Digger’s activity at men’s European Beach Volleyball University Championship

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study of digger activity among university beach volleyball players. A total of 929 digger actions carried out by 24 European University teams at the 9th European Beach Volleyball Championship EUSA GAMES were analyzed. The video was analyzed using Longomatch v.0.27 software. Statistical significance of the comparison between systems was calculated using the Z test to compare proportions. Results showed that 63.8% were passive actions and 36.2% were active actions (p<0.001) while 51% of digger actions were in static position and 49% in dynamic position (p=0.178). Furthermore, 23.1% of digger actions ended in counter attack and 76.9% ended without counter attack (p<0.001). As a result, the most effective defence can be considered to be static actives. This study leads to specific training of defensive actions and lays the foundation for specialized training for diggers.