BigTime Stats

Find your elo rating in my new spaghetti monster data viz 😅

Olympics Unexpected Ace Leaders

Miles Partain (🇺🇸 USA) and Marco Grimalt (🇨🇱 Chile): traditionally not ace leaders, they’ve really stepped up their game in the Olympics, serving more aggressively than before.

Andy Benesh (🇺🇸 USA): has employed the jump serve in the past, but together with Miles, it’s clear the US team had a game plan to be more aggressive on serve, helping them advance to the 2nd stage of the tournament.

Ondrej Perusic (🇨🇿 Czech Republic): typically gets about .2 aces / set but has been able to get as many as .5 aces / set in the olympics, a big improvement!

Bartosz Losiak (🇵🇱 Poland): has always had a tricky serve, utilizing a similar toss for float and jump spin serves. Given he already has a high career average, it’s hard for him to improve it much further, and is therefore ranked 7th in the cohort.

Brandie Wilkerson (🇨🇦 Canada): has the biggest improvement in aces / set at the Olympics, getting .8 aces / set, a 232% improvement over her career stat of .24.

Hitting % at the olympics

(🇧🇷 Brazil): Improved his hitting % to over 52%, up from a career average of 42%, a 25% increase!

Ondrej Perusic (🇨🇿 Czech Republic): has one of the highest career hitting percentages at 53%, which he’s somehow managed to surpass over the past 4 sets played at the olympics (based on 2 matches)

nner (Switzerland): leads on the women’s side, with only a marginally lower hitting % than her typical career average of 36% compared to her cohort.

More info on the blog.

Elo progression for the top 5 CBVA players.

Each point represents a played match. Matches could be played at different time periods. Match number unique to the player. More info on the blog.

Top CBVA players based on elo. Read more about elo and its’ implications on the blog!

Although Dylan Maarek has the highest winning % at 95%, Lev Priima takes the top spot due to having played more matches in 2024.

Top 10 winning players in CBVA (2024 season so far)

Do they line up with your expectations?

Last post on horoscopes, I promise 😅

Find your optimal beach partner based on your horoscope. Powered by AI (jk).

Top zodiac partnerships made in heaven!

Data from my april fools post on horoscopes. Data is real while the science a bit shaky 😂.

Are Leo’s ♌️ the best beach volleyball players?

Don’t blame me, blame your mom that she didn’t birth you in July / August 😂

I also checked to see if the search popularity was correlated with the # of matches per federation.

It seems like search popularity for the AVP and FIVB declined since 2004. For the AVP, this could make sense given there were almost no matches played in 2011 during their bankruptcy. However, for the FIVB, matches played continues to increase.

More info on my blog

Relative to other sports, beach volleyball search popularity is declining 📉📉📉

I wanted to compare beach volleyball 🏐 against other sports and professional federations. More niche sports like tennis 🎾, pickleball 🏓, padel 🏓, and footvolley ⚽️ seemed like a decent comparison.

Both pickleball & footvolley have gained popularity worldwide since the start of covid. 

Pickleball has had huge growth in the last few years, generating almost 1m monthly searches globally, almost 10x 📈 more than beach volleyball in a typical month. Footvolley generates about half of the search volume compared to beach volleyball, but still a decent number considering the recent growth of such a niche sport 📈📈

Compared to other sports federations like the ATP (tennis), the AVP is on a major decline. However, searches ~2004 were more likely related to the alien vs predator movie franchises. The line around 2010 is the year the AVP filed for bankruptcy. Since then, it’s continued to decrease even further.

Compared to searches for “beach volleyball”, “volleyball” 🏐 interest tops 2.5m monthly searches globally.

Since covid, volleyball has been on an upward trajectory, up +26% from pre-covid levels and growing 5% Y/Y 📈📈📈