AVP League's premiere on The CW is a disaster
Pro beach: Boondoggle broadcast hits all the wrong notes for a casual audience
How kind of the producers of the AVP League telecast Saturday night on The CW to show viewers the “brain trust” responsible for this abomination, Bobby Corvino and Heath Freeman.
The latest new owners of the venerable but perennially unprofitable AVP — with Corvino as their most visible face — have ponied up millions to put their revamped product in front of an audience larger than the usual die-hards.
The presumed objective was to recruit new fans by enticing casual mainsteam sports viewers to sample the team-oriented League, a vast departure from the traditional bracket tournaments, through consistent exposure on linear cable and broadcast television.
The premise was sound in theory, but the execution of the AVP League’s debut on the over-the-air CW was sorely lacking. Corvino and Co. rolled out a bare-bones business-as-usual volleyball telecast with almost no effort directed to telling impressionable first-time viewers who the athletes were and why they should care about them.
The 10 minutes of the show should have been chock-full of voice-over video packages interspersed with sound bites from sit-down interviews with all the players. It was the first time, after all, on the broadcast channel capable of reaching pretty much anybody with a TV. The “setup” for the casuals logically should have been the overriding priority.
Instead, the AVP chose to go with a standard opening — the talking heads chatting for a bit and a couple of graphics — before moving right into the first match, pitting Paris Olympic silver medalists Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson of Canada, representing the host Palm Beach Passion, against Hailey Harward and Kylie Deberg of the Dallas Dream.
Crucial opportunity lost. No “special” feel was apparent. It was as if this were just another AVP match live-streamed on its YouTube channel for a viewership of perhaps a couple thousand.
Why spend the money to be on national TV (in what almost certainly is a time buy) if the AVP is not going to do it right?
The irony is that this production would have been fine for the ever-diminishing and aging group of die-hard beach-volleyball fans. But the AVP’s “brain trust” headed by Corvino and Freeman (so referred to by announcer Camryn Irwin when they were pictured on camera) has seemed hell-bent on driving away its long-timers. The AVP packed its 2025 schedule with nine League dates, and only two bracket-style events for the domestic tour’s top-level athletes.
The reality is that the League concept has met with harsh criticism and even a feeling of apathy among a significant percentage of the existing fan base.
Again, as on Friday night, those casuals who might have stumbled onto Saturday’s League offering saw a minuscule crowd at the Delray Beach Tennis Center in South Florida, probably fewer than a thousand. That spawned undesirable optics, for those empty seats are magnets for the eyes.
The broadcast was peppered with more instances of bad national TV, including the heinous error on a graphic involving living legend Phil Dalhausser. Announcers Irwin and Kevin Barnett all too frequently lapsed into insider chatter and jargon as though they were calling the fifth match of a long day’s slog on the YouTube channel.
A 10-minute lull in the action between the women’s and men’s matches would have provided an ideal platform for slickly produced video packages, but was mostly frittered away. And the interview by sideline reporter Casey Patterson with his teenage son simply was an embarrassing waste of air time. For all the bucks Corvino’s ownership group has dumped on TV production, it still comes across as being done on the cheap.
The AVP League will be back on The CW on June 7 from San Diego. The second installment has nowhere to go but up.
A little help …
Larry Hamel’s All Volleyball! is just getting started so I ask for your assistance in building its readership base. Please forward this email to your volleyball friends who might find the page of interest and/or share this post to your social-media platforms. Also, your financial aid would be greatly appreciated. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All Volleyball! is independent third-party journalism bringing you stories you can read. Thanks for your support!
If you enjoyed reading this story, check out what else is on the All Volleyball! site by hitting the button below:
