How data is changing Indian Volleyball: Inside the work of a Performance Analyst

Ashutosh Mishra’s academic background is in physics and neuroscience – two fields that seem lightyears away from the fast-paced, high-flying world of professional volleyball. Yet, a deep-rooted love for the sport eventually pulled him away from the laboratory and onto the court.

Today, he serves as the performance analyst for the senior national men's volleyball team of India. His unconventional journey, which began during his PhD studies in the Netherlands, perfectly highlights a rapidly growing, yet often misunderstood, field in the modern sports ecosystem: performance analysis.

But what exactly does a performance analyst do?

To put it simply, it is the objective, data-driven evaluation of athletes and teams to strategise and improve outcomes.

As Mishra explains, "Performance analysis is basically measuring the performance of your own players, your team and your opponents."

"We need performance analysis to objectively understand how we are playing, what trends we have in our gameplay, what opponents follow and what weaknesses and strengths we have," he added in a conversation with The Bridge.

In modern sports, going into a match blindly is a recipe for disaster. To build these preparations, analysts "code the game" in real-time.

They sit courtside, rapidly typing out every action, detailing which player touched the ball, the type of action performed, and the final outcome. This meticulous stream of data is simultaneously synchronised with a live video feed.

This allows coaches to instantly isolate and re-watch specific, highly-pressure scenarios like how a setter responds to a poor reception, or how a player navigates a triple block in volleyball.

It is a multi-variable process that helps teams identify trends over time, tracking players across various domestic competitions for over a year to build a comprehensive profile of their capabilities.

While the job sounds incredibly technical, often involving software like Data Volley in volleyball or other specialised software for other sports and coding languages like R and Python to create visualizations, the human element remains most important.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the field is evolving rapidly, yet Mishra strongly insists that technical wizardry is secondary to a deep understanding of the sport.

"I don't think it's absolutely necessary to be an excellent programmer or need to know programming," Mishra asserts.

"Most important thing is that you understand the sport and you are a little bit comfortable around the laptop," he added with a chuckle.

This innate sporting knowledge is exactly why many retired or injured ex-players successfully transition into these analytical roles. Furthermore, an analyst's data is only one piece of the puzzle.

Coaches must combine this objective data with psychological inputs, training observations, and their own intuition to make holistic decisions.

So, where does India stand in this tech-driven revolution?

Having previously worked with under-18 and under-20 national teams in Europe, Mishra notes a significant developmental gap.

In Europe, even under-16 teams have dedicated analysts working directly in training sessions, creating a deeply ingrained data culture from a remarkably young age. India is currently playing catch-up, but the tide is turning.

"There's definitely an appetite to grow in this field, especially with the foreign coaches and with the Prime Volleyball League (PVL) where the foreign coaches are coming, and they are used to working with data analysts," Mishra observes.

The immediate challenge is to develop this data-driven culture at the junior levels so that athletes arrive in the senior category speaking the same analytical language.

For India to truly harness the power of sports analytics, systematic, structural changes are necessary. The country currently lacks official academic degrees or structured pathways for performance analysis across sports.

More crucially, it lacks a long-format domestic calendar.

Mishra suggests looking at cricket for inspiration: "We really need maybe a longer league or organizing the domestic competition in a more, let's say, longer format, like I don't know, just thinking out loud, like cricket they have Ranji [Trophy] which lasts many months. This way, a performance analyst can learn to apply every week for a new game".

Ultimately, the integration of performance analysis is an inevitable frontier for Indian sports. Once governance issues are sorted and these systematic structures are established, the potential is limitless.

"Once we bring in the structure, a little bit of professionalism, we will see we are 1.4 billion, just saying statistically we can dominate any field," Mishra confidently asserts.

With the right data and structured programs, India is steadily preparing to code its way to the podium.