If you’re completely new to dual coding, read this article before continuing.
Something that we at VolleyStation have been noticing so far in the 2025 NCAA Division I women’s indoor season is the number of teams taking advantage of dual coding. We’ve been interested to learn how teams are incorporating this VolleyStation Pro feature into their work. We talked to technical coordinators and coaches at a few NCAA Division I women’s indoor programs: Andrew Clark at the University of Utah, Joe Skinner at Texas A&M University, Jon Wong and Jacob Cops at Florida State University, and Will McDonald at Baylor University. Here’s what we learned.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for teams who have yet to try dual coding is that it isn’t a complicated or hard-to-implement feature. As Will at Baylor put it, “can you draw lines?” While there are more ways to use dual coding, drawing serve and attack directions really only requires the ability to draw lines on a computer. We’ve seen teams go from “that sounds like a good idea” to actually doing it in a match within a couple hours. If you have a person willing to try it, you can integrate them into your work flow quite easily.
The next takeaway was how frequently teams are using dual coding as a teaching tool. All four teams we spoke with are using dual coding as a way to give new coders hands-on experience in real-life situations in addition to gathering additional data. The advantage of using dual coding is the new coder can be supported by a more-experienced coder while using the same match file at the same time, instead of having either two files for the same practice or having one coder hanging over the other’s shoulder as they work. It becomes much more of an apprenticeship experience.
While all four teams are using dual coding to help new coders learn, each one is doing so in a different way. Joe at Texas A&M only uses dual coding during home matches, because that’s the only time the student managers he’s teaching are present and able to devote time to coding. Joe is teaching more than one manager during the season. Meanwhile, Will is only teaching a single student manager but he uses practices more as time for teaching instead of matches. Jacob at Florida State has been coding for less than a year, but that was enough of a head start for him to support others in their learning, even as he continues to develop his own VolleyStation skills. He’s teaching a student manager during practices and matches. Andrew at Utah is different from the others because he’s an assistant coach, rather than a technical coordinator. He’s teaching the DOVO to code, which is allowing him to spend more time on the coaching parts of his job, even as he’s watching her code. This variety of situations should tell you that, if you have a person who’s interested in learning to use VolleyStation Pro, there’s a way to do it so they are providing value to the team.
In addition to teaching in different ways, each team is also using additional coders in different ways. In practices, Will and the student manager use dual coding in practices so they can have a single scout file at the end of each session, even though they may be coding play on different courts at times. When the team is on a single court they often split coding responsibilities, which allows Will to tailor the division in such a way that the manager can learn different parts of coding without being overwhelmed by having to learn all of it all at once or forcing the team to go without some data while the manager develops their skills. Since they’re only creating a single scout file, syncing and uploading video becomes far easier than if they each created their own files. During home matches, the student manager is adding directions as well as serving velocities. At first, it was more challenging for the manager to keep up with the speed of the game, but they’ve improved significantly with more practice. Will has a couple of spreadsheets that leverage the data the manager is collecting so he’s prepared to answer questions from the coaches about the information the manager has added.
Andrew, unlike the others, functions as the secondary coder and the DOVO is the primary coder. During matches, since he’s not responsible for generating all the data himself, he can spend more time interacting with players and analyzing the data the DOVO generates. He sometimes will add directions but typically he’ll just add some information to the code, like setter calls and extra data about the serve and pass. He’ll sometimes make corrections or give the DOVO feedback about their code, but he has found there’s less of that work to be done as the DOVO has improved. While the DOVO handles all the coding during practices and matches, Andrew handles all the VolleyStation-related responsibilities outside of practices and matches: creating reports, making montages, and scouting opponents.
At Florida State, having the student manager be the secondary coder during matches allows them to learn how coding works by watching Jacob code and then adding more information and looking for errors. Having the student manager adding code allows Jacob to skip non-terminal block touches and zones. This frees him up to improve his own coding without compromising depth of data and analysis. Instead of having to focus on coding more things in the short term, he has instead been able to learn other aspects of VolleyStation, like functions and formulas, and become more involved in opponent scouting. Having a secondary coder allows him to go wider in his skills instead of being stuck with having to go deeper into only coding before picking up these other skills.
Joe at Texas A&M sometimes has two student managers adding information to his code, something he called “trio coding”. While they are adding similar information to what other secondary coders are adding, having two of them doing it separately allows both of them to learn at the same time. They will trade off who will add directions and who will add serving velocities. One thing Texas A&M does differently is the secondary (and tertiary) coder will sit away from the bench area so they can use VolleyStation Streamer to watch video of the match as they code. This helps with drawing directions, especially in longer rallies. One more difference between A&M and the other teams we talked to is that the student managers are data science students with no volleyball experience. Joe said he didn’t encounter any additional challenges when teaching them how to code. He said that, to the contrary, having the structure of coding to build on made learning the game a little easier.
Despite all these differences between programs, there are some aspects of dual coding that are common to them all, as well as to programs interested in trying the feature. First, connecting the secondary coder’s computer needs close attention. Entering the IP address and port number must be done carefully or the connection won’t be established. You can read more about that here . Windows users also need to be certain both computers will allow VolleyStation to pass data through Windows’ default firewall. You can read more about that here.
As for the actual coding, more than one person commented about how difficult it can be for the secondary coder to remember multiple attack directions while waiting for the code to appear for them to work with. The best way to ease this difficulty is for the primary coder to type the return key in between possessions or plays. Each time they type the return key, their code is added to the list, so it becomes available to the secondary coder in chunks during the rally instead of receiving all the code at once at the end of the rally.
If you’re wondering how secondary coders enter serving velocity data, the answer is they put it in the custom code section. You can read more about custom code in the “double comma” section of this article. It is possible to search for data in the custom code, either in spreadsheets, when searching code in a match, or in video analysis. You can read more about how to structure those filters in the VolleyStation Pro manual in section 12.1, which covers the VSCOUNT() function.
We hope this gives you some great ideas about how to use the dual coding feature in VolleyStation Pro, both for teaching and for data collection and analysis.