There's a particular quiet that settles into the volleyball calendar in the last week of May, and it's the quiet of a season getting ready to begin a different season. The college players are home. The MLV trophy is in Dallas. The LOVB gyms are dark for the offseason. And somewhere on a printer in Colorado Springs, a 30-player long list and a 31-player long list have already been emailed out, the floor about to belong to a different group of athletes wearing stars and stripes on their chest.
I've spent enough Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays this spring on the courts where most of those names live during their domestic seasons that this week feels less like a transition and more like a reset. The work doesn't stop. The setting just changes. The opponents start saying things to each other that nobody in the Comerica Center crowd or the Houston gym has ever heard before.
That's what the past seven days have been. Two roster sheets. A drawer full of MLV postseason hardware. A LOVB league office making the kind of phone calls that get the rest of the volleyball world to refresh its tabs. And a beach tournament in Huntington Beach that put a familiar pair back on top.
US Olympic: The VNL Rosters Are Set
The week's headline story has nothing to do with a final score. It has to do with who's on the plane.
USA Volleyball released the 2026 Women's Volleyball Nations League long list on May 13, then the Men's preliminary roster followed on May 20. The women's list has 30 athletes. The men's has 31. Both teams will trim down to 14 per preliminary round stop, with head coaches Erik Sullivan and John Speraw choosing fresh combinations based on who is fit, who has rhythm, and who matches the opponent on a given Thursday.
The women's group runs deep with returning Olympic medalists. Six members of the long list have stood on an Olympic podium: Chiaka Ogbogu, Jordyn Poulter, Dana Rettke, Avery Skinner, Micha Hancock, and Jordan Thompson. That collection of bodies and résumés has won together at the highest level the sport offers, and the muscle memory of that experience will be one of Sullivan's most valuable assets in a year that intentionally rotates through new face combinations every match. There's a sister storyline worth tracking in Quebec, too. Avery and Madisen Skinner are both on the long list. The older sister is the proven Olympian. The younger one is on her first call-up in this cycle. Whether they share the floor at the same time will depend on Sullivan's lineup math at each stop.
Beneath the Olympic veterans is the layer that ties this roster to my season on the LOVB and MLV floors. Asjia O'Neal and Madi Banks. Logan Eggleston. Stephanie Samedy. Claire Hoffman. Lexi Rodriguez. Molly McCage. I've photographed most of them this spring inside arenas in Houston, Austin, Salt Lake, and Frisco. The pipeline from American collegiate volleyball through pro indoor and out to the national team is shorter and more visible than it has ever been, and you can see it in the names on this sheet. If you want the longer view on how women's pro volleyball got here, I traced it in Before the Boom last week.
The men's preliminary group is anchored by two returning Olympians who almost don't need an introduction. Matt Anderson is back. TJ DeFalco is back. Eight Olympians total dot the 31, and the opposite competition is one I think gets settled inside the first ten days in Ottawa. The men open in Ottawa, Brasília, and Linyi from June 10 through 14. The women open in Quebec City, Nanjing, and Brasília from June 3 through 7. Quebec is going to be the first place the Sullivan-era roster math gets tested in live competition, against an Italian and Polish field that has not gotten any easier in the year since the Volleyball Nations League closed out 2025.
A quick note on the setter conversation. Poulter's gold-medal résumé is the longest one in the room, and the photo at the top of this post is from an LOVB Salt Lake against Austin match in April that gives you a sense of why coaches keep coming back to her. But Hancock has been one of the most-credentialed indoor setters in the world for a decade, and Lauren Carlini is on the list too. Sullivan's first major lineup decision of the summer is going to be how he splits rotations among those three at the Quebec stop. I'll have a closer look at the opener in next week's rundown.
Indoor: MLV Postseason Hardware
The trophy has been awarded. The play-by-plays are written. Most of the league office is already on summer schedule. But the MLV postseason award announcements rolled out across the back half of May, and the names worth knowing are out.
Mimi Colyer of the Dallas Pulse took home Outside Hitter of the Year, which feels both inevitable and earned after watching her close the championship match in Frisco. If you want the full story of how the Pulse got there, the full eyewitness recap of the Dallas title run lives over here. The award puts a stamp on a debut season nobody on the team's bench will forget anytime soon, and gives the franchise a face going into year two.
The rest of the league's positional hardware went to one zip code. The Indy Ignite collected Setter of the Year (Mia Tuaniga), Middle Blocker of the Year (Lydia Martyn), Libero of the Year (Elena Scott), and Opposite of the Year (Azhani Tealer). Indy's sweep of the positional awards is the kind of credential that doesn't fade in the offseason. They were the No. 1 seed all year. They were the league's most balanced offensive group. They came one Cinderella story short of a title. The hardware is the receipt for a regular season that may go down as the most dominant in league history.
I'd add one personal footnote. Elena Scott is one of the players I photographed at the MLV semifinal weekend, and she's also on the USAV Women's VNL long list. The number of athletes who close a domestic title chase and walk straight into a national team training camp two weeks later is small. The MLV is one of the only places in the United States where that calendar exists at all.
Omaha Supernovas rookie Kiara Reinhardt picked up Rising Star, a nod to a finals-run season that almost ended differently. The Supernovas, for their part, are spending the offseason figuring out who's in the head-coach chair for the next cycle. The MLV coaching market is the slow-burn story of the summer.
Indoor: LOVB Goes to Ten
The biggest league-business story of the week didn't involve a court at all. Larry Hamel of All Volleyball! reported on May 21 that LOVB is adding a fourth expansion team for its third season, with Miami joining Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Minnesota to bring the league to ten franchises split across two conferences. Hamel's piece is the cleanest summary of where things stand. No ownership group disclosed. No venue announced. No team name yet. But the league moves from six teams to ten in a single cycle, and the geographic footprint stretches from the East Coast to the Pacific for the first time. That kind of expansion math doesn't happen in American pro sports very often, and almost never in women's leagues. It's the clearest signal yet that the moment volleyball has been telling itself about for two years is, in fact, actually happening.
Beyond the expansion announcement, the LOVB roster picture for 2026-27 is starting to take shape. Chiaka Ogbogu is heading to the Turkish league after a championship run in Austin, which is a top-shelf middle blocker leaving the LOVB floor entirely. Anna Hall is back in Madison after pregnancy leave, which is a returning starter the rest of the Western Conference will have to plan around. Kelsey Cook is out for the upcoming Atlanta season. None of these moves carry the league-scale weight of the Miami announcement, but cumulatively they're going to make the new season look meaningfully different from the one that just ended.
Beach: Crabb and Benesh, Again
The AVP tour rolled into Huntington Beach for the Heritage Open from May 15 through 17, and the men's title fell to a partnership most of the beach-watching world has gotten used to seeing in finals. Taylor Crabb and Andy Benesh closed it out. Benesh's serving in the late stages of the final was what carried the trophy across the line, and Hamel captured the moment in more detail than I'm going to here. The next AVP League stop opens in Belmar, New Jersey on May 30 and 31, with CBS broadcasting one Sunday match for the first time. A legacy network airing a beach event in 2026 is a quiet kind of milestone for a sport that has spent the last decade fighting for screens.
The Week Ahead
Quebec opens Wednesday, June 3. The USAV Women's National Team gets its first competitive look of the cycle, and Erik Sullivan begins making the lineup decisions that will shape the rest of the summer. Three days later the men land in Ottawa for their own opener. The beach calendar moves to Belmar on May 30 and 31. The MLV offseason coaching market keeps churning. Three weeks ago the volleyball calendar felt like it was running out of trophies to hand out. This week the calendar opens back up, and the next two months are going to look more like every weekend matters than any May I can remember.
I'll be back next Sunday with the first results from Quebec, the Ottawa opener, and whatever else lands in the inbox between now and then.
For deeper weekly volleyball reporting, two outlets I read every week: Larry Hamel's All Volleyball! on Substack and 900 Square Feet for ongoing volleyball news and updates. Both belong in your bookmarks.
Matt Powell is a professional sports content creator based in Houston who specializes in volleyball photography. See his volleyball portfolio or get in touch about coverage for your program or athlete.
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