After 25 years, AVP returns to Phoenix

For once this weekend — maybe, hopefully — Betsi Flint and Kelly Cheng will have the crowd on their side.

Flint doesn’t quite understand why the crowd has tended to favor opposing teams for the most part of this 2022 season, though the simple fact that they have had the best season of any on the AVP thus far — their 13,963 points this year are more than 2,000 above Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth who did, it should be noted, skip one AVP — and enter most tournaments as the slight favorites to win is an easy explanation.

Still: It’ll be nice to have the Arizona crowd this weekend for the AVP Phoenix Gold Series Championships, the first time Flint has ever been able to play at home, in front of her family and childhood friends.

“Hopefully it’ll be the first stadium that will actually cheer for us,” said Flint, who moved to Phoenix when she was 10 years old and continues to have the support of local sponsors: Sanderson Ford, TMD Wealth, and hers and Cheng’s season-long sponsor, Vea Newport Beach Resort & Spa. “I feel like no one ever wants us to win. I don’t know. No one likes us. We played [Sara] Hughes and [Kelley] Kolinske, and technically we’re the underdogs, and no one is cheering for us. I don’t know. I’m very excited. I’ve never played in Phoenix.”

Neither has anyone currently on Tour. The last time the AVP stopped in Phoenix was 1997 — the same year that Nuss, Kloth, and Julia Scoles were born. Sarah Sponcil, the only other local competing — she is the No. 2 seed with Terese Cannon and will not play until Saturday — was only a year old.

“I’m excited. I’m excited to see who shows up. I think there’s going to be a lot of people I’ve seen, a lot of people I probably haven’t seen in years showing up. It’s going to be a surprise who stops by,” said Sponcil, who was twice named the Gatorade Arizona Player of the Year in high school. “It’s an awesome idea. It’s more of an incentive for the athletes to look forward to something big at the end of the season. You have to bring everything and be consistent.”

So it’s a bit new, this weekend. All of it. From the crowd alas leaning towards Flint and Cheng, to the AVP returning to Phoenix, to playing in the 18,422-capacity Footprint Center, home of the Phoenix Suns, to the format of the event itself, which is sort of single elimination, sort of not.

Six teams per gender qualified for this…