new york | BILLY KETCH ALLEN

NYC AVP (Experiments In Time Travel)

The New York City Open was the first tournament in the new AVP Gold Series and had one of the deepest fields. The 35th seed in the qualifier was a team of two Olympians, Canadian Chaim Schalk and Brazilian legend Ricardo Santos. They would go on to qualify and upset the number 1 seeded team of Dalhausser/Lucena. Over on our end, Stafford and I lost our first match of the tournament to Ratledge/Zaun, 22-20, 18-21, 15-12. I didn’t play well, struggling to side-out from the windy side. I felt uncomfortable and wasn’t able to put much heat into my attacks. We were just coming off some solid play the week before in Moscow where we battled through multiple must-win games. New York felt like it was going to be a letdown tournament. This could be my worst finish in a couple years; the previous year I didn’t finish below 5th place in an AVP. From the way I felt after the match, it looked like that streak was over.

Sitting in our player box, defeated, my mind ran through a possible future…

My AVP Playlist

In honor of the AVP’s New York City Open, here is a picture of me jump serving the Brooklyn Bridge along with my official AVP Spotify playlist. I’m not huge into pre-game pump-up music—I won’t be the player stretching with my headphones on, ignoring my partner—but I am really into music. I’m also pretty one dimensional with my tastes (7-12th grade I only listened to The Beatles, since then it has been mostly Bob Dylan) so if they’d asked for much more than 20 songs without repeating an artist I might have been in trouble. What follows are not my favorite songs but semi-upbeat songs by a lot of my favorite artists. (Simon and Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell didn’t make the cut—it was enough of a stretch to sneak in Leonard Cohen.)

Tracklist