Automatic Rotation, Serve and Libero Tracking While You Score

Keeping stats is one job. Keeping track of the serve, the rotation and the libero is a second job, and it is the one that goes wrong. Miss one rotation and every stat after it is credited to a player standing in the wrong spot.

SpikeLedger does the second job for you. The scorer records what happened. The app works out the rest.

The four rules

Volleyball's serve and rotation follow four rules, and every button that ends a rally applies them.

1. 1Your team wins a rally while serving: same server, no rotation.
2. 2Your team wins a rally while receiving: you get the serve and rotate one spot.
3. 3The other team wins a rally while you serve: the serve goes to them, no rotation.
4. 4The other team wins a rally while they serve: nothing changes.

A kill, an ace, a block, an opponent error, any error by your players, a serve receive graded 0 and the They scored button all end a rally. Each one moves the score, the serve and the rotation in one tap. An assist, a dig, a pass graded 1 to 3 and a swing kept in play end nothing, so they move nothing.

The start of a set

At the start of every set the app asks one question: who serves first? It shows the court you are about to start on, with each player in their spot. If the picture is not how you are lined up, you turn it until it is. The first time a set is set up this question cannot be skipped, because a set that starts from a guess is wrong from the first rally.

The libero

Mark your libero in the lineup, and a second libero if you have one. From then on:

• When one of the players the libero replaces reaches the back row and is not about to serve, the libero goes in for them.
• When the libero would rotate to the front row, that player comes back.
• The libero does not serve, unless your league allows it and you switch on that team setting.
• A libero swap is never counted as a substitution.

By default the libero plays for your middles. You can choose other players. A line under the court always says where the libero is, and you can swap by hand whenever you need to. If you take the libero out by hand the app says the automatic swaps are paused and gives you one button to resume them.

Buttons that know who is serving

Because the app knows the serve and the rotation, it knows which buttons make sense. Ace and Serve error are on only for the player in the serving spot, and only while your team serves. Serve receive is on only while the other team serves. Block is on only for the front row. A button that is off is greyed out, not hidden, and a tap on it says why.

If the app ever has the serve wrong, the message tells you the fix: tap the serve indicator to switch it.

When you make a mistake

Undo reverses the last action completely: the stat, the point, the serve, the rotation and any libero swap that point set off. If only the score is off, plus and minus fix the score without touching the serve or the rotation.

Showing players where to stand

Show rotation opens the court large enough to hold up in a timeout: each spot, who serves, and where the libero is. Because the court was kept right after every point, it is right when you need it.

The full list of what the scoring screen does is on the features page. If rotations themselves are new to you, start with understanding volleyball rotations.