In this project, I analyzed 10 years of self-collected men's NCAA volleyball player height and team wins data to determine the importance of height for success.
In this project, I sought to answer the following question: “am I tall enough to have played NCAA men’s volleyball?” There weren’t any clear height figures online, so I collected 15,000 player records from all men’s teams over the past 10 years.
I found that I was slightly shorter than the average outside hitter even for D3, so I then dove into whether height is actually important for volleyball success. I grouped the data by team and season and joined it with win figures, finding much higher R2 values between team height and success (measured by win percentage and rank percentile) for D3 teams than D1 teams.
This aligned with my intuition, because D1 teams have no trouble acquiring very tall players, while D3 teams find it much more difficult; tall players can therefore impact the outcome of D3 games much more than D1 games. Finally, I looked at teams year-to-year and whether an increase in height came with an increase in win pct or rank percentile.
I wrote an article about the process and findings for this project; you can find it here.