How to fill out a volleyball scoresheet

Somebody handed you a scoresheet and a pen, the first whistle is in ten minutes, and the sheet has roughly two hundred boxes on it. This guide walks the whole thing, in the order you actually fill it in.

It describes the official-format sheet used across Canadian indoor volleyball — the FIVB-style layout that Volleyball Canada, BC club and most BC school play all work from. Associations tweak the details, and your tournament may hand you a sheet with a box in a slightly different place. The logic below holds either way.

Before anyone warms up: the header

The strip across the top is the only part of the sheet you can finish early, so finish it early. You will not have a calm minute again until the match ends.

• Match number, time and court — from the schedule, not from memory
• Competition, city and gym — the event name as it appears on the draw
• Division — gender, and the age category (18U, 17U, 16U, 15U, 14U, 13U) or

adult grade

• Date and start time — the real start time, filled in at the first whistle,

not the scheduled one

Then the two teams, and this is the part people get wrong: the sheet has an A side and a B side, and which team goes where is decided by the referee or the draw, not by who is the home team. Write the team names in the boxes the referee points at, and use the same letters everywhere else on the sheet.

The rosters, and who is allowed to sit on the bench

Copy the numbers and names from the line-up the coach hands in — jersey number first, in ascending numerical order, so you can find a number fast later. You will be searching this list under pressure.

Mark the captain. Then the libero, or liberos, which go on their own line rather than in the ordinary player rows. Under the roster there is a team leaders block: C for the coach, and AC1, AC2, AC3 for assistant coaches, trainer and therapist. Only the people written in that block are allowed to be on the bench, which is exactly why a referee will ask you to check it.

The coin toss: S, R, and the side

Two small circles per team, marked before every set:

• S on the team that serves first
• R on the team that receives first
• A or B for the side of the court each team starts on

Set 1 comes from the coin toss. Sets 2 and 4 flip — the team that received now serves. If the match goes to a deciding set, there is a second toss for it.

Getting this wrong is the single most common way a sheet ends up unusable, because everything downstream — the service order, whose column is whose — reads from it.

The starting line-up is service order, not court positions

Each team gets six columns, numbered I through VI. This trips up almost every new scorer, so it is worth saying plainly:

Those Roman numerals are the service order, not where the players stand on the court.

The number in column I is the player who serves first for that team. Column II serves next, and so on around to VI. A coach who hands you a line-up card is handing you service order, and you copy it straight across.

The libero is not in any of the six columns. The libero goes on the separate libero line.

Scoring the rally

Once play starts, the sheet only asks you for two things, over and over.

One: cross off the point. Each team has a column of pre-printed numbers running 1 upward. When a team wins a rally, cross off their next number. Only ever one number per rally — if a team’s score jumps by two, a rally went unrecorded, and finding it later is much harder than catching it now.

Two: track who is serving. When the receiving team wins a rally, they win the serve as well. That is a side-out: the serve moves across, that team rotates, and the next player in their service order steps up. You record the score at which each new service term begins, which is what lets anyone reconstruct the rotation afterwards.

That is the whole job during a rally. Everything else on the sheet only happens when the referee stops play.

Substitutions

When the second referee authorises a substitution, record it at the moment it happens, at the score it happens. You need the number going out, the number coming in, and the score.

Write it in the substitution box under the service column of the player being replaced — that is the detail that makes the sheet auditable, because it shows not just that a change happened but which slot in the rotation it happened in.

Two things to watch. A player who has been substituted out may return only to the same position in the service order, and only for the player who replaced them. And a libero replacement is not a substitution — it does not go in the substitution boxes and does not count against the team’s limit.

Time-outs

Two per team per set. Record the score at which each one is called, in that team’s time-out boxes for that set — both scores, theirs and the opponent’s.

If a team asks for a third, or asks for a substitution when they have none left, that is an improper request. It gets refused without penalty the first time, and it is recorded in the improper request box rather than in the sanctions block.

Sanctions: W, P, E, D

The sanctions block has four columns, in ascending severity:

• W — warning
• P — penalty, which awards a point and the serve to the opponent
• E — expulsion, for the rest of that set
• D — disqualification, for the rest of the match

Here is the part most explanations skip. What you write in the column is not a tick — it is who was sanctioned. Use the player’s jersey number for a player, or C for the coach, AC for an assistant coach, T for the trainer, M for medical staff. Delay sanctions are recorded with D for delay against the team rather than a person.

Then record the team, the set, and the score at the moment of the sanction. A sanction with no score beside it is a sanction nobody can place afterwards.

Anything unusual that does not have its own box — an interrupted match, an injury, a court problem, a protest — goes in the remarks box in plain words. Referees would much rather read a clear sentence than decode a margin note.

The end of a set

At the end of each set:

1. Confirm the final score and that the winning team crossed off their last point
2. Record the set duration — the finish time, against the start time you wrote at

the first whistle

1. Carry the set result into the results box at the bottom of the sheet
2. Take the new line-up cards for the next set and start again

Sign nothing yet. A scorer’s signature says the sheet has been checked and is complete, which is not a thing you can claim mid-match.

The deciding set is different

If the match reaches a deciding set, three things change, and the sheet has a separate block for it because of them: there is a fresh coin toss, the set is played to 15 rather than 25, and the teams change sides when the leading team reaches 8 points.

That change of sides has its own box — the score at the change — and it is the detail most likely to be missed on a sheet that has otherwise been kept perfectly, because it happens fast and everyone in the gym is standing up.

The results box and the signatures

The results block totals the match: each set’s score and duration, total points, total match time, and the winner with the set score.

Then the approval block. First referee, second referee, scorer and assistant scorer sign, with the line judges recorded. Both team captains sign to accept the result. Sign last, after you have checked the sheet — because that signature is the claim that it is right.

The five errors that cause most corrections

Almost every sheet that has to be reconstructed after the fact fails in one of the same few ways.

1. The coin toss was recorded wrong, so the service order is inconsistent

from the first rally

1. A rally went unmarked, and the score on the sheet no longer matches the

score on the board

1. A substitution was recorded without the score, so it cannot be placed in

the rotation

1. The libero was written into a service column instead of the libero line
2. Times were left blank — start, end, or the change of sides in the deciding

set

If you catch a mistake mid-set, do not erase it. Draw a single line through the error, write the correction beside it, and tell the second referee. A sheet with a visible, initialled correction is a valid sheet. A sheet with a rubbed-out hole in it is an argument.

Or never fill one out again

Everything above is learnable, and the volunteers who learn it are genuinely useful people. But it is worth naming what the notation actually is: a manual database, maintained in pen, in real time, by someone who was recruited in the parking lot.

That is the part VolleySheet removes. The person at the table taps the team that scored. The app tracks the rotation, the service order, the substitutions, the time-outs and the sanctions underneath, and produces the official-format sheet at the end — the same boxes, filled in correctly, ready to print and sign.

You still get your official-format sheet — printed, perfect, and signed. We just make sure no volunteer has to learn scoresheet notation to produce it.

If you are running the event rather than sitting at the table, the tournament setup is where that starts. If you have just been handed the job for one afternoon, the volunteer’s guide is the shorter read.