AVCA Individual Awards (Updated)

The All-American teams were announced on Tuesday with three additional awards to be announced tomorrow prior to the Championship. When I learn of them, I will update this page with that information and replace my unknown woman on the cover. The 2023 Awards Page has already been updated.

Update: The other individual awards won’t be announced until either Thursday or Friday from what I hear.

I originally started this paragraph off with a snide comment about the Players of the Week but I don’t want to distract from the amazing accomplishment of these student-athletes. There are 14 on each of the first three teams with the Honorable Mention list consisting of everyone who made All-Region 1st Team. The article mentions that Juniata and Northwestern had the most All-Americans but that NYU and CMS had the most players on the first three teams with 3 each. The 2023 Freshman of the year was Grace Nelson (NYU).

From Region X, we had Jenna Holmes (CMS), Georgia McGovern (CMS) and Mya Ray (La Verne) make the first team. This was Holmes 2nd time making first team as she was the Player of the Year in 2022. McGovern was 2nd Team last year while Ray didn’t make one of the first three teams as a freshman. These were the three players that I thought would be our All-Region Player of the Year (it ended up going to McGovern).

On the second team from our region were Maddie Fate (Trinity) and Mackenzie Logan (Trinity). Audrey Sawyer (CMS) was the only student-athlete from our region to make the 3rd team.

As for Player of the Year, it’s going to come from one of those 14 players on the first team. I’d love to handicap it but it’s just too difficult. I’ve seen a number of these players a few times each but rest assured they are all great at what they do. I would assume the Region X candidate will be McGovern as she took home the All-Region honor. Joining her on a short list would be Haley Holz (NYU), Olivia Foley (Juniata), Deborah Hong (Emory), Addie VanderWeide (Hope), Riley Kindt (UW-Oshkosh) and Abby Glanzer (Northwestern). That’s 7 possible for the award and, frankly, I can’t do all of the work so I’ll let the AVCA narrow that down by selecting a Bridgewater player (Dang! I tried so hard!).

Coach of the Year probably comes down to either Heather Pavlik (Juniata) or Jon Ellmann (UW-Oshkosh), but the list of possible winners is really good and how do you not go with Becky Schmidt (Hope) or Julie Jenkins (Trinity) or Andrew Brown (NYU) or…well, you get the point.

Update – Coach of the Year goes to Jon Ellmann. Assistant Coach of the Year went to Casey Dale of Juniata College. Congratulations to both!

Last Update!!! Player of the Year was announced and it was a tie between Olivia Foley (Juniata) and Addie VanderWeide (Hope). There seemed to be a delay in announcing the winner this year and this was probably the reason why. There are 10 members on the committee so it would have been a 5 to 5 vote. I wrote in my musings post that I thought it was between these two players and Georgia McGovern. It would be cool if they released a vote total like they do in professional sports. Love transparency. What’s really cool is that these two players will face off in the Championship on Saturday. Congratulations to both!