Hold up for just one second. Didn’t Chaim Schalk and James Shaw lose in the round of 12 at the Quintana Roo Elite16? And didn’t the same fate befall Terese Cannon and Megan Kraft?
And they’re…still in the tournament? Competing for medals?
Did they both lose and…advance in the tournament?
Yes, all of these things are somehow true at once.
When Volleyball World expanded the size of the Elite16 fields to 24 this season, a shift in format had to come with it. Twenty-four is a notoriously difficult number of teams with which to run a tournament.
Compete in the standard modified pool-play format, and you get what plagued the Challenge events for the past two years: forfeits in the second round of the winners pool play matches, because there was no incentive to win.
Compete in double-elimination, and the first round — there would be 16 teams in the first round, with eight receiving byes — could be somewhat useless. If you win your first but lose your second, you’ll actually go backwards in the tournament, as if you hadn’t won at all, finding yourself in the same position as the eight teams who had lost in the first round (I did this twice at the Hermosa Beach Open). When the AVP ran double-elimination tournaments with 24 teams, they added increased prize money and points for those won won-lost-lost as opposed to those who just lost-lost, which is the best thing an organization could do in this case. But, with the scar tissue of all those forfeits the past two years no doubt still fresh, there was still the frightening possibility of forfeits in that first round, and this was apparently off the table. When it was brought up in a meeting when formats was discussed, the fact that double-eliminations would add six more total matches to the tournament was also a hindrance which, to me, is a bad, lazy, half-hearted excuse.
(If you’re a regular reader here or a listener to our podcast, you know I am firmly in the camp of give me double elimination or give me death. I even had a shirt made just for that. It is the easiest to understand, rewards winning, punishes losing, and is pure).
Compete in the round-robin style of the Olympics, and you simply have too many matches for just two courts, and round-robin also comes with the possibility of point manipulation and forfeits as well.
Born, then, is whatever you call the new Elite16 format.
Pool play is easy enough to follow: Win your pool, and you get a bye into the round of 12. The 12 teams who come out second and third compete against one another in the first round of playoffs. Those six winners then meet the six pool winners in the round of 12.
Then it gets weird.
Six winners will advance from that round of 12 into the quarterfinals, which is all well and good. The problem is that you need eight teams to run a quarterfinal.
Where do the other two teams come from?
Evidently, the teams who lost by the least in the round of 12.
This comes on points alone, which means a 19-21, 19-21 sweep loss is a better way to go than, say, a 21-19, 19-21, 10-15 loss in three. Debate the merits of that all you will — and you could until you’re red in the face — but that is what it is.
So, yes, Schalk and Shaw fell in the round of 12 to the Capogrosso Brothers, were resurrected from the dead because their loss was, as far as point differential goes, the most palatable – and used that second life to shock a previously undefeated David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig in the quarterfinals. They will play the Capogrosso Brothers again in Sunday’s semifinals.
So, yes, Cannon and Kraft fell in the round of 12 to Kelly Cheng and Molly Shaw, were resurrected from the dead because their loss was the most palatable – and used that second life to upset Svenja Muller and Cinja Tillmann and then avenge their previous loss to Cheng and Shaw in the semifinals.
They are now competing for gold and a fifth straight Beach Pro Tour medal.
If it was a simple formula you were looking for, Elite16s are not where you will find it.
But hey, at least there won’t be any more forfeits.
