How to Split Balanced Volleyball Teams on the Court and on the Sand

Splitting volleyball teams by “overall skill” tends to fail in a specific way: both sides look even on paper, but one team simply can’t put together an attack while the other can. The reason is almost always the same — both setters ended up on the same side. In volleyball, before you look at who plays better, you need to look at who does what. The method below sorts by role first, and only adjusts by skill afterward.

Why volleyball doesn’t split like soccer

In soccer, a team with weaker players can still play — the ball moves, everyone touches it, the scoreline suffers but the game happens. Volleyball doesn’t work that way, because the attack depends on a three-touch sequence with a clearly defined role for each touch: pass, set, hit. If a team has nobody who can set consistently, the second touch turns into a raw swing or a ball thrown blindly to the other side — the game stalls, not because the players are bad, but because the piece that organizes the play is missing.

That’s why “similar average skill” isn’t enough to balance a volleyball game. Two teams with the same average ability can still end up completely lopsided if all the setting ability landed on one side.

The 4-step method

Step 1 — split the setters first

Before anything else, identify who in the group can set consistently — organize the second touch for an attack, not just bump the ball upward. Put one setter on each team before assigning anyone else. If the group only has one real setter, tell the other team ahead of time: someone will need to take over the role by default, and it’s worth picking whoever has the cleanest hand contact among those left over, even if it’s not their natural role.

Step 2 — spread out who receives serve well

The pass is the first touch, and if it’s off, the setter never even gets to place the ball where they want. After the setters, identify who receives serve most reliably and put one per team. Groups that skip this step and jump straight to “who hits hardest” end up with one team that passes and attacks well, and another that never gets a ball clean enough to attack.

Step 3 — balance height and attack

Only now does the more obvious criterion come in: who blocks well at the net and who finishes with the most power. Spread the tallest players and the hardest hitters alternately between the two teams, the same way you did with the setter and the passers.

Step 4 — fill in the rest by overall level

With the three critical roles already split, the rest of the group goes in by overall skill, alternating between teams so you don’t stack the weaker or stronger players on one side. Standard common sense applies here: alternate, don’t just dump whoever’s left onto the same team at once.

Example with 12 players (two teams of 6, indoor)

Team A: Jake, Anna, Lucas, Sofia, Rafael, Carla Team B: Maria, Peter, Bianca, Diego, Dana, Theo

Notice each team ends up with one setter, one strong passer, one height/attack player, one solid all-around player, one intermediate, and one beginner. It’s this split by role — not the sum of “skill points” — that makes both sides play alike.

Example with 14 players

Fourteen doesn’t split cleanly into two teams of six. Two options work well, depending on where you’re playing:

• Indoor: build the two teams of 6 with the method above and keep 1 sub on each side. Agree that subs swap in for a starter every set — that way nobody sits out the whole match, and whichever team is playing still has six on court.
• On the sand, casual game: build two teams of 7 straight away, applying the same method (setter, then passing, then attack, then the rest) with one extra person per team. This works well when the goal is getting everyone playing at once, with nobody sitting out.

Is the sand different?

Official beach volleyball is played 2 versus 2, on a sand court 16 by 8 meters, with no libero and no substitutions — each pair plays with what they’ve got on court from the start of the set to the end. But hardly anyone playing beach volleyball with friends sticks to that format exactly: since only two fit per side, a group of 10 or 12 people would need several courts or a rotation of pairs just to get everyone playing. That’s why the most common casual beach format is 4 versus 4 or 6 versus 6, closer to indoor volleyball than to the official pair format.

When the game is set up that way, the 4-step method still applies, with one adjustment: since sand games rarely have someone specialized purely in defense (the role the libero fills indoors), weight who defends low balls well more heavily before looking at who hits hardest. Without that defense, the ball never even reaches the setter to finish the play.

If your group actually plays 2 versus 2, the criteria change: there’s no fixed role there, so what balances the pairs is always pairing a more offensive player with a more defensive one, and never putting the two weakest players in the group on the same pair.

When nobody in the group can really “set”

That’s common in very casual games, and it doesn’t stop play — it just changes the criteria for step 1. Instead of looking for who can set, look for whoever has the cleanest hand contact in general (even if that person normally attacks or passes) and spread that ability between the teams the same way you would a real setter. The game gets a bit messier on both sides, but it stays even.

Is it worth just drawing randomly instead of sorting by role?

For a very casual pickup game, where nobody’s tracking who sets or passes better, a random draw settles it fast and nobody complains about favoritism. If you already have your participants defined and want to split the teams quickly, use the Squadb team randomizer to do the split automatically — then apply this article’s method on top, manually swapping whoever ended up on the same team by mistake, like the two setters in the example above.

Before you settle on teams, it also helps to know how many players are on a volleyball team and what each position does on court — that’s what lets you spot who in the group already fills those roles without realizing it.