The role of skills in winning in different types of set in women’s volleyball

The aim of this study is to identify volleyball performance indicators that best discriminate between winning and losing teams in a set according to the level of competitiveness. The data have been collected from teams’ performances (N = 438) in all sets played between top four teams in the final ranking of women’s Greek volleyball league for five periods. Clusters analysis established three different groups of sets according to set final score difference: two to three points (balanced), four to seven points (semi-balanced) and more than seven points (unbalanced). A 3 × 2 MANOVA was then performed on twelve performance indicators reflecting expressions of five basic skills of the game (serve, pass, attack 1 and 2, block). The analysis revealed significant multivariate differences in the type of result and in its interaction with the type of set. A follow-up discriminant analysis showed that the effectiveness of attacks 1 and 2 are the most important performance indicators for all the set types. The discriminant function classified correctly more cases as the score difference got higher. Especially for balanced sets, 62% were correctly classified, allowing space for further improving the critical performance indicators. These results suggest that training of a women’s volleyball team should emphasise more on improving offensive abilities.