The NCAA Women’s Volleyball Rules Committee met this week. They decided to keep substitutions at 12 per set, and to allow players to go under the net to pursue an errant ball in the opponent’s free zone. I would have preferred the opposite result on both counts — but I also would have preferred us to stick with side-out scoring, so maybe I’m not the best judge of things! And at least they didn’t make a dramatic change like the move to 25 points. If I’m not mistaken, rule changes will from now on be restricted to every other year. So (assuming they don’t come back and add anything else later this year) the volleyball rule book will be locked until 2012.

A box score summarizes a sporting event by giving information about scoring as well as the major statistical categories for each player. While not as ubiquitous as the ones for baseball you’ll find in most newspapers, volleyball also has box scores. They can be useful in several ways, including: to check what happened in a game you missed, to compare how a team stacks up against its competition, or to see how a player is progressing throughout a season. To the casual fan the box score may seem like an unintelligible listing of random letters and numbers. However, making sense out of them is not too difficult and may help improve your understanding of the game. (more…)