AU Mondays: Week 2
Recapping most closely-contested week in league history.
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 the closest match of Week 1:
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.
Also, exciting news! On March 31, I’ll be doing a coaches workshop for premium subscribers. The topic will be setting and I’ve roped the great Alisha (Glass) Childress and the great Carli Lloyd into joining me for the discussion and Q&A. Two Olympic medalists who both think really deeply about the setting position and are great resources. Get your setting questions ready!
And even better, in the spirit of the AU Causes program, I’ll donate all subscriber revenue from now through March 31 to Give Directly.
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. Last week I went into some detail on the unique format of the league, so if you’re not familiar, check that out. Otherwise, let’s go right to the takeaways from this past week’s play and draft.
Last Week’s Results
First of all, let’s look at the results:
Gold: 5 set wins (+200 points) and 3 match wins (+180 points) = 380 points Purple: 5 set wins (+200 points) and 2 match wins (+120 points) = 320 points Orange: 5 set wins (+200 points) and 0 (!) match wins = 200 points Blue: 3 set wins (+120 points) and 1 match (+60 points) = 180 points
This was one of the strangest weeks in AU history in terms of match result. Orange (captained by Aury Cruz) had the strange distinction of being the first team in league history to record 5 set wins without winning any of the 3 matches.1 They won 1 set vs Blue (and lost the match), and then they won 2 sets vs both Purple and Gold, but lost the total score for both matches. Technically it would be possible to win 6 sets without winning a match, but I think we might never see that in league history.
Also, Gold winning all 3 matches despite winning only 5 total sets was the first time that happened. Last year, every time a team went 3-0 in matches they won at least 6 sets.
Put both of those things together and this was actually the closest week in league history, as measured by the spread between the number of points that the top team earned and number of points that the bottom team earned. The 200-point difference was significantly closer than the last year’s Week 5- the closest week of last season, where Team Purple went 3-0 and earned 460 points, and every other team went 1-2, with Blue and Orange both earning 180 points, same as Blue earned this week.
Also worth noting that in both the loss vs Purple and vs Gold that Orange lost the first set rather badly before rallying to win the next two sets by very close margins. So either that is part of the randomness of the game that doesn’t really mean anything they were the worst at warming up or the best at making in-match adjustments?
Last Week’s Draft
If you remember from last week’s post, I was assigned as coach for the Purple team, captained by Deja McClendon. We started slow against Gold, but finished the week on a pretty strong note
Last week, I summed up our draft strategy as:
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.
How did we do with that? I think pretty well!
A 2nd-place result in this league isn’t too bad. As an individual player, if you earned 320 points each week you’d end up with 1,600 win points at the end of the season, which would have been 12th-most. So, each player can be pretty happy with getting those points.
And in terms of individual players, Dani Drews finished the week with the most overall points in the league, moving from our team to take the Gold captainship. If you draft somebody 1st overall and they win the week, that usually means you made a good choice! And our second pick was Leah Edmond, who finished the week 4th in kills and was selected #1 overall in the Week 2 draft (more on that in a bit). So thumbs up on our goal of “two biggest arms on the pin.”
Our goal with our third pick was, “most physical middle we could get,” and we went with Jenna Rosenthal. She had a very strong week, finishing 10th on the leaderboard and was drafted with the 5th overall pick this week. So again, thumbs-up on that one.
Before the draft, Deja and I made the decision to prioritize drafting attackers. We felt comfortable with getting any one of 4 different setters. Since there are 4 teams, being the last to choose a setter, libero, or opposite gives you an opportunity to stock up on other positions. If 3 teams have already chosen their setters, you know they will generally complete the rest of their starting lineup before drafting a setter, meaning you can wait until round 6 to pick your starting setter.
We were happy to have Natalia Valentin be the 4th setter available, and she did so well that she played herself from the 6th round to a captainship! And the funny thing is that it was the Blue captainship, so her and I will be working together again. More on that below.
I think we picked good, defensive players who brought awesome energy. But it took us longer to get on the same page as a team than I would have liked. Part of the downside of our strategy of, “just get the two biggest pin arms we could,” was that we were playing Drews a little out of position. She’s a natural left-side who we played on the right. It didn’t affect front-row attacking as much, but it affected our back-row defense and her back-row attacking.
In Match 1, we played her exclusively in right-back, the way you normally would an opposite. In Match 2, we started playing her in middle-back and having Lichtman or McClendon play right-back defense and in Match 3, we went to that strategy entirely. Drews was more comfortable digging in middle-back and hitting out of the pipe than digging in right-back and hitting a D-ball. Once we made this adjustment, our defense solidified and our backrow hitting improved.
This is part of the deal in this league; you have really limited practice time, so you are generally rewarded for playing more conventional strategies. However, I’m frustrated with myself that I didn’t think of this earlier in the week and set ourself up to have that option in our first match vs Gold. It may have helped us earn a few more points.
This Week’s Draft
The captains for Week 1 were determined by the player rankings from last season. But now, there’s no carryover from last season. So the Week 2 captains are the highest point-scorers from Week 1. In order, they were:
#1 (Gold) - Dani Drews #2 (Orange) - Betty De La Cruz #3 (Blue) - Natalia Valentin #4 (Purple) - Lauren Stivrins
The coaches rotate through the colors on a pre-determined schedule. Since I was with Purple last week, I’m with Blue this week.2 That means I get to continue to work with Nati Valentin, only now in a captains role. In some ways, that made things easy; you already have a relationship with somebody, so it was easy to get on the same page about draft strategy. On the flip side, I think it’s harder to draft with a setter captain than with an attacker as a captain.
One of the advantages of having an attacker, particularly an outside, as a captain, is that you are already starting with one hitter. You have a more flexible draft course. Starting with a setter (and maybe also starting with a middle, as in the case of Stivrins this week) is harder because your only option is to take a pin hitter, preferably a left side passer/attacker first. It doesn’t mean you can’t have a good draft, it just means you have fewer options, so things need to fall your way.
Fortunately for us, we knew we would have at least one of two really strong options to choose from. We already mentioned that Leah Edmond was 4th in the league in Week 1 in kills for us on Purple last weekend, so Nati and I would have been fired up to take her. But we felt pretty sure Purple would take her 1st overall this week, so we expected to take opposite Karsta Lowe with the 2nd overall pick. Karsta led AU in kills last year and was 1st in Week 1. So we felt great about locking up that offensive production right away.
We expected to take Karsta 1st overall, so we were pretty much pre-determined to take an outside hitter in the second round. Our plan was then to get a middle in the third. We drafted Madison Villines in the second round. But when our third round pick rolled around, Lindsay Stalzer was still available. We decided to jump at the opportunity to take another strong outside attacker, even though it meant passing up a middle as good as Molly McCage.
Our next two picks were middles: Lianna Sybeldon and Ali Bastianelli. We wanted middles that were complete volleyball players: who could block and serve as well as attack. Since three liberos were already off the board, we would be auto-assigned our libero (Hana Lishman) in the last round, which let us start rounding out our bench earlier than some other teams. We got a couple of good backup pin hitters in Deja McClendon and Erica Wilson. We were surprised to get Taylor Sandbothe and Taylor Bruns as a third middle and second setter respectively; since both those players have tended to be drafted as either starters or early (6th or 7th-round) backups. To get them in 8th and 9th was a pleasant surprise.
Training
The schedule for the week is: Train Monday, Train Tuesday, Play Wednesday. You get training time on Thursday but it’s going to be light because you’re sandwiched between the Wednesday match and the upcoming Friday and Saturday matches.
How I approach this is to have Monday be our heaviest overall loading in terms of jumping, but to do no full 6v6 volleyball. Today (I’m writing this after practice) we came in with the goal of getting each of our 6 serve receive rotations dialed in.
At this level, players and coaches generally have an idea about rotations. So you’re not building from the ground-up. But you do have some specific calls. For example:
Setter-1: Do we spread or stack? Specifically, do we want Karsta to hit on the left as an opposite, or do the (in?)famous Karsta run-around to be able to hit on the right?
Setter-6: What’s our middle release going to be like? Do we need to get that middle across to the Gap or are we going to keep her close to the setter? Is she always going to drift from right to left or is she she going to release early to the center of the court and come back to the setter? Can our Zone 1 passer maintain passing vision the whole time?
Setter-5: This is the easiest attacking rotation, but our libero is in 1, so we want to make sure we have the seams between the two outsides dialed in. Do we want to incorporate a 4th hitter with the backrow outside (who is in good position by virtue of passing in 6) to hit a Pipe or do we not have time to dial that in?
Setter-4: Long release for the setter plus our libero is still in 1. What backrow route are we going to have our opposite do? Last week we kept Drew primarily on a straight Pipe in the center of the court. Should we do that with Karsta, or will we work C/D balls in concert with what the middle is doing?
Setter-3: Same questions, although the libero in 6 and easier release for the setter makes some of this stuff a little easier.
Setter-2: Do we have our away middle (some call it M2) hit in front or behind the setter? If she stays in front, can we get production from our backrow opposite behind the setter to still spread the net?
Substitutions: Are we subbing for offense or are we subbing for serving/defense/ball control? If we’re subbing for offense, what specifically do our players off the bench bring? Can we get that dialed in given the limited training time we have?
Before practice today I thought out each of those pieces and wrote them out. I listed what I thought we could get done and wrote down the top priorities that we could get accomplished today.
Tomorrow, we’ll get on the same page on some block/defense stuff and scrimmage the Gold team a bit, because they practice at the same time. We’ll go an overall lighter load and shorter practice, but more live 6 v 6 volleyball.
And Wednesday we’ll play!
AU History
The history of setter captains is the ultimate mixed signal. Last year in Week 4, Kelly Hunter was the Purple captain as a setter… and that team was the only team in AU history to record 0 win points in a week. 0-9 in sets! But the next week Brie King was the Purple captain as a setter (and I was with Purple as her coach that week as well), and that team went 3-0 in matches and 7-2 in sets.
So… which one will we be? We’ll find out this week!
No team that went 0-3 last year won even 4 sets actually.
And I’ll be Orange in Week 3, Gold in Week 4, and then rotate back to Purple in Week 5.