Lot’s of Volleyball

There was a lot of volleyball last weekend, and not a small amount this weekend. Lets run it down.

Last weekend, LOVB, one of the professional volleyball leagues in the US held their Finals weekend here in Louisville at the KFC Yum! Center. This was a 5 match schedule of a single elimination tournament involving all six teams in LOVB.

The marketing in the city for the event leaned heavily on the presence of Claire Chaussee and Anna “Stevie” Hall, both of course former Cards players, to appeal to the local crowd. I heard from various folks that this was being looked on by LOVB as an exploration of the local Louisville market for volleyball perhaps with an eye to adding a team here in the future, and the opportunity for Louisvillians to express their desire for this was not passed up. Mayor Craig Greenberg was interviewed during the Sunday session and said directly that we’d like this (while wearing a PGA shirt and then dipping right after, so maybe the strength of that message was diluted a bit). Other Louisvillians that got on the mic during the event also expressed the desire, so now we’ll have to see what LOVB does.

As to the competition, the play was good, although there was some disappointment in the crowd that Madison, the team with Chaussee and Hall, lost in the first round taking all of the local rooting interests out of the competition early. The silver lining is that gave Chaussee and Hall more free time over the weekend to enjoy being in a city that they both look at with strong feelings of affection.

Saturday of last weekend was, however, an off day for LOVB. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any volleyball going on, however.

The JVA club organization was hosting their ginormous club tournament over the weekend, with something on the order of 130-140 volleyball courts set up and running between the Kentucky Exposition Center and the Kentucky International Convention Center downtown. In the midst of that massive event, the Cardinals held their third match of the spring season. This was a five set battle with Tennessee and largely reinforced some of the observations from previous spring matches.

After the match vs Tennessee was over, I promptly hopped in my car and drove up to Indianapolis for the Indy Ignite match, where Anna DeBeer and Elena Scott are playing. Alas, the Ignite dropped a five set thriller to Grand Rapids, but Scott looked absolutely superhuman in defense, and DeBeer, who hadn’t started the past few matches essentially won the starting role back with some good play in the fifth set.

This weekend is a bit less crowded, but no less important.

I did make the run up to Indianapolis against last night for the Ignite vs The Vegas Thrill, with Charitie Luper. Again, it was a five set affair that saw the visitors barely prevail over the Ignite.

And then tonight, in just a few hours as of this writing, Louisville will be playing host to a first-indications-are-a-very-good Kentucky team in spring play at the L&NFCU Arena. The match starts at 6pm and will apparently be streams on the ACC Network Extra, a first for Louisville spring volleyball. Beyond the normal cheering for the Cards, former Cardinal Amaya Tillman will be on the Kentucky bench as a new assistant coach for the Wildcats.

It should be another great evening of college volleyball, but enjoy because this will be the last we get until mid to late August when we get the build up to the fall season. A little birdie tells me that this year will see the return of the Alumnae Match with former Cards pulling up the kneepads again to show the young whippersnappers how it’s down.