AU Mondays: Week 3

As many of you know, I’ve had the good fortune to be a part of the Athletes Unlimited pro league. If you haven’t read Week 1 yet, I go into detail on the unique format of the league that some people are unfamiliar with:

AU Mondays: Week 1

Additionally: on March 31 (aka this Thursday), 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.

Let’s start this post by looking back at the previous week.

Last Week’s Results

First of all, let’s look at the results:

Blue: 5 set wins (+200 points) and 2 match wins (+120 points) = 320 points
Orange: 5 set wins (+200 points) and 2 match wins (+120 points) = 320 points
Gold: 4 set wins (+160 points) and 1 match win (+60 points) = 220 points
Purple: 4 set wins (+160 points) and 1 match win (+60 points) = 220 points

Well, Week 1 had been the closest week in league history, but this league will take the cake. It would be mathematically possible to get closer than this, but it seems unlikely.

So far I’ve had a pretty good feel for the flow of the league so far, as measured by “texts sent on WhatsApp to trusted coach friends immediately after the draft.”

I thought it was pretty clear after last week’s draft that the teams were really close. I liked our Blue squad and De La Cruz’s Orange squad a bit more than the Gold and Purple squads, but thought it was tight enough that nobody would go 3-0 and possibly nobody would go 0-3. That turned out to be the case!

Reviewing the week, we were pretty productive offensively. Here are the top-10 attackers in the league right now, by total kills:

Lowe, Drews, De La Cruz, and Edmond have formed a top tier if you look at the mix of kills and efficiency, with the next tier down a little less productive in both volume and efficiency.

At the end of the day, “how many of the top attackers can I get on my team?” is never a bad strategy for a captain to go into the draft with. (Which bodes well for Blue this week as Drews drafted Edmond with the #2 overall pick.)

I felt good about our pin attacker trio of Lowe, Stalzer, and Villines last and felt like they could carry us to compete for the top spot, and they were able to. The match that we lost was to Betty’s Orange team, and we weren’t quite good enough on the serve/block/defense end. Here’s the pin hitter production from that match:

So we got good production out of our pins, but we just weren’t able to stop them on the left side. At the end of the day, if the other team’s two outside hitters combine for 36 kills on 0.276 efficiency in 3 sets, you probably aren’t winning that match.¹

But after beating us, Orange lost to Purple in their second match of the week, who we beat. And Gold beat Purple but lost to us and Orange… so the merry-go-round ended up with two teams at 2-1 and two teams at 1-2. As I said, close week!

This Week’s Draft

As I mentioned above, sometimes you don’t want to overcomplicate things. “Get as many kills on your team as possible.” I rotated to the Orange captain this week, who was Karsta Lowe. Karsta is leading the league in kills so far and she got some nice win points on Blue last week, so she bumped up to be the Orange captain. Betty moved into first place to retake the Gold captainship while Dani Drews dropped down to third to switch to Blue. And the legend Sheilla Castro moved up to 4th place with an incredible 3rd match of the week to become (much to her dismay!) the Purple captain.

It seems like the third week is when a lot of the league settles into a rhythm and you start to get a feel for the way other people are thinking. There’s also an advantage to keeping certain groups of players together. Setters like to set hitters (especially middles) they’ve already played with. Outsides and liberos who have already passed together like to stick together. Etc.

Going into the draft, we were pretty confident Sheilla would pick Nootsara Tomkom, the excellent setter she had just played so well with, with the first pick of the draft. And we expected Dani Drews to pick Edmond with the #2 overall pick. Last week Betty drafted a setter and libero with her first two picks, so we expected she might try that same strategy again.

Last week we had a strong team behind the pin hitter trio of Lowe, Stalzer, and Villines. We felt like we could do pretty well if we could get them together again, and figured that had a pretty good chance of happening.

One of the difficult factors in the league this week is that two of the most productive middles, Molly McCage and Lauren Stivrins, are sidelined right now. Here are the top-4 middles in the league in kills:

With McCage and Stivrins out, that left Rosenthal and Sandbothe as the top-2 producers available. We were hoping to get one of those two in the third round, and, since we had Sandbothe on the team last week, we wanted to go with her first. She was available in round 3 and we snapped her up!

Once you get into the 4th round and beyond, you’re generally off your plan and you’re reacting to what the other teams do. You always want to be starting a run on a certain position rather than coming in at the end. Fortunately, it seems like us picking Stalzer and Villines back-to-back started a bit of a run on outsides and other teams were just catching up on that, and Rosenthal dropped to the 4th round, so we were happy to get her as well.

In the 5th and 6th rounds we rounded out our likely starting lineups with libero Amanda Benson and setter Alisha Childress. Alisha was not drafted as a starter in weeks 1 or 2, but came in and played a bunch in week 3, including against us. She played very well, so we had our eye on her from the beginning of the draft. The other teams went with setters pretty early (3 setters off the board in the first 10 picks), so once that happens you can wait to select a setter, because it would be pretty unusual for a team to draft a backup setter before they’ve picked all of their starters.

In filling out our bench we were able to grab setter Taylor Bruns, who sparked several nice runs as a serving sub for us last week. Teams are siding out under 50% against her serve right now, so if she doesn’t contribute as a setter, I’m definitely expecting her to be in the match as a server. We also got Sha’Dare McNeal, who adds ball control to our team and also played with Stalzer, Villines, and Benson in two pre-season scrimmages. Getting passers with experience together. And in our last two picks we selected MB Tina Boe and Opp Naya Crittenden, who I haven’t worked with in a team setting yet, but am looking forward to getting to know more as players and people.

Training

The big theme of this section every week will be: how much can we get done in limited training time?

Last week we talked about emphasizing sideout offense early in the week, and I want to make sure we do that again. One of the questions in my mind right now is: “we emphasized sideout a lot in early-week practice, and we were good at that phase, but we were maybe a little behind defensively. Our first match is against Blue who has two of the most powerful pin hitters in the league. We will need to make sure our block/defense is tight if we want to be good against them.

So while we’re going to hit sideout pretty hard here on Monday, I want to make sure we dedicate a little extra blocking time on Tuesday. We don’t have a ton of training time, but I think we can get better here. The last couple weeks we did more of a Ball-Setter-Ball-Hitter type focus that had a big emphasis on read-blocking against overload plays (because those require communication and blockers to be on the same page), but this week I want to hit some more individual blocking mechanics.

As we’re into week 3, I think we’ll have situations where we have a pretty good idea who is about to get set on the next play. And since 4 of our 6 likely starting blockers are the same from last week, I think we’ll be on the same page pretty early in the week. So I think a little extra work on blocker handwork can turn some times getting tooled into stuffs.

What’s your predictions for the week? Let me know in the comments.

1. As a broad trend, the attacker efficiencies in AU are a bit lower than other comparable pro leagues. I suspect it’s because setters and hitters don’t get the same amount of time to train together, so the connections aren’t quite as tight.