How to fill out a volleyball line-up sheet

Before every set, each coach hands the second referee a small card with six numbers on it. That card is the line-up sheet, and it is the thing the whole scoresheet is built on.

It is also the source of the single most common misunderstanding in volleyball scorekeeping, so let us deal with that first.

The slots are service order, not court positions

The card has six slots, labelled I through VI in Roman numerals. Those are not the six zones on the court.

Slot I is the player who serves first. Slot II serves second. And so on around to VI.

If your team serves first, the player in slot I is standing in the serving position and serves the opening point. If your team receives first, that same player is not serving yet — they rotate into the serving position when your team wins its first rally, and serve then.

Once you have that, everything else on the card is bookkeeping.

What goes on the card

• Six jersey numbers, one per slot, in service order
• The libero, or both liberos, in the separate libero box — never in one of

the six slots

• The captain, marked as your association’s card asks
• The set number, because a new card is submitted for every set
• The coach’s signature, on cards that ask for one

Submit it before the deadline the second referee gives you, usually as the previous set finishes. A late card is a delay sanction, which is a genuinely annoying way to give away a point.

How the scorer uses it

The scorer copies your six numbers straight into columns I through VI on the scoresheet, for your side. The libero goes on the libero line.

From that moment the card is the reference for the whole set. If a referee needs to check whether a team served out of order, or whether a substituted player came back into the right slot, this is what they check against.

Which is why one detail matters more than it looks: once submitted, the card is the line-up. A coach who realises they wrote the wrong number cannot quietly fix it. The correction goes through the second referee, before the set starts, and after that the players on court have to match what is written.

Substitutions read from the card too

A substitution is a swap into one specific slot. The player coming in takes the outgoing player’s place in the service order, and if the original player returns later in that set, they return to the same slot and only for the player who replaced them.

That rule only makes sense against the card. It is why the scorer records substitutions under the relevant service column rather than in a general list.

A rotation sheet is a different thing

Coaches also keep rotation sheets — six court diagrams showing where each player stands in each of the six rotations, with the base positions they run. That is a coaching tool. It is not submitted to anyone and it is not what the referee wants before the set.

If you are being asked for a card at the scorer’s table, you are being asked for service order: six numbers, in the order they serve.

Where this gets easier

The card itself is not the hard part. The hard part is what happens after it — keeping the service order, the substitutions and the libero replacements straight for five sets while the gym is loud.

VolleySheet takes the starting six once, then tracks the rotation underneath every point that gets tapped in. The service order stays correct without anyone maintaining it, and the official-format sheet at the end reflects what actually happened on court.

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.

For the sheet the card feeds into, see how to fill out a volleyball scoresheet.