Nearly six thousand fans packed the Ningbo Beilun Sports and Arts Center on Sunday night for a final that lived up to every bit of its billing — a rematch of the 2023 title match, and just as tight. Poland beat the United States 3-2 (25-21, 23-25, 25-27, 25-23, 15-10) to win its third VNL crown in four years, and once again, the U.S. walked away with silver. Fourth VNL final for the Americans. Fourth silver. At some point that stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern a coaching staff has to reckon with.
The match opened evenly — 4-2, then 6-4 America’s way — before Poland found its footing midway through set one and closed it out 25-21. The U.S. answered immediately, breaking away 17-13 in set two before Poland clawed back to 21-20, only for Jake Hanes to string together three big serves and drag the set back for the Americans, 23-25. Set three was the wildest of the night: the U.S. pushed it to extras and finally closed it 27-25 on a pair of plays at the net from middle Taylor Averill, putting them one set from the first VNL gold in program history.
That’s when things got interesting from a coaching standpoint. Poland’s opposite, Bartłomiej Bołądź, was struggling, and Nikola Grbić made an unusual call: he moved Wilfredo Leon — normally an outside hitter — over to opposite for the rest of the match. It’s not a swap you see very often at this level, mid-final, with a title on the line. It worked. The U.S. still led 20-19 in set four, five points from history, but Poland answered with better composure down the stretch and a nasty serving stretch from Tomasz Fornal that dragged the set to 25-23 and forced a fifth. In the tie-break, Poland broke a 5-5 tie behind a monster serving run from setter Marcin Komenda, built a 13-7 cushion off a string of American attacking errors, and closed it out 15-10 on a long swing from Hanes.
Look at the box score without context and you’d think the U.S. won. They out-hit Poland 65 kills to 59. But Poland finished with fewer unforced errors — 29 to the Americans’ 34 — plus more blocks (12-8) and more aces (8-4), and that’s the whole match in three numbers. Poland’s team attacking efficiency for the final was 49%, with 45% positive reception — the kind of clean, efficient number that quietly wins five-setters while the box score gets all the attention for kill totals.
Individually, sub-in outside Kamil Semeniuk led all scorers with 17 points on a scorching 57% hitting efficiency. Leon added 15 points with two blocks and two aces, doing it at a modest 36% attacking clip — proof that his value in that final was as much about composure and shot selection under pressure as raw numbers. Fornal, who capped the tournament as MVP, matched Leon’s 15 points at 53% efficiency, with five personal aces — more service winners by himself than the entire U.S. roster combined. Middle Bartłomiej Lemański put up four solo stuffs on his way to 11 points, and two more Poles reached double figures: Szymon Jakubiszak with 11, Bołądź with 10 before his substitution. Six players in double digits, in a final. That’s not a lineup with a soft spot to attack.
On the other side, Hanes led the U.S. with 21 points on 18 kills and three aces, and Matthew Anderson added 20 on 18 kills. But after those two, the scoring drops off fast — middle Merrick McHenry turned in his best match of the tournament with 11 kills on just one error across 17 swings, adding three blocks for 14 points, and outside Ethan Champlin chipped in 9 points on 8 kills. It’s a good night individually. It’s not the kind of six-deep balance that wins a rubber match against a team that can throw six double-digit scorers at you and still bring more off the bench.
How Italy and Japan Never Got This Far
The final only tells half the story. To understand why the U.S. looked so dangerous walking in — and why Poland’s response mattered so much — you have to go back to the quarterfinal, where the Americans dismantled the reigning world champions.
The U.S. beat Italy 3-0 (25-22, 25-21, 25-21), and it was a rout built almost entirely on serving pressure, avenging a defeat to the Azzurri earlier in the cycle. Fefè De Giorgi’s team had arrived in Ningbo with real optimism — captain Simone Giannelli and opposite Yuri Romanò were both back to full health after missing stretches of the preliminary phase — but the cracks that showed up in surprise pool-stage losses to Ukraine and Bulgaria never got patched. Against the U.S., they were fully exposed. American servers put together 14 aces across three sets, an absurd number for a knockout match, and Jake Hanes alone was responsible for six of them. His jump serve, hit at real velocity into Italy’s weaker passing lanes, kept Giannelli locked into predictable high sets to the outside — precisely the kind of set a set block reads easily. Take away a setter’s options with your serve, and you’ve usually already won the match; Italy never solved that problem, and De Giorgi’s team went home in the quarterfinal.
The other semifinalist storyline belongs to Japan, and it’s a tougher one, because Japan spent the entire tournament looking like the best team in the building. They ran the preliminary phase a perfect 12-0, stretched that to 13 straight with a quarterfinal win, and did it with a system — smothering back-row defense, fast combination sets that routinely beat taller blockers to the spot — that looked like it had cracked the code on modern volleyball. Then they ran into the U.S. in the semifinal and lost a five-set battle, 15-13 in the breaker, after leading for long stretches. It was close. The bronze medal match against Slovenia was not: Japan lost 3-1, and by the fourth set they looked like a team running on fumes, passing percentages down, tempo slower, the margins that had carried them all tournament finally gone. A system built on speed and precision asks a lot of a roster over a long event, and eventually the bill comes due.
Slovenia was the team standing on the other side of that collapse, and their side of the story is the better one. Beating Japan 3-1 gave them their first VNL medal in history, and it wasn’t a fluke built on one hot night against a tired opponent — Slovenia had already needed three sets to get past Türkiye in the quarterfinal in an epic that went 25-21, 35-33, 39-37, and had taken Poland to three sets in the semifinal before finally losing. Against Japan, they absorbed the early defensive scrambling without panicking and slowly imposed their own tempo through a physical block-defense system and a patient, varied attack that eventually broke Japan’s rhythm for good. With a talent pool that’s a fraction of the size of Poland’s or the USA’s, Slovenia won a medal on organization, composure, and a roster that trusts each other in the biggest moments — which, coincidentally, is exactly what separated Poland from the Americans a few hours later.
The Rules Behind the Results
Some of what happened in Ningbo has less to do with talent and more to do with a rulebook that changed underneath everyone’s feet this season. FIVB bumped substitutions per set from six to eight, and that single change rewarded roster depth more than almost anything else on the court. Coaches could run tactical subs — serving specialists, a defensive reinforcement to stabilize a shaky passing rotation, a blocking sub late in a set — as a repeatable weapon instead of a once-a-match emergency move. Poland is built exactly for that rule: Grbić rotated constantly and still had enough left in the tank to move Leon to a new position mid-final without losing a beat. Teams with a steep drop from starters to bench, Italy being the clearest example, were at a structural disadvantage before the first whistle blew.
There was also a new video-review process, nicknamed “Bookmark,” that let coaches and captains flag a potential call mentally without stopping play, with the review only happening once the rally ended. The goal was to protect the flow of the match, and for the most part it did — though plenty of staffs spent the early rounds still figuring out the timing of when to use it.
The one change that generated real friction was a much stricter interpretation of ball-handling, specifically on tips and pushed sets at the net. Contact that would have been waved off as clean a year earlier got whistled as a carry in Ningbo, and the line between legal and illegal wasn’t always obvious in real time. France and Italy were the most vocal about it — De Giorgi didn’t hide his frustration with how often his team’s finesse plays at the net got interrupted by the whistle.
None of that takes anything away from two individual performances worth flagging for anyone building a scouting file for the next couple of years. Bulgaria’s Aleksandar Nikolov put together one of the most absurd individual stat lines the VNL has ever produced in the preliminary phase — 278 total points, 247 of them kills, a regular-season record — essentially carrying an entire offense by himself, even though the rest of the roster wasn’t deep enough to get Bulgaria to Ningbo. And Belgium’s Ferre Reggers, third in the preliminary scoring race, is being deployed as a hitting outside despite coming up as an opposite — an unconventional call that says a lot about where roster construction is headed, with coaches increasingly building around what a player can do rather than the label on his position.
Put it all together and the pattern from Ningbo isn’t subtle. Poland won with fewer kills than their opponent, and won anyway, because they cut down on unforced errors, controlled the net, and had six credible scoring options instead of two. Italy had the servers to blow a match open and no answer once the Americans turned the serving pressure back on them. Japan had a system fast enough to go 13-0 and not quite deep enough to survive a long tournament on top of it. Slovenia had a fraction of the talent pool of the giants and still made a medal stand with nothing but composure and cohesion. However you want to say it, this is where the sport is right now: the team with the deepest bench and the shortest error column is the one lifting the trophy.
