Wooden. J.D. Morgan. Ackerman. Pauley. Hedrick. Sproul.
All of these successful Bruins have made their mark on UCLA with
buildings named after them.
Michael Sondheimer, UCLA associate athletic director and
director of recruiting, had a box score named after him.
“The NCAA already had basketball box scores, and I tried
to model the volleyball box scores after basketball,”
Sondheimer said.
Sondheimer invented the volleyball box score. Like Isaac Newton
devising the foundations for calculus while pondering physics
questions, Sondheimer made up volleyball statistics on his own.
It’s hard to make up good and useful statistics.
I’ve tried myself, but the choke rating, the realistic magic
number, and the two-point field goal percentage never stuck.
“The stats should be for the layman in volleyball,”
Sondheimer said. “They not only should say who won, but why
they won.”
Volleyball stats sound different than what your average sports
fan has been acquainted with.
There are kills, hitting percentage, sets, digs, and blocks.
Kills are basically points scored, like spikes the other team
can’t return.
Sets and blocks are what they sound like.
There is some controversy surrounding the dig.
Digs are theoretically defensive hits that prevent the other
team from scoring. However, when the NCAA made its own box score in
1981, two years after Sondheimer made his, it said a dig must be
recorded every time a hit is made to keep the ball in play after a
return. However, not all of these digs are truly point-saving
hits.
Because of this, dig inflation occurs.
“Digs should be a saving play,” Sondheimer said.
“High numbers of digs don’t mean as much
anymore.”
But Sondheimer’s creativity and ingenuity come into play
with another stat ““ hitting percentage.
It’s like batting average: in baseball, the batting
average is calculated by dividing the number of hits by the number
of at bats; in volleyball, the hitting percentage is kills minus
errors divided by total attempts.
Why the subtraction of errors? Strikeouts don’t count
against a batter’s hits in baseball, and you can
theoretically have a hitting percentage of -1.000. Well, errors are
the opposite of kills, your team loses a point when you commit one.
Also, a hitting percentage is comparable to a batting average.
Hitting .300 is good, hitting .400 is great.
In case you’re still reading, you might wonder, why did
Sondheimer do all of this?
“The media needs numbers,” he said.
So true.
“Media would be there that hadn’t had any volleyball
experience, and they’d write stuff like a guy had 12 spikes,
not kills. A box score helps them cover the game.”
It’s true. For every sport nowadays, reporters are
bombarded with box scores and stat sheets of a game, sometimes even
while the game is going on. If a beat writer is ever not informed
about what’s going on the field, it’s because of a lack
of effort, not because a lack of understanding of the sport.
Imagine reading a game recap without any mention that Tyler
Ebell ran for 100 yards, or that Jason Kapono shot 4-for-33, or
that Troy Glaus went 3-4 with two home runs and a double.
That’s what it was like to read a recap of a volleyball
game before Sondheimer came along.
Sondheimer has also been actively involved with the media
himself.
Since writing for the Daily Bruin in 1974, Sondheimer has done
statistics and research about volleyball for NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and
ESPN.
He has also done statistics and research for both indoor and
beach volleyball during the 1996 and 2000 Olympics.
To add to his resume, Sondheimer has been working NCAA
men’s and women’s volleyball championships since
1974.
But wait ““ there’s more.
He’s also the radio voice of the Bruins for many of the
Olympic sports, and not only is he announcer, he engineers the
broadcast, negotiates contracts, and even sells radio time.
All while keeping stats.
Sondheimer, the original Stat Geek, has also created
statistics for rodeo. E-mail the Daily Bruin’s current Stat
Geek at gquinonez@media.ucla.edu