Ditch the tiaras, ladies. Queens of fifth, you are no longer.
Since the Volleyball World Jurmala Elite 16 in June of 2022, Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth settled for fifth place in six of seven tournaments. Five of those quarterfinal losses came in the third set, some in the wildest, most tantalizing deciding sets of the season — 18-20 to Tina Graudina and Anastasija Kravcenoka in Gstaad, 22-24 to Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes in January’s Beach Pro Tour Finals.
On Saturday night at the La Paz Challenge, it all felt so eerily similar. Nuss and Kloth watched as a 19-16 lead in the first set of the quarterfinals evaporated into an eventual 25-27 loss to France’s Lezana Placette and Alexia Richard. On multiple occasions, the match was stopped due to technical difficulties with the lighting. Placette and Richard passed the time playing tic-tac-toe on the sand, the added minutes building a tension that had been accumulating for nine months.
A different team materialized after the break. Nuss and Kloth resumed the dominant form that had staked them to a 19-16 lead in the first place, winning the second set 21-18, and dominating the third, 15-9. The proverbial quarterfinal monkey was off their backs, tossed to the coast of Baja California Sur.
They took advantage, winning another three-setter over Brazilians Taina Silva and Victoria Lopes (15-21, 21-18, 15-12) in the semifinals to earn a gold-medal matchup with familiar foes in Savvy Simo and Toni Rodriguez, a pair of March Cinderellas dancing from the qualifier to the final match of the tournament.
They know each other well, those four. Rodriguez wore the purple and gold as she played alongside Nuss and Kloth at LSU. Simo, a UCLA alum, played against Nuss and Kloth three times in their senior seasons. The respective pairs were even playing against each other last May in New Orleans when Rodriguez went down with injury, the rest of her season lost.
She’s back, of course, and the first professional match of the 2023 season featured these very same pairs, in the opening round of the qualifier of the Doha Elite 16, one which Nuss and Kloth won in three.
There would be no such extended match this time. Not in La Paz. The moment Nuss and Kloth flipped a 9-12 first-set deficit at the technical timeout into a 14-14 switch, the narrative had changed. Nuss had a read on Simo. Kloth finished with four blocks. The all-American…
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