The Notebook and the Data Void in Vietnamese Women's Volleyball

The Arena, 9:40 p.m.

On the coaching bench, the assistant bends over a plastic-covered notebook gone soft with age. He holds the ruled page with his left hand and marks it with a pencil in his right. Behind him, the electronic board shows the score in tidy figures: 25-22, 21-25, 25-23. No line on that board says that in the third set, the girl born in 2026 who had just come off the bench touched the ball more than forty times, saved four balls that looked already dead in the corner, and passed so precisely that the home team's setter could run almost the entire attack menu.

I sat in the stands, opened my laptop, and realised I had nothing to copy down. Not a single outlet in Vietnam published the perfect-pass rate of the match that had just ended. Nobody counted how many times she read the serve direction correctly. The assistant's notebook was the only record, and it would go home with him, undigitised, never becoming part of any system.

People call girls like her unknown. I call them the ones about to write history — and that history is being written in pencil, in a notebook nobody reads.

A sport growing faster than its record-keeping

Over roughly the past seven years, Vietnamese women's volleyball has entered its most closely watched period since I began following the national championship system. SEA V.League matches are broadcast live, domestic stands are fuller, and a new generation of players — mostly born after 2026 — has arrived with a physique, jump and speed Vietnamese women's volleyball never had. Figures such as Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hoa, Bui Thi Nga, Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, Nguyen Linh Chi, Le Thanh Thuy, Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen and Doan Thi Lam Oanh pulled the whole level of the women's game up a tier, and children at training centres finally had role models to chase.

At the same time, the information infrastructure around the sport has barely moved.

Every Volleyball Nations League match has its own statistics page published by the organisers, with each metric standardised under international federation convention: attack points, attack efficiency, blocks per set, the ace-to-error ratio, and each player's perfect-pass rate. At domestic club level, the closest thing to those metrics is an A4 sheet written by hand by the match secretary, and it rarely leaves the organisers' meeting room.

That asymmetry is not purely a technical matter. It is a power structure. Whoever holds the data sets the player's price. Whoever lacks it must trust someone else's eye — and usually someone else's connections.

I have seen this mechanism at work in a completely different arena. In 2026, in Moscow, I watched the reporter Olga Smirnova being stopped by security in the press-room corridor for wearing ripped jeans, while male colleagues walked past unchallenged. I wrote a small investigation and found that 78 percent of major broadcasters at the time had no dress code specific to female reporters. A blocked corridor is no accident. It is an unwritten rule, and it only surfaces when someone bothers to count.

Vietnamese women's volleyball sits in exactly that corridor. Nobody has ordered a ban on measurement. It is simply that nobody has decided measurement is worth paying for.

What should be counted

Every volleyball coach knows the scoreline cannot tell a match's story. To assess a player you need at least five families of metrics.

The first is the quality of the first pass. The perfect-pass rate tells you what share of reception attempts put the ball exactly where the setter can run the full tactical menu. A team at 55 to 60 percent can attack fast at position three, hit behind the setter, and stretch the opposing block. When that rate falls below 40 percent, the team is forced to the outside, and every rally becomes a one-on-two duel between a wing hitter and two blockers. That is the line between a team with a system and a team with only individuals.

The second is attack efficiency, calculated as direct points minus attack errors and times blocked, divided by total attempts. This is very different from points scored. A hitter who scores 20 points but commits 12 errors and is blocked 5 times has a lower efficiency than one who scores 14 with 4 errors. Spectators see the points. Coaches need to see the difference.

The third is blocks per set. A strong middle at national level can reach 0.7 to 1.0 kill blocks per set. Below 0.5 and the block is leaking, and the defence behind it must carry work that was never theirs.

The fourth is the ace-to-error ratio. In modern women's volleyball, a hard server who errs often can do more harm than good. This ratio shows who genuinely pressures the opponent's reception system and who is simply gambling.

The fifth is the dig success rate. This is the least discussed and hardest to record, because it depends on whether the ball was lifted for the setter, not on whether the player touched it.

In Vietnam, not one metric from these five families is published publicly at club level. I say this based on my experience following matches in the national championship system across consecutive seasons, and on comparing it with what international organisers publish for their competitions. No portal. No data file. No individual leaderboard by metric. The only thing that exists is the competition points table, and even that is usually updated only at team level.

What is striking is that teams still measure. In every match, coaching staff still record each rally in a notebook or a laptop spreadsheet. The problem is that the data dies in the meeting room. It is not standardised between clubs, not archived season by season, and not cross-comparable. One club's middle blocker and another's may be recorded under two different conventions, making any comparison meaningless.

There is a notable paradox: when the national team plays international events, foreign organisers publish full individual statistics for every Vietnamese player. The same athlete has data while wearing the national jersey and vanishes from every record when she returns to her club. The gap is at home, not in the players' ability.

Why nobody counts

There are three causes, and all three can be solved with money and will, not with miracles.

The first is budget. A standardised statistics system needs people. Each match needs at least two trained data recorders, one cross-checker, and software for real-time entry. For a competition running several weeks and dozens of matches, the staffing and software cost is far from trivial against the wallets of women's clubs, where — from what I know through conversations with coaching staff — many players still earn a monthly income at barely subsistence level.

The second is training. Even with software, a data recorder still has to understand volleyball. Distinguishing a perfect pass from an acceptable one is a skill, not an operation. Distinguishing an attack error from hitting out of bounds from an error caused by a deflection off the block is another skill again. If the recorder cannot tell them apart, the data produced will be wrong, and wrong data is worse than no data.

The third, and the hardest to admit, is incentive. Women's volleyball has yet to be treated as an asset worth measuring. When the men's competition gets more broadcast time, more sponsorship and more press, investing in data for the women's competition becomes an expenditure nobody wants to sign. Nobody says it out loud. It shows up in small decisions: a broadcast contract with no data clause, a communications plan with no line item for statistics, and meeting minutes with not a word on the subject.

An editor once told me something I have never forgotten, when I pitched the potential of a young female player: readers only want to read about the men's team. I posted that article on my personal blog, and within two days it drew about 120,000 reads. Two weeks later, a national team head coach called me to ask about how I read an opponent's tactics. The demand exists. What is missing is the decision to serve it.

The price of the notebook

The gap produces four measurable consequences.

The first is selection. Without standardised metrics, national team call-ups depend on who gets seen. A player at a club with broadcast coverage, crowds and reporters has a clear advantage over one of equal ability at a club nobody televises. The result is that national team places gravitate toward a few big centres, and smaller centres gradually lose the motivation to develop players, because no amount of good coaching gets recorded.

I have counted before. In 2026, at a regional youth women's tournament held at Hang Day Stadium, I tracked a sixteen-year-old winger and recorded twelve dribbles past opponents and three decisive passes in a match that ended in a narrow home win. The coach pulled her off in the 65th minute with the score level. What I wrote in my notebook does not exist in any official report. Had I not counted, all that would remain of her is one line in the match record about being substituted.

The second is injury. Most injuries in women's volleyball are cumulative: patellar tendons, shoulders, ankles. They appear after thousands of jumps, and they are predictable if someone counts jump loads, counts training hours, and tracks the body's response week by week. At domestic club level this barely exists. A twenty-two-year-old middle blocker may have jumped hundreds of thousands of times in her career without anyone holding data to know where her knees stand.

They write their diaries in sweat on the training court; I record them with my heart — but a heart cannot replace a load monitor.

The third is the transfer market. Without metrics, a female player's value at the negotiating table has no basis. In developed volleyball markets, a club wanting a wing hitter opens three seasons of attack-efficiency data, checks block and dig figures, and only then talks contract. In Vietnam, negotiations often open with an open question: what do you think? With no anchor, the weaker party is always the athlete. There are contracts that never make the airwaves but quietly decide a club's fate, and in Vietnamese women's volleyball most of those are signed with not a single page of figures attached.

The fourth is the story. Vietnamese women's volleyball has produced athletes who deserve a full data record for later generations to consult. But when the generation of Ngoc Hoa, of Bui Thi Nga, of Tran Thi Thanh Thuy retires, what remains will be clips online and the memory of those who sat in the stands. Memory is precious material, but it cannot be compared, cannot be ranked, and cannot persuade a sponsor that this sport is worth funding.

In volleyball, people usually remember who scored the last point. I remember those who passed the first ball so that the last point could exist at all.

I have seen what happens when a community decides to measure itself. In 2026, when the pandemic halted every competition and the country's most storied women's club had 70 percent of its sponsorship budget cut, I pooled my modest savings to buy resistance bands and knee wraps for the squad, then launched a fundraising drive on my page that raised more than one billion dong in three months. Alongside that, I conducted forty video interviews with female players across the country: monthly income, rent, bus fares to training, sessions held in living rooms, and the tears of a teammate forced to quit because she had no income. Set side by side, income and costs made the story impossible to argue with. Empathy needs data to become action.

The contrarian angle: more data is not automatically better

Here I must say what someone who has just called for digitisation is usually reluctant to say.

Digitisation does not automatically improve a sport. It only makes everything arguable.

Volleyball has already been through a shift similar to football's when refereeing technology arrived. The challenge system, ultra-slow cameras and net-touch sensors are now widespread at top-level events. The result is that referees decide less and confirm more. Rallies that an experienced official once judged in a split second are now replayed, measured and re-compared. That reduces error, but it also reduces human authority on court and slows down moments that need to be felt more than processed.

In football I still hold that millimetre offside lines are strangling strikers' attacking instinct, and that referees are gradually becoming editors of the match. Volleyball risks following that road, with one difference: here the arguments will not be about a disallowed goal but about a touch misattributed, a block error credited as a point, a perfect-pass rate assigned wrongly.

My goal is therefore not to turn every Vietnamese women's volleyball match into a giant spreadsheet. It is to put data in the hands of those who can use it to protect players: a coach who wants to distribute training load sensibly, a team doctor who wants early warning of injury risk, a club that wants to pay fairly, and the athlete herself who wants to know where she stands against herself three months ago. Data serving the players, not players becoming data.

There is a more worrying trap. When metrics become currency, people play to optimise metrics. A hitter who knows her attack efficiency feeds her contract value has an incentive to swing hard rather than fool the block with a tip. A middle who knows kill blocks are counted has an incentive to abandon her position to chase the ball rather than hold the system. That is the price big leagues are already paying, and Vietnamese women's volleyball has the latecomer's advantage: seeing that price before buying it.

What is changing

In the past two seasons, a handful of women's clubs have begun hiring software-based recorders instead of marking paper. A few youth academies have begun keeping quarterly physical profiles. Domestic sports media platforms have started building their own index sets to compare squad depth between clubs, because readers increasingly ask questions the points table cannot answer. These are small seeds, but they are in the right place.

The girl born in 2026 I mentioned at the start may never know that a journalist sat in the stands that night trying to count her every touch. But if, three years from now, at a domestic tournament, a spectator opens a phone and sees her perfect-pass rate appear after every set, then the assistant's notebook of today will have done its job.

The crumpled press pass of years past has already opened the door for women who write about sport. The next door is not the press room. It is the data room.

In Vietnamese women's volleyball, measuring by eye has gone on long enough. It is time to measure on paper, with machines, and with a system that does not depend on who happened to be in the stands that night.