AU Mondays: Week 1

As many of you know, I’ve had the good fortune to be a part of the Athletes Unlimited pro league. Last week’s Match Analysis post featured a critical match from the last week of last season.

Transition Strength In Action

I’ll keep adding Match Analysis posts as the weeks go on, highlighting how the shape of the Triangle influences the outcomes of these matches. Like most of my Match Analysis stuff, those will be premium-only, so consider subscribing if you want to check them out.

But each Monday, I’ll post something that’s available to all you poor bastards free subscribers on the draft and the outlook for the week. But first, an intro to how the AU league works and some of its quirks.

The Competitive Format

The biggest difference about AU is that it is fundamentally not a team competition, it is an individual competition. A traditional pro league might have a bunch of teams in different cities who travel around and play each other. At the end of the season, you have a playoffs, and one team wins the league. In AU, there is a 44-player pool who all come to one city (right now: Dallas) and conduct a league that consists of constantly-changing teams where player rankings shuffle each week, with one player being crowned champion atop the leaderboard at the end of the schedule.

The competitive schedule is 5 weeks long, and each week has a similar flow. The first day of the competition week is Draft Day, where 4 team captains (more on this in a second) conduct a televised draft, dividing the 44 players into 4 teams. Each team gets a couple days to train, and then the teams play a round-robin tournament over multiple days, with each team playing each other.

Each team is given a color: Purple, Blue, Orange, or Gold. So Match Day 1: Purple plays Gold and Blue plays Orange. Match Day 2: Purple plays Orange and Blue plays Gold. Match Day 3: Purple plays Blue and Gold plays Orange. Your standard 4-team pool seen from little kid club tournaments all the way up through FIVB World Championships. At this level, you just play one match a day, so you spread it out over (in this case) 4 days: Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

Then, after the Saturday matches conclude, the player rankings are resorted (more on this in a second) and then top-4 players become captains. Some captains maintain captain status, while one or two will drop out each week. There’s another draft on Sunday, and then the week starts again: Monday/Tuesday practice, Wednesday/Friday/Saturday matches.

Do this 5 times and you’ll play 15 matches, with players accumulating individual points along the way. After the last match, the leaderboard is sorted out and the players finish with a final ranking, 1-through-44, which also reflects their bonus pay. Kind of like a mix between a really long AVP tournament, the PGA tour, and World Series of Poker.

What Do You Mean By Individual Scoring?

There’s a detailed explanation on the AU site, but the short answer is that, after every match, players get points for both team success and individual actions.

Team success is roughly 2/3 of the total point contribution, with individual stat points coming in at about 1/3.¹ So team success is heavily incentivized. Plus, it’s hard to rack up a lot of stat points on bad teams. The average number of win points earned through a season is 1350². No player with a below-average number of win points finished in the top 10 and the highest-ranked player with below-average win points was Leah Edmond at 15th, and she missed the final week of the season.

So the incentive for each player is: contribute heavily to winning teams.

Captains And The Draft

I mentioned this before, but one of the features of the league is that is player-directed. The teams are not long-standing university teams or established pro franchises, the way we typically think of teams. Each week the top-4 ranked players headed into the draft are named team captains.³ Each captain is assigned a color (#1 is assigned Gold, #2 is assigned Orange, #3 is assigned Blue, #4 is assigned Purple) and the teams are named after the captains.

Coaches are assigned on a pre-determined rotating schedule between the colors, and you find out who the captain is after the new rankings are confirmed after the Saturday match. So for Week 1, I’d been assigned to Purple, which is named “Team McClendon” for Week 1, since it is captained by #4-ranked returning player, Deja McClendon.

But the deal is, coaches are in an advisory role. The captains are the only ones physically present (besides media, etc) for the draft and they are responsible for entering draft picks. Coaches are talking on Zoom to captains during the draft, but the ultimate choice rests with the captains. The captains are also responsible for entering the lineup, calling timeouts, and making substitutions- although in practice captains often defer to coaches to make these calls so they can focus on playing.

The Role Of The Coach

With all this, it’s tempting to think that it’s a radically different coaching role. You don’t get final say in the players? You don’t get final say in the lineup or the subs? What kind of bullshit is that?

The funny thing is, for me, it’s felt almost exactly the same as I normally would coach. What successful coach doesn’t get on the same page with their best players and most influential leaders on the team? If you’re making a whole bunch of subs or setting a lineup that your captain isn’t on board with, what does that say about that relationship?

The main thing that was challenging for me was just that you quickly had to change each week. So each week I’d meet with the captains and sit down and talk volleyball. I wanted to understand their perspective on the game and what they valued. And 90% of it was stuff that is just common sense volleyball.

“Oh wow, you want players with good ball control who can score and who are also good teammates? I’m shocked!”

The main thing that required coordination was around which setters we would target and if that would change what hitters we would go after. There was about a 10% flex between, “that setter is a fast-tempo setter, but I like a higher offense,” or, “that setter is good to the pins, but we need to make sure we get somebody who can run middles,” or whatever. So some little fine-tuning there.

And for things like, “what are we going to do at practice?”

Joe: “Hey, I was thinking we’d warmup, do some setter and passer tutoring, get into live serve-pass, work through a few attack/block situations, and then play a little 6-on-6.”

Captain: “Yep, sounds like a normal volleyball practice. Can we make sure we do a little extra of [this aspect of the game]?”

Joe: “Yep!”

This Week

This post is getting long, and it’s heavy on background information, so we’ll keep things short for this week. Expect me to also stick more to generalized coaching topics rather than the nitty gritty evaluations of each player or any behind-the-scenes drama. As a rule, I limit discussion individual players outside of teaching points for something they do on the court, such as the way they take their approach or how they defend a Gap-Go.

And please don’t take player compliments as insults in disguise. “You said she has a big arm, are you saying I don’t?” Relax VolleyTalkers!

So just a short run-down here:

With Team McClendon we had 1st pick, which is nice. It’s also a snake draft, so after the first pick, we wouldn’t draft until the last pick of the second round (#8), which would then be followed by the first pick of the third round (#9). Teams Purple and Gold always make two picks in a row, because the order snakes every round. So we had picks #1, #8, #9, #16, #17, #24, #25, #32, #33, and #40.

Deja’s strengths are her ball control and defense, so we wanted to come out of the first 3 picks with the two biggest arms on the pin and the most physical middle we could get. And after that, we wanted smart, scrappy players who could play defense and would have the chemistry to get on the same page quickly- an important quality in this league.

We went with OH/Opp Dani Drews, the rookie out of Utah with our first pick. She’s physical and can play on either pin, which would give us more flexibility with the next pick. Coming back with our #8/#9 picks we were able to snag OH Leah Edmond, accomplishing our goal of getting two big point-scorers, and MB Jenna Rosenthal, one of the biggest and most physical presences at the net in this league.

With our #16 and #17 picks we got our second middle Taylor Morgan and our libero, Nomaris Velez. And our #24 and #25 picks gave us setter Nati Valentin and outside Cassidy Lichtman. This rounded out our lineup with scrappiness and defense, as well as giving us a great serve/pass/defense sub.

In this league, your last 3 picks need to round out the lineup and be good chemistry players who are able to come in as a substitute when needed and help make practice go well. We got setter Ray Santos, middle Emma Willis, and opposite Niki Withers.

What A Week Looks Like

The weeks go fast in this league. We have a practice today (Monday), a practice tomorrow (Tuesday), and then we play on Wednesday. We have a practice day on Thursday, and then matches on Friday and Saturday. Then the weekend will be over and it’s time for another draft on Sunday.

There’s not much practice time, and you have to be mindful of loading because you’re playing 3 matches per week. So you have to get done what you can in a short period of time. There isn’t time for a, “one step back to go two steps forward approach.”

I like to keep things as simple as possible anyway, and in this league that’s even more important.

The Monday practice will focus mostly on getting our reception line intact, doing some serve/pass tutoring, and then spending the rest of the practice dialing in our sideout offense. If we can be good in that first sequence, it will make the transition game a lot easier.

The Tuesday practice will be lighter, but we’ll play more 6v6. So we’ll hit some serve-pass again, and then run through how we want to block against isolate and overload plays. Nati is a smaller setter, so teams are going to try to run plays to attack against her block. Figuring out how we want to get her some help on the block against different offensive plays is a worthwhile time investment.

And then we’ll have our first match on Wednesday. Don’t worry, it’s only against returning #2 player, and all-around volleyball queen, Bethania De La Cruz.

No problem, right?

1. For the players who accumulated a ton of stat points (or didn’t win much), it was more like 50/50. But the players who didn’t compile many stat points (mostly because of lack of playing time) earned almost exclusively through team success.

2. 180 win points are available per match, with 30 matches total, split between 4 teams.

3. In Week 1, the captains are the top-4 returning players from last year.