Pro Volleyball Federation: Thrill opens at Omaha; Gillen wows; TV woes abound
The third week of Pro Volleyball Federation action begins Wednesday when the Omaha Supernovas entertain the Vegas Thrill, who play their first match in the league’s inaugural season.
The Supernovas (1-1) come off a sweep of the San Diego Mojo and will play under new interim head coach Bird Kuhn after Shelton Collier was reassigned. Read our story here:
The Supernovas had a scare against the Mojo when leading attacker Brooke Nuneviller went down with an ankle injury. She likely will not play this week.
Action continues Friday when the Grand Rapids Rise (1-0) goes to the Atlanta Vibe (3-0). Vibe OH Alli Linnehan suffered a leg injury early in a sweep of the Mojo last week. The last shot we saw of Linnehan was sitting on the bench with her foot elevated and her shoe off. On Monday, the team placed her on short-term injured reserve.
On Saturday, Vegas goes to the Orlando Valkries (0-1) and Monday, the Supernovas are at the Grand Rapids Rise (1-0) and the Valkries visit the Atlanta Vibe.
All the matches can been seen on the league’s YouTube channel, and we have plenty about that in this report.
Encouraging first steps for rookie Valkyries
Could the “tynamic” Jill Gillen become the PVF’s first home-grown breakout star?
Gillen made an eye-popping debut in front of an appreciative crowd that seemed to hang on the high-flying 5-foot-7 rookie’s every move.
Orlando fans made Scott Skiles, another feisty giant killer, the face of the expansion NBA Magic in the franchise’s pre-Shaq infancy. Like Skiles, Gillen rates high on the “scrappy underdog” scale. She also starred at Arkansas, a Southeastern Conference school, and even though UCF’s athletic program has made great strides, Central Florida still is very much SEC country.
Coming to the Valkyries in a 2-for-1 draft-day swap after being selected by the Supernovas with the first pick of the second round (eighth overall), Gillen earned a starting outside-hitter spot with a strong training camp. In her first match as a pro, Gillen had 15 kills against four errors on 48 swings (.229 efficiency), two aces, 14 digs and four block assists. Hitting .229 might not seem like a big deal, but in a five-set thriller against the Vibe in which the teams combined to hit .135, that was the best number among the starting outsides.
The hometown squad might have come up three points short in the tiebreaker, but the fans enjoyed their first look at an energetic bunch fueled by “true rookie” starters in Gillen and libero Georgia Murphy out of Oregon, a whippet-like setter in Puerto Rican standout Wilma Rivera (called “underestimated” by Valkyries Coach Amy Pauly) and a go-to outside in powerhouse Adora Anae, the former Utah star.
“She’s always had to do that because of her size. Gill has to be creative. She has to find ways to score. I was really proud of her for recognizing the situation she was in, learning how to play through it and finding success both early and late in the match.
“Gill knows how to be the best version of herself and that’s really awesome,” Pauly added. “I am so happy that I got her and Abby (6-foot-5 middle blocker Hansen, a UCF product) in the trade. Gill is my type of player, fiery and just a badass, if I can say that.”
Snagged in the second round (10th overall), Murphy also projects as a key building block for a team that held on to all five of its drafted rookies, three on the 14-player roster and two on the practice squad (middle Azhani Tealer of Kentucky and opposite Kalyah Williams of USC). Georgia enjoyed a productive debut with 21 digs, four assists and positive passing of 67% in serve-receive.
“We want to build for the future,” Pauly said. “Gill and George, they just walked into practice and absolutely owned it. They earned their spots. They deserved to start.”
PVF potpourri
Thrill coach Fran Flory made a flurry of moves to pare her roster to the league limits. Designated for the rookie practice squad were libero Maddie Schermerhorn (Purdue, the team’s fifth-round pick) and middle blocker Amani McArthur (Michigan State). Earlier, setter Hannah Pukis (Oregon), the Thrill’s first-round choice, was put on short-term injured reserve. Flory placed opposites Holly Toliver (a waiver claim) and Angel Gaskin on waivers …
The Bolt6 technology used to determine in-or-out line calls and in reviewing plays challenged by coaches has received widespread kudos during the first two weeks of PVF. The league has eliminated officials on the lines and the camera system delivers a near-instantaneous computer-generated graphic (similar to what fans have seen in tennis) that provides a definitive result. The cameras also give the off-site replay official access to video of incredible quality that allows the difficult “touch, no touch” calls to be made quickly. Two thumbs up, way up, to the PVF for its investment in this technology. …
Leah Edmond of the Vibe picked up the PVF’s Player of the Week award. The charismatic OH ripped 16 kills and hit .407 in three sets against the Mojo, adding two aces, three blocks and five digs. Her Vibe running mate, Linnehan, was the PVF’s first Player of the Week. …
Ex-NBA standout Paul Millsap, a four-time All-Star with the Atlanta Hawks, has bought into the ownership group of the PVF’s Vibe. …
The franchise in Indianapolis scheduled to join the PVF for the 2025 season will call itself the Indy Ignite …
We have heard from reliable sources that a handful of current PVF players have already signed with League One Volleyball, which starts play in January 2025. LOVB recently added three more players of distinction in American stars Roni Jones-Perry (BYU) and Sarah Wilhite Parsons (Minnesota), and French veteran Christina Bauer. Pin hitters Jones-Perry and Parsons have USA national team’s experience.
TV announcing fallout
The PVF has image damage to undo after its national audience leveled blistering criticism of the streaming feed on the new league’s YouTube channel that piggybacked the locally produced telecast of the match between the San Diego Mojo and the hometown Omaha Supernovas.
We should note that for this Wednesday’s match, which will again be produced by News Channel Nebraska, play-by-play announcer John Baylor returns, this time with former Nebraska great Nancy Metcalf, who joined him on the first broadcast of the season.
This past Saturday night, in addition to being plagued throughout by technical issues, the live stream rankled out-of-market fans from the outset with announcers in all-out “homer” mode and became embarrassingly awful when the analyst — Tonia Tauke Dorn — veered off the rails with a rant on volleyball apparel that was deemed wildly inappropriate and disrespectful by numerous flabbergasted viewers.
The match was produced by New Channel Nebraska, which chose the announcers.
For two extended periods of the 1-hour, 43-minute presentation, the audio was annoyingly out of sync with the video, ahead of it by at least two seconds.
Baylor, the longtime voice of Nebraska volleyball, for the entire match misidentified the Mojo’s Lindsay Stalzer (No. 17) as Genesis Collazo Vazquez (No. 77), even though the name on the back of the player’s jersey plainly read “Stalzer.” Baylor also referred to Mojo coach Tayyiba Haneef-Park, a three-time American Olympian, as “Parker” multiple times.
Tauke Dorn, a former Nebraska standout and director of a girls volleyball club in nearby Lincoln, frequently used “us” and “we” in reference to the Supernovas and “they” when referring to the visiting team from San Diego. That might have been OK on the statewide NCN network, but grating to the ears of a wider viewership. (Aside to those who seemed deeply offended by such homerism: Local announcers more frequently than not are homers.)
But the live chat hooked up to the YouTube stream exploded with incredulity when the announcers veered off on the following tangent bashing the University of Oregon’s program (a Nebraska foil) and the garb worn by its players:
Tauke Dorn: “Can we talk about Oregon for a second since there are five players on the team from Oregon? I try so hard to watch Oregon play volleyball during the season, but I just can’t do it for two reasons.”
Baylor: “One.”
Tauke Dorn: “One, their court is so busy that it gives me a headache.”
Baylor: “Lots of trees. Two.”
Tauke Dorn: “Their shorts are too short.”
Baylor: “Really?”
Tauke Dorn: “Yes. I have a rule in my gym that if I can see your butt cheeks, it’s too short. Like, can we just make that a rule in college volleyball that there are no butt cheeks allowed? It is so distracting when you have a player and you can see their butt cheeks. Can we just talk about that for a second?”
Baylor: “No more mid-’90s fashion is what you’re saying?”
Tauke Dorn: “Yeah, I mean, we make shorts long enough. Let’s just go with that. But Oregon, they go with Nike and I don’t think there’s even an inseam, it’s a zero.”
Baylor: “22-13 Omaha in the second …”
The “butt cheeks” backlash was so immediate and so intense that even a Pro Volleyball Federation coach and an announcer who had been commissioned to work the league’s debut match publicly weighed in on the X social-media platform (formerly Twitter).
Emily Ehman, a familiar face to VolleyballMag.com readers and a Big Ten Network analyst, called the PVF’s first match on January 24, the Vibe at the Supernovas, for its national feed. Ehman tweeted: “Let me just say that Oregon is a damn fun team to watch. And that it makes me really upset when people comment on what players look like in their game attire or how they wear it.”
Live streams produce trickles
Walking back the fiasco from Saturday likely will be a chore for the PVF, but perhaps the only saving grace is that relatively few people suffered through it. While an announced crowd of 11,403 witnessed the Mojo-Supernovas match at Omaha’s CHI Health Center, the peak live views on the YouTube channel’s feed Saturday (February 3) was 7,645.
I have kept a viewership log of all five of the PVF’s matches and this was the first in which the fans in the stands outnumbered those viewing on the live stream.
Here’s a breakdown of the other announced attendances as announced by the PVF and the peak live-stream views logged in those matches:
January 24, Vibe at Supernovas — 11,642 at CHI Health Center vs. 13,745 on YouTube.
January 25, Columbus Fury at Grand Rapids Rise — 7,805 (an announced sellout) at Van Andel Arena vs. 8,544.
January 26 — Vibe at Valkyries, 5,284 at Addition Financial Arena vs. 7,514.
February 1, Mojo at Vibe — 6,100 at Gas South Arena vs. 7,183.
These live views numbers are crucial because they provide the most accurate gauge of how invested fans are in their PVF teams. It’s live sports, after all, and real-time viewership is what makes sports so highly prized by TV networks. Consumers watching live cannot fast-forward through the ads that pay the freight.
Through two weeks of competition, the PVF has done an admirable job of putting (covered) butts in seats, an average of 8,446, and even its least-attended match should be viewed as encouraging. But its average peak live views on YouTube (a free platform with universal accessibility) of 8,926 lacks critical mass. That number simply does not send the message that the PVF has cultivated a highly invested audience that would be worth it to a TV partner to pay a difference-making rights fee.
Don’t be fooled by the views number you see on the videos of PVF matches that have been around for a while. Those are cumulative views, not unique viewers, and a view is registered every time a user looks at a clip for around 30 seconds.
For example, the Mojo-Vibe match from February 1 showed 53,000 views on Monday night. That might seem like a lot, but it tells TV people that the bulk of the viewers preferred to watch it later rather than sooner (e.i., DVR consumers), thus being far less attractive to a traditional linear channel. That video, by the way, had generated $99 in revenue (according to a popular YouTube revenue calculator), a drop in the bucket even for bare-bones TV.
Another glaring example of “done on the cheap” production came in the debut match on January 24. Rather than open that historic show with high-energy hoopla and shots of a huge cheering crowd, the producers opted to record an intro in which the first images viewers saw were of a near-empty arena and two announcers sitting at a desk with nobody behind them.
The PVF’s rollout remains a work in progress, and the league’s early streaming efforts did little to send the message to mildly curious fans that what they watched was special.
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