AU Mondays - Week 0
Preseason recap
My 3rd season as a “coach” in the Athletes Unlimited pro “league” is underway.
If you don’t get why “coach” and “league” are in scare quotes, or are just unfamiliar with AU in general, check out this post from a previous season where I explain some of the mechanics or the league, which has a very different format than typical professional volleyball.
2024 Season Updates
I coached for AU in the spring of 2021s and 2022, the first two seasons that the league was launched. I was on board to coach last year, but then I left for Korea, so I couldn’t participate last year. Now I’m back for season 4. Most of the overall structure of the league is the same, so if you’re familiar with the format, you’ll know what’s up for this year as well.
The shift to the fall is a major change, and mostly a positive one for American pro volleyball in general. With the two full-season league startups, PVF and LOVB, playing more in the typical pro season of January - April (a bit shorter, as the typical pro season starts in October/November), AU in the fall becomes a nice compliment. Most of the players in the 44-player AU pool are also on PVF or LOVB contracts. For some players, a ~60k contract in the American pro leagues is a less (when you consider housing costs and taxes) than they would earn overseas, so picking up an extra 20-40k in the AU season goes a long way toward keeping good players playing domestically. And for the top players, who are making in the 150k range domestically, that extra 30k bonus for an AU season helps get them at least in shouting distance of the 150-300k (plus housing, etc) that they can get overseas.
So I’m positive on AU and I like the shift to the fall!
Pre-Season
As you might imagine in a format that is individually-scored and the teams change every week, my job as a coach is not to train any one particular system, but instead to help prepare the overall player pool. The two priorities of pre-season were:
Ramp up the players, physically and technically, to playing professional volleyball.
Give everybody a chance to gain familiarity playing with and against everybody else.
Like all pre-season camps, the players enter in various degrees of physical and technical condition. (Yet another reason for me to write an article entitled: “Professional sports are like high school sports, only more so.”) Some players have been getting in the gym for full 6v6 reps with college teams and have been working out for 2 hours a day, so they were ready to hit 100 balls on Day 1. Other players… weren’t.
To accommodate this, I generally planned the formal part of practice a bit on the short end (about 1 hour, 45 mins) and then kept the courts open for extra reps. For some players, especially those working into shape or dealing with nagging injuries, that was enough and they shut it down. Other players stayed after for nearly an hour. This is a flexibility you don’t get as a club coach, for example, but you also get a longer time to progress into the season. We only had 6 practices before our first scrimmages.
I’ll have more info on this in the In The Gym section (which I’ll update today after we draft), but basically I blocked the first 3 practices to focus more on reception and sideout and the next 3 to focus more on block/defense and transition play. With 44 players, we broke out to 4 courts so we could do 1-Way Serve/Pass and some 1-Way Sideout Attacking. Those were the core drills for the first 3 days, along with 1 set’s worth of 6v6, which we did as rotational games so that all the players could get on the same page with rotational alignments, etc. On the next 3 days, we did shorter rounds of serve/pass and get into some Block Lines (day 1 we did 1-on-1 blocking, day 2 we did more overload/read blocking), a BSBH construct where we practiced getting block/defense organized against some scripted plays, and then some full 6v6 scrimmage type stuff.
The First Draft
As you’re reading this, the first draft might be already completed, or, at minimum, about to get underway. I don’t want to get too into the weeds of player specifics. I try to be conscious that these players are (semi) public figures and I don’t want players feeling like I’m going to be putting any individuals on blast or getting too much into comments that could be taken one way or the other by fans. So I want to keep the overall commentary of these articles to the coaching principles and takeaways.
The Week 1 draft sees me paired up with Purple captain, and AU veteran, Betty De La Cruz. I’ve worked with her before, she’s an experienced veteran, and it’s not hard to get aligned on values. So in that respect, it’s a pretty easy week for me. Purple is a weird team to draft for, because you have the 1st pick, but (due to the snake order), you don’t pick again until #s 8 and 9. So you can’t script out your first 3 picks quite as much as the other teams can. We know who we’re taking 1st, but from there, we’ll just have to be flexible and adapt to what the other teams do.
From a strategy standpoint, we want to emphasize players with some experience and ball control. There’s a few players that I think will be good as the weeks go on, but they might need a few weeks to get settled and familiar with the task of playing with and against different players every week. So our goal is to draft a team that can come together quickly, and pair up 2 big point scorers with a bunch of players with some smarts and experience who won’t give away a ton of points.
We’ll see how it goes!