AU Mondays: Week 4
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:
Each Monday I share some analysis of the past week along with some discussion of this week’s draft and practice prep for the upcoming matches.
Also, if you didn’t get a chance to sit in on the Setting Q&A with Alisha Childress and Carli Lloyd, don’t worry! I’ll be posting that video at the end of this week.
Last Week’s Results
Week 3 was a tougher one for me! We were in the middle of a good battle with the eventual top team of Week 3, Blue (captained by Dani Drews) when our captain, Karsta Lowe, took a pretty hard shot to the head on defense. She stayed in the match, but was definitely affected by it. After the match, it turned out that she had a concussion and was not able to play Friday or Saturday.
And those turned out to be some crazy matches!
On Friday we matched up against Sheilla’s Purple team. We traded 25-19 wins, so it came down to the third set. And we packed nearly two sets of volleyball into that third set before eventually losing 39-37. We fought off 12 (!) match points before finally losing. One of those matches where you’re pissed that you lost but you can appreciate the battle by both teams.
When Saturday’s match rolled around, there was definitely some fatigue on our team. We let the first set slip away, 23-25 to Betty’s Gold team, and then faded hard in set 2, losing 15-25. We went into set 3 down by 12 points in the match, meaning we needed a 25-12 set win to take the match and a 25-13 win to force a tiebreaker mini-set. That obviously seemed out of reach, but we for sure at least wanted to get a set win to finish things out.
As a coach, when you go into these huddles between sets, you hope you have some magic words to rally your team. You’re getting your butts kicked. Do you scream and yell and try to light a fire? Do you challenge them? Do you support them and try to pump them up? Do you try to keep things technical and volleyball-specific, or do you appeal on a more emotional level?
I certainly don’t think I had any magic words, but we talked in the huddle about being professionals, and how that means you need to go out and perform even when you’re not at your best. “The easy thing to do here would be to just get this set over with and move on to tomorrow’s draft. The hard thing is to battle, but tomorrow you’ll be happy you did,” I said in the huddle. We also talked about not trying to play the whole game all at once and just used the old cliche of being the first team to 5 points and then go from there. We also said we’d call timeouts quick if we got behind, even if it was only at 5 or 6 points. I just didn’t want to let this set get away from us too.
We also changed our setters, giving Taylor Bruns (who had played some limited action as a double-sub) an opportunity, along with Naya Crittenden at opposite.
Well… something worked. We sided out the first ball and our first server, Jenna Rosenthal got us to 5-0. We then allowed a bit of a run by them, but our third server, Lindsay Stalzer, pushed our lead to 12-5. I still wasn’t thinking about winning the match at all yet- even with a 12-5 lead, we’d still need to outscore them 13-8 just to force a tiebreaker. But then we widened it to 15-6 and maybe… just maybe we had a shot. Another run by Rosenthal widened the gap to 20-10 and we definitely had a shot. But, once they sided out to make it 20-11, we still needed to outscore them at least 5-2 down the stretch.
And guess what? We did!
At 21-11 we dig a quick and turn it for a point. At 22-11 we get a nice touch on their outside and tip it to the donut for a transition kill. At 23-11 Stalzer puts up a huge roof block on their opposite. And at 24-11...
Your lefty setter turning on the game-winning point is always a fun way to close it out!
An up-and-down week but what a fun way to end it. As a coach, you hold out for those miracle comebacks and there’s nothing better than when your team comes through like that. Really proud of those women for fighting through that one.
This Week’s Draft
The comeback win was a little bittersweet, because it prevented Betty De La Cruz from retaining the top captain’s spot. Betty is one of my favorite people in volleyball; I had the opportunity to be her coach for two weeks last year and I love being on the court with her. I haven’t worked with her yet this year, and (since I rotate to Purple next week and it’s very unlikely she would drop all the way down to 4th in the league) not getting to work with her this week means I’ll go the whole season without being her coach.
But… on the flip side, the player who (re)claimed the top spot in the league is Dani Drews. If you remember from Week 1, Nati and our Purple team chose Dani as the #1 pick in the first draft of this year. Dani has been a captain ever since and she enters Week 4 with a very strong chance to win the league. She’s an awesome player and leader, so I’m fired up to try to help her and the rest of this week’s Gold team get some wins.
Going into Sunday, Dani knew it would be a more challenging draft than her Week 3, where she got to choose from the Blue (#2 overall) slot. Dani was able to draft Leah Edmond with the #2 overall pick last week, but we knew she would be selected first overall by Nati’s Purple team. This meant that Dani would probably need to take an overall higher offensive load, without a hitter as productive as Leah to share some of that burden. We talked it over for a while, but Dani felt like she could do that best by playing on the left-side; she’s been playing primarily on the right these 3 weeks because that seemed to be best for those teams, but she’s probably better on the left.
Our goal going into the draft was to put together a high-energy, defensively-minded team. We wanted speed, good servers, and the ability to win the long rallies. We both felt that the league as a whole was not as terminal in first ball as you might expect- limited training time and setters/hitters shuffling being the likely culprits. So we wanted a team that could serve/block/dig well enough to create transition opportunities, and then who had the energy and athleticism to scrap out those rallies.
We weren’t really sure who Betty would draft #3 overall, but we figured it would be an outside. Betty went ball control and selected Cassidy Lichtman.
Gold picks back-to-back with the last pick of the 1st round and 1st pick of the 2nd round. We selected an outside to pair with Dani in Madison Villines and libero Morgan Hentz.
We then had to wait a while before our third pick, but when Carli Lloyd was available as a setter, we snatched her up. And we paired her with middle Taylor Sandbothe. We wanted to get an offensive middle to take some pressure off the outsides and Sandbothe has been scoring well. She’s also a good server and defender for a middle, which was important to us.
With Karsta out and Dani moving to the left, the league was short a couple of opposites. Or, put another way, we knew some different opposites would get a chance to be drafted as starters. From the beginning of the draft, Dani and I wanted to target Sha’Dare McNeal and Erica Wilson. We thought they both had some shown good flashes in limited time so far in the league and we ready for a shot at bigger roles.
We also thought they had complementary skillsets. Sha’Dare is an unusual opposite in that her two best skills are (1) passing/defense and (2) slide hitting. Erica has played quite a bit on the outside, so she’s good at hitting on the left as well as the right (important for rotation 1) and she’s also a good hitter out of the backrow, as well as a good server.
So we drafted the two of them back-to-back to serve as our opposites for the week. Sha’Dare’s passing (plus Morgan Hentz as a standout libero) help take a little pressure off Dani and Madi in general, but specifically allows one of them to step out of serve receive to hit out of the backrow in the rotations where we need that.
We filled out our starting lineup with Rachael Fara at middle and got Deja McClendon as our third outside hitter, Tina Boe as our third middle, and Val Nichol as our backup setter.
A good squad with a lot of good personalities and good energy. I’m excited to coach them this week.
Training
As you know if you’ve read the previous updates, limited training time is the order of the day here at AU. My Monday theme has generally been to focus on sideout and get some offensive cohesion, with Tuesday dedicated a bit more to block/defense, along with some scrimmaging.
I generally hit some passing tutors on Monday as well. Passers are coming off a weekend where they had the natural ups and downs that come with 3 matches. They’re thinking about servers they had trouble with or specific serves that they shanked. I like to talk to the passers and work through a couple of exercises for passers on an individual level before we get into team serve-pass. I tend to do stuff like the Goldilocks Method in these exercises.
The two we did today were:
Tape, Ten, Perfect. I give the passer 3 serves in fairly quick succession. The first ball they are trying to pass the ball right onto the tape of the net. The second ball they are trying to pass to the 10’ line. And then the third ball, they try to pass perfectly as normal. I find this helps raise awareness of their angles and their shoulders for how flat or forward their angles are.
Timing contrast. I’ll cycle between serving from 5-7’ in the court, a normal serve from the endline, and a serve from way behind the endline. This changes the time that it takes for the serve to get to the passer and I find that it’s a good exercise for passing eyework and tracking.
I like both of those and the passers on this team liked them as well. We’ll see if it pays off on Monday!
Hey Joe! Would you will be willing to share a copy of your Markov chain analysis from your time with USAV? If not, no worries. Sincerely - Brian Hurler