AU Wednesdays - Week 3

Match analysis and spreadsheet examples

Let’s get right into it, previous posts are here:

Week 0
Week 1
Week 2

Week 3 was an exciting one. I rotated to Orange this week and was paired up again with Betty De La Cruz. It was an unusual draft with the Purple, Blue, and Orange captains all being outside hitters and drafting outside hitters with their first picks. So 6 outside hitters were gone after the first 3 picks. The Gold captain, Brittany Abercrombie, then drafted a middle and libero with her first two picks, since nobody else was likely to take their 3rd outside before filling out the rest of the roster.

The draft worked out well enough for us. We won our first match 2-1 by a solid margin. Our second match we started off well, winning the first two sets 25-18, 25-21, which gave us a nice 11-point cushion going into set 3. Surely we’re not going to lose the third 14-25, right. Right!? We didn’t, but it was seriously in doubt until the last few points of the match. We escaped with a 16-25 loss in the third set, which means we still took the match in this unusual format.

So we went into the third match 2-0, against Abercrombie’s Gold team, who was also 2-0. We lost the first set 21-25 before getting a nice lead the second. Up something like 22-19 we let it slip and lost 24-26. This meant that we needed to win 25-18 in the third to win the match in the funky way that the AU scoring system allows.¹ We surged to a nice lead and maintained it and it was 23-18 with Gold serving. One sideout meant we had a 24-18 lead with a chance to take the match. We served them out-of-system and they hit the ball out. We win! Only… the challenged and the replay showed the ball catching our middle’s finger on the way out. Noooo!

But still, we sided out the next ball, and the 25-19 win meant the match was now tied and we were going to another golden set. Great for the fans! But… not great for us. They got us in the golden set behind some incredible defense by Morgan Hentz.

Alright, 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.