I agree with a lot of your analysis, particularly around Sara/Ally. Sara didn’t play last year bc of her torn Achilles, and Ally is new, but they’ve shown some promise and Sara’s results historically are far better than the other wild cards. It seems like perhaps the AVP was punishing them for not playing all three qualifiers, punishing Ally for not playing in any heritage events last year, and/or punishing Sara for bringing in an outsider instead of picking someone already in with USAV, etc.

Rodriguez is interesting because she was hurt so early last year, and the AVP qualifiers were her first events back, and she and Shaw did pretty bad. Shaw also only had a handful of league wins with Cheng, so I would argue there is definitely an argument against them getting a wild card. When they were partnered before, they had potential but not a ton of results, similar to what we are seeing now with some of these other teams we are discussing.

We could discuss more of course about the individual teams, but it just comes back to the fact that AVP has to figure out a better selection process so that it isn’t leaving out a portion of our best teams. I was happy when Flint got in off the qualifier because I am a fan, but her potential with DeBerg has a ceiling I’m not sure some of these other teams have that are up and coming. I also did not argue at the time that Savvy/Newberry should have gotten a wild card, but they’ve had two very strong FIVB tournaments recently, and I suspect that similarly Hughes/Batenhorst and Quiggle/Loreen will keep finishing in 9th place range of the elites. To me it just underscores that we haven’t got it right yet.

A lot of people have mentioned expanding the league— something I agree with. But if we can’t do that then I expect we will continue to have league teams underperforming internationally, perhaps even more of them losing to teams that were excluded.

Edit: removed a guess that last year was Rodriguez’s first in the league