Olympics volleyball: “Gritty not pretty” USA women sweep France; men to face Brazil

PARIS — You want pretty?
They’d rather be gritty.

And that is the USA women’s volleyball team in a nutshell at the Paris Olympics, as the Americans finished pool play with a sweep — not an easy sweep, by any means, but a sweep nonetheless — of France and await their Tuesday quarterfinal assignment.

In their first Olympics match the Americans lost their first two sets to China, came back, but then lost in five. Against Serbia, they won the first two sets before holding on to win in five.

And against France, those first two sets of a 29-27, 29-27, 25-20 victory, well, sacrelebleu!

This team is certainly hard to get a handle on.

“Good,” USA setter Jordyn Poulter said. “That means our opponents can’t either.”

Meanwhile, the USA men know who they play late Monday night in South Paris Arena. They are the second seed and play Brazil. A more detailed look at the men’s quarterfinals follows.

USA women grind to sweep of France 

The Americans simply could not shake winless France in the first two sets as Le Bleu thrilled the home crowd by not mailing it in even though they could not make the quarterfinals.

“France is not one of the top 10 teams in the world, clearly,” said USA coach Karch Kiraly, one of the world’s most decorated players on both the beach and indoors. “When I was a player the biggest struggles I found was playing against that next level of teams. I would sometimes of fall into the trap of expecting things to come a little easier than they did. The other teams might do something that is surprising or unorthodox than that next tier, and I think we probably fell into that trap a little.”

A blessing in disguise?

“I think we are benefitting from it. Nothing has come easy for us in three matches for us here,” Kiraly understated.

“But that’s exactly what’s going to happen in two days and we can’t have shown any more grit than we have shown in this tournament, and our grit is going to get us as far as we can go, two days from now and hopefully a lot farther. We don’t know who we’re gonna play yet, but it’s going to big a best test, and so this is right along with this theme. I think we’re better prepared than if things had gone easily.”

They certainly did not go easily in those first two sets.

“Give France credit,” Kiraly said. “They played well. We responded.”

The USA was up…