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GREG AUMANWith the new system, a team can score even when its not serving.
The scoring is changing but the game is largely the same.
Volleyball teams began practicing Monday and in three weeks open their seasons with a long-awaited shift to rally scoring, ending years of seemingly endless sideouts back and forth in favor of a more fast-paced system with a point awarded on every play.
In past seasons a team had to serve to score a point, making the length of matches unpredictable. Matches are now best of five games, with each game going to the first team to 30 points and winning by two. Should a match go to five games, the final game goes to 15.
"We've been doing it in club volleyball for three years, but it's not going to impact the game at all," Mitchell coach Joe Dixon said Monday. "You won't even notice the differences, but it's definitely a faster game."
The new format, already implemented in college and Olympic volleyball, puts more importance on avoiding service errors. With the previous system a serve into the net meant a sideout, a lost opportunity. Now it could end a game or match.
"You miss your serve now, you're losing points," River Ridge coach Heidi Castelamare said. "For the teams that have a high percentage on serves, it won't change very much."
In middle schools, which also are shifting to rally scoring, it might make a coach less likely to have an inexperienced player attempt an overhead serve, Castelamare said. She said that decision is much like one she faces with players asking to try jump serves in games, and she wants players to have an 80 percent serve percentage on jump serves before risking an error.
Another change is that let serves - those that hit the tape at the top of the net but make it over - are now in play.
Castelamare said her team attended a camp this summer with one station devoted to hitting let serves on purpose.
"It's a tough serve to get to, but it's also a tough serve to serve," she said.
Dixon said the biggest rule change is one that allows a team's first contact with a hard-driven ball to be with both hands, leaving it as a judgment call to officials as to whether the ball was held. In the past such contact - often done as a defensive reflex on balls hit toward a player's head - drew an automatic illegal contact call.
The littlest changes, such as jewelry and glitter no longer being allowed in games or in pregame warmup, can have more impact than expected. The penalty for such a violation can be a point or a time out, the latter becoming a rare commodity.
Under the old scoring format teams were given two timeouts in a game, with a third available if the score went above 15. Now each team receives a total of two, regardless of a game's score, requiring coaches to be more selective when they use a timeout to disrupt an opponent's momentum or break a server's concentration.
The rally scoring also makes large comebacks more difficult. In the past a team down 14-5 could make mistakes on its own serve so long as it kept its opponent from scoring. Now a team facing any match point knows its next mistake, whether serving or not, is its last.
"Once somebody's over 20, it's hard to catch them," said Dixon, who had a club team come back from a 17-3 deficit in rally scoring in a game this summer. "The pace of the game is faster, and you can really feel the momentum more."