  The progression of a single point in volleyball starts with a serve and then
alternates between teams, each team allowed up to three contacts with the ball.
Using charted data from the 2022 NCAA Division I women's volleyball season
(4,147 matches, 600,000+ points, more than 5 million recorded contacts), we
model the progression of a point as a Markov chain with the state space defined
by the sequence of contacts in the current volley. We estimate the probability
of each team winning the point, which changes on each contact. We attribute
changes in point probability to the player(s) responsible for each contact,
facilitating measurement of performance on the point scale for different
skills. Traditional volleyball statistics do not allow apples-to-apples
comparisons across skills, and they do not measure the impact of the
performances on team success. For adversarial contacts (serve/receive and
attack/block/dig), we estimate a hierarchical linear model for the outcome,
with random effects for the players involved; and we adjust performance for
strength of schedule not only on the conference/team level but on the
individual player level. We can use the results to answer practical questions
for volleyball coaches.
