Doctor Volleyball Inc. was officially incorporated on May 23, 2018.
The first line of code that would eventually become Doctor Volleyball was written on February 16th 2017. From inception to incorporation, a few founding principles emerged that would inform the direction of Doctor Volleyball.
The goal of Doctor Volleyball is to improve the sport by providing access to analytics for everyone. This means it needs to be affordable, easy to use and high quality.
Affordable
Many other services sell yearly subscriptions, however most volleyball seasons do not run for all 12 months of the year. Therefore a monthly subscription just makes more sense. Doctor Volleyball has a single, simple pricing model: you pay for each month you use the service to create data.
To explain, there are two modes your team can be in: Inseason and Offseason. The only difference between the two modes is you cannot create data during your Offseason. This means that all your data and analytical abilities of Doctor Volleyball are available to you, free of charge, forever.
Once your season starts, you can upgrade your team to Inseason Mode. If you decide to do this on, say, October 5th, you pay the monthly fee and are in Inseason Mode until November 5th. If you don’t want the subscription to automatically renew on November 5th, you can downgrade to Offseason Mode anytime free of charge. There are no hidden fees. The only money Doctor Volleyball makes is from you paying to use the service.
Easy To Use
Doctor Volleyball was designed for beginners to get good at quickly. If you understand volleyball, you are able to use it.
If it’s a website, won’t I need an internet connection? No. No internet connection required!
Not every venue you play at will have wifi, or will give you access. Cellular data is expensive and not everyone has the luxury of being able to create a hot spot. This is why Doctor Volleyball was rewritten to be a Progressive Web Application.
- It is available on any device that has a web browser.
- You do not need to download anything to use it.
- It magically works without an internet connection.
- It even acts like a native app, living as an icon on your home screen.
No longer will teams have to print out their stats to distribute to their athletes. Each athlete can create an account and view all their stats on doctorvolleyball.com.
High Quality
The statistical models used to underpin the analytics were developed from international caliber stat sheets and coaching at the university level. The most important part of it all is turning numbers into insights. We use both standard metrics like Attack Efficiency and custom metrics that have been created in-house.
Robertson McClure made Doctor Volleyball originally for himself. He wanted an easy way to create and distribute stats. We call this eating your own dogfood as the product is used by the people who make it. He is also pursuing degrees in both Mathematics and Human Computer Interaction.
What’s Next?
I plan to steer Doctor Volleyball using these three Founding Principles. There’s currently a road map for new features that extends into 2020. Every single feature addresses one or more of the Founding Principles. Let me know if there are any features you want to see included!