AU Wednesdays - Week 4

Plus post-game spreadsheets

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

Week 0
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3

Week 4 came down to the wire again. The individual leaderboard in AU has turned to a 2-person race for the top of the championship between Brittany Abercrombie and Betty De La Cruz. Below them, spots 3-10 (and the according bonuses) are up for grabs, as well as chances for players to move up and down to other spots on the board. But the championship is going to end up between 1 of those 2 players. Since they came into this week #1 and #2, they were the Gold (Brittany) and Orange (Betty) captains.

I was the coach for Gold this week, and I felt pretty good about the team I helped Brittany put together. Unfortunately, in our first match of the week, we dropped the first 2 sets to Purple and were facing quite a hole. The first set was 20-25 and the second was 22-25. This meant we were in an 8-point deficit. If you remember, the AU format is not a best-of-3, it’s 3-sets-no-matter what and you play to the total score. This meant that we needed to win the 3rd set by 9¹, which is no easy task.

We won the 3rd set… by 9. Whew!

One of my favorite things about the AU format is that it truly cultivates an Every Point Counts mentality. Purple came out really strong in the first set and went up big, stretching the lead to 12-21 at one point. I forget when I called timeout, but it was sometime in that ballpark, and I just talked about chipping away at the lead. We knew dropping the first set by 8 or 9 points can almost put the match out of reach right then. We chipped back a little but were still down 16-23 when Brittany hit a ball out. I wasn’t sure if there was a touch, but with a challenge still left, we gave it a shot… and won the challenge. There’s a big difference between 17-23 and 16-24 and, during the challenge, we talked about trying to chip away a few more points. We did and we at least got it back to 20-25. Not great, but at least we were in, “we’re not out of it yet,” territory.

And turned out that every one of those points mattered as we barely completed our comeback win in the third set.

Something I say at coaching clinics or other events is, “professional volleyball is just like high school volleyball, only more so.” Have you seen bad attitudes in high school? You’ll see worse in the pros. Have you had a great kids who were great teammates and hard workers in high school? You’ll meet those same great characters in the pros, only more so. And even though you play a best-of-3 or best-of-5 in hs/club volleyball, how many times growing up did I hear my dad give the, “hey, let’s not worry about the score of this first set, let’s just take it one point at a time and build some momentum for the next one,” speech?

At the end of the day, volleyball players, of any age and ability level, are people, and some of those cliches are cliches for a reason.

Going into match 2, we were prepared for anything, but it wasn’t quite as dramatic. Our team, particularly OH Claire Hoffman played really well and we were able to take all 3 sets.

Okay, final week of the match was a showdown between 2-0 Gold and 2-0 Orange and the top-2 players on the leaderboard. We took the first set 25-21 and dropped the second 20-25. This meant that whichever team took the third set would take the match. It was a back-and-forth battle that was tied at 18-18 going down the stretch. Unfortunately, Orange was able to pull ahead and this nasty ace by Dani Drews sealed the match for them.

When I talk about the 3 elements of a good float serve, I say:

1. Flat (low over the net)

2. Clean (no spin)

3. To Space (between two players)

That’s about as good of an example as you could pick. (And ironically, with that game-winning ace, Dani moved herself into 4th place, and thus the Purple captain, for the last week… so she’ll be my captain. Funny how that works!)

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.