Athletes Unlimited returns, serves up pro volleyball season openers Friday

Bethania De La Cruz celebrates winning AU’s 2022 volleyball season/AU photo

Athletes Unlimited will tip off its third season on Friday with a 44-player roster that includes six members who are part of the USA national-team program and scads of names that are familiar to volleyball fans the world over.

“I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but the AU system makes volleyball new and exciting,” said former Oregon star and first-time AU player Brooke Nuneviller, who joined the program in Mesa, Arizona, about two weeks ago. “Especially when you’re a professional athlete, it starts to be more of a job.

“So when you have all of these new rules and point systems, it’s just different. That lends a new, exciting twist to the game.”

The league has mainstream TV exposure: Each match during AU’s five-week season can be seen on the linear ESPNU cable channel or the streaming ESPN+ platform that numbers 25 million subscribers.

The kicker is that Athletes Unlimited is just the start of a wave of women’s indoor professional volleyball set to break across the United States.

The first-week schedule

Friday, October 6
Team Nootsara vs. Team Valentin-Anderson, 7 p.m., ESPN+
Team De La Cruz vs. Team Edmond, 9:30 p.m., ESPN+

Sunday, October 8
Team Edmond vs. Team Valentin-Anderson, 7 p.m., ESPN+
Team Nootsara vs. Team De La Cruz, 9:30, ESPN+

Monday, October 9
Team Edmond vs. Team Nootsara, 7 p.m., ESPN+
Team Valentin-Anderson vs. Team De La Cruz, 9:30 p.m., ESPN+

Week one draft

Athletes Unlimited last held a season in the spring of 2022 in Dallas and will compete for the next five weeks in Mesa, Arizona. The first-week captains, based on how AU finished last time out, are defending champion Bethania De La Cruz (an outside hitter), Natalia Valentin-Anderson (setter), Nootsara Tomkom (setter) and Leah Edmond (OH).

Nootsara Tomkom/Jade Hewitt Media

The first-round picks in the draft for this week’s matches held on Tuesday were outside hitter Alli Linnehan (by Edmond), OH Yossiana Pressley (by Nootsara), OH Brooke Nuneviller (by Valentin-Anderson) and setter Alisha Glass Childress (by De La Cruz). Plucked in the second round were opposite Willow Johnson (De La Cruz), opposite Saskia Hippe (Valentin-Anderson), middle hitter Molly McCage (Nootsara) and middle Danielle Hart (Edmond).

De La Cruz, a member of the Dominican Republic’s national team, set the AU points record with 4,652 the last season, after finishing second in the standings with 3,690 in the inaugural campaign behind American superstar Jordan Larson.

Among the players on the AU roster are players who are in the USA national-team gym, including Stanford’s Morgan Hentz (libero), Wisconsin’s Sidney Hilley (setter), Penn State’s Nia Reed (opposite), Penn State’s Kendall White (libero), Hart and Nuneviller, an AU rookie who played her first pro season in Türkiye last season was picked third overall in the draft.

The league welcomes 25 newcomers, including 2022 AVCA All-Americans outside Claire Chaussee (Louisville), setter Gabby Blossom (Penn State/San Diego), Nuneviller (Oregon) and Hart (Wisconsin).

The full rosters are at the end of this story.

Preparing for the season

Nuneviller was stoked to be drafted third overall by Valentin-Anderson, the veteran from Puerto Rico who will be her setter with the Omaha Supernovas in the Professional Volleyball Federation when the startup league begins play after the first of the year.

Brooke Nuneviller attacking for Nilufer this past March

“It was incredible to get picked so high, particularly with a setter I will be playing with in Omaha,” said Nuneviller, a superbly athletic 5-foot-11 player who is adept as a libero or an outside hitter.

Nuneviller has been busy since an All-American campaign at Oregon that ended last December. She has played professionally in Türkiye, as well as competed with the USA in the Nations League, Pan Am Cup and on the gold-medal-winning squad in the NORCECA Pan Am Cup Final Six.

We huddled with Nuneviller and Valentin-Anderson on different days, but the first-week AU and future Supernovas teammates expressed virtually the same sentiments about the “team vs. individual” aspects of Athletes Unlimited’s scoring system.

“The individual component is part of the scoring, but I’ve come to realize that AU is much more team-oriented than an outside viewer might think,” Nuneviller said. “Team points and wins are worth by far the most points you can get, so the players who are going to be at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the season are going to be those who help their teams win. How people work with the team is going to be a significant aspect of it.”

Her “we vs. me” outlook was not lost in Valentin-Anderson.

“Holy, moly, look at that!” Natalia exclaimed. “I’m all about the team effort. I am so happy to hear Brooke say that. I am going to tell Brooke tomorrow that we answered the same thing. It still has more to do with wins and losses. If your team wins, there’s a better chance of making it higher. So I focus on making the team better, grinding each week and trying to make the teams win as many games as possible.”

Valentin-Anderson earned the captain’s spot in three weeks of the 2022 season and she can spot a difference between the talent on the roster between this year and last.

“From last year, the level has grown,” she said. “It’s not that it was bad last year, it’s just that we have more complete players in the gym. We have great middle blockers who can serve, play defense, set a ball out of system. We have all-around outside hitters. And we have a wonderful mix of veterans and young people. When that happens, and those two groups come together, it creates great competition. I just love that [in this format) every week when you come to the gym, you have to scout people, you have to stay on your toes.

“The beauty of this league is that it rewards the players who can adapt quicker. The overall level has gone up because we have a lot of skilled, complete players at every position.”

The IUPUI team gave Symone Abbott a group hug last week before she headed to AU/Lee Feinswog photo

Veteran Symone Abbott, who played in the league’s debut season in 2021 and returns in 2023, added perspective about AU’s loaded gym. Abbott, who is from Indiana and played at Northwestern, recently spent time helping coach and play with the team at IUPUI in Indianapolis.

“I see a lot of talent across the board,” Abbott said. “It’s a super-competitive league. Sometimes it gets a bad rap because it gets compared to overseas overall because it’s month-and-a-half long and it has this very different scoring system. But that doesn’t mean that the league is just as competitive as any overseas league, if not more. If you’re on one team with 12-13 girls, you’re competing with maybe three girls for a starting spot at your position and in AU you’re competing against maybe 12-13. So you have to be that much better.”

Athletes Unlimited, the nascent PVF and League One Volleyball (LOVB) that is scheduled to launch in fall of 2024 offer American players viable alternatives to the overseas leagues, a welcome change, even though Nuneviller said her season playing for the Nilüfer Belediyespor team in Türkiye was filled with positives.

“My management was great, my coach was excellent, the girls that I played with were incredible,” she said. “The Turkish girls welcomed me with open arms and made me feel I was a lot closer to home than I was. I made a lot of great friends here. I got paid on time, which you never know with clubs overseas, especially as an American.”

Nonetheless, playing at home holds an undeniable allure.

“I kind of take life year by year with my volleyball career,” Nuneviller said. “I’m really looking forward to having opportunities to play in the United States now and in the future. That really excites me, and I can see myself doing this for a long time. But I don’t want to close any doors overseas. A lot of our top players on the national team are playing in Italy and Türkiye still, so while there are exciting things overseas, I do love the factors here of being closer to family and friends.”

Fueling the optimism are metrics for indoor volleyball that seemingly point upward every week. On Saturday night, for example, the NCAA women’s match between Nebraska and Indiana lured 328,000 total-average viewers to Big Ten Network, just 21,000 fewer than what had tuned in for the late-afternoon regional football games aired on BTN.

“The growth has been incredible,” Nuneviller said. “Another metric you can add is that Oregon volleyball broke its attendance record (with 7,334 fans) in its season Pac-12 opener. I played in front of over 5,000 fans at Oregon and it was a surreal feeling, So I can’t even imagine what it was like with a couple more thousand in that arena.”

Abbott, who left the collegiate ranks in 2017 and has played professionally in Italy, Greece, Puerto Rico and Türkiye, wishes this opportunity “had come along a few years earlier,” but is gratified to still be able to catch the wave of opportunity.

“This is a huge year for indoor volleyball in America,” Abbott said. “There are three leagues now that are kind of duking it out for position — AU, PVF and LOVB — and I’m all for it. Volleyball is only moving up. It’s been popular for a long time, but now that it will get more visibility brought on by these pro leagues, it’s just going to skyrocket.”

The format/scoring

AU’s non-traditional format calls for four captains drafting teams each week, and those squads play a six-match round-robin spread across Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays, at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Eastern each day.

The top four point-scorers from Week 1 become the captains in the second week and the draft process begins anew.

Athletes Unlimited is an individual competition contested within a team framework. The league champion is the player who scores the most points over 15 matches, with points awarded not only for team victories (in sets and matches), but for players voted as match MVPs, and for individual statistics such as kills, aces, assists, blocks, digs and accurate passing. The system penalizes errors. For example, a kill counts as eight points, but an attacking error subtracts 12. Ballhanding errors by setters are particularly punished: An assist is worth one point, an error is minus-12.

“The individual component is part of the scoring, but I’ve come to realize that AU is much more team-oriented than an outside viewer might think,” Nuneviller said.

“Team points and wins are worth by far the most points you can get, so the players who are going to be at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the season are going to be those who help their teams win. How people work with the team is going to be a significant aspect of it.”

First-week rosters

TEAM DE LA CRUZ
Facilitator: Kayla Banwarth
Betty De La Cruz, OH
Alisha Childress, S
Willow Johnson, OPP
Anota Adekunle, MB
Nomaris Vélez, L
Lindsey Vander Weid, OH
Karis Watson, MB
Gabby Blossom, S
Erin Fairs, OH
Kayla Caffey, MB
Symone Abbot, OPP

TEAM VALENTIN-ANDERSON
Facilitator: Brandon Directo
Natalia Valentin-Anderson, S
Brooke Nuneviller, OH
Saskia Hippe, OPP
Shelly Fanning, MB
Katie Lukes, OH
Tori Dixon, MB
Maria Schlegel, OH
Kaz Brown, MB
Nia Parker-Robinson, OH
Amanda Benson, L
Ray Santos, S

TEAM NOOTSARA
Facilitator: Stephen Gbur
Nootsara Tomkom, S
Yossiana Pressley, OPP
Molly McCage, MB
Claire Chaussee, OH
Ali Bastianelli, MB
Kendall White, L
Nia Reed, OPP
Aury Cruz, OH
Nicole Edelman-Cagliari, S
Sassá, OH
Marin Grote, MB

TEAM EDMOND
Facilitator: Dave Rubio
Leah Edmond, OH
Alli Linnehan, OH
Danielle Hart, MB
Morgan Hentz, L
Sydney Hilley, S
Jenna Rosenthal, MB
Génesis Collazo, OPP
Taylor Bruns Tengenrot, S
Deja McClendon, OH
Emma Willis, MB
Lindsay Stalzer, OH

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