Auditing Vietnamese Volleyball Data: The Silent Scoreboard On Court

During the semifinal of the 2026 National Women's Volleyball Championship, sitting in the stands of Đại Yên Arena, one rally made me stand up. Score at 22-23. The away team surged. The opposite hitter's serve dropped into zone 1 – the perennial weak spot of the defensive system. The ball bounced up, the setter handled it, and the next attack sealed the point. The crowd erupted. And I looked up at the big screen.

There was nothing but the score.

No perfect-pass rate. No blocks per set. No distribution of attacking zones. No tally of serves that broke the opponent's reception system. Just the numbers 22 and 23, and a whistle. That was the moment I understood: we were watching a volleyball match in the dark. The arena lights were on, but tactical knowledge was dim.

After twenty-two consecutive years of calling national volleyball finals on the microphone – a personal record I kept quiet until someone asked – I still find myself without enough data to explain what actually happened in that rally. Not because I'm lazy. Because the system does not provide it.

Seven months in a season, and an empty data table

Vietnamese volleyball has come a long way since the years I was a young athlete. The women's V.League and the men's national championship now have sponsors, broadcast coverage, and derbies that draw thousands to the arena. The season stretches nearly seven months. We calculate standings, tiebreakers, head-to-head records. But when the season ends, almost everything that happened on court vanishes from collective memory.

I call this the mapless gap.

In any professional-grade sports data report, analysts start with primitive indicators: perfect-pass rate – the share of first passes delivered to the ideal position that lets the setter run the full attacking menu; side-out rate – the ability to score on the first rally after the opponent's serve; blocks per set; ace-to-error ratio on serve; distribution of attacking zones. These are the backbone of every modern tactical analysis.

In Vietnam, those numbers either do not exist, or exist scattered and unsystematic, impossible to cross-reference across matches, tournaments, and seasons. I once asked the organizers of a national tournament for detailed statistics after the group stage. The answer: the report only lists set scores.

A Korean analyst once invited to work with a Vietnamese women's national team told me something haunting: "In Vietnam, we analyze by... feeling." A coach's feeling is a precious asset, built over thousands of hours of observation. But it cannot scale into knowledge for an entire volleyball ecosystem. It cannot be passed to the next generation.

The causes have historical depth. For decades, Vietnamese volleyball existed in scarcity. Organizers lacked staff to record every rally. Matches were not fully filmed; only televised games existed. After each match, the report was a sheet of paper with three or five set scores. Vietnamese volleyball memory – in my phrasing – was written in easily fading ink.

Three layers of the same gap

I want to go into three specific layers, each a small tragedy.

School and youth level

How much data do national youth tournaments have? Almost none. Yet this is precisely the layer where data is most valuable, because it concerns talent selection. How do you select talent by evidence rather than the intuition of a few dozen local coaches? That intuition has value, but it does not scale. A country with thousands of young athletes cannot rely on the eyes of select individuals. That is why leading volleyball nations build youth databases early – to discover talent in remote provinces where no national expert has ever set foot.

Based on my experience watching youth matches over many years, I can say: the pace of a young hitter's progress depends not on how much video the coach watches, but on whether the player knows their own weaknesses, strengths, and relative position among peers. No data, no feedback. No feedback, no leap.

V.League and national championships

This is the layer where data should exist, yet it lacks systematic depth most of all. Sponsors pay for billboards, not for statistical infrastructure. Organizers worry about schedules, not open databases. A season generates thousands of rallies – an estimated two thousand four hundred per team per season – and then they vanish from collective memory.

I personally reconstructed data for one team in a women's V.League season. Sitting before the screen, replaying each rally, pressing buttons, taking notes. One match took three hours. After eighteen matches, I had a small but trustworthy dataset. The result startled me: the team's perfect-pass rate was only around 38 percent. Among Asian women's top five, the norm hovers between 45 and 50 percent. A twelve-point-percentage gap means: out of every three rallies, this team loses one standard attacking rhythm, forcing the setter into a second option – the ball out to the wing for a hitter in a worse situation.

But wait. This data is what I collected myself. No organization confirms it. No authority cross-checks it. No federation publishes it. In Japan, South Korea, Italy, Poland, and Brazil, this kind of data is delivered free to media, coaches, fans, and independent researchers. In Vietnam, it depends on the patience of one person.

The consequences are not small. A young coach at a second-tier club who wants to learn from the top has nothing to compare. A journalist who wants to tell a tactical story has nothing to cite. A fan who wants to understand why their team lost only knows that "they played poorly today". An entire volleyball ecosystem deprives itself of the ability to look in the mirror.

National team level

Here, data occasionally exists, but often only internally. Foreign analysts are invited, they build systems, they work for one campaign, then leave, taking the knowledge with them. When they go, the gap returns. No public data legacy. No transferable manual.

I remember 2026, when the Vietnamese women's national team first played the FIVB Challenger Cup. At that level, every team has an analytical staff. Our opponents arrived with individual profiles: knowing which cross-court angle the main hitter prefers when served into zone 1, which spots she struggles with on short balls, how the middle blocker tends to commit on quick sets. We prepared by watching video and taking notes.

That is not the coach's fault. It is the system's fault.

Trần Thị Thanh Thúy, Nguyễn Thị Bích Tuyền, Đoàn Thị Xuân – the leading hitters of Vietnamese women's volleyball – deserve detailed data profiles like their international peers. So do Ngô Văn Kiều and Từ Thanh Thuận in the men's game. Not to celebrate them, but to understand. A nation that does not understand its own players cannot help them improve, nor help them move abroad at the right time.

Data is not a religion

Now I want to test my own argument.

There is a dangerous trend in modern sport: turning data into religion. Two decades after Moneyball reshaped baseball, data thinking has swept every sport, sometimes pushing humans out of the equation. In football, millimeter offside lines have killed attacking instinct. Referees have become editors of the match. VAR shreds the flow. Players no longer trust their own sense because they are waiting for a whistle from a locked room.

Vietnamese volleyball could fall into the same trap if it chases data blindly. Pretty metrics do not always win. A team with a low perfect-pass rate can still be champion if they excel in chaotic rallies – where instinct, emotion, and collective cohesion decide outcomes. Those rallies cannot be perfectly quantified. They belong to the territory of feeling.

I have seen coaches so obsessed with numbers they forget to look at their players' faces. They forget that a nineteen-year-old girl stepping onto the court with trembling legs trembles not because her block stat is low, but because she is afraid of making a mistake. No algorithm measures that fear. No software knows when a pat on the shoulder is needed, when silence is needed. The jungler among the towers, carrying the forest into the fortress – as I once wrote about Modric – understands that the map is only a ground, and the decision lies in the feet.

So my argument is not "datafy everything". It is: build the basic foundation so we can argue with facts, not with feelings. After we have the facts, we still need the heart. The silence between rallies – a few seconds before the serve, how the formation shifts before the ball touches a hand – is where the match truly turns. Data can help us look into that silence, but cannot feel it for us.

The sentinel who lights the fire

Thirty-five years ago, when I entered the sports newsroom of Belgrade Television at twenty, I learned one principle: numbers do not speak for themselves. They need someone to place them in context and tell the story. Vietnamese volleyball has enough players, enough fans, enough emotion to write its own epics. What is missing is the person who records it.

In my notebook, I write a line I remind myself of every morning before heading to the arena: a dark map has no light, but the sentinel always lights a fire. That sentinel could be a young journalist deciding to spend every evening recording each rally. It could be a former athlete opening a spreadsheet. It could be a coach patiently teaching a student to read their own numbers. Age is just a number, but epics are written in blood and ink.

Looking at victory is easy; understanding the sleepless nights takes an epic. What I wish for Vietnamese volleyball is not a tournament with more media attention, but an open database, updated each round, accessible to all. When people have a map, they travel farther. And perhaps, at fifty-five, I will be the first to download it, open it, and continue writing the articles I left unfinished.

There are internet cafés that never close, because they hold someone else's dream. Vietnamese volleyball deserves a room like that too – where data never sleeps, and memory never fades.