Photo Gallery
October 8, 2024
Photographer Rick Atwood’s best photos from the weekend are in a gallery below. Click on any image to view full size.
Viewers tuned into CBS Sports Network for the national-TV debut of the AVP League were treated to a pair of electric matches set against a backdrop of vocal fans in the stands.
The crowd at the H-E-B Center at Cedar Park in suburban Austin, Texas, on Saturday night likely was the largest drawn by the cutting-edge AVP League to date. On the two-hour tape-delayed telecast that aired Sunday evening, both matches in the game between the Austin Aces and Palm Beach Passion produced high drama over three sets.
The headliner in the fourth weekend of the League was the showdown between USA Olympians Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss of the Aces and the Passion’s Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson, the silver medalists from this summer’s Paris Games. It lived up to the billing as Kloth and Nuss turned the tables on their red-hot rivals from Canada in a riveting 7-15, 15-10, 15-13 victory.
TKN (as they are known to their legion of fans) had dropped their last three meetings to Mel and Brandie, and looked on their way to a fourth after an error-filled first set that saw the 5-foot-6 Nuss make five errant attacks, hitting minus-.250.
But Nuss righted the ship, going error-free in the second set and the tiebreaker, while the 6-foot-4 Kloth ratcheted up the pressure from the service line. Taryn (15-for-21 against one error, .667 hitting efficiency) ripped three of her four aces in the third set, just as Kristen got dialed in on defense with eight digs.
A crucial and controversial play in the tiebreaker came when Kloth’s deep serve down the middle was ruled to have caught the baseline tape for an ace that put TKN up 13-11. Mel and Brandie vigorously argued the call, and announcers Dain Blanton and Rich Lambourne said that the serve looked long after watching several replays.
“They’re Olympic medalists! It’s always a three-set battle,” Kloth said after TKN improved to 9-6 all-time against the Canadian superstars. “It’s always a fun match, and obviously it’s so much more fun to win.”
Nuss said that she fed off of the energy of the “hometown” crowd in Austin.
“The fans really rallied around our men before us, so that fired us up,” she noted. “I don’t even think I needed to warm up because the warmup was watching the men play.”
The see-saw victory by the Aces’ Paul Lotman and Billy Allen over the Passion’s Phil Dalhausser and Avery Drost went 57 minutes and might have worn out more of the fans’ fingernails than TKN’s triumph.
The 6-foot-7 Lotman, 39, hit 8-for-8 with two blocks in a 15-11 first set won by the Aces. Phil and Avery combined for 12 kills on 14 swings and took the second set 15-12. The tiebreaker stretched well into overtime, with Allen and Lotman (five kills, an ace, a block and a dig) pulling it out 20-18.
Lotman, a former U.S. indoor Olympian, would loom large again on Sunday afternoon as he and the 42-year-old Allen punctuated a 2-0 weekend with a 16-14, 15-11 victory over Cody Caldwell and Seain Cook of the Brooklyn Blaze.
Paul and Billy built a 14-9 advantage in the first set but Caldwell and Cook would not go away quietly. They ran off five points, capped by Caldwell’s rejection of Allen, to pull even. But Lotman sided out with a crosscourt roll shot and Paul sealed the deal with a block against Caldwell.
Lotman broke open a tight second set late with a block against Caldwell and a thundering spike in transition that was shanked by Cook and prompted Paul to send some trash talk in Seain’s direction. Lotman rang up another strong stat line with nine kills on 14 errorless swings (.643), four blocks, two digs and an ace.
“We were both frustrated that we didn’t put (the first set) away earlier,” Allen admitted. “We called a timeout and went back to work, focusing on the pass.”
That preceded the most stunning result of the weekend, when Megan Kraft and Terese Cannon of the Blaze took down Kloth and Nuss 19-17, 15-7, picking up their first League victory and handing TKN their initial loss.
Kloth and Nuss seemed in control in the first set with 11-7 and 13-11 leads before the 6-foot-3 Cannon’s top-spin jump serve and strong play at the net erased those advantages. TKN weathered two set points and had two set points of their own. But Megan and Terese were stout in the clutch, scoring the last two “real” points on a sizzling deep spike by Cannon and a Kraft’s hard kill down the line.
The wheels seemingly fell off for Kloth and Nuss in the second set, with Taryn hitting an uncharacteristic .167. Combined, Kraft and Cannon cracked 10 kills on 11 swings. For the match, Terese went 12-for-17 against three errors with three aces.
“We know that team really well and have played them a lot of times,” said Kraft, a rising star who was NCAA player of the year in 2023 and ‘24. “We know that they would come out really strong in the second set. We wanted to work on what we have been doing in practice, focusing on one point at a time, and it paid off.”
Cannon noted that the pair’s plan was to “serve tough and stay aggressive. Seain said it best that there’s nothing more dangerous than a team that has nothing to lose. We just wanted to have some fun. The boys are rubbing off on us. It was good.”
The turnaround by Kraft and Cannon came after they had dropped a 15-13, 15-12 battle to Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles of the LA Launch on Saturday night. Scoles was the difference-maker with 12 kills on 17 swings with one error, three aces and two blocks.
The story would be much different for the Launch’s women on Sunday afternoon against Humana-Paredes and Wilkerson, who bounced back from the loss to TKN with a 15-5, 15-11 thumping of Betsi and Julia. The Canadians committed no hitting errors and combined for 22 kills on 32 attacks. Mel dug 10 balls and Brandie chipped in five blocks and three digs. The Canadians’ results were pretty much a redux of Week 2 in South Florida after they had fallen to April Ross and Alix Klineman.
“We don’t like losing, so when we do, we like to come out with a little more fire,” Humana-Paredes said. “We reset (our) minds heading into today.”
Four pairs broke into the win column in League competition for the first time: Allen-Lotman, Kraft-Cannon, Dalhausser-Drost and Tim Bomgren–Troy Field (Launch).
Bomgren and Field rallied to defeat Caldwell and Cook 9-15, 20-18,15-13 in a wildly entertaining nail-biter on Saturday that saw the effervescent Field and the ebullient Cook trade antics and athleticism. Cody and Seain had 12-8 and 13-11 leads in the tiebreaker, but Tim and Troy closed it out by scoring seven of the last eight points.
“Our motto is TNT. We’re going to grind. No deficit is too large for TNT,” Field said.
The first victory for Dalhausser and Drost came on Sunday against Bomgren and Field in another tense three-setter (12-15, 15-12, 16-14), the fourth in eight matches in Austin. Drost made two spectacular defensive plays to seal the victory. His dive to the sand brought up Field’s cut shot and he scored on a nifty deep roll shot. Then Avery plucked Troy’s crosscourt spike out of the air with an overhead open-handed dig and tooled Bomgren’s block for the match-winner.
“Phil is an incredible point-scorer and I kept thinking that I’m going to have to make a play to help our team score a point,” Drost said, emotion cracking his voice. “I have been working as hard as I can, really, all the time, to try to make good on this opportunity and to come through for my partner. I’m just so happy to be doing this and to get a chance to make a play for my team.”
Added Dalhausser: “We needed a ‘W’ so bad, coming in 0-3. And we lost a tough one last night.”
The weekend in Austin concluded the first half of the League’s regular-season schedule and all eight teams have played four games. The Aces went 3-1 and are 5-3 overall, in effect in a three-way tie for second with the Miami Mayhem and Dallas Dream behind the first-place New York Nitro (7-1). The Passion and Launch were 2-2 and are tied for fifth at 3-5. A 1-3 record left the Blaze at 2-6, deadlocked at the bottom of the standings with the San Diego Smash.
The Passion and the Blaze will join the Nitro and the Mayhem in Week 5 as the AVP League goes back outdoors. Doubleheaders are scheduled on Oct. 12 and 13 at the 8,200-set Delray Beach Tennis Center in South Florida.
Here are the lineups for the fifth of eight regular-season AVP League weekends:
Saturday
New York Nitro (7-1; Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander, 3-1; Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, 4-0) vs. Miami Mayhem (5-3; Trevor Crabb and Theo Brunner, 3-1; April Ross and Alix Klineman, 2-2).
Brooklyn Blaze (2-6; Cody Caldwell and Seain Cook, 1-3; Megan Kraft and Terese Cannon, 1-3) vs. Palm Beach Passion (3-5; Phil Dalhausser and Avery Drost, 1-3; Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson, 2-2).
Sunday
Nitro vs. Blaze and Mayhem vs. Passion.
The results from each match in the series will go toward determining the four qualifiers for the bracket-style championship rounds on Nov. 9 and 10 at the Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, California. The first criterion for advancing to the playoffs is team winning percentage.
