Worlds marked “Redemption” for Hughes, USA Volleyball; changes must be made in beach

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.”
— — “Redemption Song,” Bob Marley 1980

The World Championships in Tlaxcala, Mexico proved to be a cosmically redemptive experience for many, but most especially for Sara Hughes, Ondrej Perusic, David Schweiner, Jonatan Hellvig, and last, but not least, USA Volleyball as a whole.

There are also some changes the beach-volleyball world has to make and we’ll get to that later and also offer some complaints and recommendations.

The Olympic qualifying process is heavily skewed to those teams that can pile up points in the year BEFORE the Games. In 2018, Sara Hughes and Kelly Cheng split, and Hughes partnered with Summer Ross. Ross was a teen prodigy, and on the surface this looked like a unit that would qualify for Tokyo when you consider Hughes and Ross played four AVP tournaments in 2018, winning twice, and lost in the finals the other two times. On the World Tour that summer they won in Moscow, knocking out April Ross and Alix Klineman in the quarters and Agatha and Duda in the finals.

As 2019 dawned, Hughes and Ross got a couple of thirds in AVP events, a third and a fourth in World Tour events, and a very solid fifth in the World Champs in Hamburg.

But not all was well in Hamburg.

I saw Hughes have an animated discussion with then-coach Jose Loiola in the bleachers bisecting courts 2 and 3. You knew at that point something was up. And sure enough, it was: Ross’ balky back was causing major problems and after two more tourneys she retired from the sport entirely at just 27. 

Meanwhile, Hughes was stuck in a horrible quandary due to the “system” that rewards not the hottest teams in the world come the Olympics, but the ones that have avoided injuries, and played the most tournaments, so that they can drop their worst finishes, to amass enough points to qualify. So, for the pandemic-delayed 2021 Games in Tokyo, Hughes was, as they say, SOL.

What followed was two years of battling through the wilderness. With all the top players taken, Hughes fought the good fight. In 2021 she lost in FIVE consecutive country-quota qualifiers, not even sniffing the main draw playing with Emily Day.

Brief partnerships with Megan Kraft, and Terese Cannon followed. A Manhattan Open win with Kelley Kolinske salved some wounds, but that tourney did not provide points towards Olympic qualifying. But shortly thereafter, her merry-go-round finally stopped. The reunion with Cheng could not come at a more opportune time, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Redemption song indeed for Sara Hughes.

The Olympic-qualifying process is untimely

The lengthy Olympic qualifying process mitigates against getting any team that clicks and finds their stride in the couple of months before the Games. It is ridiculous that reigning Olympic gold medalist Alix Klineman basically has no shot to defend her title, and we are nine months out from the actual Games in Paris. And, by the way, despite being eliminated in pool play, Klineman, teamed with Hailey Harward, herself played very, very well in Tlaxcala.

If it was already 2024, Miles Partain and Andy Benesh would likely not have qualified for the Games by not having the minimum requisite tournaments. The USA swimming, gymnastics, and track and field teams are all selected six weeks out from the Games, because these federations want the hottest, most in-form athletes to represent the red, white and blue. This is not at all USA Volleyball’s fault, but instead it is the FIVB’s system. An ingenious system to be sure. It guarantees that Elite16 tournaments will be strongly fortified with top teams because it is the best way to build up the requisite point totals for Olympic qualification.

Klineman is not the only great who will be missing in action in Paris. Sophie Bukovec, a Canadian, riding high after last year’s silver medal at the Worlds with Brandie Wilkerson, is also likely to be on the outside looking in when it comes time to first serve in Paris in July.  

Even if you do make the Olympic Games, disaster can strike at the most inopportune time. Just ask Czech World gold medalists David Schweiner and Ondrej Perusic. In the spring of 2021 they were playing the best beach volleyball of their lives. Some pundits even had them medaling in Tokyo, considering they won a big four-star tourney in Doha in March, and then took second in a four-star in Ostrava, taking out eventual Tokyo silver medalists Vyacheslav Krasilnikov and big Oleg Stoyanovskiy. The Czechs were peaking at the right time.

They were in Tokyo, getting ready for their first match against Latvians Edgar Tocs and Martins Plavins. And then disaster struck. A positive COVID test, and a first-round pool-play forfeit. With only three matches in pool play to begin with, they were screwed! They were cleared for the second match, which they won, but then they had to face the Russians, Stoyanovskiy and Krasilnikov. It went three, but the Czechs, who needed to be perfect, were not and were sent packing.

After the Olympics, Schweiner and Perusic went on a tear, winning in Prague and getting a runner-up finish in Cagliari in October, 2021. In the latter event, the Czechians lost to Anders Mol and Christian Sorum, 22-20, 23-21. No shame in losing to the Volley Vikings. But it started a disturbing trend for Schweiner and Perusic: Their inability to close out  in finals. What followed was a loss in Itapema in April 2022 to Andre Loyola and George Wanderley, 15-12 in the third. In the next tourney, a month later in Ostrava, Mol and Sorum came back and won 21-15, 21-23, 15-13. The Czechs headed to the Elite16 in Gstaad. And they suffered another tight finals loss to the Grimalt cousins, 19-21, 20-22.

The turning point for Schweiner and Perusice appeared to be in Uberlandia in April of this year. They got the monkeys off their backs by upending the Volley Vikings in the final, 15-11 in the third. And then in the final tournament before the Worlds, in Paris, Perusic and Schweiner ran the table, beating a very good German team, Clemens Wickler and Nils Ehlers in the final. It was an emotional victory for the Czech duo. There was a hitch though. The Paris final was on October 1 and the Worlds started five days later in Apizaco, Mexico, 9,124 kilometers and a few airline connections away (5,670 miles).

Sure enough, the Paris hangover hit immediately for the tired Czechians. They had a Pool I loss to the 33rd-seeded Cubans Jorge Alayo and Noslen Diaz. Two matches later, Perusic and Schweiner laid another egg, losing to Evandro and Arthur in their final pool match.

They escaped the dreaded Lucky Losers playoff, but as third-placers in their pool they drew Pool H winners Adrian Gavira and Pablo Herrera in the single-elimination round.

They caught fire, rediscovering their Paris groove. They bounced Daniele Lupo and Enrico Rossi in two, but then had to play the Volley Vikings and the losers of that match would take fifth. For context, in the last five years, Mol and Sorum had won four Euro golds and a bronze, a Worlds gold and a bronze, and Olympic gold. They only missed one major podium since 2018, and that was in Vienna in August, a head-scratching fifth at Euros. 

Yet, Perusic and Schweiner exorcised all of their past demons, taking down the Vikings in three (15-12 in the third), proving to all, including themselves, that they are FOR REAL. Then in the gold-medal match they toppled the heir apparent to the Norwegians, the Swedes David Ahman and Jonatan Helvig, 15-13 in the third.

Schweiner and Perusic have definitely figured it out. They can win the close ones. They can sing the redemption song.

Speaking of the young Swedes, volleyball life has not been easy for them, either. Timing is everything, so consider that they came into their own just AFTER the 2021 Olympic cycle. Then, after a strong start to the 2022 season, Hellvig hurt his hand, which necessitated a withdrawal from the Worlds in Rome. Lightning struck again in June of this year when Helvig collided with Ahman during a “hubby/wife” play in the Elite16  in Gstaad, cracking a bone in the same hand he hurt before. This time though, the recovery did not preclude the duo from making the trip to Mexico. Their high-wire, acrobatic style was a crowd favorite and after their two prior European titles and now a Worlds silver, they will be arriving next summer in Paris as the probable favorites.

Bounce-back for USA Volleyball

USA Volleyball took some hits after last year’s Worlds in Rome, where the Americans came home empty handed, with the best finishes a fourth on the men’s side by Chaim Schalk and Theo Brunner and a fifth from Kelley Kolinske and Sara Hughes. What a difference a year makes, a complete turnaround with two medals from the ladies and a fourth from Brunner and Trevor Crabb, as well as a fifth from Miles Partain and Andy Benesh.

No other country came close to the output of Team USA. A definite redemption song for the red, white and blue.

Moreover, Benesh and Partain are on the verge. Benesh had a terrible passing game at an inopportune moment in the match against Poland’s Bartosz Losiak and Michal Bryl that, had they won, would have advanced them to the semis. Up until then, Benesh and Partain were clinical, with straight set wins in four of their five matches leading up to the quarterfinals. It would be nice though if Miles and Andy at least looked like they were having a little more fun out on the court. They need a shot of Pedro Solberg-Adrian Carambula “joie de vivre.”

On the one hand, it is nice to have a robust Worlds with 48 teams, but that being said, of 144 matches in pool play, only 29 went the distance — about 25%. Of the 12 pools on the men’s side, only two were competitive. For the women, it was four. Only one significant team got knocked out in pool play, Andre and George, the reigning bronze medalists from Brazil. Aside from that, all those long days of pool play were decidedly ho-hum. A reduced field, and a reduced number of days for the tournament would provide for more high-level volleyball. Also, the current tie-breaking formula for advancement is so confusing. We need the game dummied down a bit so that you don’t have to be a calculus major to figure out who is going to advance from pool play. 

A reasonable question to ask: Are the Worlds the year before the Olympics a good predictor of success in the Games themselves? The answer is a resounding yes. Only once, in 1999, has there not been a repeat medalist on the men’s side. In the subsequent five Worlds the year before the Games, two times there were two repeat medalists and three times there was one team that completed the double.

It is even more pronounced on the women’s side. There has NEVER been a situation where there were no repeat medalists from Worlds to Olympics. In fact, in four of the six occurrences, there were two repeat medalists.

The net/net is that expect the podium in Paris to look very similar to Tlaxcala’s, which is very good news for Team USA. Moreover, with the late Worlds ending in mid-October of this year, and the Olympics starting in July of next, there is probably an even stronger likelihood that the leaderboard will look similar.

There has to be changes

On that note, a Worlds in October essentially means that no one outside of volleyball fanatics like you and me are paying attention. Consider this event, as good as it was, plopped down at a time when NFL and college football and Premiere League were in full swing and MLB storylines were sucking air out of the sports world, to say nothing of the start of NHL season, Victor Wenbenyama’s preseason NBA debut, Simone Biles historic performance at the World gymnastics Championships in Antwerp, and, well, the FIVB and Volleyball World may have in fact picked quite possibly the WORST time to hold this tournament.

For beach volleyball to get any sort of attention from anyone aside from the diehards, it’s biggest events need to be in July and August, when competition from other sports is minimized to a great degree. With the 2025 Worlds in Adelaide, Australia, good luck with that. Because it will be in the Southern Hemisphere in  late spring or summer the window is November at the earliest and March at the latest.

Like the other professional sports, beach volleyball needs a “season.” Ideally this would be April-Labor Day with its biggest tournaments occurring in July and August. One can only assume that Volleyball World’s business model depends on high-quality tourneys taking place ALL months of the year so that there will not be subscriber churn to their VBTV service.

Speaking of VBTV, the announcers for the most part were excellent. The camera positions were good, although if you were watching on an iPad, it was impossible at times to see if a ball landed in or out. The producers and directors need to make sure framing is better to see the WHOLE field of play. In addition, when, for instance Adrian Carambula served a sky ball, it would have ben nice if the camera folks had followed the flight of the ball. This also goes for high sets … One final critique of the coverage is that lot of non-challengeable plays were not shown in replays. These included mishandled balls and the like. It is educational for the viewer to understand, and see, what a chucked ball looks like in slo-mo. In all the other major pro sports, whether the ref makes the right or wrong call, it is shown to the viewer. Hey, we get it, refs are human, but the lack of transparency is concerning. 

As far as the tournament itself, give credit where credit is due. The FIVB/Volleyball World folks were geniuses in choosing Tlaxcala and surrounding areas for the tournament to be conducted. The bullrings provided a spectacular backdrop and gave one a sense of place. The crowds looked to be having a great time and the beer portions were quite generous. The mascot, Lucy the firefly, with a big volleyball for the tail, was one of the best mascots ever!

All that being said, the Worlds NEED to be held in Santa Monica in 2027 as a prelude to the Olympics the following year. There would be no better way to generate excitement from the non-volleyball diehard and to spike interest from the next generation in the world’s biggest market. 

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