Blank Cells in Volleyball Data: Why Good Analysts Must Learn to Say “Not Enough”

“Give me a finished take in three hours.” The editor’s message arrived at eleven at night, attached to a spreadsheet. I opened it. Fourteen columns of data from a match in a national league system. Seven columns were blank. Attack efficiency had numbers. First-contact quality had numbers. But the setter’s distribution column and the transition-attack column were left empty. The note at the bottom of the sheet said only this: “Tracking data not yet reconciled.” I sat still for a long time, hands on the keyboard, then typed back the sentence no editor wants to read: “Not enough information to conclude.” That night taught me something that nine years in this trade has repeated more times than I can count: the hardest part of sports data analysis is not reading a number, but knowing when to refuse to read it. Newcomers believe their value rises with the number of conclusions they deliver. Veterans learn the opposite. The value lies in knowing when to stay silent, in knowing how to say “I don’t know yet” when the spreadsheet permits nothing else. This article does not dissect a specific match. It is about the moment just before the dissection: the moment you stare at a dataset and must decide what to do with the empty cells. For a data journalist, that is the moment that defines the whole profession. When a volleyball match ends, at least three separate data sources are born at once. The official statistics sheet from the organisers, hand-counted by observers at the arena. Tracking data, if the competition can afford ball-and-player camera systems. And the private notes of the analysis team, usually the most detailed and the least published. These three sources rarely agree. A rally one observer logs as a “scoring block” may be logged by the tracking system as an “opponent attack error.” A first-contact pass the analysis team rates as perfect may be graded merely good by the official sheet. This misalignment is the normal state of the trade, not a rare error. The problem only surfaces when a writer decides to ignore it. I remember one session watching live from a regional arena. In the observers’ row