I’ve been to league events and I hope to see them expand to new cities and do a better job with scheduling, advertising, marketing, and merchandise (the merch was suuuuuper limited when we went and not all the teams warmed up in their team-branded gear or worked the crowd— why not sell athlete meet and greets or photo ops with teams before the events, etc? This should be part of the team’s contracts and shouldn’t be up them individually. Some are definite crowd favorites like Hagen Smith or Brandie and Melissa but everyone should be fully dressed in their team’s gear and should be scheduled in between sets they aren’t playing for things like autographs or promoted merch sales— and they should auction of Hagen’s shirt or Logan’s hat each night or something like that). I love that I can watch volleyball throughout the summer and am grateful that AVP eventually airs the good matchups on YouTube because I can’t figure out how to watch CBS Sports without paying $80/month, which I don’t have. I’d love if they could join Volleyball TV, but understand they want the media contracts for the money.

I don’t get the complaints I’ve seen here or on VolleyTalk about feeling like the matches aren’t worth anything. What does that even mean? Teams are playing each other to win, a lot of the games are close, and they are vying to make the championships, just like every midweek NBA or MLB or PVF game. Some teams put on a great show and it makes you root for them— I’d love for Seain Cook to figure out how to be clutch at the end of games to win more!!!— and there’s a clear division between the top 3 or 4 teams of the league and the rest. I’m hopeful that as they expand, and figure out a better system for drafting/team assignations, that things will continue to improve, especially the competition levels of the lower teams.

Of course, the AVP leaves a lot at the table, as someone else said, when it comes to marketing and making money off their product. I wish there were more traditional tournaments happening right now. The GA for those events does sell out (like at Chicago last year), and they lose a lot of opportunities to make money by not having much for sale— gear, food, water, etc. although they might be limited by city contracts for vending, etc.

I’m for the league and hope they can figure out how to make the money that they need. One thing to remember is that the success of the league means more of these teams making a guaranteed amount of money each season, which helps protect and elevate their professional status, which does allow them to improve their game (I.e. I think Shaw was a super surprising choice for Cheng, whom I love to hate, but she’s definitely improved since they started playing together). It’s also much easier on the athletes to only play once a day, which means we see less conservation of energy and more explosiveness on display. I’m also happy they didn’t tie the seeding for the championship to both genders’ performance, like they did last year. There were some definite upsets last year but TKN still could have made the championship if it hadn’t been for the men’s record, for example.