Photographer Jim Wolf was in Anaheim and a gallery of his best shots follow. Click on any photo to view full size and be sure to give him credit if you share.
The San Diego Smash embraced a “nothing-to-lose mentality” in playing their way into the AVP League playoff picture, going 3-1 and coming within an eyelash of winning all four.
The Austin Aces nearly painted themselves into a corner during a Week 7 train wreck that dropped them to .500.
And the New York Nitro split their four matches at the spacious Honda Center in Anaheim, California, but that was good enough to nail down the top seed in the League playoffs.
“We (wanted) to get first place and it’s a nice check,” the Nitro’s Taylor Sander said.
All in all, the penultimate weekend of the League’s regular season was full of surprising results, not the least of which was that the Aces’ high-powered women’s pair of USA Olympians Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss went 0-for-2, dropping both matches in sweeps and not scoring more than 12 points in any set.
The Smash jumped to 5-7 in the standings, with USA Olympians Chase Budinger and Miles Evans (3-3) taking down the Aces’ Billy Allen and Paul Lotman in three sets on Saturday night and sweeping Phil Dalhausser and Avery Drost of the Palm Beach Passion on Sunday afternoon. The Smash’s Geena Urango and Toni Rodriguez (2-4) pulled off one of the biggest upsets in the League series when they served Kloth and Nuss off the court in a 15-10, 15-12 victory.
The 6-foot-1 Rodriguez sizzled in the first set with four aces, including a feathery hybrid float serve that dropped untouched on set point. Urango kept the pressure on from behind the line in the second, dialing up four more aces. Geena’s “left-to-left” sharp-angled topspin jumper gave TKN (as they are called) fits and Urango tallied the match-winner on a slicing serve that landed inches from the sideline. The Smash duo complemented their serving by combining to hit .500 (17-for-30 against two errors) in the match.
“The past few weeks we’ve been training to be more aggressive from the service line because without wind and the elements, you need to execute a little more efficiently with your serve,” Urango explained.
Added Rodriguez: “Where we are sitting (coming into the weekend 2-6), we have nothing to lose, so we wanted to come out and be aggressive.”
Budinger was effusive in his praise of his teammates: “They sided out like champs and they (were)…
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