Two months ago, Megan Kraft was a left-side blocker, wearing a USC Trojans tank-top, competing against NCAA talent on an NCAA stage.
On Saturday afternoon in Vienna, Austria, Kraft was, as she has been since leaving USC as a four-time NCAA champion, a right-side defender, wearing a USA Volleyball tank top, competing against Elite16 talent on the world’s biggest stage.
She looks the same in red, white and blue as she did in the garnet: Dominant.
Following a convincing 21-16, 22-20 sweep over Brazilians Agatha and Rebecca in the bronze-medal match of the Vienna Elite16, Kraft and another former Trojan, Terese Cannon, will return home from Europe with two medals in hand. Just eight days earlier this new pair went all the way to the Gstaad Elite16 final before losing to fellow Americans Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss.
“Megan’s amazing. She has completely switched positions,” said Cannon, who collected her eighth and ninth medals in the last two weeks in Gstaad and Vienna. “The fact that we’re able to have such success against incredible teams — it’s just been so fun. I’m excited to see where we go.”
For a moment, they almost — almost — went into a third set against Agatha and Rebecca. With Cannon and Kraft holding three match points up 20-17, Brazil erased it with a side out and consecutive earned points, putting the Americans under duress for the first time of the match. This is where a typical rookie fresh out of college might get pinched, the stress of a three-point edge building to a nervy crescendo.
Which is precisely where Kraft reminded everyone that she is no typical rookie.
A missed serve from Agatha gave the USA an additional match point, where Kraft, just two months into defending full-time, dug a bomb into the angle from Agatha and buried the ensuing swing down the seam for the match-clinching kill.
“We wanted to slow it down,” Kraft said. “They’re obviously a really good team, had a lot of momentum, we wanted to slow to down, trust our pass, and we just stayed steady, trusting each other, trusting the game plan.”
The game plan was, it became evident early on, to avoid Rebecca, both in serve receive and in defense. During their semifinal in Gstaad — a 21-18, 15-21, 15-13 win for Kraft and Cannon that put them in their first Elite16 final as a team — Rebecca sided out at 64 percent and killed 50 percent of her transition opportunities. They wanted nothing to do with her in Vienna, serving Agatha nearly exclusively, hunting the high hands of Agatha at the net as opposed to shooting and bringing Rebecca’s defense and transition attacking in play. For the second straight week, it worked, and Cannon and Kraft have, for the first time in their careers, consecutive medals because of it.
“Easy” is how Emily Stockman once described playing with Kraft during their two years as partners. Sure enough, Kraft made it look easy all tournament, siding out at 75 percent, 14 percent higher than what they limited their opponents to in Vienna. But easy is also a word that quickly comes to mind when it comes to playing, and succeeding, with Terese Cannon.
In the past three seasons, Cannon has now medaled with five different players on the Beach Pro Tour. Molly Shaw, Delaney Mewhirter, Sara Hughes, Sarah Sponcil, and now Kraft have all benefitted from her block and intangible ability to make every one of her partners better. Kraft, for the foreseeable future, is the one who will get to benefit from the 6-foot-3 blocker who is making a case for the world’s most improved player.
Yet Cannon has stiff competition in that category. Germany’s Svenja Muller won her first Elite16 gold medal in more than two years with Cinja Tillmann, sweeping Switzerland’s Anouk Verge-Depre and Joana Mader, 21-14, 21-18. Six straight matches did Germany win en route to their first podium since the Beach Pro Tour Finals last December, dropping only a single set in the process.
The silver marks Switzerland’s first medal above the Challenge level since Verge-Depre and Mader won bronze at the Tokyo Olympic s in 2021.
For the second straight Elite16, there will be no podium for the American men. Andy Benesh and Miles Partain, the lone USA men in the main draw, fell in the quarterfinals to Norway’s Anders Mol and Christian Sorum, who are returning to peak form after a foot injury kept Mol out for three months.
While the fifth brings home no hardware for Benesh and Partain, who won a bronze a month ago at the Ostrava Elite16, it was the manner in which they played that should give American fans hope. The apathetic pair that was summarily dismissed in their final three matches in Gstaad was replaced by one with a rediscovered enthusiasm in Vienna, with three sweeps over Germany, Australia, and Austria. Their two losses came to the two seed (Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler) and the three in Mol and Sorum.
It is the final time Benesh and Partain will be in action until the Paris Olypic Games, where they are in a pool that includes Cuba’s Jorge Alayo and Noslen Diaz, Brazil’s George Wanderley and Andre Loyola, and Morocco’s Mohamed Abicha and Zouheir Elgraoui.
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