Volleyball!

I've been playing volleyball for exactly a year and I love it! Okay well actually I played a couple games in the fall of 2024 and I guess I played a bit in high school gym class, but it's been one year since I joined my first league at the Richmond Oval. Since then I've been in a bunch of Oval leagues, a Volleyball BC league, and two different tiers of intramurals at UBC, and I've also attended a bunch of drop ins at Trout Lake Community Centre and two volleyball clinics, and I've subbed for a bunch of different times. I've been playing 3-5 times per week for the last 7 months and I can't get enough! I'm about to leave for Europe for two months and I'm going to seriously miss playing volleyball.

For my entire year-long volleyball career, I've been playing middle. It makes sense, since I'm tall enough to block and hit and in a lot of the leagues men can't block women, so it's a good advantage. I did play a few games where I subbed for power and opposite, but I always just want to play middle. I think my favourite moments are when I do a good block or joust, and as middle I can always go for those. Also, most of the time no one actually wants to play middle. It's meant to be!

To celebrate my volleyball anniversary (technically tomorrow, April 1st, since my first league game was April 1st 2025), I'm looking at all my recorded sessions playing volleyball. The y axis is the number of calories burned per minute, which I use as a sort of proxy for activity intensity. The x axis is the number of sets we won minus the number of sets we lost. There's a bit of jitter to make the points easier to see as well. The colours of the points show what type of session it was: a league game, a practice or clinic session, a game where I subbed, or a drop in session. Practices and dropins don't have scores except for one exception, so they're all in the middle.

I think it's interesting that my intensity is highest for league games when the games are close, or when the sets are even, and that games where we lose or win by many points are lower intensity. It's funny that we've clearly lost a ton of games really badly, and that our wins are more spread out in terms of how much we won by.

I love volleyball and I'm so happy that I've gotten into the sport. Thank you to my main team for inviting me to join and to everyone I've played with in the last year. I'm excited to play more in the summer when I'm back from Europe!