leaderboards rather than sorted to the bottom. The Leaders cards show the top five in kills per set, hitting pct, assists per set, digs per set, aces per set, blocks per set and serve rating. Hitting pct and serve rating are the volume stats among them, so they carry minimums: 20 attempts for hitting pct and 15 graded serves (counted the way the rating's own denominator is, so graded serves plus aces and errors) for serve rating.

Passing distribution

A bar per passer showing how her receptions were graded: how many were a 3, a 2, a 1 and a 0, as counts and as percentages, next to her total receptions and her average. A 0 is a reception error, where the ball never came up. Passers are listed with the busiest first, because the girl passing forty balls a match and the girl passing four are not the same problem.

The average next to the bar is the same R avg as everywhere else, so the two can never disagree. The same bar appears on each player's own stats page. The four counts are also in the players CSV.

Serving impact

The section is headed "team outcomes while this player serves", and the heading is the definition. Half the columns are hers and half are the team's:

• Hers: serves (rallies she served), aces, service errors, and the ace and error rates that come from them. Her serve rating too, when serves were graded.
• The team's: rally win, how often the team won the rally while she was at the line, and her serve runs.

Rally win is not something she did alone -- six people are on the court. It is worth reading anyway, and it is the reason this section exists: a server who never aces anybody but keeps the other team out of system shows up here and in no other table.

A serve run is one turn at the line: she serves until the team loses a rally or the set ends. Its length is the points the team scored during it, so a turn that ends on the first rally is a run of zero and still counts as a turn. Points per run is the average across all her turns and longest run is her best one.

Point sources

Two bars, side by side: how we scored and how they scored. Every point of the match or the window is in one of them.

• How we scored: our kills, our aces, our blocks, the opponent's errors and the opponent's faults.
• How they scored: their kills, their aces, their blocks, our errors and our faults.

A fault -- a net touch, a rotation fault, a foot fault -- is charged to nobody, so it is its own row rather than mixed in with the errors. Each row shows the count and its share, and each side shows a per-match average so a four-match window and a twenty-match window can be compared. A team can be outhit all afternoon and still win because the other side keeps handing points over, and this is the picture that shows it.

Recent form

The last five completed matches next to the five before them, on six lines: side-out pct, point-scoring pct, first-ball side-out pct, hitting pct, reception average and serve error rate. Each side shows the number and how much play it came from, and the last column is the change.

The change is always signed, and green means better rather than bigger: on the serve error rate, a fall is the improvement, so a minus sign there is green. Only finished matches take part, because half a match in a five-match window moves the answer for no reason.

With fewer than ten finished matches the "before that" column is built on whatever there is, and the page says how many. With fewer than two, there is nothing to compare and the section says so instead of showing a table.

Rotations over time

The Rotations table averages a whole season together. This one does not: it is a row per match and a column per rotation 1 to 6, so a rotation that only leaks against certain opponents shows up as a stripe instead of disappearing into the average.

Three small buttons switch what the cells show: side-out pct, point-scoring pct, or first-ball side-out pct. The shading is a hint and the number is the answer -- both are always printed, along with how many chances the cell came from. A cell with no chances at all is left blank rather than shaded as a zero.

Click any cell and you land on that match's rally log, showing only that rotation's rallies. The log has a Rot column so you can see where you are, and a link back to the whole log.

Trend metrics

The trend chart on the Players report page and on a player's own page draws one number per match, oldest first. The Metric select above it chooses which:

• Hitting pct, receive average and serve rating, all defined further up this page.
• Kills, assists, digs and aces per set.
• Serve error rate: service errors over serve attempts.
• Side-out pct, on the team chart only. Six people are on the court, so it is never charged to one player.

A player's chart opens on whatever her position is usually judged on - a setter on assists per set, a libero or defensive specialist on receive average, everybody else on hitting pct - and the team chart opens on side-out pct. Pick another and the choice stays in the address bar, so a reload keeps it and you can send somebody the link.

Hover a point and it tells you the opponent, the result, and how many chances the number came from. Click a point and you land on that match. A match with nothing behind the number - no graded serves, no receptions - has a gap rather than a zero.

Sample sizes and "recorded in 3 of 8 matches"

Every percentage and average on the reports, player and match pages is printed next to the number of chances behind it -- in brackets after a table cell, or on a small line under a summary card. A 50% off two rallies and a 50% off two hundred are not the same claim, and the sample size is the only thing that tells them apart.

Some of what Freeball records is optional, match by match: grading serves, tracking touches, and describing each swing with a type and a zone. Where a section depends on one of those, a small grey line above it says how much of the data has it -- "Serve grades recorded in 3 of 8 matches", "Attack type known for 62% of attacks". When there is none at all, that line appears instead of an empty table.

Those lines are about the recording and never about the team. What was not written down is left out of the numbers rather than counted as a miss, so a blank is never a bad result. See what the tablet records for turning the options on.

Runs

Freeball counts two different things that both get called a run.

• Runs under the score progression charts are three or more consecutive points by one team, whoever was serving. They read like "Set 2: Lakeside 5-0 run from 12-14 to 12-19", where the scores are ours first and the "from" is the score before the run's first point.
• Serve runs, summarized above the rally log, are points scored without losing serve. The match page reports the longest one per set and how many reached three.

A run of the first kind can cross a side-out; a serve run cannot. On the live fan page the current set's margin is drawn as a small sparkline, and a run still going is called out once it reaches three.