Numbers never lie, but they don't always tell the whole truth, either.

If you're a coach at one of the 84 NCAA men's volleyball programs and you're looking to gain more coverage for your team, honors for your players and a better sense of your team's strengths and weaknesses, finding meaningful statistics is a necessity.

The American Volleyball Coaches Association's (AVCA) men's coaches committee is looking to further align the collegiate game to the international game. NCAA men play under international rules and, in the very near future, want to record statistics the same way.

For the 2003 season, the committee requested that coaches or sports information staffs record the number of serve reception attempts for each player. The current box score tracks only serve-receive errors. The new statistic translates into either one more keystroke using statistical software or an extra number to write down.

Joel Wortmann, head coach at the University of the Pacific (California) and a member of the AVCA committee, said the request came because of the libero position. "We wanted to determine the best libero in the country but needed an assessment tool," he said.

The libero is a passing and defensive specialist who can make unlimited entries during a match. Limited to the back row, the libero cannot serve and in most cases cannot set players or attack the ball.

Wortmann and the AVCA committee are charged with selecting the AVCA all-Americans each year. In determining the best libero after the 2002 season, the committee realized the standard box score masked the libero's true contributions. To correct that, Wortmann said the committee felt it needed the number of serve receive attempts each player made in order to find a meaningful statistic other than the number of digs. A libero who makes two serve-reception errors but receives 85 percent of serves is easier to evaluate within a team and easier to compare with other teams' liberos.

Changing the way stats are kept for everyone when only players of AVCA member coaches can win all-America designation might seem a little self-serving.

"That could be valid," said Joel Walton, head coach at Ball State University and a committee member. "(Non-AVCA coaches) could say, 'My kid won't be an all-American, why should I bother?' "

Walton said there isn't a way to mandate compliance, but he said that most coaches probably would want to run their programs according to AVCA statistical standards. So far, the response has been positive, but some schools aren't reporting the statistic. That could prove problematic at the end of the season.

"For it to be a valid stat, every team has to keep it whether they are AVCA or not," Walton said.

Making points with media

The final response rate the new statistic receives will set the tone for future committee recommendations and actions. Already, the committee is looking at making changes for 2004 to more accurately reflect the international model.

The standard NCAA box score tracks a slew of players' percentages and outputs in hitting, setting, serving, digging and blocking categories. An international box score largely ignores such data and instead focuses on the number of points each player contributes to the match. Walton is an ardent proponent of overhauling the men's box score.

"Internationally right now, a lot of statistics have gone away," Walton said. "The international scoresheet has so much less information; that's the way it should be. It's very clear to the media."

Walton said that points help identify the most significant contributors through the course of a match.

"Having a player earn 30 points is clearer and more meaningful than seeing that a player had a .780 hitting clip," he said. "That percentage could have been based on five or six kills."

In essence, the kills leader for a match might not be the match's most valuable player. The person who was second in kills but had five blocks and four service aces could have had more of an impact.

The advent of rally scoring facilitates points tracking since players can earn points only by making a kill, ace or block. All points in a match can be accounted for. Accountability is one of the most attractive features of recording points.

"To change any stat information is hopefully to assist the media in reporting what happened. They'd rather hear 'player so and so got 32 points last night,' " Wortmann said.

Easier path to change

Though the AVCA and some Division I conferences publish weekly point totals for both the women's and men's seasons, points are not part of any official NCAA records, nor have they made their way into the NCAA box score. If the men's committee has its way with the latter, that will change, too.

Men's volleyball has more flexibility in this area than the women do. Since the NCAA statistics staff does not oversee regular-season stats for men's volleyball, the sport can set the course in how its stats are recorded.

Jim Wright, NCAA director of statistics, said, "When the NCAA becomes officially involved with maintaining statistics for a sport, the statistics staff works with conference offices and sports information staffs to determine which categories are compiled."

Wright said that if enough interest develops in keeping total points for women, the NCAA would work with the leagues and schools to make the change. But it would take time.

"Since we rely on the conference and school SIDS to provide us with the statistics for their teams, we have to be sensitive to the limitations of existing software and the time it takes to compile those numbers," Wright said.

The men's game can bypass the process entirely. The AVCA committee, which has one representative from each NCAA men's volleyball league, can recommend changes and then send its reps back to their respective league coaches and SIDs to gain support and help in implementing them.

The AVCA's Bill Kauffman assists the committee by communicating its actions to its membership. This year, he included directions on how to track serve- reception attempts in the annual SID score-reporting packet.

During the season, Kauffman collects weekly cumulative stats from AVCA member schools, applies the points formula to those stats, and sends a weekly e-mail to members and the media that describes the previous week's statistical contributions. The process is somewhat incomplete because not every school is an AVCA member, and not every member reports.

A more comprehensive report comes from Rick Hazeltine, whom the NCAA Men's Volleyball Committee has paid to keep men's volleyball stats for the last 10 years. Each week, all NCAA volleyball schools report stats to Hazeltine, who in turn crunches the numbers and sends category rankings to all NCAA schools.

Assists to change, too

Coaches are a big part of implementing any changes in statistics. Wortmann said that when the request for reception attempts was made to SIDs, some were reticent about the added responsibility. He said since many coaches already track the number of reception attempts for their personal match records, coaches are helping report by writing down every pass by hand or using the existing statistical software.

That communal effort is what the sport will rely on for other anticipated changes because the ultimate concern is to gain more coverage by giving media people information that is easy to understand and simple to convey to the public.

In that vein, the committee wants to eventually eliminate block assists as a statistic and would have in 2003 if, as Walton said, the group had a chance to fully canvas the coaching community.

Block assists muddy the picture when trying to figure out who is the most effective blocker. Players can accrue block assists and credit by merely being next to the person who actually blocks the ball. Middle blockers often lead in total blocks because their position requires that they join players on either side to block hitters; it inflates their numbers.

"Block assists really tells you nothing," Walton said. "There may have been some NCAA blocking leaders who had the two best players beside them, so they get credit."

Wortmann agrees with removing block assists from the equation. "We really want to know who is blocking that ball and get an idea of who is being effective for us," he said.

The same is true, he said, for set assists.

"Assists aren't an indication of anything. It's another one we're looking at. We're not quite sure what the value is of that statistic," Wortmann said.

Other statistics in question on the standard box score are ball-handling errors and blocking errors.

Walton said, "There's no NCAA record for the guy with the most blocking or ball-handling errors."

If he had it his way, box scores that he has drafted would replace the current one. One version counts setting and serving attempts and eliminates blocking assists and errors. Both versions have total points as the lead column. Walton hopes that whatever the outcome, the box score will be a better evaluation tool for the coaches and more media-friendly at the same time.

"We'll try to go slowly about doing this," Wortmann said, "But it may be more important that we get our scores in USA Today than having a box score that no one sees."