The solipsism of this debate some times shocks me.

Any way you look at the way the JO's are structured right now, the process is screwed up. The two tiered tournament are at cross purposes, the open division is uber-selective, allowing only those teams that play an all open qualifier season to be eligible. The bids are few and the at-large teams must play in the open division in order to be considered. The rules for selecting an open at-large team is slanted toward those who play lots of qualifiers and does well in those open qualifiers.

In the meanwhile, the club division consists of regional winners and runner ups and those select few team who qualify in the club division as winners and runnerup. The rest are teams come from trickle down bids.

As it stands now, the open tournament is severely numbers limited, while the club tournament is also numbers limited but by no means as severely as the open division. The USAV proposal is to open up the club division even more, creating a total of six divisions at JO's but the open division is still very limited. Why? Why create a gulf between the open and club divisions? If indeed we are growing as a sport, should it not be true that the number of those elite teams capable of playing in the open level should be growing too? If the desire is encourage teams to participate in JO's why limit the open teams? If the desire it to enforce quality control over the tournament, why open up six distinct divisions of teams?

In the Pleistocene era of volleyball, the only teams that traveled are the better teams looking for competition. The year end competitions were Volleyball Festival at Davis and AAU's and the intent wasn't to crown the overall champion of an age group, the intent was to have a big volleyball party at the end of the year. By and large I would say JO's are a great idea, have a huge party and celebrate volleyball while also crowning a national champion, quite unlike the BCS. But the road to the year end tournament is what is messed up.

I think having a sequence of increasingly difficult gates for those teams who aspire to play in the year end national tournament makes much more sense. You need to win in order to move on to the next level, let competition dictate who moves on and who does not. And that in essence and devoid of all the other arguments is what JVDA proposes.

The USAV right now won't entertain any changes in their formula. There are vested interests involved for a lot of constituencies and they aren't going to give up their golden eggs. Change i hard and some times it takes a heavy hand to force the change. Solipsism does not help, in fact things get worse with entrenched dogma unencumbered by critical thinking..

Yes VolleyballFan13, those are the constituencies I am talking about.

The golden egg is the money that they get from juniors, and USAV does not believe that they are killing the goose that is laying the golden egg.

The solipsism refers to the fact that people have relatively rigid attitudes about JVDA and USAV: either you are for us or against us. I am more on the side of JVDA because I personally think that the way the USAV selects teams for JO's is geared toward making the most money for themselves and those clubs that have their own private qualifiers without bering answerable to the rest of junior volleyball community. I am also not naive enough to think that the JVDA is doing this out of the good ness of their hearts, it is a capitalist society afterall, but I think what they propose has merit and the USAV, in their hubris, chose to ignore something reasonable, and in their pique of temper is choosing to pay lip service to change and will end up doing what they have always done, probably at junior volleyball's detriment..