There was a stretch Sunday morning when New York Nitro looked like a team about to lose its own party. By late afternoon, they’d turned it into the best weekend they’ve had all season.
Palm Beach Passion left Central Park unbeaten, 4-0, the only team to sweep the stop. Austin Aces got one win. San Diego Smash got none. But Nitro’s 3-1 finish, on their own sand, made the day feel like it belonged to somebody.
Saturday didn’t happen. Thunderstorms rolled through, then wind, then flood warnings, and AVP scrapped the entire day and jammed both sessions into Sunday. So instead of a two-day rollout, everybody showed up to a compressed, eight-match sprint that started at 8 a.m. and didn’t let up until late afternoon. For the home team, that reset turned out to matter more than anyone expected.
Nitro’s women were up first, and for one set, it looked like a statement was coming. Toni Rodriguez and Molly Shaw took the opener 15-13 and had the crowd believing. Then Taryn Brasher and Kristen Nuss did what good teams do: they adjusted. A different serve, a tighter block, and suddenly New York couldn’t buy a point. Austin took the next two sets, 15-8 and 15-12, and Nuss – who’s made a career out of reading hitters and keeping her touches clean since her LSU days – closed it out without much drama. It was the only match Austin would win all day, but it landed right on New York’s home floor. (Troi Santos)
An hour later, it was the men’s turn to answer for the morning. Chaim Schalk and James Shaw dropped the first set 10-15 to Austin’s Troy Field and Ryan Wilcox, and for a few minutes it looked like a repeat performance was brewing. It wasn’t. Schalk – a Rio Olympian for Canada – and Shaw started serving into different zones, tightened up at the net, and simply talked more between points. Small stuff. It worked. They won the next two sets 15-11, 15-11, and the whole sequence had the feel of two guys diagnosing a problem mid-match and fixing it before it cost them.
Nobody had a rougher day than San Diego. Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson opened against Megan Rice and Geena Urango and never let them breathe, closing it out 15-4, 15-12. Trevor Crabb and Phil Dalhausser did the same to Chase Budinger and Miles Evans, 15-11, 15-12, with Dalhausser’s block forcing San Diego into lanes they couldn’t hit.
By the afternoon, Palm Beach was just running the table. Humana-Paredes and Wilkerson beat Brasher and Nuss again, 15-13, 15-11. Crabb and Dalhausser beat Field and Wilcox, 15-9, 15-12. Four matches, four wins, with little drama in any of them.
New York finished the way you hope a home date finishes. Rodriguez and Shaw beat Rice and Urango 15-10, 15-8 in the afternoon, clean and unhurried. Schalk and Shaw followed with a tighter match against Budinger and Evans – 15-13 in the first, then 15-9 once their serve and block started stacking points. By the end, Nitro looked like a team that had settled into the day rather than survived it, closing out Central Park 3-1, second only to Palm Beach’s perfect run.
Austin’s win over the Nitro women is worth remembering – it’s proof that group can play at a high level when their first touch is on. The question now is whether they can maintain that level for four matches instead of three. San Diego, for their part, never found anything that changed the shape of their day.
Underneath all of it is a league still figuring out what it wants to be. AVP’s tour goes back to the early 1980s – open draws, long beach weekends, a handful of American names who carried the sport through several Olympic cycles. The League format is the new layer: city teams, men’s and women’s pairs sharing a banner, a schedule that bounces between real beaches and pop-up builds like the one dropped into a former ice rink in the middle of Manhattan.
That’s what Central Park is – sand where skaters usually are, bleachers packed with people who came specifically for this and people who wandered over from the park and stayed. Saturday got washed out and Sunday turned into a marathon. Somehow, that only made New York Nitro’s day feel bigger: an early loss, a same-day answer, and a 3-1 finish in front of the only crowd on the schedule that was theirs.
Palm Beach Passion def. San Diego Smash – 15-4, 15-12
Austin Aces def. New York Nitro – 15-13, 8-15, 12-15 (Austin won 2-1)
Palm Beach Passion def. Austin Aces – 15-13, 15-11
New York Nitro def. San Diego Smash – 15-10, 15-8
Men
Austin Aces vs. New York Nitro – 15-10, 11-15, 11-15 (New York won 2-1)
Palm Beach Passion def. San Diego Smash – 15-11, 15-12
Palm Beach Passion def. Austin Aces – 15-9, 15-12
New York Nitro def. San Diego Smash – 15-13, 15-9
Team Records (Central Park Stop)
Palm Beach Passion: 4-0
New York Nitro: 3-1
Austin Aces: 1-3
San Diego Smash: 0-4
Palm Beach left Central Park as the only untouchable team, with Humana-Paredes, Wilkerson, Crabb, and Dalhausser making it look almost routine. New York Nitro had the messier, more interesting day – an early loss followed by three straight wins built on Shaw’s blocking, Schalk’s in-match adjustments, and Rodriguez refusing to let balls hit the sand. Austin got their one win where it counted least for anyone but them, and San Diego is still chasing its first win at this stop. Squeezing two days into one, plus adding a home crowd that showed up anyway, resulted in one of the stranger, more satisfying weekends on the 2026 AVP League calendar.