Final weekend’s Chicago Gold Collection marked the ultimate main occasion of the AVP’s 2023 season.
There shall be no AVP Gold Collection Championship this yr.
“Regardless of our greatest efforts, we remorse that we have now been unable to safe an appropriate location and time to carry the 2023 AVP Championship,” the AVP wrote in an announcement. “The 2023 season will conclude with the AVP Tour Collection Laguna Seaside Open from October 13-15.
We stay up for sharing thrilling information concerning the 2024 season within the weeks to return.”
Final yr’s Championship, which featured six groups per gender, was held on the Footprint Heart, dwelling of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. All year long, the situation of the Championship, which was slated for September 22-23, was listed as TBD, as had been the remaining particulars, equivalent to what number of groups would qualify, what the prize cash could be, and if the format would stay the identical.
Given the shortage of readability to these aforementioned particulars, the cancellation isn’t altogether shocking, particularly when contemplating that the AVP took down the Championship from its schedule on Friday afternoon.
It leaves, because the assertion talked about, the Laguna Tour Collection, held on the identical dates because the FIVB Seaside Volleyball World Championships in Tlaxcala, Mexico.
Eight USA groups are scheduled to be in Mexico — Miles Partain and Andy Benesh, Trevor Crabb and Theo Brunner, Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk, Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, Terese Cannon and Sarah Sponcil, Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles, and Alix Klineman and Hailey Harward — with a ninth, Chase Budinger and Miles Evans, nonetheless No. 1 on the reserve listing and considerably prone to slip into the sector. Most, if not all, of these gamers wouldn’t compete in a Tour Collection, the bottom of the AVP’s present three-tiered system.
With no championship, the AVP season, hyped and touted because the fortieth anniversary, ends abruptly. Nuss and Kloth, winners in 2022, will exit with back-to-back wins in Atlanta and Chicago. Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander is not going to get the chance to defend their 2022 win in Phoenix, their first as a crew, and can as a substitute bow out of the 2023 season with a fifth in Chicago. Trevor Crabb and Brunner, like Nuss and Kloth, will shut the yr on their win in Chicago.
What comes subsequent domestically stays a thriller.
Internationally, the Volleyball World Seaside Professional Tour Paris Elite16 shall be performed on the final weekend of September, kicking off a full slate of fall occasions as Olympic qualifying continues in a season that received’t end till December’s World Tour Finals in Doha, Qatar.
