MANHATTAN BEACH, CA. — Just one week ago, Deahna Kraft and Toni Rodriguez spent an entire day together in Huntington Beach. Played three matches as a team and won all three, sealing up a main draw berth into the season-ending Chicago Gold Series on Labor Day weekend. On that same day, Zana Muno was split-blocking with Savvy Simo in a practice match against Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, prepping for their own run in the Chicago Gold Series, where they were seeded directly into the main draw and were able to bypass the qualifier won by Kraft and Rodriguez.
On Saturday afternoon, in the quarterfinals of the Manhattan Beach Open, all four were on the court together once more, the new partners playing with their old and old with new. Or something like that.
Beach volleyball gets weird sometimes.
“It was bound to happen,” Kraft said of the future partners playing one another in Manhattan. “All is fair in volleyball and war. I respect them as players so it’s easier to play hard because I respect them so much so I’m just going to go out there and give them my best game and they’re going to give me their best game. We’re all just competing and we can leave it on the court and hang out afterwards.”
With a 21-13, 22-20 quarterfinal win in hand, Kraft and Muno had plenty of time to hang, soaking in a tournament thus far that has felt months in the making. They knew they could be good together, Kraft and Muno, a pair of supreme athletes with excellent touch and skill who displayed an ability to beat the highest-level teams but hadn’t yet sustained it for a full tournament. For every quality win — over Sarah Pavan and Kelly Reeves in Huntington Beach, over the Maestrinis, over Lexy Denaburg and Carly Kan in Hermosa Beach, over Betsi Flint and Megan J. Rice in Atlanta — there was a loss that put a stopper to the momentum.
There has been no such stopper in Manhattan Beach. Not from Madison Shields and Lydia Smith; not from the Waupaca champs, Alaina Chacon and Kylie Deberg, who held a match point over Muno and Kraft in the second round; not Washington’s finest in Chloe Loreen and Natalie Robinson, the highest-finishing 32-seed ever; not even their friends and soon-to-be teammates Rodriguez and Simo.
“The biggest win for us today was getting to the quarters,” Kraft said of their 23-21, 21-17 win over Loreen and Robinson. “That match, to me, mattered more, which sounds crazy. I had two goals this year: make…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Volleyballmag.com…