AVP New Orleans, the second event of the AVP’s 2023 season, begins with Thursday’s qualifier and ends with Sunday afternoon’s finals.
Whether you’re attending in person, streaming, or simply following online, here are the top storylines to watch this weekend.
There is also the Volleyball World Challenge in Saquarema, Brazil, this weekend, and a handful of USA players are there, affecting the men’s field more than the women’s.

Can Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth defend their home AVP?

New Orleans is becoming something of a required stop on the AVP, mostly because two of its brightest talents reside just a short drive from Coconut Beach, site of this weekend’s tournament, which begins with Thursday’s qualifier. Louisiana has a passion for its sports teams that goes far beyond anything you’ll see in California, and Nuss and Kloth are very much a Louisiana sports team, even if Kloth, a South Dakotan by birth, is an adopted child of the Bayou. The LSU products lost in last year’s title match at Coconut to Kelly Cheng and Betsi Flint. They’ll enter as the No. 4 seed, behind Cheng and Sara Hughes, Miami champs Brandie Wilkerson and Melissa Humana-Paredes, and Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles.

Toni Rodriguez back in New Orleans after breakout yet season-ending event

It’s difficult to properly summarize what New Orleans last year was for Toni Rodriguez and Savvy Simo. A breakout event? An unbelievably unfortunate one? Positive? Negative? All of the above.

Rodriguez, who is from Gonzales, Louisiana, and spent six years at LSU on both the indoors and beach teams, and UCLA-product Simo won their first two matches last year, earning a berth into the quarterfinals, where they met Nuss and Kloth in a hometown matchup. Even before the quarterfinal, it was the best career finish for both, and the first time they’d compete on a Sunday. Until they didn’t. Rodriguez re-injured one of her oft-injured knees, and that was that, for the entire season. Now Rodriguez is back, playing perhaps the best volleyball of her career. In two events this season, Rodriguez and Simo have qualified for a pair of main draws in Volleyball World Challenges in La Paz and Itapema, winning a silver medal in the former. Even as the No. 12 seed in New Orleans, they’re poised for another breakout event.

Can Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes win six of eight?

It wasn’t much of a secret that when Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes decided to partner in the fall of 2022 they’d be a fantastic beach volleyball team. But winning five of their first seven? Winning the Beach Pro Tour Finals? Twice beating Ana Patricia and Duda in gold medal matches? Even for the most optimistic of fans and prognosticators, it has been an exceptional start. New Orleans will mark their first AVP Pro Series, and it is a fully loaded affair, hardly any less competitive than a Beach Pro Tour Elite 16 would be.

Among the women’s pairs in Brazil, Corinne Quiggle and Sarah Schermerhorn are in Thursday’s qualifier while Kelley Kolinske and Hailey Harward are into the main draw.

Saquarema Challenge diluting men’s field into wide-open affair

While the women’s field is legitimately close to an Elite 16 level event, the men’s is closer to what you might find in a big purse CBVA or an AVP Tour Series like, say, Denver of 2022. The Saquarema Challenge has pulled Miami champs Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander, Miami runners-up Miles Evans and Chase Budinger, AVP title contenders Miles Partain and Andy Benesh, and serial AVP winners Trevor Crabb and Theo Brunner. All told, there are just six players on the men’s side who have won an AVP, one of them being Phil Dalhausser, the 12 seed who is playing with John Sutton and is not considered much of a favorite to win New Orleans. For comparison’s sake, the women’s field boasts 15 players who have won an AVP.

Tri Bourne, Chaim Schalk make AVP debut as heavy favorites

With such a light field, the pressure, then, is squarely on the shoulders of Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk, the top seed in New Orleans by nearly 1,300 seeding points. The first three events of their partnership have been mercurial, with a flat debut in La Paz, a promising but tantalizing 13th-place finish in Tepic, and an up-and-down fifth in Itapema. They’ll probably be disappointed with anything less than a win.

Who is primed to challenge Bourne and Schalk? 

With four of the top teams in Brazil, it leaves the door wide open for any number of men’s teams to have a breakout event. Kyle Friend and Tim Brewster, the No. 2 seed, appear as able as any, coming off a fifth in Chicago, third in Central Florida, and a fifth to start the season in Miami.

Cody Caldwell and Chase Frishman were tremendous in Miami, upsetting one team after the next to make the semifinals, where they lost a heartbreaker to Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander, 21-18, 18-21, 19-21. They followed that up with a second-place finish at a recent NORCECA qualifier, where they beat JM Plummer and I and Friend and Brewster — both in three sets — before losing to Troy Field and Silila Tucker in the finals.

Evan Cory, too, is as poised as any individual. Like Kloth, Nuss and Rodriguez, Coconut Beach is home for Cory. It’s also the site of his first breakout, where he and Logan Webber won an AVPNext Gold in 2021 to cement their partnership for the remainder of that season. They’ve played well thus far in 2023, beating a talented Chilean team in the first round of the Itapema qualifier before falling to eventual fourth-place finishers Noslen Diaz and Jorge Alayo of Cuba.

Will the weather hold up?

The 2016 AVP New Orleans is still one of the most indelible memories I have in beach volleyball, for some of the strangest reasons. Rain had poured in buckets to the point that the courts at Coconut Beach were flooded and resembled a very large, very shallow swimming pool. So the AVP waited … and waited … and waited some more, delaying as long as possible to till the courts into a reasonably playable condition. But the delays forced the AVP to truncate matches to sets of 11, 11, and 7. And so it was that I lost a beach volleyball match 8-11, 11-7, 4-7. Weird.

The finals were equally bizarre, a windy, rainy, chilly mess that saw Kendra Van Zwieten and Kim DiCello win their first and only AVPs and Ryan Doherty and John Mayer come back from a 9-21 opening set loss to beat Casey Patterson and Jake Gibb, 21-17, 15-8 in the ensuing two sets.

There is no telling what the weather will do in New Orleans. It’s currently forecasted to rain on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, but at least, unlike the Masters, it will be warm, between 70-81 degrees. Rain or shine, the White Claws and beers will be flowing at the Coconut Beach bar.

That’s a guarantee.

Go to Drago’s and get all the grilled oysters you can eat

That’s an order.

AVP and its YouTube channel promise

This is from VolleyballMag.com contributor Larry Hamel:

The AVP wrote in its statement to VolleyballMag.com after its season-opening tournament in Miami Beach that its official YouTube channel, AVP Beach Volleyball, would “offer a deeper dive and more complete view of the AVP. This year our YouTube channel subscribers will have access to highlights from our 2023 Pro and Gold events —  including Miami, which will post after the finals broadcast” on one of the ESPN channels, in this case ESPNU.

After the telecast on ESPNU, that “deep dive” on the AVP’s YouTube channel has consisted of one 38-second video running down the Miami Beach event’s statistical leaders set to Latin dance music found on the “Videos” tab, and a variety of clips with vertical “cell phone” perspectives varying from 11 seconds to 44 seconds under the “Shorts” menu. Given the feedback its fans gave the AVP on social media, it seems highly unlikely that most of the 108,000 subscribers of its YouTube channel would have had their appetites satisfied by these scant offerings.

Meanwhile, over on the AVP channel on the ESPN+ streaming platform, subscribers looking for specific matches from the Miami Beach event pretty much would be on their own, greeted with the same label, “2023 AVP Miami Beach Pro Series,” accompanied by a photo of an AVP Wilson Optx volleyball sitting on the sand. None of the 23 videos archived indicate who might have played whom or in which round. The first description that comes to mind of such labeling is “user unfriendly.”

AVP New Orleans 101: Storylines to watch for this weekend at Coconut Beach Volleyballmag.com.