Footvolley terms, explained
Every Areia Score number depends on a vocabulary: the player's side, the bracket stage, the quadrant where the ball landed. This page defines each term in one sentence, with a link to where it shows up on the site.
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Footvolley
- Beach sport played in pairs on a sand court with a net, where the ball may only be touched with feet, legs, torso, shoulders and head, never with arms or hands. Each pair has up to three touches to return the ball.
Pair (dupla)
- The footvolley team: two players, one on each side of the court. On Areia Score the pair has its own page, with campaign, head-to-heads and record, separate from each player's individual profile.
Left side and right side
- Each player's fixed position in the pair, seen from their own court. It sets the natural attacking angle and the preferred quadrants, and every head-attack name mirrors the side. In club leagues the side belongs to the match, set in the line-up, not to the player.
Serve
- The shot that starts the point, taken from behind the baseline. Scouting records aces and service errors as events separate from attacks.
Pingo (drop shot)
- Short attack that lands just past the net, in the opponent's quadrants Q1 to Q3. It punishes a pair that stays deep waiting for the long attack.
Down the line (paralela)
- Attack along the sideline nearest the attacker, parallel to the court's edge. In quadrants it lands in Q3, Q6 or Q9 for a right-side attacker and Q1, Q4 or Q7 for a left-side one.
Cross-court (diagonal)
- Attack from the attacker's position to the opposite corner of the opponent's court. It is the longest possible attack and the hardest to defend when hit hard.
Free ball (de graça)
- Ball returned with no attacking intent, just to clear the net. Scouting records it as its own category, because a pair that keeps giving free balls is usually under pressure from the serve or the defence.
Scouting
Scout
- Point-by-point record of a match: who touched the ball, with which body part, in which quadrant it landed and how the point ended. On Areia Score every scout is done by a scouter and checked by a reviewer before publishing.
Scouter
- Trained person who watches the match and logs every rally in the system. Different from the reviewer, who checks the log against the video.
Review and audit
- Second check of a scout before it enters the public database. Once published, any logged-in user can request an audit of a match or of a single point, and the reviewer decides from the video.
Quadrants Q1 to Q9
- Division of the opponent's court into nine equal regions, numbered from the attacker's view: Q1 to Q3 just past the net, Q4 to Q6 in the middle and Q7 to Q9 on the baseline. Every attack is recorded by the quadrant where the ball landed, not where it came from.
Competition formats
Stage (etapa)
- A tournament in a placement-based league (CBFv, LBF, Circuito Catarinense). Each stage awards ranking points to pairs by final placement.
Placement ranking
- Sum of the points a pair or player earned across the season's stages, following each league's table (the champion earns the most, down to the last scoring placement).
Round robin
- Club league format in which everyone plays everyone across rounds. On Areia Score a 2-0 win is worth 3 points, a 2-1 win 2 and a 1-2 loss 1.
Best of 3
- Tie decided by whoever wins two games. Sides alternate between games and, at 1-1, a third game is played. Statistics and predictions count the tie, not a single game.
Winners' bracket and repechage
- In double-elimination stages, a pair that loses in the main bracket drops into the repechage and stays in the tournament. Two losses and you are out. The final usually brings together the best of each bracket.
Qualifier
- Qualifying round played before the main bracket, usually on the Friday of a stage. The pairs that advance enter Saturday's bracket.
Group stage
- First phase of some tournaments, where the pairs in each group play each other and the best advance to the knockout.
Swiss system
- Format in which each round pairs teams with similar records, with no elimination until the final rounds. Used in European tournaments such as the Copenhagen 1000.
Club mode
- Tournament in which each team is a roster larger than a pair (seven players, for instance), with a line-up and substitutions per match. It is the format of the Liga Nacional de Futevôlei.
Statistics
Player rating
- Index from 0 to 10 computed from the scout: attack points, errors, digs and blocks, weighted by match volume. A small sample pulls the rating toward the middle until the player has enough matches.
Attack efficiency
- Attack points divided by attack attempts, as a percentage. It is the metric that best separates an efficient attacker from one who only hits hard.