This weekend over 500 teams from all around the country travel to Kansas City for the first big national tournament of the club season. With a highly-coveted invitation, Triple Crown truly lives up to its slogan ‘Where the Elite Come to Compete’. This will be my third time going to Triple Crown, and it is one of my favorite tournaments of the year. For many athletes, Triple Crown is the first time college coaches get to watch them play in the club season, and it is a significant step in the recruiting process. With that being said, where are players from the top teams at Triple Crown committing to, and where did they come from?
Triple Crown brings in the top teams from around the country, everyone knows that. And the results reflect that high level volleyball is being played all across the country. For example, take a look at the geographic distribution from the top 12 teams in 18s from Triple Crown last year.
As you can see, the teams are from all across the country placed well. Drive Nation took first place last year, coming from North Texas. Coast took second place, coming from Southern California. Local talent was well represented, with the hometown Mavs KC team taking 5th place and nearby Premier Nebraska making the top twelve also. Teams from the Pacific Northwest (NPJ) and Mountain West (Club V), Florida (OTVA) and elsewhere in the Midwest (Mintonette, Kiva, Munciana, Legacy) also did exceptionally well. Triple Crown really is the only place for college coaches to see the top high school volleyball talent from all across the country except for Nationals (held in late June and early July each year).
Over 100 athletes went off to play collegiate volleyball this year just from these twelve teams. The map below has a dot for every college that athletes from these teams played for as freshmen this past fall. These two maps show vividly that the elite players at Triple Crown both come from clubs all over the country and go on to play for the top colleges all around the country.
What was most interesting to me, however, was looking at where the players from these top clubs went to college. These maps show where the players from the top 12 clubs at Triple Crown in 18s last year went to college. I find it fascinating to see which clubs tended to send people further versus those whose players would go to a more regional college. The players from Coast Volleyball Club in California, for example, tended to go more coast-to-coast (get it?!), whereas players from Legacy Volleyball Club, a club based in Michigan, did not send any players west of the Mississippi River. Players from last year’s Club V 18s went to a lot of different schools (there aren’t that many universities in Utah), but none went to the upper midwest or northeast.
With Triple Crown right around the corner, it will be interesting to follow how the top teams in the country are doing! I am so excited to go compete this weekend, surrounded by some of the best athletes in the nation!
Data Notes:
- I’ve been collecting and analyzing more data on the geography of college volleyball recruiting and will post more in the coming days. Since I’ve scraped 11 years of roster data from all D1 and D3 college volleyball team websites, I have the hometowns and high schools of most college volleyball athletes who played recently.
- I find the geography of college recruiting interesting in at least two different ways: First, certain states, cities and high schools have (disproportionately) generated more college volleyball athletes over the past decade than those you might automatically expect. And second, some college volleyball teams draw their athletes from a much broader area, with more people come from further away, while others draw most of their athletes from close to home. Take a look at Wisconsin, for example. While a few of the athletes have been from parts of the US outside of the Midwest, the team really has been able to recruit top talent from nearby (along with bringing in some great international talent, who are not shown on the map below).
Photo Credit: Arizona State University Athletics