AU Wednesday - Week 2

Featuring my 3 main post-match VS sheets

Week 2 of this year’s Athletes Unlimited season is in the books. Check out my Week 0 post to update yourself on what the league looks like this year and for a link to an explanation behind the unique format of the link.

This week was a bit of a reversal of fortunes compared to Week 1. My captain this week, Kayla Caffey, was a middle, which creates a bit of a tricky draft strategy. Historically, middles rarely end up as captains in this league very often. We thought we had a good draft and that we put together a team which could be competitive in every match. Which was true. But… unfortunately we didn’t get any match wins.

In Match 1, we actually won 2 of the 3 sets, but because we lost the first set by a wide margin (17-25) and won the next 2 sets 26-24, we still ended up losing the match (by AU format rules) to eventual 3-0 Team Abercrombie, 69-73. Still, you end up picking up 80 (of a potential 180) win points, so not all is lost.

In Match 2, we won the first set, but lost the next 2 sets to Team De La Cruz, so we only picked up 40 of 180 win points there.

And then in Match 3, we almost pulled off the reverse of the first match. Playing Team Nootsara in the battle of 0-2 teams, we lost the first set 22-25 and the second set 21-25. We broke a huge lead in set 3, going up 22-12. This meant that we needed 3 points before they got 6 points to take the match. Unfortunately, we got those 3 points but they got exactly 6 as they stormed back to close to gap to 25-18. This meant the match score was tied at 68, which forced a 5-point Golden Set tiebreaker in AU rules. Again, our hopes raised as we went out to a 2-0 lead, but a few unforced hitter errors and a big block by Team Nootsara dashed those hopes. So we did pick up some win points but ultimately didn’t get the match win.

Well, the upshot of all of this is that we get some wacky matches to analyze!

For Premium Subscribers, I share my 3 main post-match analysis sheets that I run on Volleystation, along with some takeaways from this week. Keep scrolling to check them out.