Battle of the Sexes: Top 3 Differences in Beach Volleyball

Like me, you probably watched the latest Beach Volleyball tournaments and the epic race to qualify for the Olympics. You probably just loved watching volleyball. But I was excited about something else. I couldn’t wait to analyze a new batch of data. The FIVB doesn’t report out match stats like the AVP, so I gathered a new point-by-point dataset from past FIVB tournaments. In my first analysis, I examine the shot selection differences between men and women.

tl;dr

1. The women’s game is more “crafty” than the men’s game. Women do more

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Road to Hawaii – AVP Beach Volleyball Stat Trends

With the AVP Hawaii Open starting September 20th, I used my match database to examine recent player stat trends. The analysis covers all players currently scheduled to play in the tournament.

What’s the purpose of this visualization?

The intent is that players, coaches, fans, and commentators can see how different players have progressed over the last 2 years leading up to the Hawaii Open.

Players and coaches can specifically make adjustments to focus on key underperforming areas. They can also study their opponent’s strengths and weaknesses to make adjustments.

Introducing Beach Volleyball Match Charting

With the AVP Seattle Open underway, I thought it might be a fun exercise to chart a professional beach volleyball match. The process of collecting the data is manual but I wanted recreate the AVP match stats that are published online to test their validity. In addition, I track shot type and direction, which adds a whole new dimension to analyzing player tendencies.

I watched yesterday’s quarterfinal match-up of Chase Budinger/Casey Patterson vs. Tim Bomgren/Troy Field. Here was my setup during charting:

Worth Rises: Mapping For-Profit Prison Contractors

I volunteer my time at Worth Rises, a non-profit advocacy organization looking to end the exploitation in the prison industrial complex. In recent years, there has been a rise in governments using private contractors to house prisoners. However, that’s not the full picture. There are thousands of contractors that service, and profit off of, this industry, where sectors such as healthcare, construction, commissary, and phone services often go unnoticed.

2019 AVP Season Data Primer, Player Trends, and More

Beach Volleyball Data

With the AVP season just around the corner (Huntington Beach on May 3-5), I thought it would be a good time to refresh the beach volleyball match database

The database now contains matches from the year 2000 all the way until April 6th, 2019.

Let’s examine some recent trends with the data update!

ATP Ranking Predictions for August 2018

In our last blog post, we detailed our new machine learning forecasting app that predicts future rankings. The app updates automatically on a weekly cadence and we’ve pulled the most recent results into 2 tables below.

The current top 10 ATP players are forecasted to remain stagnant into August. This is after Zverev defended his title at the Citi Open and last week’s tournaments have been accounted for.

Name	July Rank	Aug. Rank Pred.	July Pts.	Aug. Pt. Pred.	Rank Diff.
Rafael Nadal	1	1	9175	9248	0
Roger Federer	2	2	7490	7167	0
Alexander Zverev	3	3	5688	5785	0
Juan Martin del Potro	4	4	5316	5457	0
Kevin Anderson	5.8	5	4400	4650	-0.8
Grigor Dimitrov	6	6	4652	4462	0
Marin Cilic	6.5	7	4194	4000	0.5
Dominic Thiem	8	8	3708	3899	0
John Isner	9	9	3436	3561	0
David Goffin	10.5	11	3118	3074	0.5

Future Insights: Monthly ATP Ranking Forecast

Welcome back tennis fans… and no, we didn’t forget about your thirst for tennis and data analytics! Our new web app allows you to easily see a player’s ranking history, similar to the ATP site, but with an added ranking forecast, packaged as an interactive visualization not available anywhere else!*

Check out the app here (15 second load time**):

More info below.

AVP & FIVB Beach Volleyball Match Database

Welcome to BigTimeStats, the TenniStats rebrand, now with beach volleyball match data. Drawing inspiration from Jeff Sackmann’s tennis match database, I’ve compiled all AVP and FIVB matches going back to year 2000, available as open source csv/excel files on Github.