Improving the Serving Motion in a Volleyball Game: A Design of Experiment Approach

The statistical design of experiment (DOE) is a procedure of planning controlled experiments for investigating the effect of some process on some experimental units. Although the DOE method has a wide range of applicability in various scientific areas, the DOE application in sport science has been received less consideration. Similarly, this study tries to determine the most significant factor in hitting the ball to a desirable distance in Volleyball serve motion. To conduct the experiments four factors were identified, which are “start angle of arm”, “stop angle of arm”, “the required force for striking the ball”, and “the arm length of the server”. The experiments were conducted according to the design of experiment (DOE) with the help of Design Expert software, and the results were statistically evaluated using analysis of variance (ANOVA). The findings of the study show that “force” has the most significant effect on the objective of experiments.