Data and code for NCAA Volleyball second contact rule change analysis

This deposit contains all of the data and code needed to reproduce the analyses in the manuscript “Impact of the Second-Contact Rule Change on Setter Performance, Referee Home Advantage, and Rally Dynamics in NCAA Volleyball.”

Contents:

RawData: 30 raw CSV files of match-, team-, and player-level data for both the 2022–23 and 2023–24 seasons, across five sex–division combinations. These files represent aggregations of all individual box scores from that sex-division-season. There is also a sub-folder (Conferences) which contains 10 matching listing of teams by sex-division-season used in assigning NCAA divisions (and conferences, though that is not used in the current study).

WorkingData: Three processed CSV files (analysis_ready_matches.csv, analysis_ready_teams.csv, analysis_ready_players.csv) generated by the DataPrep script.

Code:

DataPrep.R: R script that reads the raw data, cleans and aggregates it, and saves the working CSVs.

FullOutput.Rmd: R Markdown file that loads the working data and generates all tables and figures in the manuscript, with additional elements for reference.

Reproducibility: Run Rscript Code/DataPrep.R to recreate the working data, then render the Rmd via Code/FullOutput.Rmd"). See README.md for detailed instructions.

License: Data released under CC BY 4.0; code released under the MIT License.

Citation: Please cite this deposit as:

Forman, J. (2025). Data and code for NCAA volleyball second contact rule change analysis [data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15878670

Update (February 2025):These data and analysis scripts underpin the article now published in Journal of Sports Sciences:

Forman, J. (2025). Impact of the Second-Contact Rule Change on Setter Performance, Referee Home Advantage, and Rally Dynamics in NCAA Volleyball. Journal of Sports Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2025.2567806

Please cite the journal article when referencing the findings, and cite this Zenodo record when re-using the dataset or code.