Week 4 Draft Takeaways: Cooper Pushes Past her Comfort Zone
Reagan Cooper describes herself as an introvert. There were a few butterflies for the 24-year-old outside hitter as she entered the Athletes Unlimited Pro Volleyball Championship.
Despite the nerves, she quickly propelled into the competition’s spotlight thanks to her standout offensive performances and captained the only team to go 3-0 in Week Three. Now, after her second time drafting a team, the AU rookie feels that she has her footing, but still drafted the kind of leaders that can supplement her experience and personality for the final week of competition.
“I’m not a captain that’s super out there,” she said. “I’m a pretty introverted person, so I wanted big personalities, and I think we got big personalities again, like with [Taylor] Sandbothe, Claire Hoffman’s a great leader, we got Chompoo [Guedpard] who’s a great leader, so I feel good about the personalities.
Her Week Three team was an upbeat, high-energy squad nicknamed the Orange Retrievers. After so much success, the group became scattered in the Week Four draft, while two of her former team members, Morgan Hentz (who has been her teammate three times this season) and Dani Drews, became captains.
Cooper suffered a loss in familiarity on the sideline as well. Coach Joseph Trinsey, who’s now coaching the Gold squad for Week Four, was assigned to each of her teams in the first three weeks, and she leaned heavily on his support.
“He’s a great, great coach,” she explained. “He knows me better than all of the other coaches. So I knew, after working with him for the first time with the draft, he pretty much predicted everything everyone was gonna do before the draft even happened. So I’m sure he knew what my moves were going to be today.”
Now, she’s fully trusting the guidance of Kayla Banwarth, but acknowledges that the switch has pushed her out of her comfort zone.
“I’m familiar with [Banwarth] and her coaching style, and she’s such a chill person,” Cooper said. “I work well with people that are down to earth and chill…Brand new team, brand new coach. It’s gonna be a new challenge for me, trying to gel that all together. But I feel like with Kayla, it’s just gonna be low stress.”
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Drews Chooses the Champ
One of the biggest questions swirling around the drafting room was whether Dani Drews would choose to play opposite or outside hitter for Week Four, and how that would affect her draft choices. Drews, who’s primarily an outside hitter, has spent the last two weeks showing off her versatility and flip-flopping between pins to help her teams maximize firepower at the net.
Opposing captains weren’t left guessing for long, as she chose the returning champion, opposite Brittany Abercrombie, with her very first pick, establishing herself as team Blue’s primary outside hitter, and scrambling some of the other team’s draft plans.
She chose Natália Zilio Pereira as her second outside.
Abercrombie has been a difference-maker for every squad she’s played for, and hasn’t scored less than double figures since her first match of the season. She’s currently averaging 4.44 kills per set, ranked third in the league behind Thompson and Cooper, and will be a valuable contributor for Drews, who’s captaining her first team of the season.
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Thompson Switches Setters
Until now, Jordan Thompson has played with a different setter every week. She chose Madi Bugg with her third pick of the Week Two draft, and Chompoo Guedpard with her third pick of the Week Three Draft, and mixed in alternates frequently in those weeks.
But for her final week of competition, she jumped at the chance to choose Natalia Valentin-Anderson–the setter she was drafted to play with in Week One.
Thompson chose Valentin-Anderson with her second pick, marking only the second time this season that a setter was selected as early as the second round. Micha Hancock was drafted in the second round of the Week Two draft by Claire Hoffman.
Valentin-Anderson has been out of Thompson’s reach for the last two weeks, as she’s been captaining her own squads, but now she’ll be partnered back up with the setter who helped her tally two 20-kill performances in Week One, when she flew to the top of the leaderboard.
The pairing could potentially make Thompson even more dangerous in the competition’s closing stretch.
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Cooper’s Coupled with Chaussee
One of the greatest marvels surrounding Cooper’s success is that she typically only plays three rotations on the court. She doesn’t receive as many of the stat points that come from service aces, digs, or positive receptions as some of the other top outside hitters in the league.
Still, she’s been able to hold her second-place position handily, while drafting a pin-heavy team, and relying on Claire Chaussee to cover her in the back row.
For her draft strategy this week, she did the same, going with point scoring pins in Hoffman and Temi Thomas-Ailara, and then securing Chaussee.
“I knew that going into this, I wanted to do something similar. So I’d want another good six-rotation player, Hoffman, and I knew I wanted a point scorer up there at the net with me, so, Temi,” Cooper explained. “With Chaussee coming in back row, for me, she’s been doing it the past three weeks, and so she’s just my back row girl. I’m just glad that those pieces fell into place, because I knew that Joe [Trinsey] knew that I wanted to take her.”
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Week Four begins Thursday, October 30, when Team Cooper takes on Team Drews, and Team Thompson goes head-to-head with Team Hentz. Matches take place at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin. Tickets are available here.
Siera Jones is the digital media reporter at Athletes Unlimited. You can follow her on Instagram and X @sieraajones.
