The Three-Column Scoresheet and the Data Void of Vietnamese Women's Volleyball

On Saturday night I sat in row four of the press tribune in a gymnasium in northern Vietnam. The match ended at 9:40 p.m. Organisers handed each reporter a pre-printed A4 sheet: column one was points, column two was service aces, column three was blocks. The fourth column was blank — no heading, no numbers.

I turned to the technical officer beside me: where is attack efficiency? He laughed: "Ma'am, we can only count points."

Twenty minutes later I opened my phone. Fourteen articles were already up. Every headline carried a number. Player A scored 22 points. Player B blocked five times. Player C served three aces. Not one answered the question I needed: did the girl with 22 points help her team tonight, or drag it down?

A sheet with a beautiful frame, spaces to fill in, and nothing inside. That is the most accurate picture of women's volleyball journalism in Vietnam right now.

Not long ago I held a different document of the same kind. Nine sections, dozens of tables, bold headings, ruled lines. Every cell read: insufficient information. You can build a perfect frame around an empty thing, and Vietnamese women's volleyball has plenty of those frames.

The sheet the referee signs

The official scoresheet of a volleyball match in Vietnam — the one the first referee signs after the final whistle — carries three groups of data: points by set, errors, and substitutions. There is no box for the quality of the first pass. No box for efficiency.

I have followed women's volleyball for more than twenty years, from VTV Cup matches at the Quan Ngua sports palace to SEA Games editions. My watching experience tells me one thing: every coaching staff keeps its own notebook. They write by hand. They use their own symbols. They know exactly which player's reception broke down in which rotation. But that notebook never leaves the technical meeting room.

In Thailand, by contrast, clubs in the national championship use Data Volley, the industry's specialist scouting software. In Japan, the V.League publishes per-player metrics weekly, from perfect-pass rate to successful digs. The sport's world governing body, FIVB, publishes detailed statistics for both men's and women's tournaments at the Volleyball Nations League, covering attack, block, serve and defence.

Here, when the national women's championship ends, fans know the score, know who won, and little else.

The irony is that the national women's team's recent results are real. In 2026 in Nakhon Ratchasima, the team reached the semi-finals of the Asian Championship for the first time. In 2026, the team won the AVC Challenge Cup. Those results were built on thousands of hours of training and specific tactical adjustments that not one line of public data records.

Three columns are not enough to understand a match

An example makes it clear. One outside hitter attacks 50 balls, scores 22 points, commits 9 attack errors, and is blocked 4 times. Her success rate is 44%. Her efficiency is 22 minus 9 minus 4, divided by 50 — 18%.

Another outside hitter attacks 30 balls, scores 15 points, commits 3 errors, and is blocked once. Success rate 50%, efficiency 36.7%. The second player scores seven fewer points but is worth twice as much.

On the organisers' three-column sheet, the second player ranks lower. In the next morning's reports, the second player is not named. In fan polls, the second player does not exist.

Confusing success rate with efficiency is the most common error in volleyball reporting. It is not that writers are poor. It is that the input data has only one column.

Serving is the same. The "service aces" column counts aces and nothing else. A powerful server with 4 aces and 9 service errors is a liability, not a weapon. The ace-to-error ratio is the number that tells the truth. Nobody publishes it.

Blocking needs a denominator. Three blocks in three sets is a completely different thing from three blocks in five sets. World volleyball calls it blocks per set. Here, people call it "she blocked well today".

Reception is the most important metric nobody measures. Perfect-pass rate is the share of first contacts delivered to the ideal position, letting the setter open the full attacking menu. A team passing 55% perfectly can run the middle attack, the back attack, the quick variation. Drop to 35% and that team can only hit high balls on the wing, with two blockers waiting.

No Vietnamese women's team publishes this figure. Not even the national team.

Then there is rotation. Coaches call it a stuck rotation: a cycle in which a team keeps losing points and cannot escape. To see it, you need point data by rotation. To have that data, you need someone sitting and recording. To have someone recording, you need money and you need skill.

The libero position is worse still. A libero cannot serve, cannot attack, cannot block. On the three-column sheet, the libero is invisible. In a 3-2 win, the libero may be the decisive figure — and may also be the only person with not one line of data to her name.

Another detail the three-column sheet never contains: number of ball contacts. A libero playing five sets may touch the ball 60 times. An outside hitter, 40. That figure shows who carries the defensive system. Nobody publishes it.

The same goes for the setter. A good setter delivers the ball to the right hand at the right tempo. How do you count it? Not by points. You count distribution efficiency, the attack success rate of each hitter after her set. That is a metric Japan's V.League publishes weekly. Here, it is not published.

In youth competitions the reverse effect is even clearer. A 17-year-old learns that hitting hard gets her name in the paper. She does not learn that a ball hammered into the block and deflected out is a point in the opponent's favour if a team-mate cannot save it. A whole generation is taught to count points, not to count efficiency.

When foreign experts evaluate a Vietnamese player, they use data we ourselves do not have. They watch video, they reconstruct every rally, they calculate. Then they conclude: this one suits a fast game, that one can only hit high balls. Those conclusions get paid for. And we, who own the players, sit and guess.

The price of managing load by instinct

There is a data gap whose consequences are heavier than statistics: workload.

Modern volleyball talks a lot about load management — tracking jump counts, contact counts, accumulated minutes to prevent injury. It sounds very scientific. But from my match-watching, most load-management stories in regional women's competitions are told after the injury has happened, not before.

Without workload data there is no early warning. Without early warning, an outside hitter attacks 50 balls a match for three straight weeks, and by the fourth her knee is swollen. Afterwards people call it an occupational accident.

There is another side, less discussed. When the calendar thickens with commercial tournaments and friendlies, a technical staff needs grounds to say no to a particular match. Those grounds must be data. Without data, the decision always tilts toward playing one more match, because one more match means money, crowds and exposure. The player is the only party without a number to protect herself.

The transfer market is also read through one column

The women's transfer season in Vietnam is quiet compared with football. News about it usually comes in two forms: a name moving from club A to club B, and a bonus figure somebody heard about.

Without metrics, a player's value is set by two things: existing reputation and points scored in the most recent tournament. Both are the wrong measure. A player with 25 points in a weak team may be worth less than a player with 12 points in a strong one, because the latter attacks in harder situations and still scores.

What matters is that at smaller clubs, where budgets are tight, a correctly priced contract matters even more. One right foreign signing can change an entire season. But to choose the right person, a small club needs comparative data, and that data does not exist. They choose from pre-cut video and recommendations. That is why many good foreign players come to Vietnam, play a few matches, and quietly leave, while people conclude that foreign women's players do not work out.

The point of the spear and the name nobody reads

This is where I want to speak plainly.

There are two kinds of data. The first kind sells: points, aces, blocks. This kind goes into headlines, posters, short clips. The second kind builds teams: efficiency, perfect-pass rate, setter distribution efficiency, points conceded in each rotation. This kind sells to no one, so no one pays to collect it.

So we have an information system that runs on what sells and ignores what needs to be known. Media report with what is available. Coaching staff decide with what they record themselves. Fans believe what is published. These three groups are speaking three different languages about the same match.

And women's volleyball sits at the bottom of both lists. Less money than the men's game, therefore less data. Less data, therefore less analysis. Less analysis, therefore harder to sell. That circle is closed, and it has fed itself for years.

I say this after more than twenty years on the press tribune, after a night in Moscow in 2026 when I forgot to record a press conference because I was drinking beer with Brazilian colleagues, and after that evening at Lach Tray. The 17-year-old's brace at Lach Tray, I rewrote with sweat, not ink. I dropped my tactical notes, jumped off my seat, and the next day's piece was full of emotion but missing one priceless detail: which rotation the women's U19 side won in.

What is changing

The good news is that change is not coming from the top.

At a few recent youth tournaments I have seen sports students sitting in the high seats recording on tablets. At a few clubs, assistant coaches are teaching themselves Data Volley from English manuals online. More than 5,000 people watched three former internationals livestream, and I am no longer alone. At the 2026 SEA Games, three former internationals sat at home recalling a final, and each felt she was there — and their commentary is data, eye-of-the-trade data that the three-column sheet can never hold.

A 60-year-old fan can still run 100 metres after a goal, and that fan is me. But if I had had one complete set of numbers in my hand, perhaps I would not have needed to run.

A women's volleyball scene that wants to go far needs open data, not another beautiful empty frame. Because when the scoresheet has only three columns, the only thing recorded in full is feeling.