SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

Mike Placek was just looking for the simple stuff. He didn’t need to know tendencies or flaws, what his opponent’s strongest and weakest shots were. He didn’t need to know serving habits or whether they preferred a backhand or a forehand. All he really wanted to know, as the top-ranked youth tennis player in Southern California, was whether he was playing a 5-foot-9 guy from Argentina or a 6-foot-6 monster from Australia. “When I went to play, there were zero scouting reports, and a lot of the guys were foreign, so the only way we’d have any idea of who we’d be playing in our next match was this college tennis site,” Placek said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “It was super basic but it showed you who played for what school. It kept a super good data base, had a ranking based on an algorithm, and it was basically all I needed and all the tennis players lived on it.” Placek’s talent was in tennis, but not his passion. He’d go on to have a solid career at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but he didn’t have any designs on going pro afterwards. “I didn’t love it, but I was good at it,” he said. “Even watching the Australian Open right now, it makes me nervous.” Afterwards, then, he turned to where his heart resided: beach volleyball. He’d grown up around the courts in Del Mar, toted along by his mother. He idolized the guys there, such as Sean Scott, and when an AVP would stop in Southern California, there you could see Placek, sitting behind the court, watching 12 hours a day. “That’s how I learned how to play,” he said. “It was a life I wanted.” In a decade as a professional, Placek would make an AVP semifinal, in 2008 with Russ Marchewka, and in 2014 and ’15 he’d become one of the top players on the NVL, winning a third of the events he entered. But when his playing career came to a close, and his coaching career at WAVE Volleyball in Del Mar began to take off, he found himself staring down the same exact problem he once had as a tennis player. As he attempted to follow WAVE alum at the college level, he found nothing. “I’d have to go on the [school] website, go through a bunch of different things, go onto the next kid,” Placek said. “I was like ‘How is there nothing more simple than this?’ So I started talking to some indoor college coaches, asking them if there was really nothing more going on with the beach game and they said no, so I said ‘Ok.’” Placek recalled the tennis website he and every other youth tennis player lived off as a kid, and he created exactly that. He hired a programmer and up went collegebeachvb.com, which has become the one-stop shop for all things college beach volleyball. It’s simple and comprehensive. There, you can find every individual’s record: who they played and when, the results, their rank. Everything you’d need to know, from Division I to CCAAA, is but a few simple clicks. Three years in, it’s the most reliable site for good, objective information, incredibly beneficial for coaches, fans, and players alike. “It’s pretty cool and going back to where I started it, there’s all these college kids coming up, and if you’re a pro and don’t know who this kid is, maybe go on the website,” Placek said. “I’m hoping it’ll translate so maybe the juniors will look at the universities and see if they’re junior stacked or freshmen stacked. It’s for the college game but I’m hoping the juniors and parents of juniors can see what programs are out there and how many matches they play. I’m hoping it will be more of a resource for the youth.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It’s a late Tuesday morning, and Falyn Fonoimoana has brought the goods again. She’s even brought some freshly baked banana bread, for her coaches, Arthur Carvahlo and Pompilio Mercadante, who smiles and says that happiness is bread and sugar. Happiness is a great many things for the 27-year-old Fonoimoana. It’s getting a big kill and celebrating it loudly, with a beat of the chest. It’s putting powdered-sugar boot prints for her 7-year-old son, Tavoi, on Christmas morning, showing physical evidence that Santa came. It’s ensuring that Nicolette Martin, all blonde hair and blue eyes, makes it through a throng of fans in Aguascalientes, Mexico. It’s talking a little trash, discovering the sassy side of her new partner, Corinne Quiggle. Mostly, though, happiness for Fonoimoana comes from being, simply, Mama Falyn. “Everyone calls me mama for a reason,” Fonoimoana said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I teach recovery, I bring magnesium, they used to make fun of me because I bring a huge suitcase where it’s all the remedies for A, B, C, D that could happen while you’re traveling. I try to be, ‘Hey, I have all this stuff here, if you need it.’ It all comes from things that I’ve experienced and it comes out of love. I love all of my partners that I’ve experienced. I’m invested.” Most on the beach scene have only seen this side of Fonoimoana, the loving, caring, doting partner who has a track record of bringing out the best in everyone she plays with. She is quick to admit this wasn’t always the case. The niece of both an Olympic butterfly swimmer and an Olympic gold medalist on the beach, Fonoimoana was, not surprisingly, one of the best on every team she ever played. She won a state and national championship at Mira Costa as a freshman, burying balls alongside Alix Klineman, and over the next four years she established herself as the No. 1 ranked high school player in the country. As a freshman at USC, she started in 31 of 34 matches, finishing second on the team in kills. This 19-year-old Fonoimoana, however, was not the one who brings magnesium and electrolytes and gluten-free banana bread to practice. This Falyn Fonoimoana was, by her own admission, “a crappy teammate when I was young.” And then, unexpectedly, wonderfully, life happened. Fonoimoana became pregnant with the boy that would change her life in all of the best ways motherhood can change an athlete of prodigious talent and limitless future and, somehow, almost unbelievably, none of the worst. It wasn’t her body that underwent the most lasting of changes – she was working out within five days of giving birth – but her mindset. “I think that was a huge part of not just growing up but finding who I am as a person and who I wanted to be,” she said. “Being young and volleyball just being everything for me, I didn’t know what life outside volleyball was. It helped me learn what kind of parent, what kind of woman I wanted to be, what kind of spouse, like these are all things that came to fruition once it happened because I have to show him who he wants to be through my actions, and I wanted it to always be positive and I wanted him to see those organic. “I’m still young, I’m only 27, but I’m really happy with where I am. I love my life, I get to help people, and I get to learn and be open minded about people. Thank God he gave me my son because mentally, he made me ten times stronger, to make me more empathetic, to make me more personable, to be able to slow down and not just think ‘go, go, go’ and really appreciate daily life. I owe my son the world because he makes me be better.” She extended her indoor career another five years, competing in Puerto Rico, Poland, and on the 2015 U.S. Pan American Games team that won gold, until she had to return home full-time to retain custody of Tavoi. The career move was not an unwelcome one. Fonoimoana had always known that beach was the long game. Being a full-time mom in the United States simply expedited her path. As it has gone throughout her athletic life, it didn’t take long for Fonoimoana to adjust. She qualified in six of seven AVPs in 2018 with Alexa Strange and Pri Piantadosi-Lima, won a NORCECA in Punta Cana with Molly Turner, with whom she also took third in p1440 Huntington Beach. In the second tournament of 2019, she made her first Sunday, finishing third in Austin with Martin. She piled up five more NORCECA medals, the final two of which were gold, with Quiggle, putting her on the international route she has set her goals on this upcoming year. “I knew that I wanted to play FIVB, but I was new to the beach game, I needed to figure it out,” she said. “My first year it was ‘Ok, get your feet wet with the AVP. Figure that out. Figure out the travel, how to get it paid for. If you can get to FIVBs, great, if not, get to as many internationals as you can.’ This year I want to get into three- and four-stars. “I’ve watched my uncle [Eric Fonoimoana] and several other famil

Tri Bourne found a funny way to describe a learning moment he and Trevor Crabb had towards the end of the 2019 season, their first as partners and first as split-blockers. “Only at the end of the year did we figure out: ‘Oh, our timing is off. We’re not doing defense right,’” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. Not doing defense right? And still finishing 2019 as the second-ranked American team in the Olympic race? Still being ranked tenth in the world, finishing the season with a bronze medal at the Chetumal four-star? “It seems simple, but when you’re in the middle of the game, it’s really hard to implement a high level, sophisticated defense with all the right movements and everything,” Bourne said. “So in the middle of the year we were learning and trying to apply it but only some of it stuck. Basically, we think of last year as our foundation and now it’s time to grow on that.” Bourne and Crabb may be in the most interesting position as any team in the United States, male or female. They enter the season as one of the coveted two American teams who, if the Olympics were to take place tomorrow, would be competing in Tokyo. But the race is close enough that it doesn’t really matter, because the Olympics are not going to take place tomorrow, and at the end of the day, it will likely come down to the Rome Major in June. What Crabb and Bourne do have is this: An upside – and downside – that is entirely unknown. As Bourne mentioned, neither of them really knew what they were doing on defense last year, and they still finished fourth at the World Championships, taking both Russia’s Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Norway’s Anders Mol and Christian Sorum to three sets. Who knows what the potential upside could be? Then again, who knows how quickly they can begin to, in Bourne’s parlance, do defense right? Such a quandary is not a quandary at all for either Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb or Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena. Gibb, Dalhausser and Lucena have seven Olympics between them, and Taylor Crabb is on the short list of best defenders in the world. In other words: Defensively speaking, you know exactly what you’re going to get on their side of the net. With Bourne and Trevor Crabb? “There’s a lot of stuff to clean up,” Bourne said. “Continue to buy into the stuff that [coach] Jose [Loiola] is bringing to the table. We were spending so much time learning how to play this new style of volleyball that I don’t feel like I ever blocked the way I used to, not even close. So I’d like to get back to that for sure.” What Bourne is grateful for, at the moment, is the fact that he’s back in this situation at all: Six months of Olympic qualifying to go, sitting in the second American spot. It was only two years ago, sidelined with an autoimmune disease, that Bourne wasn’t sure if he’d be able to play beach volleyball again, let alone at a level that could qualify him for the Olympics. Now here he is, autoimmune disease under control, tenth-ranked team in the world – and he didn’t even “do defense right” the whole time. “If we play well and get better at volleyball, if we’re a better team, and we play better, and I become a better volleyball player, I’m good with the result,” Bourne said. “I’m gonna be pissed if we don’t make the Olympics. Don’t get me wrong. That is the goal, but what are you going to do? You got better. You improved. And these other teams did better? Ok, I’ll live with it. “Right after the last Olympic quad I was like ‘This is my time.’ It’s cool to be in this position and I’m super grateful and it’s going to be fun no matter what happens.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dain Blanton is smiling. For almost an hour and a half straight, sitting in a room talking about beach volleyball and a life that has revolved around it for almost three decades now, he smiles. At some point in the conversation, it just becomes almost impossible to be in anything but a great mood, because you’re around Dain Blanton, and Dain Blanton is, at 48 years old, living his best life, and he’s really, really happy about it. “I got a 22-month-old son, my first kid, and that’s keeping me busy,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I got the new head coaching job at USC and that’s about four months old, so that’s been really busy. But I was telling Tri before we began the show, when you’re doing something that you love and it’s fun, you’re fired up to get up and get into work. It’s been awesome. It’s been really great.” The more you talk to Blanton, the more you wonder if there has ever been anything that wasn’t great. A Laguna Beach kid, he grew up as a dual-sport athlete, good enough in basketball and volleyball that he garnered scholarships for both. He opted for Pepperdine volleyball, and in 1992, he led the Waves to a National Championship. Five years later, he became the first African American to win an AVP event, when he and Canyon Ceman won the Hermosa Beach Grand Slam. That in itself would be a fine career for anyone. A college education, an historic win, decent prize money. And yet Blanton was only getting started. The next year, in 1998, he and Eric Fonoimoana began a push for the 2000 Olympic Games, in a men’s field that was as wide open as any, competing against some of the biggest names in beach history, including two who top the all-time wins list in Karch Kiraly, who was partnered with Adam Johnson, and Sinjin Smith, who was attempting to qualify for a second straight Games with Carl Henkel. No matter. Blanton and Fonoimoana, against all odds and most anybody’s prediction, pulled it off. Then they saved their biggest magic trick for last when they stunned one Olympic opponent after the next, shocking Ricardo Santos and Ze Marco de Melo in the gold medal match. “I remember going down to the Olympics and people were like ‘Take a lot of pictures, have fun’ you know what I mean?” Blanton said. “And you’re like ‘I see what you’re saying.’ And we went down there and we really enjoyed it. And Eric and I said ‘Let’s really immerse ourselves, we’re going to take it all in.’ It was awesome. Sydney was prepared so far in advance. They were so fired up to have it. “Me and Eric always said ‘Let’s bring home some jewelry, let’s bring home a medal.’ Bronze, silver, gold, we didn’t care. You want to win gold, but if you can focus one point at a time, and one match at a time, and that’s what we were able to do. And it’s cliché, you hear it a lot, but to actually do it, ‘next point, next point,’ but if you watch, Eric stuffs a point and he turns around and tackles me, I’m almost in shock because I’m so locked in to ‘We got another point.’” By now in Blanton’s life story, which at the Sydney Olympics was just 28 years in its authoring, it would be impossible to doubt anything Blanton would set his mind to do. What had he tried and not accomplished? So when he began to see the writing on his metaphorical beach volleyball wall, and he was tired of the travel, and his body wasn’t quite responding like he was used to, and he set out to pursue a broadcasting career, Blanton began like he did everything else: At the bottom of the ladder. And he relished it. He reached out to an executive producer at Fox Sports West named Tom Feurer and requested not job or a shot or a gig, but just to shadow. It took an entire year for the gold medalist Olympian to get a call back – to shadow high school football. “I went and I shadowed and they said the next yea next year we need a high school football sideline reporter. It was a cool thing to do, and a lot of people say how did you get involved in broadcasting and it was interesting to take a step back. People think ‘Oh you’re an Olympic gold medalist, you’re all this’ and you go and broadcast high school football,” Blanton said. “You have to leave the ego on the side, you want to learn a new trait, you’re late to the game, and it was the greatest place because you could totally mess up.” Here it all begins to make sense, why everything Blanton touches turns to gold. Why he was able to win Hermosa Beach, one of the biggest events on the AVP schedule, as the seven seed. Why he and Fonoimoana were able to pull off what Blanton labels, and not incorrectly, as the biggest upset in Olympic beach volleyball history. Heck, just to qualify for Sydney – leaping Kiraly and Johnson for the final spot – in the last tournament of the qualification period, he had to beat Jose Loiola and Emanuel Rego and then, immediately after, Sinjin Smith and Carl Henkel. Once in, most didn’t give them a chance. “Once we got in, people were like, ‘You know, Karch sh

Sinjin Smith knows the world is different now. That guys just can’t play volleyball for four hours, jump train for one, take a ride down to South Mission Beach and then play for another four. Jobs. Kids. Families and responsibilities and such. But he is curious. Curious as to why the beach volleyball culture has changed so much from his days. Days when he and the boys would put a ball down on center court and have at it for an entire day. No need for drills or simulated plays. You just played. And you never stopped playing. “You’d want to get on the No. 1 court, and you’d play all day,” Smith said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Eight hours! Imagine all those guys that set up matches, if they all went to Sorrento or Manhattan Beach. All of them. Or Santa Barbara. There’d be a group, and you’d be bummed out if you were third in line to get on center court. You wanted to be on the first court. You’d compete all day long.” And the guys who did that won. They won more than anybody in the history of beach volleyball has ever won. Mike Dodd, Karch Kiraly, Smith, Tim Hovland and Randy Stoklos – all members of the Hall of Fame, all of whom are proponents of the play all day ethos of training – combined to win 513 domestic tournaments in their careers. It might have been more difficult to get any of them to take a break from playing volleyball than it was to get them to lose. “If I won the tournament, I’d take Monday off. If I didn’t win, I’m going hard on Monday, all the way through,” Smith said. “We were winning quite a bit, and I’d feel bad sometimes. If it was an easy win, if I didn’t feel like I was totally torched, I’d go out on Monday anyway.” What Smith found was that the more he played, and the more he played, in particular, with Stoklos, the easier winning became. Why change? “He was a big 6-5,” Smith said of Stoklos, with whom he played 198 events and won nearly half. “He jumped so well for someone his size, and he played so much volleyball growing up that he had an incredible sense for the game. And of course, he had incredible hands, probably the best hands on the beach. He could set any ball from anywhere. We complemented each other very well. He was great at the net at a time when blocking was becoming more important for the game, and he could dig, but he was better as a blocker, and that freed me up to do in the backcourt to do what I do. We played to each other’s strengths. “Communication is so important, right? But it got to a point where we didn’t even have to talk. I knew what he was going to do in every situation, and he knew what I was going to do. When you play long enough together with somebody, that’s the beauty of it. You’re not running into each other. You know where he’s going to be, and you know where to go. And if he gets in trouble, I know exactly what to tell him and if I get in trouble he knows exactly what to do. “It didn’t seem like we had to do anything special or different. It was just natural for us to do what we did.” What they did was win more than any other partnership in American beach volleyball. When this point comes up, Smith shrugs. He doesn’t quite understand all the hype about the weight room, unless it’s to rehab an injury or work on a specific movement. He’s a proponent that you play on the beach, and the beach is therefore where you should train. He and Kiraly, with whom he played 14 events and also won a National Championship at UCLA, would put on weight belts when they played at South Mission. When Smith wanted to get a workout in, he’d just jump – jump with no approach, jump with a full approach, slide sideways for three shuffles, slide the other way for three, jump on one foot, jump on the other, then do it all over again. “We’d do that every day,” he said. “We couldn’t get enough volleyball, indoor, outdoor, it didn’t matter. We just wanted to play.” Not drill or lift or do yoga. Just play. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On April 10, 1995, Carl Henkel was studying for his law school finals when one of the strangest, most unpredictable and, at that time he would have likely surmised, miraculous phone calls rang in around four in the morning. “Hey,” said the voice on the other line. “I need you to play this weekend in Spain. Can you make it?” Henkel nearly dropped the phone. Was that Sinjin Smith on the other side of the line? That Sinjin Smith? Asking him to play? “How long do I have to think about it?” he asked. “Well,” Smith recalled telling him on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “You’ve got about ten seconds.” Ten seconds? Here was Henkel, a 25-year-old who had cobbled together a good but not great professional volleyball career. He had played in more than 30 AVPs, finishing in the top 10 twice, and was playing most of his volleyball on the four-man tour. Whittier Law School was, without question, the wiser career move. So Henkel did what anybody else would do when Sinjin Smith asked you to make a run at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics: “Of course!” Henkel recalled telling Smith, in an interview two winters ago. “Forget these finals. I don’t need these finals. I’ll meet you there!” Henkel called up his instructors and told them the situation. They worked out a plan to delay his finals. The next day, Henkel was on a plane bound for Marbella, to play a tournament with Smith, the man who had helped co-found both the AVP and FIVB tours and is still considered to be one of the greatest of all-time. You may, however, be wondering how Smith got here. From the late 1970s through the early 90s, until a bum knee began limiting him, Smith was arguably the best beach volleyball player in the world. Nobody had won more tournaments or more money than him, not even Karch Kiraly or Mike Dodd or Randy Stoklos or Tim Hovland. Nobody had done more for the game. So how did he end up with Carl Henkel, a guy who hadn’t finished better than ninth on the AVP Tour, who didn’t make the indoor national team, who had spent his most recent days in beach volleyball on the less-heralded four-man tour? Who was studying for a law school final, far away from a beach? The answer can be boiled down to one name: Ricci Luyties. A gold medalist on the 1988 indoor team in Seoul, Luyties was a sublime talent, a 6-foot-5 freak of an athlete out of Smith’s hometown, Pacific Palisades. He wasn’t quite the talent that Stoklos, Smith’s longtime partner and the first man to make $1 million in beach volleyball, was, but he had won seven AVPs. They had agreed to make a run for the 1996 Olympics, gunning for the berth that was guaranteed to the top American finishing team on the FIVB. He and Smith would be all but a lock. And then he pulled out with hardly any warning at all. On the morning of April 10, 1995, he simply left Smith a voicemail: The AVP had pressured him. He wasn’t going to play. He was sorry. That was the day they were supposed to leave for Spain. Smith had enough on his mind. His first son, Hagen, had just been born. And now he was supposed to find a partner to go to the Olympics? To give up the next year traveling the world on a tour that didn’t pay well? To drop everything and stay in hotels and planes and abandon whatever other responsibilities they had? And he was supposed to find him in a day? It was too late in the process to pluck someone from the AVP – which was perhaps the point of the AVP pressuring Luyties so late – so Smith turned to the emergency option: The four-man tour. “Carl was the first to call me back,” Smith said. The oddest team in beach volleyball, a legend and a clerk, was born. And they were going to make it. Smith laughs at all of this now, but still with a shake of the head. There was so much infighting then, just as there is now. It was Smith who, with the help of then-FIVB president Ruben Acosta, helped found the beach side of the FIVB Tour. And it was Smith who helped usher it to the Olympics, despite a heavy, though understandable, pushback from the AVP, a tour and union he also helped found. “We had an event alongside the ’92 Olympics in Barcelona, to showcase the sport for the IOC,” Smith said. “That’s the event that Randy and I were sanctioned $70,000 by the AVP for going [instead of competing at the AVP event in Seal Beach that weekend]. We happened to win that amount of money. And then the AVP kept us from playing in the biggest events of the season, events that we would win most of the time. “But from that, the sport became an Olympic sport, so it was all worthwhile in the end for us. They said ‘It’ll never be an Olympic sport, you’re just blowing in the wind.’ So it became an Olympic sport. It was awesome.” Smith and Henkel would go on to finish fifth at the Atlanta Games, though before they bowed out, they put on perhaps the greatest volleyball match of all-time, a 15-17 quarterfinal loss to Kiraly and Kent Steffes. “I remember that well,” Smith said. Some will. Some won’t. But nobody can a

Joe Houde had just begun his career with USA Volleyball, and there was a dead man was in the road. “Oh, yeah,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Just not a good day.” It was certainly one way to start his stint as USA Volleyball’s newest traveling physical trainer. His first trip with the U.S., to a NORCECA in Guatemala. First time to a third-world country. And there was a dead man in the street. “It was eye opening,” Houde said. “I got off the plane, and I had never been to a third-world country before, and I was like, ‘Alright!’” It didn’t end there, of course, because this was a NORCECA and nobody knows when the NORCECA adventures will begin or end, only that they will happen, as inevitable as a sunrise. When Houde and the men’s team cabbed back to the airport, a ride the driver expected to take around a half an hour, the ride kept going, and going…and going. A little less than three hours later, the players sprinted through the airport, just making it in time. Houde was stuck in Guatemala for another day and a half, where he’d fly to Florida, Dallas, and then home, to Boston. “That,” he said, “was my first trip with USA Volleyball.” Some may view that as the worst possible start to a trainer’s career with USAV. Look at it from another perspective, however, and it may have been the best. For now Houde has the mindset that his next trip, to China, “was great!” and he said it with such enthusiasm that he genuinely meant it, making him potentially one of the first representatives from United States Volleyball to describe a trip to China as great. “I just love to travel. It doesn’t matter where I go. It’s about enjoying it, being with these guys, helping them get to where they need to be,” Houde, a Boston native, said. “I’m not going for vacation. I’m going to work. It’s either, ‘Ok, hopefully everybody loses so I can have a trip.’ Well, I don’t want that to happen. Let’s get on the podium so I have to work hard. It’s humbling.” Houde was there, for the final event of the season, in Chetumal, Mexico, for the most successful event of the season. He helped keep Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb and Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb fresh enough to win a pair of medals, a gold and a bronze, respectively. It was the first time the American men had won a medal in a four- or five-star since Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena took silver in Doha in March. That’s what he’s about, Houde. He doesn’t get any medals, but he wants nothing more than to see the men and women he’s there to support to come home with them. That’s how he got the job in the first place, anyway. When Sara Hughes was breaking into the professional scene, she recommended Houde, as they were both located in Orange County and he primarily worked on her for recovery. His foot was firmly in the door. Not that he travels much. USA Volleyball’s budget only allows Houde to travel a few times per year. And so, in between trips where he navigates dead bodies in the road in Guatemala, he has his own practice, Paradigm Chirosport, and also works with the men’s field hockey team, which won its first medal at the PanAm Games in 24 years. Houde, of course, takes no credit. This is the guy who told the players to run through the airport so they could make it and he’d be stuck in Guatemala for an extra day and a half. “I’m a small one percent of their 99 percent,” he said. “It’s very humbling to work for these guys.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mark Burik tried it. You will notice that to be a theme of his life: The man just tries everything. In this case, a young Burik was trying his best, as a freshman at the University of Delaware, to sell his father on a month-long semester in New Zealand. His father balked. Fourteen-thousand bucks? What was Mark going to learn in New Zealand that could possibly be worth $14,000? Well, Mark replied, we’re going to go zorbing. If you’re wondering what in the world zorbing is, allow Burik a moment to explain. “It’s when you get put in a clear bubble and they send you rolling down a hill,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. So, no, Mr. Burik was not going to hand his son a $14,000 check to go zorbing in New Zealand. But he did have faith that Mark would find his way to New Zealand at some point, and he’d get to go zorbing or bungee jumping or hopping off of bridges or whatever else he would do – and studying was likely not one of them – on his own dime. “Once I got the volleyball bug,” Burik said, “I knew I was going to take it as far as I can.” He means far in every possible sense of the word. Physically, he has gone quite far, to the point that when his longtime girlfriend, Janell Haney, suggests what could be a fun overseas trip for the two, Burik will reply, “Oh yeah, that place is fun.” And then she’ll get frustrated, because she wants to go somewhere new, but finding a new place in the world for Burik to travel is quite a difficult endeavor these days. He’s gone bungee jumping in New Zealand. Played on the national tours in Austria, France, Norway and Sweden. He’s run volley camps in Germany, Spain, Switzerland. He’s flown in helicopters in Rio, been discouraged at the state of an FIVB one-star in Cambodia. “I’ve just had trouble saying no to tournaments and saying no to an adventure or trip,” Burik said. “It’s too much fun. There’s too much world to go and see to say ‘No.’ And if volleyball is either your ticket or your excuse, why not? “I think I love the fact that even if I’m going somewhere to travel, I’ll hunt down my local volleyball contacts, because if you’ve got a sport like volleyball, and you’re pretty good at it, you have built-in friends wherever you go. You don’t even have to do all the tourism stuff and wonder where you have to go because your built-in friends will bring you.” Burik now is one of those volleyball contacts for players all around the world who are looking for a place to play or train or build a community at any time of the year. Five years ago, Burik founded VolleyCamp Hermosa, a now-booming and wildly popular adult camp of sorts for players of all skills and ages. He founded it, of course, on some of the most ridiculous premises. He wanted it to be a volley hostel, where he’d find all of the broke and hungry 20-somethings in the sport, give them a bunk to crash in, a court to play on, and a bunch of guys to play with, and let it run wild. It worked for a bit. Burik rented three apartments, squeezing in four bunk-beds in the master bedroom of one. “It was so much fun and so crazy,” Burik said. “I was cleaning toilets at 3 a.m. getting ready for the next turnover.” To the surprise of perhaps only Burik, he was evicted from one of his houses – “I did it all legally,” he is adamant to assure you – and has since sent the VolleyCampers to local hotels, where he does not have to clean toilets at three in the morning. Though the hostel vision for VolleyCamp has since changed, the impact of it has only multiplied. Rare is the day you will not see Burik and his coaching staff on second street in Hermosa, teaching from sun-up to sundown, VolleyCampers rotating in and out of the courts the entire day, all year long. “It’s gotten to a point where it runs itself,” Burik said. This has allowed him to expand into other projects, all in the name of growing the sport. He’s building a YouTube channel, Betteratbeach, with an eponymous website, betteratbeach.com. He’s authoring webinars. Conducting film studies with players from all over the planet via FaceTime and screenshare. “If you get one, solid piece of advice from one great coach, that’s going to affect the rest of your career,” Burik said. “People think one piece of advice is just one piece of advice but it’s not. It’s thousands of points.” But it’s not just about improving as a player. It’s about building up this sport that has for so long needed a growth spurt. It’s about building the community that allows players to grab dinners with strangers in Austria, to crash on a couch in Rio, to know the best local spots in Spain, with the only connecting thread being the sport of beach volleyball. “It goes beyond beach volleyball for me,” Burik said. “It’s about getting a platform. My why is more – get the platform to start making the world better. I think I do that successfully with my coaching. I think I teach people how to be better partners, how to talk to each other better. I teach them how to talk t

There is a moment before every practice that is so innocuous, so easy to forget that it’s not all that uncommon for teams to go about practicing without remembering it at all: putting up the antennas. And yet it is that moment that Kelly Reeves loves – or, in her vernacular, “gets jazzed about” –as much as she loves anything, and allow us to inform you early in this story that Kelly Reeves loves a great many things. But before she can discuss how much she loves playing volleyball, how jazzed she gets about this game, how she loves the long rallies, getting a scoop on a hard-driven, or the feeling of her lungs searing at the end of a long, three-set match, she wants you to know how much she loves putting up those antennas each morning. “That’s my moment before practice, setting up the antennas,” Reeves said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “It’s like ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’ People overlook that. I always set the antennas up, but that’s something I just enjoy. I just look around at the bay and it’s like ‘Wow, life’s pretty good.’ It’s just what I do and I’m like ‘I love being here.’” It’s possible that Reeves, who won a national championship indoors at UCLA before starting her professional career on the beach, loves more aspects of volleyball, and life, than anyone you’ve met. Workouts that leave her heaving, worn out, walking gingerly out of the gym? Loves them. Rallies – even the ones she loses – that leave her caked in sand, sweaty, out of breath? Loves them. Heck, the 27-year-old even loved, in a weird sort of way, getting roofed by Alix Klineman on match point in the quarterfinals of the Manhattan Beach Open. “It was just so surreal playing against the top teams in the world like ‘What? This is awesome!’ What a fun experience,” said Reeves, who finished a career-high third in Manhattan with Terese Cannon, losing only to April Ross and Klineman and Melissa Humana-Paredes and Sarah Pavan. “And, obviously, we lost to both of those teams, and I give Alix a little [crap] because I got absolutely roofed on match point. I was like ‘Either way I’m going in to crank it and see what happens’ and there’s a photo of Alix just reaching her hand, dink, and I’m like ‘C’mon! You couldn’t give me just one?’ But I respect both of those teams and it’s elite volleyball, it’s high level volleyball, and that’s what you want, that’s how you get better.” Reeves understands the process more than most. It’s why she allows herself to stop and enjoy the peaks like in Manhattan. Where many, after achieving a career-high, seek the next high, Reeves is consciously aware to stop, as she did in Manhattan, and pause for a second to drink in the bliss. “I just looked around and smiled, like ‘I’m here. This is the biggest stage probably anywhere’ and I had to just soak up the moment,” she said. “It was so awesome.” And she loves the lows, too, in that strange sort of way that mature athletes do, understanding that there are moments of growth within those lows. She looks at Chicago, where her and Cannon, coming off that career-high in Manhattan, lost both matches and finished 17th. “You gotta go through the trenches a little bit to see the good and it’s been such a fun journey to be a part of and that’s why longevity for me, you can go forever in beach volleyball,” Reeves said. “There’s just so much you can learn every single day you step foot in the sand.” At the moment, Reeves is learning as much as she can in the gym. She’s in there, three hours a day, Monday through Friday. She’s playing the long game now, prepping her body for a career that she wants to last as long as possible. John Hyden’s still doing it at 47, Jake Gibb at 43, Kerri Walsh Jennings at 41. She has as much self-doubt as anyone, Reeves. But when those moments of doubt arise, and the numbers in her bank account are looking as if they’ve been on an extreme diet, she journals, does a little introspection: Where’s my bliss? And then it all comes rushing back, all the love she has for this sport and everything and everyone in it. In an hour-long interview, Reeves used the word “love” no less than 30 times. So it really doesn’t matter what her bank account looks like, because no amount of money in the world can buy that kind of bliss, that self-assurance that, yes, she’s exactly where she needs to be, doing exactly what she needs to be doing, with the people she needs to be with. “I just love the sport of volleyball,” she said. “I think it brings me joy, it’s made me the person I am, I just love stepping out on the court and sharing the game with anyone and everyone.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mike Dodd apologized. He’d been getting all wound up, or as wound up as the man, labeled by anyone you ask as one of the nicest guys in the world, can get. He even dropped the f word not once, but twice. “Sorry about that,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I think I said the f word.” You can forgive the man for being impassioned. He’s seen beach volleyball in its every iteration, every stage of its growth, from infantile to colossus to broken to slightly built up once more. He competed when there was hardly any money in it at all, in the early 1980s, when he was fresh out of college and finished with a brief – very brief – stint in the NBA with the San Diego Clippers. He’d boycotted the 1984 World Championships, not only witnessing the formation of the AVP – then only a players’ union, not a tour – but playing an integral part of it. He’d won five consecutive Manhattan Beach Opens with Tim Hovland. He’d talked smack to Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos. He’d played in and won the only Olympic qualifier to date, securing a spot in the 1996 Atlanta Games with Mike Whitmarsh, where they’d win silver in one of the greatest shows of dominance the United States has had on the beach, on the men’s side, at least. And he’s since commentated (in 2000 and 2004) and coached (in 2008 and 2012) and you won’t ever find the man too far off the beach. He’s not one to preach about the old-school days, as some, mostly fans, are wont to do. But he does look at the current landscape of the game in the United States and wonder if there isn’t a simpler solution to the sometimes-complicated hierarchy. “If I were the czar of USA Volleyball, I would mandate that my eight best guys would just go down. Just go down for five hours in the afternoon, when it’s windy and [crappy] and it’s not little morning 9 a.m. perfect, no wind, no nothing,” he said. “Draw your lines, switch partners, and see who’s the fu***** best. See who’s the fu***** best. Keep score. Keep track. It’s an easy pick.” It was less about the money than it was about who won, who had bragging rights in an era of bombastic bragging and smack talk, and few won more than Dodd. Few, lest the tour returns to its halcyon days of 20-30 tournaments a year, ever will. Seventy-two times Dodd finished atop the podium in the United States, 73 if you include winning that Olympic qualifier in Baltimore in 1996, which Dodd does. “If you don’t think an Olympic trial prepares you for the Olympics,” he said, “you’re outta your mind.” Yet it hasn’t been done since. The FIVB has become the road through which U.S. teams must qualify for the Games. For now, at least. There are other countries who operate differently. Dodd has seen it himself. Prior to the 2016 Games, he was hired by the Italian federation as the beach program’s head coach. They rented a house in Southern California for the eight potential candidates, and what did Dodd do but bring them out to the beach, draw up some lines, and have them play. They’d mix partners, play in the wind, in the most imperfect conditions. And he’s see who wanted it most, who could just find a way to win, just as he used to do during those endless days when he was a 20-something kid out of San Diego State. He and Hovland and Karch Kiraly and Sinjin Smith would practice for four hours with the United States indoor national team, put in another hour of jump-training, then find the closest liquor store, pick up a couple of Mickey’s big mouth beers, and play beach until the sun went down. And they’d learn how to win. It is hardly a matter of coincidence that those four are now all in the Hall of Fame, four of the winningest players in history, four individuals where only a single name will do – Hov, Dodd, Sinjin, Karch – and you know exactly whom they mean. “It was just the jungle,” he said. “It was natural selection. Smith and Stokie, they’re winning, they’re great. Dodd and Hovland. Dodd and Whitmarsh. This team and that team. You migrated to each other and you did it by survivial because you had the best chance of winning. There was money and this but everybody just wanted to win. At the end of the day, it’s how many opens did you win.” And then, coaching those eight Italian players a little less than a decade ago, he saw those very same traits emerge again. A cocky, swaggering young player named Daniele Lupo was rooming with Paolo Nicolai, a 6-foot-8 blocker who had won consecutive youth world tour events in 2007 and 2008. When Dodd swung by the house, as he sometimes did, he saw them, after hours on the beach, dinking a ball back and forth in their room, competing still. “I had the analytics that said they were probably the best team,” he said. “But that’s what told me they would be the best. They just had the love for the game.” Sure enough, in 2012, Lupo and Nicolai would qualify for the London Games, stunning Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena in the first round. Then they’d claim silver in Rio in 2016. It’s t

This week on SANDCAST, Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter break down all of the partner switches happening in United States beach volleyball. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Theo Brunner was in need, he says, of a rebirth. Not quite a religious ceremony, but something to revitalize a beach volleyball career that had, while not sunk, gone a bit sideways. There was the chronic calf injury that flared up, a nod to the fact that he hadn’t really taken a full off-season in several years. There were the flashes of success – a silver at the Kuala Lumpur three-star with Reid Priddy – sprinkled in with missed opportunities – two crushing three-set losses in country quotas in Gstaad and Rome. The proverbial rebirth came in the most unwelcome of places, at the most unwelcome of times. Funny how it works like that. Theo Brunner was thrown back into an AVP qualifier. “At first I was super-bummed,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, of he and John Hyden being seeded Q1 at AVP Chicago. “But then I thought, this is good for me. It’s good to remember what it’s all about, see what everybody else has to go through every tournament, stop being all high horse, who cares about the qualifier. To get back in there was a nice thing.” It’s easy to say that in retrospect, of course. It would not have been easy for him to say that midway through the afternoon of August 29, when he and Hyden were down one set to none – 15-21, no less – to Jake Urrutia and Earl Schultz in the final round of the qualifier. Losing the second or the third would have meant the first failed attempt at an AVP main draw since 2009, when he and Matt Heagy fell in the second round in Ocean City. “I was like ‘Ah crap, what am I doing?’” Brunner said. “But it was a good reminder of the love of the grind, which you can forget sometimes.” Throughout literature, any moment of rebirth, of finding a new identity or rediscovering an old one, requires a trial. Brunner had his. And he and Hyden prevailed, winning the next two sets, 21-13, 15-7. It wouldn’t be until three weeks later, though, when he and Hyden were put back into the qualifier again, that they would return to the championship winning team they had been a year prior. It had barely been more than a calendar year since they won AVP Hermosa, coming back at the freeze to beat Billy Allen and Ryan Doherty, 16-14, in the third. They did that, however, as the one seed. In Hawai’i, for the final event of the year, they’d do so also as the one seed – in the qualifier. Just as they did in Hermosa the year before, they returned to the final. And then the most poetic stories of the year came to a crashing halt. Hyden, at 47, would have broken his own record as the oldest to win an AVP title, in searing heat and shallow sand, no less. Had it not been for a Herculean performance from Taylor Crabb, Brunner and Hyden would have locked up the greatest storyline of the year. Alas, a 20-15 lead in the second set was undone by Crabb and Jake Gibb, just as another lead in the third was undone, thwarted once more by the Bug and Gibb. “Oh, Hawai’i,” Brunner lamented more than once on SANDCAST. “Still hurts.” And it will hurt for some time, to be sure, but never has there been a rebirth without a bit of discomfort. Brunner is now entering the off-season, his first blessed off-season in as long as he can remember, one of the most coveted free agents in the sport. Hyden has turned to Bill Kolinske, but after that, who knows where the chips may fall. Do Casey Patterson and Chase Budinger stay together? Billy Allen and Stafford Slick? Chaim Schalk and Jeremy Casebeer? Priddy? “It goes from the top down and I’ve been fortunate enough that I’m one of the guys people are waiting on,” he said. “I’ve been enjoying not being super focused on that stuff this off-season but I still have a bunch of people in mind and have chatted with a few different people. “My wife forced me to watch the bachelor and it just occurred to me that this is a lot like the bachelor. Just trying to find a mate for next season. It’s a lot like a relationship – this guy is really good at this, but I don’t know if we’d get along that well. It’s pretty funny.” And life, in beach volleyball, is fun again for Theo Brunner. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

TEL AVIV, Israel – Tim Brewster was thousands of miles from his classrooms at UCLA. His seat in his 300-plus-student lectures was empty again, as it had been for the previous two weeks while he was in the Dominican Republic and the Middle East. And yet, while his classmates and peers were in their seats like good students, listening to the professors, taking their notes, studying, Brewster was getting an education of his own, the same unofficial independent study he’d been getting for the previous three years. It is one thing to learn about the religions of the world, a class he took with that very name. It is entirely another to stroll the cobblestone streets of Jerusalem, to walk the Via Dolarosa, to see the 14 stations of the cross, to touch the Western Wall, to hear the calls for prayer at the site where Mohammed ascended and descended from heaven. It is one thing to learn of the poverty of countries like Cuba, and to listen to professors discuss the dangers of men like Fidel Castro. It is another to arrive on your first international beach volleyball trip as a 17-year-old in Havana, and to run out of running water one night, lose power for two, be bereft of functional wifi and any means of communication to the outside world, all the while being subjected to misleading government propaganda. No, Tm Brewster may not be in the classroom as much as his professors may like. But rest assured, he’s getting an education of his own. “Definitely more valuable than college,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. And he said this, of course, not from a classroom or anywhere close to it. He said it at the kitchen table in an AirBNB in Tel Aviv, where he played in his fifth one-star FIVB of the year, finishing with a career-high fifth. He said it after eating in Old Town Jaffa, after praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, after hearing gunshots ring out from war-torn Jordan as he floated in the Dead Sea. “I’m going to these places that I’ve learned about in school before, which is awesome. I’m getting the real-world experience of it,” he said. “I’m getting to see these cultures and learn a bunch, especially from the people I’m traveling with, because a lot of people I travel with are older. I wouldn’t miss this stuff for the world. “I took a religion class last quarter and it was all about Christianity, Judaism and Islam and it’s what we saw today, all day. I’ve never really experienced that. It was crazy.” Talk with Brewster and, aside from the boyish face and the body that hasn’t quite filled out yet, you would be hard-pressed to pin him as a teenager still finding his way in the world. This season alone, which coincided with his current sophomore year at UCLA, he competed in seven international tournaments. He’s competed against Olympians and AVP champions. He’s been coached by some of the all-time greats. He is 19 yet is surrounded by some of the most elite players and voices in the sport. “It’s weird because these are guys I’ve looked up to for the last five or six years since I was 14 and playing,” he said. “It’s weird that I’m playing against them now. I’m still not there yet but I can see the progress from where I’ve come from and where I’m heading and it’s pretty exciting. It’s really cool, though, getting to play guys at that high of a level and you get to see the things they do well that you don’t.” At 19, Brewster is considered precocious by U.S. standards in beach volleyball. Nearly every Olympic Games is a testament to the States’ delayed development system. In 2016, the four United States players – Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena, Jake Gibb and Casey Patterson – were surpassed in age only by one. Of the six players on the top three U.S. teams with a legitimate shot at making the Tokyo Games, four are older than 30, another, Trevor Crabb, is only a few months shy, and the other, Taylor Crabb, is 26. And yet there is Brewster, alongside his equally young and aspirational peers in John Schwengel, Miles and Marcus Partain, and Kacey Losik, the few youngsters in the U.S. breaking in before their mid-20s. This year was a watershed one for all: Brewster made his first FIVB main draw, Schwengel cracked into AVP Hawai’i for his first main draw, Marcus Partain made it in Manhattan Beach, Miles won the AVP Rookie of the Year. To the United States, they’re young, babies on tour. To the rest of the world’s 19- and 20- year olds, they’re quite normal. “There’s not a lot of guys my age who are committed only to beach,” Brewster said. “There’s John Schwengel and I, who are basically the only two who are only playing beach without playing indoor. “A lot of these [international] kids specialize early, and a lot of these countries have academies. We don’t really have anything like that. I think the high performance does a good job but it’s hard to compete with a country like Brazil who has their kids living in a facility, training year-round.” And so he has created his own development

Karissa Cook is a self-dubbed “inside cat.” She doesn’t need to go anywhere to have fun. Doesn’t really need to see anybody, aside from her fiancé, Shayne Skov, and her pup. She’s good with that. So when Katie Spieler, her partner throughout the 2017 and 2018 beach volleyball seasons, asked if she wanted to play in a NORCECA playoff for a one-off event in a pinprick of an island named Martinique, she felt very little compulsion to do so. But she did, because Cook loves Spieler, and she does – though she rarely admits it out loud – love volleyball, event at the end of a year. She was in. And so began one of the strangest, world-crossing, successful years of Cook’s life. Her and Spieler would win gold in Martinique, which wasn’t so much a beach tournament as it was “jungle ball,” as she dubbed it on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, seeing as it was played in the middle of a tropical forest, in a grove of cleared out trees. In reality, it would be one of the most normal events Cook would play over the next calendar year. A month later, Cook and Spieler were chatting again, about a new, slightly absurd invitation to play snow volleyball in Russia in December. They added Allie Wheeler and Emily Hartong to the crew, and thus the “Snow Dogs” were born. “I feel like this year is still bookended by Moscow because that was the origination of the snow team,” Cook said. “Looking back on these 12 months, I’m like ‘How did we get roped into all these strange, amazing country trips and all these amazing environments?’ “Basically, USA keeps emailing and we keep saying yes. Every time, I’m like ‘I’m done for the year’ and then I get an email saying ‘Do you guys want to…’ and I’ll probably say yeah.” For Wheeler, there is never a hesitation. Not anymore. She said yes immediately to Moscow, and everything thereafter. Did she want to play snow volleyball in Austria and Italy, three weeks before the AVP season? Yes. And another in Argentina? Yes. How about a fours tournament at the inaugural World Beach Games in, of all places, Doha, Qatar? “It’s always just ‘Yes,’” Wheeler said on SANDCAST. It’s easy to see why, too. Every time she’s said yes, she’s returned home with gold. When she agreed to play a one-star FIVB in Vaudz, Liechtenstein, in August of 2018, as the No. 12 team in the qualifier, they wound up winning the whole thing. Perhaps her decision making is expedited by the fact that her goal is rarely about the winning, though for anybody as competitive as Wheeler, a national champ at USC, winning is always a plus. “For me, I think about it – in Liechtenstein, me and Lara were down, 13-12, in the third set in the quali, obviously terrible scenario, so we were like ‘Alright, it’s a win win. If you lose you get to travel. If you win you get to play more volleyball,’” Wheeler said. “We ended up winning and then won the whole tournament so it was pretty cool.” Everything about this year has been cool for the two. Cook has won events in a forest (Martinique) and in snow (Moscow). She won her first AVP, in Austin, and claimed gold at the Pan American Games with Jace Pardon in Lima, Peru. Together, her and Wheeler, adding Geena Urango and Kelly Reeves to the snow team, won the inaugural World Beach Games in Doha. “This year, I went into it with a lot of uncertainty, but my only two goals were to not get burned out and be really conscious with my limits and not doing too much because I feel like I have to,” Cook said. “And then just to play with really good people. I think getting slightly more points than opponents was cool, but it was just a cherry on top. Winning helps, it definitely makes it more fun, definitely preferable, but I can’t control that.” So here’s what they can control: The mindset and the team they bring with them. They’re all close friends now, the snow dogs, and the two “desert queens” in Urango and Reeves. Good friends and world champs. “Well they’re going to pay for us to go to cool places so long as we keep winning,” Cook said. “So let’s do it.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It was somewhere in the space between the Gstaad Major and the Espinho four-star when the façade came crashing down. How long had it been since Sarah Sponcil had decompressed? Relaxed? Reflected on all that had happened in her life in the past six blurs of months? In that span, she and Lily Justine, her partner at UCLA, established themselves as the best No. 2 NCAA beach pair in the country. In May, the Bruins repeated as NCAA champions. Days later, Sponcil was on a flight with Kelly Claes, her professional partner, to Itapema, Brazil, for an FIVB four-star where they’d play Kerri Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat in a country quota. They lost in 28 minutes. “It’s such a surreal fast-paced experience, national championship to pro in three days, trying to adjust my game to match the opponents, the best in the world,” Sponcil said when she and Claes joined us on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I’m just speechless when I’m asked that question. You’re never ready. You never know what you’re really doing and if I didn’t (go for the Olympics), I’d regret it for the rest of my life.” On the outside, though, it very much appears as Sponcil is ready for all of this, as if she has keeping up with her rapidly-changing world, no problem. She and Claes rebounded from Itapema with four straight top-10 finishes, including a ninth at the FIVB World Championships. They didn't just look like they knew what they were doing. They made it look -- dare we say? -- easy. On top of all of that, in Warsaw the week before, while the rest of Sponcil’s teammates and classmates at UCLA were walking across the stage back home, Sponcil and Claes put on a comical photo shoot of Sponcil “graduating,” cap and gown included, diving for a ball on the sand. It can all look so glamorous sometimes -- the world traveling, the funny Instagrams, the hilarious videos of them running through airports and Sponcil walking around the world doing handstands -- that it’s easy to forget that she’s never done any of this before. “Sometimes I can’t even wrap my head around how stressful this year has been for her,” Claes said. “I think back to my first season coming out of college. We finished the USA Pairs Championship and jumped on a flight to Rio. We jumped on the world tour and it was so stressful and we had so many new things coming at me and I felt like my head was spinning and on top of that it’s an Olympic qualifying year for her.” And then, after dropping in the qualifier in Gstaad, now two months on the road with stops in Portugal, Tokyo, Vienna, and Moscow still looming, Sponcil let down her guard. “Sarah sent me a text to come outside and she’s balling,” Claes said. “And I’m like ‘OK, we’re doing this.’” They’re a fun-loving duo, Claes and Sponcil. They’re goofy and happy and wildly talented, two of the top players in the country despite being in diapers when Kerri Walsh Jennings, who they’re trying to beat out for the 2020 Olympics, was making her Olympic debut on the beach. But they are -- in spite of how magnificently tailored their lives may look at times -- human. Three months on the road is a monumental task for a human being, much less one who had never done any of this before. Full-time World Tour, Olympic race, figuring out flights and hotels and meals and how in the world to survive this thing. “Honestly, I felt like I had nothing together,” Sponcil said. “I was missing home, I felt like I was trying to change so many different things in my game, and you can’t change a whole lot and still feel like you’re playing free. Everything was just crazy in my mind, and definitely had some teary moments, and I was just honest with Kelly and open and vulnerable and I was like ‘I am not OK right now.’ “To get closer you have to be vulnerable in those positions and it sucks to acknowledge that you don’t have it all together, especially coming off of college where you had everything. You did so well and now you’re being pushed in ways you didn’t think you could be pushed because you won a month ago, on cloud nine, and now it’s ‘Oh, shiz.’ “But Kelly had been in the same position and her listening to me means everything. It was a step in the right direction to know if we win, we lose, whatever, we’re still in this together, and that’s really powerful. That was a huge moment for us.” Claes may be the perfect partner for Sponcil, old enough to have done this for three years now, young enough to still be able to fully empathize with where Sponcil is in life. Perhaps that explains why, once considered underdogs by many in this race, these two are eighth in the world in the Olympic ranks and third in the U.S. They trail only April Ross and Alix Klineman and Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat, with another 12 or so events -- depending on what they want to play -- left in the qualification period. Theirs is a chemistry wholly unique to them. Last October, Claes was still unsure with whom she was going to partner for this run. She

There was a time – a very brief time in the middle of a jet-setting, globe-trotting season – where Kelley Larsen had the correct count of how many tournaments she and Emily Stockman had played at that point in the year. “We did count at one point,” Larsen, an Olympic hopeful with Stockman, said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We did a certain amount in a row, we did – what was it? – ten back to back in a row. Ten in a row. I think that was our longest stretch. I don’t know how many tournaments it was this year. I think I lost count halfway through.” It’s easy to do when you’ve had a year like Larsen and Stockman. The official count, at the moment, with two more tournaments to play, is 19 tournaments in all – five AVP, 13 FIVB, one NORCECA. It has included competition in 13 countries, with a third trip to China coming up next week and a first to Mexico a week after that. “LAX is our home,” Larsen said, laughing. “It was a lot of travel this year. We were gone six or seven weeks straight at one point and then before and after that we would be at a tournament overseas then come back for a tournament, be home for a few days, and we’d be back and forth. So ever since May, we’ve been gone the majority of the time.” They knew they were getting themselves into this, Larsen and Stockman. When they both broke it off with their respective partners prior to the onset of the Tokyo race, they knew that international volleyball was the priority, that the Olympics were the goal, and that being anywhere from moderately to severely jet lagged would be the new default. “I knew her work ethic was already incredible,” Stockman, a Colorado native, said. “Every time I was in the gym she was there, so I knew she was working hard. But to sit down and be like ‘Our goals all align,’ that was huge for me.” For the most part, everything has seemed to align for Stockman and Larsen this season, both on the court and off. On the court, they won an enormously valuable silver medal at the Warsaw Four-Star and then followed it up with a win at AVP Seattle, Stockman’s first AVP victory. Off the court, their quiet yet warm, independent but caring personalities meshed perfectly. During downtime on the road, Stockman would wander for a good coffee shop; Larsen would take a walk. At home, Stockman retreats to the mountains, Larsen, somehow, still to the beach. And then they’re back at it, on the beach with coach Evie Matthews or in the gym with their new trainer, an ass-kicking, no-nonsense man recommended by Matthews. “There’s a lot of teams that sort of started breaking down a little bit and we felt good throughout the year,” Larsen said. “I think a lot of that is due to what we were doing in the gym, just conditioning wise. And all of our training was specific to you and to volleyball. Every movement we do in the gym is very related to volleyball and has a purpose for why we’re doing it. “His workouts are killer. You get your butt kicked and you don’t lift a single weight. It’s bizarre. It’s definitely helped us conditioning wise in matches this year.” They have but a few matches left, in China for an upcoming Three-Star in Qinzhou and then a Four-Star in Chetumal, Mexico. Then Stockman will take to the mountains, Larsen to the beach and planning her wedding with Manhattan Beach semifinalist Bill Kolinske. And then, before they know it, season will begin again. And they’ll be back on planes, back to their passports getting tattooed regularly, back in their new home-away-from-home: LAX. “We’re like the Brazilians now,” Stockman said. “Just nonstop.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Of all the indelible moments we’ve had on SANDCAST these past two years – and there have been countless many, with massive lifetime milestones from both Tri Bourne and I – none stood out quite like the moments after our latest podcast, which published today. For the first year and a half, our typical post-show routine was a bit collegeish: We’d barbeque, drink a few beers, watch some football or a documentary or YouTube. Sometimes Trevor Crabb would come over and hang. Gabby Bourne, Tri’s amazing wife and resident ‘Pod Mama’ as we’ve affectionately dubbed her, would invariably be present, joining the boys. It’s not that those days are over, but things have certainly changed. After we recorded the show on Monday, an exasperated Pod Mama walked upstairs, a crying newborn Naia Zuri Bourne in tow. She passed him off to Tri, and now instead of cradling a Kona or a small glass of red, he was cradling his infant. Listening to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Anything to put Naia to sleep. Life comes at you fast. “That evolution of where I was, and all of the things that have happened since then, it all started with the SANDCAST,” he said, and he did say this jokingly, because, obviously, there are a lot more important things that have been changing the direction of Bourne’s life. But the podcast, in its 110th episode, has been there to document it all. It was there, on episode one, to document Bourne when he was deep in the throes of his now-famous autoimmune disease. “The New Tri Bourne: Buddha Tri Bourne,” is what we dubbed that episode, which, in retrospect, is a funny name, because now that is such an old version of Tri Bourne it hardly seems to exist anymore. That Tri Bourne wasn’t allowed to sweat – “I wanted to sweat,” he said, “but I literally wasn’t allowed to.” He wasn’t allowed to jump, or to lift weights, or to play the sport that is his lifeblood and his way of life, how he supports his growing family. Now he’s ranked No. 1 in the Olympic race among American teams. “Yeah,” he said, “that is crazy.” The podcast was there to document the publication of my first non-fiction book, We Were Kings, just as it was there to document my first main draw, in Austin of 2018 with Raffe Paulis. It was there to document Bourne’s return to beach volleyball, in Manhattan Beach of 2018, which seemed to just be a one-off with his buddy Trevor Crabb, but then it became more. It became a partnership for the next event, in Chicago, where they finished fifth, and the next, in Hawai’i, where they beat Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena and took third. Now, should they continue to play well on the World Tour, they could be Olympians in Tokyo in eight months. With an extra fan, Naia Bourne, cheering him on from phone. With a podcast to document the journey, as it has for the last two years. “In this situation,” Bourne said of the year-and-a-half in which his autoimmune disease sidelined him, “I had to rethink it all. I was like ‘Alright, all I know is, I want to come out of this better than I was before.’ So I just planned it out. Assuming I was going to get better, I had to stay solid to that mindset: ‘Ok, I’m going to get better, I’m going to get back to where I was, what do I want to have gained from this?’” He has gained more than he could have ever imagined. He’s switched partners, switched positions, switched roles in life from a newlywed to a dad of a baby girl. He’s written a forward for a book, come back from an autoimmune disease and, remarkably, recorded a career-high finished at World Championships, claiming fourth with Crabb in Hamburg, Germany. Meanwhile, when Tri and I launched the podcast, I didn’t own a passport. By the end of this year, I’ll have been to 10 countries. Life takes you places. This sport takes you places. And gosh is it fun to have a podcast to record every step of the ride. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It took a matter of weeks for Lee Feinswog to rebound from being laid off. Not a month had gone by from the moment he received a call from the higher-ups at Turner, for whom he freelanced to write college volleyball stories on NCAA.com, when he began scrolling through his phone, idea and contact in hand. His passion for writing about the sport came as a surprise, even to him. Here was a guy who had covered LSU basketball in the Shaq days, who had written about the highest levels of the NBA, MLB, who ran in circles with some of the best writers in the country – and he was smitten by college volleyball. It’s possible that it was the novelty of it, at the time. He had watched his first men’s match only a year before, a semifinal of the NCAA Championship where, as fate would have it, he sat next to Hugh McCutcheon, then the head coach of the women’s national team and one of the most brilliant minds in the game. “I learned more that day than you could possibly imagine,” Feinswog said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. A few days later, he found himself in Anaheim, watching the women’s team practice at the invitation of McCutcheon. But Turner, which owned NCAA.com, was bleeding money, and the first to go were the freelancers, including Feinswog. McCutcheon, though, wasn’t the only contact Feinswog had made at that semifinal. He had also exchanged contact information with the editor at Volleyball Magazine, Aubrey Everett. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Wait, I sat next to the editor of Volleyball Magazine,’” Feinswog recalled. “I sent her a note and said ‘I’m a free agent, can you use me?’ “You guys have never seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but it’s kinda like where he goes, ‘Well, considering I’m desperate and you’re exactly what I need…’ so I picked up with the magazine and wrote for them for four, five six years as a freelance writer.” Despite holding what was basically a monopoly over volleyball coverage, the magazine wasn’t immune to the downsizing of the journalism industry as a whole. The print edition was shrinking, circulation was down, the website was limited. Simply put: It wasn’t going to last long. Feinswog knew this, as did Ed Chan, who had subscribed to the magazine for more than 40 years and had been one of its most reliable freelance photographers. They agreed that, when the magazine hit a certain threshold of pain, it would be willing to sell. They’d be the ones to buy it. “It got to that point,” Chan said. “So I asked if they were interested in selling, and they said yes.” It was the simplest of business negotiations, almost to comical levels. Feinswog was driving down I-10 in Houston. Chan called and said “We can buy volleyball magazine, you want to buy it?” “Ok, sure.” “That was it,” Feinswog said, laughing. “That was our business negotiation. And that’s how we became publishing magnates.” He says this jokingly, but on a relative scale, Volleyball Magazine – since renamed VolleyballMag.com in Feinswog’s and Chan’s ownership of the publication – is without a doubt the most reliable and regular source of news coverage on all things volleyball, be it beach, indoors or otherwise. Their goal was to become the daily digital news source of volleyball, which is exactly what has happened. They cover college women. They cover college men. They cover the pros, to the point that Feinswog watched every single match during the 2016 Rio Olympics. Not just every American match. Every match. “And then I was like, ‘Wait, now college is about to start?’” he said. They have covered the AVP and the NVL and the World Series of Beach Volleyball and p1440 and CBVA and every other iteration of professional volleyball there has been on the beach. They have covered the college game. And while competitor sites such as Volleymob and FloVolley have either shrunk or folded, VolleyballMag has grown and expanded at an impressive, if not staggering, clip. The number of stories that are read through organic Google searches has exploded by 800 percent in the four years they’ve owned it. They’ve hired freelancers to cover whatever the two of them cannot, expanding to juniors and even to Brazil. It was Feinswog who named the very podcast on which he told this story. Yes, SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter was as much Feinswog’s creation as it was Bourne’s and Mewhirter’s. Now a new chapter of VolleyballMag.com begins, as the magazine – “magazine” used loosely here, since there is no longer a print edition – has been acquired by p1440, equipping them with the resources they’ve long needed but haven’t possessed. “It’s amazing really,” Chan said. “It’s kind of like making the transformation from being a garage band to getting a recording contract. We had all these ideas. We wanted to expand to juniors. We wanted to expand to Brazil. Normally we would be ‘OK, how are we going to pay for this? Who are we going to get to buy into this? How are we going to promote it?

Kevin Barnett has never been required to do just about anything he does in his current chapter of life. He doesn’t need to be out there on stadium court, swinging a homemade hammer at miniature volleyballs into a crowd of thousands. He doesn’t need to make art for the Amazon Prime set that becomes his home away from his Redondo Beach home for four months out of the year. He doesn’t need to dress up in gold and do the goofy dizzy bat skits and the shows at the technical timeouts. Just as he hasn’t needed to host a volleyball show called the Net Live on – most, as his and Jeremy Roueche’s joke goes – Mondays for the previous decade. He hasn’t needed to do any of that, though this is only partially true. From a work standpoint, he hasn’t. Amazon never told him to do anything, really – “I can basically do whatever I want,” Barnett said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. But his mind did. Two-time Olympians do not simply retire onto beach chairs and Coronas. And when Barnett retired from professional volleyball in January of 2006, not by choice but by the unrelenting demands of ticked off knees, he grew restless, and fast. He and his wife, Arian, flipped roles. She put her MBA to use and went to work while Kevin watched the kids, two boys then ages two and four. “My life,” he said, “was goldfish and sandwiches.” Which is fine, even idyllic, for a great many people. But Olympic athletes are wired differently. Their entire lives, up to that point, are predicated on solving problems, improving, beating out another guy for the spot – “suiting up with the mindset to go kill somebody,” Barnett said. There were days he’d sit there with the boys and think “‘Bro, I used to be somebody!’” he said. “Internally, I’m like I used to do something that people valued, and now I’m like ‘What am I doing here?’ There’s one night that sticks out. I was back in my former rental house in Redondo, and there was a bunch of moving boxes back there, and the moving boxes paid for my frustrations. I don’t know what the neighbors thought. I was spiking balls on an Olympic court a year ago and now what am I doing?” What he did was get back to work, not on anybody’s else’s terms but his own. What he did was create value where value was needed. His love for volleyball hadn’t waned; the only problem was, well, how in the world do people follow volleyball? If Tom Brady sneezes, ESPN reports on it. But if Reid Priddy sprains an ankle and is put on the bench for a few weeks, nobody knows why. “There was no talk between events, and on the indoor side in particular, the World League is happening every week,” Barnett said. “If you’re watching World League every week, you don’t know why the roster changes happen from one week to the next. You don’t know if somebody’s hurt. You don’t know if somebody’s trying to decide a spot. There’s no chatter.” And so began the next season of Barnett’s life: A season of creating. He, alongside Priddy, Dan Madden, and Chris ‘Geeter’ McGee, created a show, The Net Live, which would report on all things volleyball most Mondays out of the year. Together, they brought an element of news and entertainment that volleyball had never previously enjoyed, while Barnett began honing the skill set that would become his next career – announcing, hosting, analyzing. Creating. “My volleyball acumen and personality gave me a shot at being an analyst,” he said. “That was a hobby, not a career.” The Net Live, in essence, gave him the reps he needed to turn that hobby into a career. For three years, he stuck with it, adding Roueche to the team in 2011 after McGee left for a job with the Lakers and Priddy continued his professional playing career. Those reps, in part, earned him a shot at the London Olympics calling matches, which earned him a two-way with Dan Patrick, which earned him job offers as a studio host discussing high school football and a gig with ESPN. Kevin Barnett had himself a new career, born out of creating something where there was previously a void, creating something that nobody told him he needed to do but he just did it anyway, because that’s how things get done. “Volleyball needed it,” he said of The Net Live. “And I needed it. You have to bring value. That’s what you have to do.” And after 10 years, The Net Live has run its course. Roueche didn’t even intend to be on the show anyway. “I got duped,” he joked on SANDCAST. Priddy had initially asked him to be the sound guy, adding musical elements to the show, occasionally piping in with the one-liner here and there. But then Priddy left and Geeter was gone, and it was just Barnett and Roueche, a creator in his own right as the AVP’s longtime DJ, doing their thing. “I would just make fun of people once in a while,” Roueche said. “Then they all started dropping like flies and then it was just Kevin and I.” Though The Net Live will soon be finished, their work as partners is not. Barnett is the lead Amazon announcer for the AVP’s lives

This SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter is with Kyle Friend and was recorded in Bonaire, where Friend and Mewhirter are competing in a NORCECA. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It almost seemed as if Trevor Crabb couldn’t believe what was coming out of his own mouth, when he recalled his conversation with Casey Patterson following his victory at the Manhattan Beach Open. Crabb’s first AVP win came after seven losses in AVP finals. It came after the beach volleyball world populated the hashtag #NevorTrevor, where some pushed it in their posts seriously and others just jokingly. Everybody knew, of course, that Crabb would get his. One doesn’t simply make seven finals and lose all of the rest to come. Crabb claimed, on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, that there was no added pressure with each passing tournament and no title. What it did do, however, is build up that moment, when he sealed the seam with his right hand and blocked Patterson for the final point of his first win on tour, at the biggest beach volleyball tournament not named The Olympics, no less. The euphoria afterwards was so high, such a rush, in fact, he told Patterson that “I almost wish it didn’t happen, because I know the feeling and what it did so I want that same feeling again. It’s all downhill from here.” So where do we go from here, Trevor? “Just rack ‘em up,” he said. “Tally ‘em up. Win as many as possible.” It is funny, how that first win came. Tri Bourne had broken his hand at the Vienna Major, leaving Crabb not short of options but certainly short of his No. 1 option. He asked the AVP to allow Italian Alex Ranghieri, with whom Crabb is good friends and plays the Manhattan six-man, but they shot it down. He shot a text to Sean Rosenthal, with whom he had made the 2018 Manhattan Open finals, but that got shot down, too. Which left, of all things, a text from Rich Lambourne that went without reply. “Priddy-Crabb on the Pier, 2019?” Lambourne asked Priddy and Crabb in a group text. Nobody replied, though it remained in the backs of their minds. Crabb was going to reach out to Priddy before he did, so when Priddy gave Crabb the call, they were both all in. Didn’t matter if Priddy hadn’t blocked since 2017, for just a single event, or that they had never played together before, or that they had once shared some trash talk and brief rivalry. Crabb knew they could win. “To be honest, I knew it was definitely a possibility,” he said. “It was going to be tough to do but I knew that both of us really just wanted it bad. I’d been to the finals seven times, that was my eighth, lost all seven. Reid’s never made a final yet in his two years so we were both long overdue for that.” That win was more than just a victory for Crabb and Priddy, but a win for the mindset they share: To be the best, you cannot specialize in one element. You must be versatile. You must, as Crabb and Priddy proved, be able to play both sides, both positions. Basically: You just gotta get the job done, from anywhere, anytime, in any condition. And they did. “In order to call yourself a beach volleyball player, you have to be able to side out from anywhere on the court so I kind of took that on me and focused and learned how to side out on the right side,” Crabb said. “It’s a lot more challenging than the left. You have a lot less vision, you have to rely on a lot of things first. It’s going pretty good so far. I can’t say I miss the left at all though. It’s nice to play both sides. I think that’s what separates me from someone else.” And now the next chapter of his career begins. His AVP victory – his first, certainly not the last – is finished. Now it’s time to rack ‘em up, tally ‘em up, build ‘em up to the ultimate crescendo: The 2020 Olympic Games. The one victory he would never wish didn’t happen. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Good luck in your search. You can travel to every tournament, watch every match, pour over film for hours. Good luck finding a moment on a beach volleyball court in which Delaney Knudsen is not smiling. She’ll pop up smiling after losing a point, because what a rally it was. She’ll smile after making an error, because sometimes errors can be funny, you know? She’ll smile after her partner makes an error, because, gosh, what a good idea it was to hit that shot. But don’t allow that joyful demeanor to bely the competitor underneath the 1,000-watt smile and ubiquitous laugh. She’s a winner, Knudsen. Always has been, from the days she practiced with the boys team at Valencia High School to her All-American years at Pepperdine to the career year she’s currently having on the AVP Tour. It’s just not the wins that she lives for. “I think that if you don’t have fun playing this game, then why are you playing this game?” Knudsen said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I don’t really see any other viable reason to be playing professional beach volleyball unless you have fun playing beach volleyball. There’s not enough money in it, there’s not the fame that you’re going to be recognized on the street for playing it. So if you can’t have fun, then why are you doing it? It’s been awesome to play with Katie because she gets that: If it’s not fun, then why are we doing it?” She has a blast with Spieler, truly. And we’ll get to her in a minute, and the friendship that has blossomed out of their love for this game. But Knudsen finds the fun in everything. She’ll laugh wildly at Jess Sykora’s jump-bump kills, and the memory of playing behind Sykora in New York City last season, when they stunned Canadians Melissa Humana-Paredes and Sarah Pavan in the qualifier. She’ll beam when recalling the grit and work ethic of Emily Hartong, with whom she qualified in Seattle a few months ago. But there is something, or dozens and dozens of things, about Spieler that Knudsen loves to her core. It makes sense, too. They grew up playing in the U.S.A. High Performance system together, every other year. They made their first main draws together, in Manhattan Beach of 2014, when they were both teenagers. They’ve got the same mindset, both on the court and off: Let this game, and life, be fun. “Just being able to laugh and have fun and work hard, which are all my favorite parts of the game, she loves those too, so it feels super comfortable to be out there with someone who has the exact same goals as I do,” Knudsen said. “I think that just the ability to push my body and to work really hard is my favorite part. I love getting to the end of a rally where you’re sandy and you’ve grinded out and bunch of one-handed scramble plays, and win or lose, I can’t come out of a rally like that not smiling, because just working and leaving it all on the court even in just one rally is my favorite part. We come out on top of most of those because we love that pressure and love that work that kind of gets on people’s nerves.” Spieler feels the same, too. After finishing 17th in Hermosa Beach earlier this season – a deceptively low finish, as they were the ones who sent Zana Muno and Crissy Jones, eventual semifinalists, into the contender’s bracket with a 21-14, 21-10 win – they met with their coach, who had made an interesting observation from Spieler. Last year she had taken a fifth, this year, 12 spots lower. Yet she was unquestionably happier after this one. “It was interesting to see what someone else could weigh in on our partnership and just the chemistry we had and just the way we played together and that I could kind of help foster that enjoyment of the game for her just as she was doing for me,” Knudsen said. “I would not have expected that we would have finished the season together but couldn’t be any happier that we are.” No, it was not the initial plan to finish as a left-side blocker. For the majority of her professional and college career, Knudsen has been a defender. While she’s always been adept at switching sides, she played on the right for most of 2018 with Sykora. Then came Spieler’s call to play Hermosa, and suddenly Knudsen was taking on a new position, a new side, and a style of play that can only be described as grind the other team into the ground. And then laugh about it. “If you would have told me I would have ended this season as a blocker I probably would have laughed and been really embarrassed because I don’t really consider myself to be a strong blocker,” said Knudsen, who finished AVP Chicago ranked second among all blockers in blocks per set. “I wouldn’t do it any other way, getting the opportunity to play with Katie and grow my game in such a unique way has been an incredible experience.” As much as she’s enjoyed the physical learning curve as a blocker, competing with a new but old partner, Knudsen is particularly enamored with the mental strides she’s made, and is making. “We can be down

Two years ago, maybe it would have worked. Maybe, when Miles Evans put a ball away, looked directly at Reid Priddy and Trevor Crabb, flexed and yelled with everything he had, “C’mon!” it would have done the trick. Thrown Priddy off. It had worked two years ago, from the guy who was now on the same side of the net as him. Crabb, in the semifinals of the Manhattan Beach Open, had famously run his mouth. It did a number on Priddy, then, though he couldn’t fully understand why. He didn’t understand where all that talk was coming from. Hadn’t all their previous interactions been cordial? Polite? Even friendly? Priddy didn’t know, at the time, that was just what Crabb does on the court. He talks trash. Doesn’t matter if you’re out of the qualifier or out of four quads with the indoor national team: You’re going to hear him. Afterwards, Priddy broke it down. “‘Why was I so mad?’” he wondered. “And it was ‘Well, he showed you disrespect,’” Priddy recalled on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “But why should I have the expectation that somebody should respect me? So it was almost really great because I let go of that expectation at all, even if I subconsciously had it. It was probably that moment, that interchange, that I let it all go.” So when Evans buried the ball to close out the first set, and piled a little talk on top of it, Priddy didn’t mind. He’d been there before. He’d learned from it. And then he gave it right back. “From that moment on,” Priddy said, “it was just ‘All right, now we’re in it. Let’s battle.’” Let’s battle. If there are two words that could accurately summarize the mindset of William Reid Priddy for these past 41 years, those may be the ones to do it. He’s a self-proclaimed underdog story, but unlike a number of athletes who like to push that sometimes-false narrative, his is rather genuine. Raised on a steady diet of soccer, Priddy is the son of Ken and Sharon Priddy, who thought it was funny that, after 11 years of soccer, Priddy was going to try volleyball. “They were like, ‘All right, we’ll just come watch. We have nothing to offer,’” Priddy said. He was athletic enough to help Mountain Pointe High in Phoenix, Arizona, to the school’s first state title, in 1995. Still, the sport was so new to the state, in just its second year as a varsity sport, that Priddy was no blue-chip prospect or can’t-miss recruit. He was still the blue-collar kid who had played mostly soccer his entire life. It was enough, however, for LMU to offer him a spot on a team that recruited seven outside hitters and hadn’t yet developed a single All-American. In 2000, Priddy would become that All-American. Years later, after the program was shuttered, he’d become the first volleyball player to enter the LMU Hall of Fame. That was, in the grand scheme of his career, the easy part. At 6-foot-4, even by the standards of the early 2000s, he was undersized for an outside. Now he was set not to compete against of diamonds in the rough at LMU, but against the best in the country for a spot on the national team. It is that exact environment, though, where the kid who wasn’t the biggest, the one relegated to the “sandlot teams” growing up, the one who only got in fights with bullies because he just couldn’t see the bigger kids picking on the smaller ones, thrives. He didn’t spurn the odds but embraced them, clutched them to his chest. “Nobody ever looked at me and was like ‘That guy’s going to be great.’ I was never the blue-chip guy,” Priddy said. “Now I purposefully channel that. A lot of us, we could have these mental lapses of confidence, ‘Oh man, can I do this?’ Once I learned to channel the competitiveness, how I felt about myself was no longer relevant, because a job had to be done, I gotta put this ball away.” Oh, he would put balls away, all right. For 16 years, he’d represent the United States. He’d play in four Olympics, win a gold and a bronze. His tenure with Zenit-Kazan would be so wildly successful, in fact, that it almost felt weird, how expected it was to win. “That was a strange feeling,” he said. It went against everything his underdog upraising had fostered. If the expectation was to win then where did the satisfaction come from? It seemed, at times, that there was no real reward: Win and it’s what you were supposed to do; lose and what just happened? He’s not a fan of expectations, Priddy. Steals not only a lot of the joy of playing this game but from the purpose of it all. “I have tremendous self-belief but I don’t like expectations,” he said. “In my best years in indoor, my mental routine was do whatever I wanted to do. We could play cards on the bus and we’d be betting but there was always a moment in the locker room where it was ‘Ok, now it’s go time.’ “The shift that took place when my generation came in and with all of our coaches, it was very focused. We’re here, so let’s be here. All in. I really love that stuff.” But expectations, from the outside, anyway, are inevi

You know what they say about plans. Some say that when God hears you making plans, he just laughs. Mike Tyson claims that everybody’s got plan, until they get punched in the face. Eric Beranek had plans this year. He was going to get a coach. Play the year with one guy. Do it the right way, finally. Then God chuckled, and Beranek was, proverbially, punched in the face. He began the year well enough, with Curt Toppel. Straight into main draw. But Toppel was, well, “Toppel,” Beranek said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. He said this with a laugh, because Toppel is Toppel. Full-time job. Kids. Just had enough points to make main draw, so why not go out and play? Beranek knew, though, that Toppel wasn’t his full-time guy. Wasn’t into it like he was. So he turned to Marty Lorenz. That, too, went well enough at first. They made main draw in Austin. Played well, too. Only thing was, Beranek had a cyst on his tailbone. Didn’t tell anyone but shew wee, you should have seen that thing. Went to the hospital right after he got home, and the surgery seemed to go ok, until, an hour later, he was sitting in the bathroom, body rejecting everything, plunging into septic shock. He spent a few more days in the hospital. Had to skip New York, and then Seattle, though the latter turned out to be a bit serendipitous. When Lorenz called Beranek to tell him he couldn’t play Seattle, Billy Kolinske phoned no more than two minutes later, asked him to play the Pottstown Rumble, a big money grass tournament just south of Philadelphia. “I still wasn’t quite right,” he said, but he went anyway, and wouldn’t you know it, they made the finals. Won a good bit of cash, too. Maybe this year was looking up. Going to turn around, close on a high. Somewhere, God laughed. Maybe he knew Beranek was about to get punched in the face again. The day before AVP Hermosa, where he was set to partner with Lorenz again, Beranek’s girlfriend broke up with him. Then salt was poured in by Dylan Maarek and Dave Palm, who knocked him out of the final round of the qualifier. “I didn’t play two AVPs, don’t qualify, girlfriend breaks up with me, ‘I’m like, awesome! We’re back. All time low. Sweet!’” Beranek said, laughing. That’s the things about slamming into the bottom: You bounce. And he did. He set up a practice with Corey Glave, just the two of them. He told Beranek that the player he once knew only wanted to win. He needed to become the player who expected to win. “You gotta find that, and you gotta work super hard to get back,” he told him. “Ok,” Beranek said. “Here we go.” Here we go meant eighth seed in the AVP Manhattan Beach qualifier. No longer with Lorenz, Beranek was back with Kolinske, his Pottstown partner. Lorenz almost encouraged the move. He had trouble dialing in Beranek’s set in transition. Kolinske, who’s world-class at the art of transition setting, would be a better partner for him. That’s one plan God didn’t laugh at. Beranek was finished, for the weekend, at least, getting metaphorically punched in the face. They qualified, and then, after dropping their first match to Ed Ratledge and Rafu Rodriguez, they battled back to win a three-setter over Travis Mewhirter and Raffe Paulis. Their legs were toast. Didn’t matter. They rallied, one more time that day, to beat John Hyden and Theo Brunner. With six matches on their legs, they were moving onto Saturday. “Holy shit,” Beranek thought. “This tournament just started.” It would have been funny, for anyone in the stands, to see Beranek’s dad there. He’s made quite the turnaround. He’s his biggest fan now, Mr. Beranek, but a few years ago, to imagine his son competing on a Saturday at the AVP Manhattan Beach Open? No way. He’s got his own Aerospace manufacturing business. His son was set for life. Didn’t matter if he had dropped out of OCC, dismayed by grades and volleyball. Eric had a job. “You’re set!” he pleaded with his headstrong kid. His friends weren’t much different. When Beranek told them he wanted to play beach volleyball professionally, “they looked at me like I was crazy,” he said. “They said ‘Ohhh, you want to be an actor too? You probably have a better shot at that.’ That was a funny and weird thing I struggled with.” So his friends would laugh, and his dad would send his daily offer: Want me to help pay for trade school? Stay in the shop? Want to be a hairdresser? Nope nope nope. He may have dropped out of OCC, but he had his own kind of education in mind. He skipped work one day and biked down to the strand to find Holly McPeak. He asked if she knew of any coaching opportunities available, and she said no, but there’s this guy, always dressed in Pepperdine gear. Name’s Marcio Sicoli. He’d be down at 15th street tomorrow morning. Go find him. So he skipped work again, found Sicoli, and for the next four months, became the world’s most dedicated ball shagger. From 8-10, he’d be with Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross, and from 10-12 he’d work wit

In 2016, Brandie Wilkerson saw everything there was to see, up close and in person. She saw the ceremonies. The athletes, both beach volleyball and otherwise. She practiced on stadium court with the women. She practiced against the men. An alternate for the 2016 Rio Games with Melissa Humana-Paredes, she did just about everything all of the other beach players were there to do, save for compete and one other element of being a participant of the Olympic Games. She didn’t go to the Athletes Village. Not yet. “A part of me didn’t want to stay in the village, because I wanted to earn it,” Wilkerson said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “So I was like ‘I’m going to get there myself one day.’” Get there herself? Wasn’t this the 24-year-old who had only picked up beach volleyball less than five years ago? The one who was almost as likely to play rugby in college as she was volleyball? Anybody who hadn’t yet heard of Wilkerson may have been able to take that comment and shelve it into the legions of other players who make similar proclamations but don’t follow up. Yet this was not an athlete who belongs in a class of anyone else. Brandie Wilkerson is a class of her own. This was the daughter of Herb and Stephanie Wilkerson, the former an NBA draft pick of the Cleveland Cavaliers and, the latter a runner for Switzerland. A five-sport athlete in high school, winner of four volleyball championships and one in rugby. What would be one more sport for her? Actually, it was, shockingly, to Wilkerson, a bit difficult, though that only raised the appeal. For so long, sports had come so easy. Here was one that presented a worthy challenge. “Playing beach, it was ‘Whoa, there’s a lot more going on here,’” Wilkerson said. “I was attracted to that challenge, and with any competitive athlete, you just want to prove to yourself that you can do it.” She hit the NORCECAs first, 19 in all from 2013-2016, adding 15 FIVBs, making seven main draws. And then the breakthrough. The team for whom her and Humana-Paredes had been the alternates in Rio, Sarah Pavan and Heather Bansley, split. Pavan grabbed Humana-Paredes. Bansley, who had been named the best defender in the world, scooped Wilkerson. Gone were the qualifiers and in was an entire season of top-10 finishes, including a fifth at the Vienna Major. Her prize money tripled, her world ranking improving 90 spots, to 20th. “I just kept raising the bar and I looked up and it’s ‘Oh, I’m doing this full-time right now.’ I was pretty surprised two years ago, when I was stable, I never thought I would be here, and that’s kind of my whole theme with beach volleyball is that I never pictured myself here,” Wilkerson said. “I just knew I wanted to challenge myself and accomplish a goal and it was little goal, little goal, little goal, and the next thing you know, your goal is the Olympics, and it’s like ‘When did we get here?’” By the end of 2018, her and Bansley would be ranked No. 1 in the world. They’d win tournaments in Itapema, San Jose, Las Vegas, Chetumal. Wilkerson would be named the best blocker in the world. Suddenly a goal of reaching the Olympics that could have seemed like a stretch at first now looks more like an inevitability. “I feel extremely blessed,” she said. “I’ve had times where I was debating switching countries because it’s so difficult to be successful in Canada and I had so many other interests I could make a living doing. I wanted to impact the environment, and I can’t do that just playing sports. But I feel like if I have an opportunity to be young and physical and have those chances so many people don’t, I’d be silly to give it up and grow old doing the other things.” There’s only one way into the Athletes’ Village, after all, and it isn’t by doing other things. But still, there is work to be done, an entire season to be played before Tokyo 2020. “I haven’t proven myself consistently, which I think is really the epitome of being the best,” she said. “I think I can get there, and that’s my goal. Watching these people dominate and seeing that it can be done, it’s like ‘Well I want to do that.’” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anna Collier is sitting on Tri Bourne’s couch, and she is – if you can believe it – relaxed. She hasn’t been to the beach in months, aside from when she rides her bike down the strand. She’s getting facials, going to the spa. Reconnecting with old friends. Getting fit. “Just call me Soccer Mom Anna Collier,” she said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. For anyone who knows, or has known, Collier, this is a near-impossible thing to imagine. For the past four decades, Collier hasn’t had time for facials. Trips to the spa. Relax? How can you relax when your day job, for just shy of 40 years, included acting as the Athletic Director, compliance office and volleyball coach at Santa Monica College? Most coaches take the summers off, do they? Not Collier. That was for FIVB, for AVP, for juniors. Non-stop the coaching cycle went, around and around and around. Until, on June 6, it came to a halt. Collier announced her retirement from USC, where she had built not only a beach program, the first of its kind, but had played an integral role in building beach volleyball as a sport at the collegiate level. “It was time,” she said. There is never any one reason for such a monumental decision in one’s life. But as those reasons accumulate over the course of 40-plus years, sometimes it takes one gentle nudge, from a former protégé, to tip you over the edge. That came, in part, from Misty May-Treanor, whom Collier had once coached. “When,” May-Treanor wondered, “are you going to have won enough?” On Collier’s fingers, figuratively, were seven National Championship rings at USC. On her resume were 206 wins and only 38 losses at SC. To her name is virtually every coaching record one can imagine: 62 consecutive wins, an NCAA recore; two-time Coach of the Year; first head coach to reach 100 wins, and 150, and 200. Enough victories over rival UCLA for the rest of the university to be happy. The more Collier thought about it, the easier it became for her to admit, both to herself and to the public, that “it’s time.” And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she slept like a rock. No longer was her mind whirring over recruiting – Who to call, when to call them, who to look for – or how she could tinker with this lineup or that partnership. Her biggest decision, suddenly, was: “Do I take my bike this way, or that way?” And she loves it. “I haven’t had a summer off in a long time,” she said. “This is literally the first summer I’ve had off in four decades.” What she leaves behind is a legacy and coaching epoch that will be labeled as iconic. She, alongside similarly Hall of Fame caliber coaches such as Nina Matthies at Pepperdine, helped usher in an entirely new era of beach volleyball, growing the college game into the fastest growing sport in NCAA history. And it all began with crashing a golf cart. In 2013, Sara Hughes was one of the best indoor players in the country. A four-year starter at Mater Dei, an athletics powerhouse in Santa Ana, Hughes was named team MVP in three consecutive seasons, the Female Athlete of the Year. All-American. All-League. All-Everything. And Anna Collier had a shot. Hughes had grown up playing sand in Huntington Beach. When she was touring schools, she made a firm rule that it needed to have a beach program, which less than 20 in the country did when she was making her decision. USC had launched its program in 2012, with only one scholarship athlete, Geena Urango. Collier had no idea if she could even offer any others, but this was Sara Hughes. She’d find a way. There was only one problem: Her recruiting trip was a complete disaster. Collier loaded up Hughes and her father, Rory, in then-indoor coach Mick Haley’s golf cart, and off they went, driving around campus, which Collier was hardly any more familiar with than Hughes was. She was still working at Santa Monica College at the time, and hadn’t had much availability to learn USC’s campus outside of anything volleyball related. So they toured, and Collier “just made stuff up,” about the buildings, making a mental footnote to actually learn a thing or two. But she can’t make up the next part, about Collier coming to a structure of arches on campus – and crashing the golf cart directly into them. “She walks out the door and I look to my assistant and I’m like ‘We’ll never see her again. That’s it. We’re done,’” Collier said. She’s able to laugh about it now, because, as you know by this point, Hughes became a Trojan, launching one of the most dominant four years in all of college sports. And it wasn’t just Hughes. With five more scholarships than had been originally budgeted, a rapid increase thanks to “an anonymous tip,” Collier said, laughing a surreptitious laugh, she locked in Kelly Claes, Allie Wheeler, Nicolette Martin. Born was the indomitable power that would become USC beach volleyball. Now that power is in the hands of Dain Blanton, who coached under Collier for four seasons as the volunteer ass

It almost didn’t happen. The Cinderella run. The upsets over the 16, the four, the eight, the 22. The AVP semifinal that would be host to the highest seed – Q47 – in the tour’s history. The 8-3 jump Zana Muno and Crissy Jones would get on top-seeded Betsi Flint and Emily Day, on stadium court, on Sunday. All of that was nearly lost before any of it even got started. Towards the end of Jones’ and Muno’s fourth and final qualifier match for AVP Hermosa, Jones felt a cramp coming on, compiled by an awkward landing on her knee. They finished the match, of course. By that point, they’d come to far not to, and it was over quickly enough: 21-13, 21-7 over Lara Dykstra and Kim Smith, who were battling through injuries of their own. In that moment, they had done everything they had come to do. They qualified on the AVP Tour, something that eluded them in their only other professional event, in Seattle, where they fell in the third round to Janelle Allen and Kerri Schuh. They cried on the way home to the airport that weekend. “At the same time,” Jones said, “we were both really unsure with what we were capable of doing.” Both of them had proven more than talented enough indoors – Muno at UCLA, Jones at Washington -- to command a contract, with a salary, validation, stability, overseas. Their beach journey, at that point, had been the exact antithesis. Twice they had bought flights, booked hotels for qualifiers. Twice, in Austin and then New York, they didn’t get into the qualifier because of a lack of points. “I was like ‘Oh my God, this is so hard,’” Muno said, laughing. She’s able to laugh now, in retrospect. It’s easier to look in the rearview and smile when there’s a third place in that same rearview. They drew lessons from each, Seattle in particular. For four years at UCLA, Muno had been the favorite in virtually every match she played, finishing a brilliant career with two national championships, scoring the final point of the match that would seal the second. Now the role was flipped: Muno and Jones, a standout on court one at Cal Poly, which also enjoyed a historic season, were the underdogs, a role they embraced. “We came into Hermosa and said ‘Ok, this is our time to attack it and we’re going to go through a qualifier again and just stay present with every match we played,’” Jones said. So when they qualified, and there would be no teary exits, that was it. “Once you’re out of the qualifier you can breathe, you’re so free,” Muno said. “Once you’re in the main draw, now you have nothing to lose, you can play free.” Problem was: They almost didn’t play at all. Jones called Muno on their way to the site, told her that her knee was hurting pretty bad. She might not be able to do it. Muno, on the other end of the phone, put on a supportive look: “I’m like, ‘It’s ok, you gotta take care of yourself,’” she said, laughing – always laughing – again. Meanwhile: “I’m sobbing.” They figured they’d give it a try anyway. They told AVP tournament director Jeff Conover to pull them off of stadium court. Nobody wants to see a mid-match forfeit. So he put them on court five, and against Katie Spieler and Delaney Knudsen, a team they had beaten weeks earlier in the Santa Barbara Open, they lost 21-14, 21-10. It was the best thing that could have happened. In a 24-team draw, as Hermosa is, if you win your first round, you play almost immediately after. But if you win your first and lose your second, on minimal rest, you wind up in the exact same spot as if you had lost your first. So instead of playing a second match on hardly any rest, Muno and Jones were able to take six, seven hours off their feet. Put the legs up. Recover, finally. And then, match by match, the story of the weekend was written: a 15-10 third-set win over fellow collegians Morgan Martin (Hawai’i) and Iya Lindahl (Cal), a sweep of Meghan Mannari and Taylor Nyquist, another sweep of Brittany Hochevar and Maria Clara Salgado, a three-set win over Kim DiCello and Kelly Reeves, a thrilling three-set quarterfinal over wunderkinds Delaynie Maple and Megan Kraft. With each win, Jones would wonder to herself, “Is this really happening?” “I think the experience in general, because it was so unexpected, and because of all the adversity we had gone through to get there, we were so grateful for everything that happened and seeing all these people who had been kicking butt on tour, just giving it our best shot,” Jones said. They did that Sunday, too, but in their eleventh match, their legs finally gave in. The 8-3 lead they established on Flint and Day was flipped into a 14-21 loss. A valiant comeback in the second was thwarted. Flint and Day would go on to win. Muno would call her brother, JJ, a minor league baseball player who is currently in the Chicago White Sox system. He asked her what happened, and she said her legs just didn’t have anything left in the tank, a feeling he’s more than familiar with. Next week, though, in Manhattan Beach, they’ll have four less mat

The first notes on the Book of Andy Benesh came a little less than a year ago, about a six-hour drive north of Hermosa Beach. Adam Roberts was there to watch Benesh’s second-round match. Playing in just his second AVP qualifier, with little points to his name, Benesh came in as the 33 seed, meaning, after a pigtail round, he, with Cole Fiers, had top-seeded Myles Muagututia and Kyle Friend. “I saw him serve a ball, get to the net, get four blocks in a row, get an ace, and I was like ‘Who is this kid? Let’s see if he can set,’” Adam Roberts, Benesh’s current partner, said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Standard big guy stuff, right? They serve Cole and he puts up a juicy set and I’m like ‘Man! What is his name? What is his number? I’m gonna tuck that one away.’” While Roberts had it tucked away, Benesh quietly made a few main draws. He wound up qualifying in San Francisco, upsetting Friend and Muagututia, 24-22, 21-17, and winning his next two matches. Then he and Fiers did it again in Hermosa. It was an auspicious start for Benesh’s beach career, one that really only began in earnest a few months prior to San Francisco. He had been an indoor kid, for the most part, growing up. Raised in Palos Verdes, he was named First Team All-American, put on the VolleyballMag.com Fab 50 list, All-Area, All-League, All-Everything. Those accolades earned him a spot as a middle at USC, where he started all 26 matches as a freshman, falling just shy of the Trojan hitting percentage record. So went the next three years at USC, where he continued to excel, eventually being named captain as a senior. But the only beach experience he had was messing around on the fours courts at 16th street. Which brings us back to Roberts’ key question for all big men: Could the kid set? Prior to AVP Huntington, Roberts set up a four-team practice, Benesh being one of the teams. There it was confirmed: Benesh could indeed put up a set, and after both failed to qualify in Huntington, both were looking for partners in Austin. Roberts turned back the clock to that day in San Francisco. Yes, Benesh would be quite the option. Their first two tournaments, though, they fell short. A few quirky plays in the third set of the final round of the AVP Austin qualifier kept them out of main draw. Then came a first-round exit in New York and all of a sudden doubt began creeping in. “You look at it, and it’s ‘Are we a good team or are we not?’ We’re kinda looking at it like ‘Maybe we’re not that good’ but I was thinking ‘Man, I really think we’re a good team,’” Roberts said. “Even if you look at the results, losing the round to get in, lose first round, lose first round, maybe they’re not that good, but I just kept thinking we really have something special here. To me, it doesn’t make sense when guys make lateral moves mid-season. I just kept thinking: I think we’re a good team, I think we’re a good team.” The past few months, they’ve proved as much. They flew from New York and directly into an AVP Next Gold Series in Colorado, winning the tournament and, subsequently, a bid into the Manhattan Beach Open main draw. In Hermosa, they qualified for their first main draw, marking Benesh’s first in a year and Roberts’ first since Chicago of 2017 with – here’s a good beach volleyball trivia tidbit – Mark Burik. They were ecstatic, to be sure. But not satisfied. Not yet. “I texted Adam Thursday night and said ‘We’re not done yet,’” Benesh said. “I’m not just here to go 0-2 in the main draw. I’m trying to win some matches, see if we can compete at that level.” Oh, they competed all right. They came out and won their first main draw match 21-17, 21-11, setting up a match with fourth-seeded Billy Allen and Stafford Slick. And on a packed stadium court, they delivered the first major upset of the tournament, 23-21, 18-21, 15-11. A day later, they’d deliver another, eliminating seventh-seeded Chase Frishman and Avery Drost, 15-21, 21-18, 15-13. “Obviously coming out of the qualifier we don’t have that opportunity every tournament,” Benesh said of upsetting main draw teams. “So when you do you want to take advantage of it. I don’t think there was a team in the draw that we were intimidated by.” They’ll be back in the main draw again, in Manhattan Beach, now with a seventh-place finish under their belt, and a God-blessed day of rest prior to the tournament. “It’s nice. It’s very nice,” Roberts said. “It kind of gives us a chance to really focus on a main draw. That extra day of rest is going to be very useful.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It was an otherwise innocuous Monday when the Canadian beach volleyball community reached and unleashed its peak fury which, because it’s Canada, really wasn’t much fury at all. Tri Bourne had put up a picture of Chaim Schalk. No, no. Not just Chaim Schalk. “American Chaim Schalk,” Bourne put on Instagram. For nearly a decade, Schalk had represented Canada on the beach. He had been an Olympian for Canada on the beach. He had made international podiums for Canada on the beach. Raised in Red Deer, Alberta, with a habit of punctuating sentences with ‘eh?’ and a humility and affability that you just don’t find much in Southern California, Schalk was, by all accounts, Canadian to the core. So what was he doing, on Monday, May 6, wearing a USA Volleyball shirt, taking pictures, doing promos, looking like, well, “American Chaim Schalk”? Just running out the clock until his international volleyball purgatory is over. “I got a lot of messages on that,” Schalk said of Bourne’s post of Schalk at USA Volleyball’s Media Day. “A lot of people still didn’t know. They were like ‘What does this mean? Why do you have a USA shirt on? This is messed up!’” At the end of the 2017 FIVB season, Schalk announced that he would be making the transfer from Canada to the United States, competing for the Yanks instead of the Leafs. It meant a hefty fee and a two-year hiatus on the world tour, but it also meant access to USAV’s resources, the ability to live and compete and train full-time in Southern California, the opportunity to represent arguably the biggest powerhouse beach volleyball nation on the planet. And, while nobody wants to lose two years of their international careers, in what could be their prime, the timing was perfect for Schalk. In May, Schalk’s wife, Lane Carico, also a professional beach player, gave birth to their daughter, Koa. With Schalk unable to compete around the globe, he’s been able to spend time at home, helping with Carico, helping with Koa, witnessing the miraculous growth that is the first few months of a child’s life. “It’s been a blur the past couple months with the baby, just helping out as much as I can. It’s been so nice to be home and help out with Lane and it’s been so nice with the AVPs because I take off Thursday and then I’ll be back Sunday night,” Schalk said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “It’s been a perfect time to have a kid because I haven’t felt like I needed to be away and if I was away for a couple weeks that would be a little tougher for right now.” This is not to say that Schalk doesn’t get antsy. He watched World Championships in Hamburg. He watched the Gstaad Major. They’re his two favorite stops on tour. He saw the Instagram posts, the ones athletes just cannot help but putting up – cups of coffee in the mountains, the stunning green of Gstaad, the mountain biking, the crowds, the stadiums. “Everyone just has to do their water photo and the morning coffee, ‘Not a bad place to wake up to,’” Schalk said, shaking his head. “C’mon guys! That makes me itch a little bit.” In November, he can alas scratch that itch, getting back out onto the world tour, representing a different set of colors, a different flag, a different federation. So, Canada beach volleyball nation, soon enough, you’ll have to accept this simple reality. He’s not just Chaim Schalk anymore. He’s American Chaim Schalk. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The most difficult transition of Ryan Doherty’s new partnership, from John Hyden to Miles Evans, might not be the difference in playing style or personality or skill level or experience or energy level or setting preferences or serving or any of the other obvious tangibles that can make partner switching a sometimes-difficult ordeal. It might just be the high five. We joke, kind of, sort of. Because we’re also serious, kind of, sort of. “Our first couple times practicing, Miles kept coming in for the high five, and Hyden – we never high-fived,” Doherty said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Miles would get an ace and I’d point and he’d be right behind me saying ‘Yeah! Let’s do this!’ “This is 9 a.m. on a Tuesday morning so I gotta get used to this puppy dog energy. I’m looking forward to it.” This is the next chapter of Ryan Doherty’s career, one that is nominated for the unofficial award of Most Likely to be Made Into a Movie. Since moving on from a professional baseball career that was beginning to flat line and making the cross-country trek to California, Doherty’s path was been wonderfully circuitous and, by all means, remarkably successful. His list of partners, despite not having a volleyball background, aside from pickup games against high schoolers in South Carolina and a few Great American Volleyball events in New Jersey, is a who’s who of the best American defenders of this generation. “I have been lucky enough to play with a murderer’s row of partners, some of the best defenders in the U.S,” Doherty said. “It started with Casey Patterson, Todd Rogers, Nick Lucena, Johnny Mayer, John Hyden, back to John Mayer, Billy Allen, and then John Hyden. I was always the younger one. As someone who tries to teach and I think I know a little bit about the game I think it might be fun to help out Miles a little bit, see if I can maybe guide him a little bit.” That group has combined for more than 150 professional wins and three Olympic appearances, five if you include Hyden’s two Olympics with the indoor national team in 1996 and 2000. That level was never Doherty’s goal. He’s not much of a goal guy. He’s always, simply, wanted to become the best beach volleyball player he can be, a path on which he’s still traveling. Now he’s playing a different role, from student and sponge, soaking up the knowledge of those who have been able to dispense it, to doing the same for the next generation of defenders, one who has a legitimate shot at making that Olympic level in the years to come. “He could easily move into that great category,” Bourne said, a sentiment with which Doherty agreed. “I’ve seen Miles play for a couple years,” Doherty said. “He’s getting better and better and I don’t know how he’s going to try to turn that corner in terms of being a good player into a great one, one of the top players in the country. His skills are there, it’s just the experience, the comfort of being at the top level. I think with his natural abilities being really physical and my calm demeanor being able to bring him down when he gets a little too ramped up, I think that might help us out a bit.” The change, in general, will likely help them both. Evans hasn’t competed in an AVP main draw since Huntington of 2016. Now, he’s straight into main with Doherty. Doherty, meanwhile, admitted this year hasn’t been his finest. Sometimes a change, not begat out of ill will but out of a need for something different, is exactly the thing. “I haven’t been playing at a very high level, so it’s one of those things where if you’re not playing really well and you’re kinda miserable, what’s the point?” Doherty said. “Let’s try to do something different, mix it up. I have no ill feelings. I hope [Hyden] keeps dominating till he’s 50 years old. I figured I’d try something new.” And so, in Evans, he is. And the next chapter of the fascinating book that is the life of Ryan Doherty begins. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It wasn’t exactly an audacious start, was it? September 12, 2016. The first match of Melissa Humana-Paredes’ and Sarah Pavan’s partnership: A country quota against Brandie Wilkerson and – who else? – Pavan’s former partner, Heather Bansley, in Toronto, no less, the training center for the Canadian national team, where Pavan has played something of a revolutionary role. She did not, however, play that role on September 12 of 2016. On that day, her and Humana-Paredes, an affable young defender of 23 years at the time, lost, 21-23, 13-21. They wondered, almost incredulously, if they could feel such an emotion at the time, why a reporter had reminded them of that loss. He had reminded them in the moments after they had won the World Championship. It was Canada’s first. A momentous achievement not just for two individuals carving out history in a sport rich in it, but for a nation that is rapidly creating a foothold in a space traditionally dominated by countries south of the Canadian border. “Why would you remind us of that?” they wondered, simultaneously. Because it makes the narrative that much sweeter, the process that much more real. There is no relating to a story with a smooth beginning, steep curve in the middle and a World Championship at the end. They know it, too, even if they didn’t want to relive that country quota loss quite so soon after reaching a new pinnacle for Canadian beach volleyball. “Every failure,” Pavan said, “has led to this moment. Nobody sees the tough moments.” What most see is that Humana-Paredes and Pavan are currently doing for Canada, on their on relative scale, what Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May Treanor once did for the United States: They’re writing their own country’s history. It was at Gstaad, where the best players in the world are currently competing, a year ago where Pavan and Humana-Paredes claimed Canada’s first major title. Didn’t even lose a match, those Canadians, dethroning the countries that laid the foundation of beach volleyball’s traditional powers that be: 21-15, 21-15 over the United States, 14-21, 21-12, 15-13 over Brazil, 21-17, 12-21, 17-15 over Germany. Only months before that, they had become the first Canadian team to win a Commonwealth Games. It was last June when Humana-Paredes said, on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, that “we have so much more that we need to improve on and that we can improve on and I think our potential – it seems limitless right now." Prophetic words. It hasn’t all been pretty, and they knew it wouldn’t. Pavan knew she was taking a chance on Humana-Paredes then, who had been relatively unproven at the time. She knew the potential upside, an upside that is now paying dividends in the form of history, of major titles, of World Championships. “It happened much quicker than either of us expected,” Pavan said on that episode a year ago, and those same words ring true a year later. “It’s nice to see the grit and the fire of not being satisfied with making one semifinal or one podium or whatever.” And so they’ll continue to remain unsatisfied. So long as reporters continue to remind them of their humble beginnings, if not only to show them just how far they’ve come. “The things we have overcome this week, last week, this year, in the last two years, three years and now we’re world champions,” Humana-Paredes said. “I have no words.” No need for words when you have history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It was the running joke in the player’s tent of AVP New York: Nobody really wanted to play any of the teams on the bracket. Of the seven teams Tim Bomgren would end up playing in New York, five included Olympians, and the other two were teams currently pushing for Tokyo 2020. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Bomgren said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “You look at the bracket and you’re like ‘Ok, I’m not really happy about playing any of these teams.’ It’s just one of those.” Bomgren and his new partner, Troy Field, the social media maven with the big jumps and the pink hat, can officially be labeled as one of those teams nobody would particularly enjoy playing, in large part because of talent, but also because balls that should go down just don’t, as if they’ve got the remote control to gravity and have found a way to keep Wilson off the sand for just a tad longer. “Team never say die,” Camryn Irwin labeled them on the Amazon Prime livestream of New York, where Field and Bomgren produced highlights of viral potential like most teams produce regular side outs. “We both know we’re going to be as scrappy as we possibly can and we’re just going to work our tails off,” Bomgren said. “We might not be the smoothest side out players, we might not be the best setters, we might not be the best servers, but we’re going to scratch and claw our way to get whatever points we can. So far it’s worked out pretty well.” Don’t listen to him. Not even for a second. That’s the Minnesotan in him. By now you know Bomgren’s story: Minnesota born and raised, playing every sport there is to play. Picked up volleyball in college but was so darn athletic it didn’t matter he had a late start. Not all that much different from his partner, really. Field, too, had a late introduction to the sport and initially, sure, but by now both are deeply skilled enough that it’s the combination of a scrappiness begat from an initial need for it blended with a bona fide beach skill set that makes them one of the most exciting teams to watch. And one of the most consistently successful teams on tour. Without a single competitive match under their belt, they made the semifinals in Huntington Beach. They won their first match over Sean Rosenthal and Ricardo Santos, two Mount Rushmore-worthy candidates for their respective countries. They beat champs in Ed Ratledge and Rafu Rodriguez, and future Seattle winners Jeremy Casebeer and Chaim Schalk. Any thoughts of it being a honeymoon phase were quickly silenced when they did the same thing the following tournament in Austin, then slugged their way through the gauntlet of New York, where they made their first final, falling to Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena but not before gifting the Amazon Prime staff a coterie of highlights for the internet to enjoy. “Both him and I just love the game and love the competition,” Bomgren said. “Getting along with your partner and having fun with your partner is so key. I hope you guys can tell it, but Troy and I are having an absolute blast out there. It’s making some of our success feel that much easier because we’re having so much fun.” He still feels like an underdog, Bomgren. Partly because he’s still in Minnesota. Partly because, I mean, what the hell, he’s not shooting for the Olympics. Yet here he is anyway, grinding through matches against the world’s elite. He acknowledges that he knows he belongs, that it doesn’t really matter to him if he has an armada of coaches pounding balls at him five days a week. He just doesn’t need that many reps. And besides, he’s got his son, Brody, an affable two-year-old who wants nothing more than to play volley in the basement with dad after work. Not the most traditional program, but when has Bomgren’s success been traditional, anyway? “One of the things that’s eye-opening is when you finally see the success,” he said. “Getting that success is never easy. You have to work your tail off, and that’s kind of my game. I’m not the best passer, not the best setter, not the best hitter, but controlling the things I can control has been huge for me and I’m doing that better than I have before and compiling those things together has allowed me to play at the top level and make it to where I want to be. I’m ready to really play at the top level.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

With one, final Jeremy Casebeer – or Uncle Jer Bear, as he was known at Lake Sammamish – swing in Seattle, the AVP officially reached the midpoint of the 2019 season. It has, by any measure, been a rollicking success. Every event has been home to packed stadiums and sold out VIP areas and flowing beer gardens. Most importantly, it’s been home to excellent beach volleyball. Upsets have become the norm this season, a sign that the field, on both the men’s and the women’s side, is deepening. Qualifier teams have upset the one seed in the men and the women. Three different teams have won a men’s title and three different have won a women’s title. Two of those victors on the women’s end – Karissa Cook and Jace Pardon, Kelley Larsen and Emily Stockman – have been new winners, while one, Uncle Jer Bear and Chaim Schalk, has been a first-timer for the men. It’s made for a fun season to watch for fans, one in which new faces are emerging, older ones are being pushed, and people are coming out in droves to see it. On SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, the hosts break down the mid-season AVP awards. MVP Men’s: Taylor Crabb Few have ever looked so indifferent when being introduced in an AVP final. Yet there Taylor Crabb sits, legs crossed, paying attention to seemingly everything but his name being called to play an AVP final. Such is the state of mind when you expect to be there, and it’s easy to see why Crabb does, indeed, expect to be there. Crabb and Gibb won the first two events of the season, in Huntington Beach and Austin, making it three straight when dating it back to Chicago of 2018. In the past two seasons, they’ve made eight finals in 10 events, not including the Hawai’i Invitational. Much of this is due, yes, to Gibb, but Crabb is playing at a level unmatchedon the AVP this season. In the running: Phil Dalhausser, Nick Lucena, Jake Gibb, Jeremy Casebeer Women’s: April Ross In discussing Ross, Bourne wondered when the last time the 37-year-old wasn’t only the best player in the country, but in the world. She has played two AVPs this season and won both. Her and Alix Klineman have played six FIVBs and won two. As with Crabb, much of the credit goes to Klineman’s 6-foot-4 presence at the net, but Ross is the engine, fueled by a serve that has earned her FIVB’s Best Server five times since 2013, and an all-around game that has awarded her four AVP MVP’s since the same year. In the running: Alix Kineman, Sarah Sponcil, Betsi Flint, Emily Day Rookie of the Year Men’s: Paul Lotman Of the many skills, both tangible and not, you cannot teach in beach volleyball, one is this: Being an Olympian. Lotman has that distinction, and it’s beginning to show, as his indoor game translates to the beach. A year ago, Lotman showed glimpses of his beach potential in a titanic serve and the physicality that earned him a spot on the 2012 Olympic team. But there were a few skills that needed grooming. Consider them groomed. Lotman and Gabe Ospina have qualified for three straight events, all small draws, and became just the second 16-seed to beat a one in AVP history, topping Gibb and Crabb in Austin. They don’t seem to be slowing, either. Now, with enough points to likely get them straight into Hermosa and Manhattan, they won’t have qualifier legs, but fresh ones prepared to make a move deeper into main. In the running: Gabe Ospina, Kyle Friend, David Lee Women’s: Terese Cannon Truth be told, I don’t know whether Cannon is still, technically, considered a rookie, because she’s made a handful of main draws prior to this season. But if she’s eligible, Cannon has a runaway case for Rookie of the Year. She took third in Austin – she skipped Huntington Beach for NCAA Championships – to begin the year and has taken a ninth and seventh since. Her and Irene Pollock have enough points where they’ll be in main draw for the remainder of the year, making Cannon the early, and heavy, favorite to win. In the running: Kim Hildreth, Sarah Schermerhorn, Falyn Fonoimoana, Emily Hartong Breakthrough Athlete Men’s: Troy Field Field’s rise on the AVP, both as a player and personality, has been meteoric. He has gone, in the span of two years, as that qualifier guy wearing a pink hat who could jump really high to a bona fide contender to winning AVPs. In four events this season, he and Tim Bomgren have made three Sundays, including a final, Field’s first, in New York City. With Hermosa and Manhattan expected to be a tad watered down, with teams skipping for Olympic qualifiers, odds are that Field and Bomgren will be back in the finals soon enough. In the running: Tim Bomgren, Chase Budinger, Jeremy Casebeer, Chaim Schalk Women’s: Jace Pardon A few weeks prior to Huntington Beach, Pardon wasn’t sure who she was going to play with. She had popped around with a few different partners in 2018, never really finding a consistent rhythm with any, one player. Then Karissa Cook freed up, and the rest, you could say, is history in th

I’ve always been one for mythology. I loved reading the tales of Zeus and Poseidon, Hades and Hermes, Athena and even those of the Norse orient, Thor and Loki and Odin. One of my favorites has always been the myth of the Phoenix, that stunning bird that never really dies. It burns, sometimes spectacularly in in a show of flames and combustion, sometimes in a simple and subtle decomposition. Either way, the end result is invariable: From its own ashes, it rises again. I think that’s beautiful. And so the beach volleyball world must do the same. This past week we, as a whole, as a single community with a single, beating heart, have been reduced to ashes. The death of Eric Zaun has impacted the entirety of the AVP and those well beyond. In Virginia Beach, there was a moment of silence before an AVP Next Gold Series. Folks from the snow volleyball world expressed their condolences. The FIVB, too. The Pottstown Rumble, site of one of Zaun’s most famous and epic and wonderful temper tantrums, will honor the kid who once took a red-eye after Seattle to play on zero sleep but put down no small amount of cash on a match anyway. Everywhere you look, the beach world is rising. It is rising in its own unique way. Donald Sun reached out to every player on the AVP, expressing his condolences, encouraging players to reach out of there was anything the AVP can do to help its own. To help them rise. We at SANDCAST are doing the same. We’re replaying Zaun’s episode this week. Maybe it will help some. Maybe it won’t. The hope is that it can provide, if just for one, that first stirring amid the ashes, that maybe it can begin to lay the foundation to the first step in recovering. Not moving on, no. But moving up. Onward. Rising. This is not a good thing that has happened but good will come of this. I am sure of it. I am sure of it because I’ve already seen it. I’ve seen it in such abundance in only a week that it’s a wonder, should this spirit, this Zaunian spirit of an unbridled zest for life and fun and mischief carry on, what incredible things could come of this. Already, Ed Ratledge is pondering how the beach community can make an award, the Eric Zaun Grinder Award. Something to do with the van, Zaun’s hysterical but wonderful abode for a few years. He doesn’t know just yet. He doesn’t have to. Point it: It will be something good. Something new. That, above all, is what I love so much about the myth of the Phoenix. It’s never created entirely new, but from the ashes of its predecessor. It never loses pieces of itself but instead uses them to grow into something brighter than its previous self. And so, at AVP Seattle, at Pottstown, the beach volleyball world recovers from the previous version of itself this week, and all those that will follow. This week, the community rises together. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It seems an idyllic existence, to be a professional beach volleyball player. Travel the world. Explore the planet’s most breathtaking beaches. See everything there is to see, both inland and coastal. Play in front of thousands of adoring fans. Sign autographs. Take pictures. Live the life Instagram would love you to have. That’s all true, yes. Tri Bourne gets to travel the world. He gets to explore the planet’s most breathtaking beaches, eat all the world’s best and unique foods. He gets to see everything there is to see. Including 2 a.m. in Jinjiang, China. A world away from his family, his pregnant wife, running on two hours of sleep per night for the previous few nights, having just spent the previous 45 hours on planes and buses and shuttles, crammed into spaces not made for abnormally large men who need to use their bodies to make a living. That, and Bourne’s body has been notoriously rebellious these past two years, with an autoimmune disease that has made traveling the world to play a sport with exceptionally high demands on the body that much more stressful. Most don’t recognize that side of the sport. Bourne, back full-time on the world tour for the first time since 2016, is again feeling its effects. “I was up at 2 multiple times,” he said of his time at the Jinjiang four-star, where he and Trevor Crabb finished fourth. “Dude, just freaking lay there. It’s brutal. We kept losing time. We kept going the same direction without going back, so we were going around the world and you had to adjust. So when we got used to it being 7 a.m., we had to adjust.” Adjusting is the name of the game for professional beach volleyball players. As Kerri Walsh Jennings said from Ostrava, the tournament following Jinjiang – where her and Brooke Sweat claimed their first gold medal as a team – “jet lag doesn’t discriminate.” Then she was off to the sauna to sweat out some of that jet lag. Which brings up the next aspect of life on the world tour: Staying fit and healthy, maintaining those lean bodies seen on livestreams and TV, is not the easiest of tasks. Hardly. “It’s difficult,” Bourne said. “A lot of times, we’re using our matches to get us into shape. These tournaments where we’re going seven matches in, you have two days of travel and then you need to recover from that travel, then you have a day or two before you play, so you don’t really have any time. “Our lifts were super jet lagged. We were just trying to open the body up because everything is super locked up from the plane. And when you haven’t gotten great sleep, you’re sore, you don’t want to push it, because that’s how you hurt yourself. There’s really not much lifting or practicing.” So they play. They play in Brazil and China and Czech and, hey, last week they even had the chance to play in the United States, for AVP New York! It wasn’t home, necessarily, but it was as close as it gets for life on the world tour. Everyone speaks English. The food is familiar. There’s family. Gyms. And now, after a quick stay, Bourne and the rest of the U.S. Olympic hopefuls are back on the road, to Warsaw, Poland. Some had to play a country quota, hardly a day to prepare for the cut-throat nature of the single-elimination format. Others will be in the qualifier. Everyone will be fighting the same, tired, thrilling, exhausted, rewarding, wonderful battle. “You watch some video, you’re playing,” Bourne said, “then you’re back to preparation.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kim DiCello was never a bad teammate, same as she has never been a bad co-worker, a bad wife, a bad anything, really. But she did have her moments where “I was this intense, fierce competitor,” she said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Not angry, but a little feisty. Without meaning to, I probably gave a couple stare-downs here and there, just having that fierceness, that edge.” She didn’t think it would change when her son, Luca, would be born. She’d still be the same person. Same interests. Same passions. Same competitive, feisty spirit. “After having the baby, oh my gosh, this flipped,” she said. “All of a sudden I have this softness, this sweetness, this tenderness that I had no idea was in me. I don’t think anything else could have pulled it out other than having a baby. All of a sudden there’s this gentleness, this patience, this calmness. “I firmly believe those qualities make me a better person and in being a better person I can leverage those to being a better teammate and an athlete and competing at a higher level. I think it’s going to require reworking and figuring out how these pieces all work together now.” The timing of DiCello’s words couldn’t be better. Her focus on being a teammate, in a sport that is often viewed as an individual pursuit, seems an anachronism. The women’s side, after just two AVP tournaments this season, has been shaken up and shuffled and thrown into a blender, spitting out dozens of new teams, products of former ones that weren’t entirely unsuccessful but left something to be desired. DiCello was one of them, having split, not by choice, with Katie Spieler after two finishes. Which isn’t to say that all of those breakups didn’t have their fair and justifiable reasons. Spieler, for instance, is going to Brittany Howard, a close friend and roommate, who became available after a split with Kelly Reeves, with whom she played for a year and a half. Howard, at 24 and still relatively new to the beach game, has all the upside in the world. It’s easy to see the logic behind Spieler’s move, just as it’s typically easier to see the logic behind any partnership move. DiCello just thinks that sometimes these moves come too quick, that beach is a world of instant gratification rather than longterm gains in terms of partnerships. “I really love the team dynamic in our sport,” DiCello said. “The value I get out of the experience of being on a team is so great, and it can be frustrating and challenging but I welcome those frustrations and challenges because through them you develop these really strong connections with the people you compete with. And I’m still really close with Lane [Carico] and Emily [Stockman] and Kendra [Van Zwieten], the partners I’ve competed with the last few years. “It’s a relationship that’s different from the relationships you’ll have with anyone else because you battle together and you’ve been through those good times and bad times and they’ve seen you at your best and they’ve seen you at your worst. “I want this in all areas in my life. I want to bring out the best in my husband. I want to bring out the best in my little boy. Doing it on the volleyball court is just another space where I get to do that.” It’s possible that this mindset is a large reason why DiCello has been able to succeed with such a variety of partners. With Carico, who is also a new mother, she finished 13th but also made four semifinals. With Stockman, she finished 17th but also made a final. With Van Zwieten, she finished ninth and fifth twice but also won her first AVP and made at least the semifinals in seven others. The lows often precede the highs, so long as you can stick it out long enough to see the final product. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chris Geeter McGee isn’t technically involved in the sport of beach volleyball anymore. He’s passed on his metaphorical emceeing torch to Mark Schuermann. But he’s still a South Bay guy, still plays in all the four-man tournaments, still watches the livestream and keeps up with the sport he’s still fully, unquestionably enamored with. So when there was a NORCECA qualifier this past spring, after the Los Angeles Lakers, for whom he does a variety of media work, were knocked out of the playoff hunt, Geeter went to check it out, see the play and some of the players he still has relationships with. At the Manhattan Pier that day was Billy Kolinske, whom Geeter kinda sorta knew in the way that those in beach volleyball kinda sorta know everyone, even if they haven’t officially met. “He said ‘I watched in Chicago. You were a big part of why I wanted to play,’” Geeter recalled. “‘If I ever make a final, I need you to do an introduction.’” The legend of the Geeter introduction lives on. A bar in Louisville. Just a small, eight-team tournament. This is the first chapter of the genesis story of the indelible Geeter introduction. “I was sucking beers down, raging,” Geeter said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “And they were like ‘Go down!’ So I go down. My whole thing was that I’d break dance but I went down, I was doing these intros, and I was just screaming in [Larry Witt’s] face. Screaming in his face. At a bar in Louisville. And then it was just ‘You’re doing that every time.’” To say that he did that every time would be such an understatement it would be an insult to the wild and unprecedented creativity that Geeter brought to the sport of beach volleyball. Suck down beers and yell a few intros? Ha! That wouldn’t be it. No, sir. Geeter ziplined into a Manhattan Beach Open final. Nevermind that he didn’t know how to do it, or what he was doing, dammit he was going to zipline into a Manhattan Beach Open final! With a van filming from the next lane over, he went 80 on a Harley down the highway and straight onto stadium court. “I’ve never been on a Harley before, I’m losing my shit,” Geeter said. Driving that Harley was “a big lady. A Harley lady. Well, she was a woman. She was on the Harley and she said ‘Hold onto these handle bars.’ That was part of the TV intro.” One doesn’t write that script. They invent it as they go. Which is exactly what Geeter did in his iconic epoch with the AVP: He invented everything as he went. Given the keys to run the Dig Show, he put his wide spectrum of creative ideas to full use. Hiking in Hawai’i, barbeques, “doing all kinds of stuff,” Geeter said. And it wasn’t just a gimmick. It was real entertainment with a splash of bona fide journalism, a combination that earned five local Emmy nominations. “I’m 0-5,” Geeter said, laughing. It is funny, though, what preceded all that charm and pizzazz and charisma and panache: pure, unadulterated panic. The first time he was given the microphone, in 1998 or 1999, to do an introduction, he handed it back. And then it got handed right back to him. Whether he liked it or not, Geeter was doing introductions. “I would just start talking, so my intros started to evolve, and then it became part of the show. I’m on the sand, I’m getting people going, and then I’m just learning, so I would just try to get you. How do I get you? How do I get you?” Geeter said. “And then the women said you gotta give us that, so I had to get them going. I always wanted to make sure I gave everything I had.” His genuinely close relationships with the players not only made it easier to do them as well as he did, but more authentic. He’d throw in inside jokes that only a few people in a crowd of thousands would understand, but that was part of the beauty of it all: The introductions weren’t for the fans, they were for the players. He’d make up random stats on Todd Rogers digs just to get a chuckle out of Phil Dalhausser. The fans wouldn’t know the difference, but a laugh from the Thin Beast is worth more than an uproar from a sold-out Sunday stadium. “I was a small part of it,” Geeter said. “I needed them. I helped facilitate everything, but it’s not like I was just running the show. The volleyball carried it. I just wanted to make it special. I wanted them to want to be there.” That goal has been well accomplished. Players who never had the opportunity to hear a Geeter intro – like Kolinske -- nostalgically seek them out. Even those outside of the beach world do, to the point that he is not infrequently requested to do wedding introductions – and then officiate those same weddings. He’s now officiated 17 weddings. His daughter sometimes asks him why he isn’t doing beach volleyball anymore. Like her dad, she’s a beach enthusiast, tuning into the Amazon livestream of all the AVPs, keeping up with the players. She doesn’t quite understand that “daddy’s with the Lakers,” Geeter said, laughing, and that working with the Lakers is quite a plush

It was, of all places, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where Corinne Quiggle discovered her ideal method of travel. It isn’t by car. Or Uber. Or ferry. Or train. Or plane. It is, instead, a tuk-tuk, a type of pulled rickshaw where most have three wheels. It’s how Quiggle and her partner, Amanda Dowdy, got around Cambodia for a two-star FIVB earlier this year. Maybe it’s the tuk-tuk, though it could just as easily be the memory that comes with the curious little vehicles: a silver medal on the FIVB Tour, Quiggle’s first in her young and burgeoning career. She did not travel, of course, to discover the novelty of a new means of getting from one place to the next, though it’s certainly a nice bonus. Traveling, not necessarily to see the world, but to experience life on the world tour, was Quiggle’s goal at the beginning of this season. Barely five months in, she’s replete with both experience and stories to tell. “It’s been my goal for as long as I’ve been in beach volleyball so I’m really just taking a good start on it,” Quiggle said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I have to grow points right now so that’s why we’re kicking it out as early as we can, just so we have a chance to get into those bigger tournaments.” It’s why Quiggle and Dowdy were amiss for the season-opener in Huntington Beach, and why they’ll likely miss a few more. The FIVB, for this season at least, is taking precedent. Rather than battle through a fully-loaded AVP Huntington, they flew to Malaysia for a three-star FIVB, claiming fifth out of the qualifier. “It was a tough decision but for me it makes sense because if we want to get into these bigger tournaments down the rest of the year then we have to make that sacrifice,” Quiggle said. “There’s a ton of great teams so if we’re going to do it, then we have to put that above. We’re thinking ‘Hey we gotta do well in Malaysia so we can do well in those other tournaments.’” She’s viewing this season through the long lens. As in, a Hubble type distanced lens. She understands that to make it into Tokyo’s 2020 Games would be a bit of a stretch. That would be lovely if they made it, but she knows it’s far more reasonable to shoot for Paris in 2024 or Los Angeles in 2028. So she’s preparing now. She’s seeing the world, through tuk-tuks and planes and boats and hitched rides from random strangers in Cuba, while learning what life is like on the world tour. “This session of time is still a great learning period for me to know that this is what I have to do for 2024 and 2028,” Quiggle said. “We want to go and do as well as we can in these tournaments and if it doesn’t work out for 2020 I think it’s super important to go through that process. Knowing the process helps a lot.” An added bonus: In learning the process, Quiggle is enjoying one of her finest years yet. It makes sense, considering this is her first full-time year on tour, after competing for Pepperdine and graduating in 2018. Already, she has won her first FIVB medal, came home with another silver at a NORCECA in Mexico, taken a top-10 at AVP Austin. “It takes me a little while, like, ‘This is crazy. I’m going to Mexico for a little while, and then in three days I’m going to Malaysia,’” Quiggle said. “And to have the opportunity to play in Huntington, and then in Austin, it’s amazing to know that we’re going to be in there. We’re getting into these tournaments, even a three-star, even a qualifier, we have the opportunity to get into those tournaments. “We’re balancing them out as we go. As it goes with the life of a beach volleyball player, we don’t know until like the week before. 21 days out we get alerted that we’re in but we still have to figure out all the little things.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You could have seen this path a long time ago, had you been paying close enough attention. When Nicole and Megan McNamara, identical twins from Vancouver, Canada, were on the same indoor team. One set, the other hit. Four others were on the court, sure, but “she would set me every ball,” Megan said, as the two broke out in fits of laughter. “And our coach was like ‘You gotta give other people some love.’” Not really, actually. There was beach, too. Nobody else to set. Nobody else to hit. Just the twins. Even in a quasi-team environment at UCLA, where they ushered in a new, small ball, fast movement offense that is becoming vogue in the college game, it was still just the McNamaras on court one. They could win and the Bruins could lose, or vice versa, which, Megan admitted, “is bizarre. It’s a bizarre feeling.” “You can win your match but then UCLA loses and you’re happy, then you’re bummed or vice versa,” Nicole said. “You’re all pissed about your loss but the team’s all stoked.” It was a bizarre and perfect four years in Westwood. Two National Championships. One of the most successful partnerships the game has seen in its nascent stages at the collegiate level. Now it’s back to their roots: Just the two of them. No scheduled practices with Stein Metzger and the crew. No team nutritionist or personal trainers or world class weight facilities. Just Megan and Nicole, taking on the world. That’s where they are right now, actually. Out in the world. Itapema, Brazil, specifically. Thousands of miles from home, whether that home be considered Vancouver or Westwood at this point. Recipients of the wild card, they’re straight into main draw, an excellent welcome to the tour gift from the FIVB, which is suddenly becoming replete with Canadians playing at a world-class level. Two different Canadian teams – Melissa Humana-Paredes and Sarah Pavan, Brandie Wilkerson and Heather Bansley – held the top spot in the world at one point last season. The McNamaras are already high enough in the world ranks that they’ve earned a spot in the World Championships during the last week of June and first of July, in Hamburg, Germany. “Our main goal for the summer was going to be to qualify for some of the bigger tournaments, and also to get settled with our new life in Toronto,” Nicole said. “Those were our main focuses so even qualifying for World Championships was amazing. We wouldn’t have expected that. If you would have told us that last year, we wouldn’t have believed you. It’s unbelievable.” What’s unbelievable now will be the standard soon enough. It would have been unbelievable, when they were freshmen Bruins, to conceive of a time when a school not named USC would win back-to-back national titles. Now that’s the new standard. It would have been unbelievable, when they were pre-teens, watching Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May Treanor, to conceive of a time when they’d not only be competing at their level, but pushing them. Now, after taking Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat to three in Mexico in October, that’s the new standard. So they’ll continue setting standards, blowing past expectations, making the unbelievable quite real quite regularly. And they’ll do so, as they’ve always done so, together. “If it’s just the two of us out somewhere in the world we just need to lean on each other a little more,” Megan said. “I think that kind of helps because we were kind of cushioned at UCLA with all the support, and also knowing that our two through fives have our back. Knowing we’ve invested a lot of time, money, it helps us come together.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Let it sink in, if just for a second, that in a tournament where a pair of Sunday regular teams – John Hyden and Ryan Doherty, Reid Priddy and Theo Brunner -- were elsewhere in the world, Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena and Taylor Crabb and Jake Gibb were in an elimination match for fifth. Six of the eight AVP tournaments in 2018 were won by either Dalhausser/Lucena or Gibb/Crabb. And they had to play one another, in the contender’s bracket, on a Saturday evening, for fifth. Meanwhile, the eight seed – Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb – had emerged unscathed from the upper half of the winner’s bracket, and the six – Casey Patterson and Chase Budinger – from the bottom half. Yes, yes, the one seed still won the tournament. In an event in which Crabb and Gibb didn’t really play their finest volleyball until that late Saturday evening, they still emerged victorious. But gone, possibly, are the chalk-walk days of the men’s AVP, where one can safely bet on few upsets, where qualifier teams are dismissed quickly, painlessly, where the mid-tiers are the mid-tiers and the top teams are untouchable. The same team that won the entire tournament was pushed to three sets in its first match, by qualifiers Kyle Friend and Duncan Budinger. Then they went three, again, with Riley and Maddison McKibbin, and again with Dalhausser and Lucena, and again in a semifinal rematch with Bourne and Crabb. This was a tournament where the 21 seed – qualifiers Logan Webber and Christian Honer -- beat the 11 – Chase Frishman and Piotr Marciniak – 21-11 in the deciding set, and that 21 then pushed the 14 – the McKibbins – to three. It was a tournament where Sean Rosenthal, one of the best defenders in United States history, paired with Ricardo Santos, one of the best blockers in the sport’s history, were relegated to the contender’s bracket after a first round loss to Troy Field and Tim Bomgren. “What kind of a draw is that?” Field said, laughing. It’s a draw begat from an ever-deepening talent pool, where the older establishment continues to win – “Old man Jake Gibb, still doing it,” Bourne said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter – and the younger generation, with the likes of Field, is pushing its way up. “I’d like to see a year where, unless it’s me, we see a new winner every time,” Bourne said. “We went for a while where it was always Phil or Jake and Casey.” That era may be gone. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see a record for new winners this year. Same goes, too, for the women’s side, which is seeing its average age of main draw players sink and sink and sink, as 16-year-olds Delaynie Maple and Megan Kraft qualified, along with high schoolers – and USC recruits – Audrey and Nicole Nourse. “We’re getting to a point where there’s no good draw,” Bourne said. “A few years ago, we were watching blowouts in the finals…the better our domestic tour is, it’s good for the sport. And if the AVP keeps growing, adding more prize money each year, more points, that’ll create enough opportunity for the back of the main draw players to stay afloat, to keep living. That’s the goal.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It was a little more than two months ago that Brooke Niles and the Florida State team suffered their first failure in a season without too many of them. Niles had made a commitment to herself, promising that she’d have the lineup figured out by the fall, before her Seminoles went off for winter break. It was mid-February. Days before the season-opener against LSU. She still had no idea. “There’s so many combinations,” she said back then. They’ve figured it out. The tinkering is, with just a few days before the NCAA Tournament, where Florida State is the three seed, alas finished. Lineup’s set. Three wins, potentially, to earn their first NCAA Championship. “Playing all the West Coast teams in the beginning, we thought we had the right pieces, we just didn’t have the right partnerships,” Niles said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “So we changed a lot, and the second time we played UCLA we had the right partnerships but they were still kinda new.” Nothing is new now. The five starters who replaced half of the team that graduated from the 33-7 team that fell in the NCAA finals from a year ago are now experienced. The fresh partnerships have settled in, and it has shown to the tune of 17 wins in their past 18 matches, including a sweep of LSU in the CCSA finals, the fourth straight conference title for the Noles. “Our goal is to get better every time we’re out on the sand whether it’s practice or a tournament, and I think we’ve been able to do that consistently over the last ten weeks or so,” Niles said. “It’s hard because a team could start off as your ones pair and other teams can progress at different rates. You’re supposed to set your lineup how it plays our in practice so those things, so we’ve had some teams progress at different rates than other teams and we’ve had new partnerships which has been exciting as a coach. You can drive yourself crazy with how many matchups you can have on your own team.” Niles has found the sweet spot with Alaina Chacon and Madison Fitzpatrick on one, Sara Putt and Payton Rund on two, Brooke Kuhlman and Avery Poppinga on three, Molly McBain and Payton Caffrey on four and Macy Jerger and Kate Privett on five. Each has found their stride, particularly courts two, four and five, all of which are the second-ranked pairings in the country on their respective courts. Rund and Putt have gone 13-2 since the switch; Caffrey and McBain are second-ranked on four trail only LMU’s undefeated Veronica Nederend and Emma Doud; Jerger and Privett are 14-1. Niles may have genuinely had no idea, as she said back in February, what her lineup would look like come May. With a 28-5 record, another CCSA championship, a three-seed heading into the final weekend of the year, it seems the Noles have figured it out just fine. “I’ve learned a lot in the past four years just being in that title game or close to it,” Niles said. “I want to treat every match the same way we’d treat a National Championship match. It’s just another beach, playing a different team across the net, and we just really want to focus on ourselves. We are getting better and better each time we’re on the sand.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The voice is feeling good. “Oh, yeah,” Mark Schuermann confirmed on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, and if you’ve listened to the episode and just those two words, you can confirm it as well. The voice of the AVP is ready to go. In eight days, the AVP season will begin. Which means that in eight days, listeners, fans, and viewers will be treated to the majestic baritone of Mark Schuermann. To describe Schuermann as the emcee of the AVP would be a great disservice to both Schuermann and the AVP. He’s far more than that. He’s the emcee, yes. But he’s also an entertainer. A man of the people. A volley nerd who just so happens to be equipped with a magnificent voice, a natural knack for commentating, and a microphone that will keep all on stadium court more than pleased. That was the idea, anyway: He wanted to call the matches like the fan he was. So you’ll hear him react like a fan – “What just happened?” Say things fans say – “Taylor Crabb, you are ridiculous!” And he’ll do it among the fans themselves. Inexhaustible. Indefatigable. Ever-enthusiastic. “You don’t want to distract from what’s going on,” he said. “You want to enhance what’s going on.” It’s largely self-taught, too, his one-with-the-fan style of calling matches. At Cal State Northridge, after experimenting with majoring in math – “I like math, but nobody wants to do that much match,” he said – and anatomy, Schuermann enrolled in a broadcast journalism class. As it can often go with epiphanies, “I knew,” he said, “in the first three minutes that ‘Yes, this is what I want to do.’” A classroom, though, can only take you so far. Much of journalism, whether it be print or broadcast or entertainment, is experimentation. Finding what works for you. Discovering your own voice and style. It’s for that reason that Schuermann is glad he went to Northridge over USC, which offers one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country. The advantage CSUN held over USC? The fact that, while it was a good program, it didn’t attract droves of prospective journalism majors. It allowed for Schuermann to create his own opportunities, such as when he began calling CSUN indoor matches. “Still some of the most fun I’ve ever had,” he said. “I’m not sure I would have been able to do that at the well-oiled machine that is USC. CSUN said ‘Oh, jeez, this kid wants to put on a show? Great! Let’s do it!’” It’s such a practical major. The more you’re willing to do something, the more they’ll get behind you.” So before he became the voice of the AVP, Mark Schuermann was the voice of all things CSUN: water polo, soccer, basketball, volleyball, “probably ten different sports,” he said. From there, the branches of networking and talent and willingness to create began to intertwine. While his peers took jobs in smaller markets, Schuermann stayed in the Los Angeles area, taking a menagerie of jobs calling sports at Harvard Westlake, a sports powerhouse in Los Angeles, calling USA Volleyball matches, calling professional indoor matches. One such match took him to a World League event in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “That was a big moment for me,” Schuermann said. “When I got to those matches, something I never planned, something I never expected to happen – it was the second day of matches, and I was sort of bored. I was announcing, somebody else was running the music, I wasn’t running the music, I was like ‘Yeah, this is volleyball, I’m calling the game, but what else can I do?’ So I turned around to my supervisor and I was like ‘Hey, I know all the players’ names, I have a wireless mic, can I go into the crowd?’ And she’s like ‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’ So I went into the crowd and announced the rest of the match that day in the crowd, and it was so much fun. That’s when I realized ‘I really want to do this. I really want to get into entertainment.’ I’d never seen anybody do this. I might be onto something here.” And thus Broadcast Mark came into his own. In eight days, should you be in the stands, or on the beach, in Huntington, you’ll find him right there with you. The only difference is that he has a mic, his reactions are heard all over the beach, and, well, he’s probably having more fun. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tyler Hildebrand doesn’t really know what you should call him. “Official title is Director of Coaching,” he said of his new role at USA Volleyball. But they’re working on title changes because, candidly, nobody really knows what that means. “At the end of the day,” Hildebrand said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “who really cares? I think some people call it coach, head coach, director of coaching. I did some presentations at the AVCA and nobody knew what the heck the title was.” What matters is not the title Hildebrand takes – or doesn’t take – but the role he plays. He was hired by USA Volleyball, after just a year at Nebraska in which he won a national championship as an assistant coach, to push the United States back on top of the world of beach volleyball. Ask most any player, and you’ll get the same response: They picked the right guy. Hildebrand is what you could call a player’s coach. He was there at Long Beach State, his alma mater, last Friday night, watching the 49ers take on then-undefeated Hawai’i. He was there with Taylor Crabb, arguably the most promising and talented beach player in the United States. Beach in the morning. Indoor at night. Volleyball all day long. That, if nothing else, is why Hildebrand is so good at what he does. And he is good. After setting for Long Beach from 2003-2006, leaving as a three-time All-American, Hildebrand has enjoyed success everywhere he has gone. As an associate head coach for Long Beach in 2016 and 2017, he helped the Niners to consecutive NCAA semifinals. In his lone year at Nebraska, in 2017, the Huskers won an NCAA Championship. On the beach, he oversaw the most successful run of Casey Patterson’s career, there in the box as Patterson and Jake Gibb established themselves as the top team on the AVP Tour, winning more than double the next team. He was there for a Manhattan Beach Open win and an Olympic berth. But again: Don’t call him coach. Hildebrand doesn’t just oversee one team anymore – he oversees the development of all of the top teams and prospects in the USA Volleyball system, everyone from the established talents in Jake Gibb and John Hyden to the promising prospects in Carly Wopat and Troy Field. “Our vision right now at USAV Beach, it’s to be the best students at our craft,” Hildebrand said. “And I know that sounds like a big scoop of vanilla ice cream, blah blah blah. But the people who are really excelling right now are at the learning or technological edge.” Hildebrand has an old soul, but still: There’s a wealth of technology and statistics in the sport. It’s time the United States began using it to its advantage. Which is why, more often than not, you can find Hildebrand in the film room, either with the athletes or just by himself. It’s possible that nobody on Earth has watched more film in the past year than Hildebrand, who is constantly searching for trends – quick sets, shoot sets, options, jump serving, float serving, whatever. “In beach volleyball, what I realized when I came out here five or six years ago, it was like ‘Whoa, in indoor we would use video,’” Hildebrand said. But in the beach? “We’d watch maybe a set,” Bourne said. It’s something Hildebrand is trying to change. Not radically. Not revolutionarily. Just a bit here and there. An hour or so every few days. Watch yourself. Watch opponents. Just watch the game. See what you can find. “One thing I’ve been doing, probably more than any other coach in the United States, is watching the game,” Hildebrand said. “Watching the world. That’s the one I’m pushing big with our athletes and coaches. All of this stuff, maybe we’ll see something, ‘Wow! That’s useful!’ And then asking the question why. “The hardest part about beach volleyball is that everybody is on their own. You can have great practices. You can work really hard. You can be really tough. But in the middle of the game, how do we think through the game? Let’s say we watched a couple matches, we can think through them.” So he’ll pour over the film. He’ll find the trends. He’ll present them to the athletes and from there, they can make of it what they will. It’s not his job to coach every specific team now. It’s to simply put them in a position to be as successful as possible. So if there’s one thing you could label Hildebrand – not coach, not director, not a director of coaching – it’s this: He is, simply, one of the most passionate people in beach volleyball. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It was Yogi Berra who best expounded upon the upside of mental performance in athletics: “Sports are 90 percent mental, and the other half is physical.” Questionable math aside, the former Yankee catcher, and indelible quote machine, had a point. Sports, and the majority of facets of life which require exceptional performance, are rooted vastly in mental strength and fortitude. It made for an intriguing question for Leon Abravanel, a former professional soccer player for the Kitsap Pumas, Los Angeles Blues and Athletico Paranese. If sports are, indeed, 90 percent, “even 99 percent,” Abravanel suggested, mental, “then why is nobody focusing on this stuff?” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “If it’s 99 percent of the game, of the performance you’re about to go do, why is there no training around this? And if there is, where do we find it?” His search led him, at first, to an alarmingly high price tag. Sports psychologists run about $250 an hour. And those are the low end. The top in the business can be as much as five figures. Abravanel was good at soccer, but he wasn’t five figures an hour for a sports psychologist good at soccer. As it can often go with retired athletes – Abravanel retired from soccer when he was 25 – his mind needed a new project, a new something at which to be exceptional. To sports psychology he went, partnering with former football coach and current Mental Performance Coach Zack Etter. Together, the two sought to make sports psychology more available. Available to athletes of all ages and sizes, of all socioeconomic statuses. Available via a book, “My Mental Playbook: The optimal performance system for athletes” which they co-authored and published this past October. “We tried to condense all the information that we would learn from 30 sports psychology sessions into one customizable mental performance playbook that you fill out,” Abravanel said. “It has tons of exercises to create your own routine, and that’s a huge piece of the sports psychology world. It can’t be cookie cutter. It has to be very specific to the particular athlete.” This is not your normal book you’d pluck off the shelves at Barnes and Noble (if anybody still shops at Barnes and Noble). For one, it’s only 70 pages long. Abravanel knows what it’s like to be an athlete. Two practices a day. Lifting. Recovery. By the time all of that is finished, most don’t have the time or the mental bandwidth left to read a 400-page non-fiction dive into sports psychology. Two, it’s more workbook than traditional book, two parts journal, one part reading. It provides leading questions for the athletes to answer, literally, in writing. “This kind of stuff can help you in so many other ways as well,” said Bourne, who has explored his fair share of mindfulness exercises throughout his recovery from an autoimmune disease. “You can easily translate everything you learn, from learning the mental aspects of sport to dealing with pressures and whatnot to any aspect of life, which is great. To actually put it on paper in a log or a journal is great, it’s something I’ve been meaning to do.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Big Game Hunters. That’s what they’d call themselves. Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos and Brent Frohoff and Karch Kiraly could have the Rhode Islands. They could have Dallas. They could have Phoenix. But the big ones? Oh, no. Those were reserved for Tim Hovland and Mike Dodd. “We’d win Manhattan, Hermosa, the Cuervos,” Hovland said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We had a lot of finals together, that’s for sure.” Eighty-one finals, to be exact. In 150 tournaments played together. A remarkable success rate for one of the most legendary and well-known partnerships in the game’s history. You can still find those boys together. They commentate on livestreams together. They play fours and sixes together. They talk trash together. “Can’t hit like we used to,” Hovland said. “But we go out there, lip them off the court, make them feel bad. Then destroy them on the dialogue. There’s been crying out there. A couple of guys never came back. It’s fantastic.” Sixty years young. Same old Hov. That was his thing. He was loud. He was brash. He had swagger. He knew he was going to beat you and he wasn’t going to hesitate to let you know it. “We showed up, we worked hard at it,” Hovland said. “We’d play all day. We’d get down there at 10 in the morning, we’d get our court at Marine, we wouldn’t lose a game, we would take pride in beating everybody down there, and everybody would come to us. We’d play seven hours of volleyball, hard games, and that was just normal. If you did that, you’d have to play seven hours on a Sunday to win an open, and these guys weren’t in that kind of shape, even though we were going out and running around. We were in great shape, and we’re bigger, faster, stronger than most of the guys anyway. They weren’t ready.” There was one team, for the most part, who always was: Smith and Stoklos, perhaps the only partnership with more sustained success than Hovvy-Dodd. In the first five seasons of the AVP’s existence, from 1984-1988, they met in the finals 43 times. In ’87, seven consecutive tournaments featured Smith-Stoklos vs. Hovland-Dodd in the finals. “It’s kinda like the old Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers,” Hovland said in a previous interview. “You’re going to get through these other guys. They might get you once in a while, but very rarely. And when they did, you go through the loser’s bracket, and you’re only going to get better and better, because you’re playing more games and you’re not going to get tired. So we just had more determination. We worked harder. That’s the damn truth.” He’s seen every iteration and change and version of beach volleyball one can imagine. He’s seen the bikini contests during tournaments. He’s played under side out scoring. He’s played under rally. He’s played with a clock. He’s trained like a typical 9-5 work day – get to Marine Street, win games until one or two, grab lunch, win games until five, call it a day. It’s a different world now, for better or worse. He loves the development of the international game, talent he was able to see, first hand, commentating at p1440 Las Vegas and Huntington Beach. “It’s apples and oranges,” he said. “The game was so pure before. There’s some great athletes out there. It’ll just get better and better… These Norwegian guys are flat out good. These Russian kids can play. It’s a different time.” Indeed it seems it is. The Norwegians, Anders Mol and Christian Sorum, are the Big Game Hunters now. The trash talk is fading. Some things change. Some things change. Some things don’t. “I’ve been all over the world,” Hovland said. “But right here, the South Bay, is the best place in the world.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Troy Field had to pause for a second on the set of SANDCAST to catch himself. “Back in the day,” he repeated, laughing. “Back in the day, like, three years ago.” It seemed to catch him off guard as much as it can oftentimes do to those who have seen Field play. Three years ago, nobody had seen the kid in the pink hat. Hadn’t seen him flying around with a vertical north of 40 inches out of sand. Hadn’t seen him reverse wind-milling, evoking images and comparisons to a young Sean Rosenthal. Hadn’t seen him at the South of the Border Volleyball Vacations. Hadn’t seen him medaling at NORCECA’s with Reid Priddy, one of the greatest the indoor game has known. Hadn’t seen him donning those signature Slunks boardshorts of his. Hadn’t seen all of that coalesce into his being named the winner of the Top Gun Award at the AVP banquet, given to the male and female who, well, most look the part of volleyball players in the Top Gun movie. “It’s been a roller coaster,” Field said. “Just up and down.” Mostly up. Both physically and metaphorically. Field’s matches invariably draw some of the biggest crowds to watch him go up up up. He wishes he could explain it, too, that massive, explosive, enviable vertical of his. Wishes he could give a legitimate answer to the legions of fans who ask how he jumps so high and if he can teach them. He feels bad that his only answer is really a shrug and a sheepish grin that implies the gift of God and genetics. "I feel so bad because I'm not that person who trained it out," Field said. "I'm not the guy who repped it out. That's kind of it." Field is more than an enormous vertical. Far more. When the AVP needs a volunteer for its AVP First events, Field is one of the first to sign up. During season, at the Sunday clinics, lest Field be playing in the semifinals or finals, he’ll be coaching the kids. This off-season, he’s been traveling back and forth, doing South of the Border Volleyball Vacations and multiple events in Texas. He’ll be the first to engage with fans, both in person and on social media. Shoot, the guy is the first to offer help to the guys he’s playing against. When he’s knocked out of tournaments, he’ll go grab a camera for the McKibbins or Casey Patterson. He’ll run up to the Amazon booth and hop on the mic with Camryn Irwin and Kevin Barnett. Immediately after finishing this podcast, he offered to do video, photo, whatever SANDCAST might need, just give him a call. Just Troy being Troy. “With the AVP 2018 season being his first full year on tour,” the AVP wrote on Instagram. “Troy Field immediately made his presence felt! Between incredible plays on the court, engaging with the AVP Family and working with the community through AVP First, Troy is becoming the ultimate AVP pro.” Three years ago – or, “back in the day,” as Field likes to say – such praise from beach volleyball’s biggest tour would have been unthinkable. Three years ago, Field had been playing ball in Doheny where "the youngest guy was, like, 45 years old." Working odd restaurant jobs. Watching enough film of Karch Kiraly that he eventually adopted his signature pink hat and the goofy-footed approach. “Now,” he said, “it’s onto the mental side of things… I went from qualifier, right on the cusp to a main draw athlete and now I have to be the guy who qualifiers are thinking about. I was that guy, like ‘I have to beat Tri and Trevor’ or ‘I have to beat Rosie.’ I don’t want to be the guy that people are watching film on. It’s weird. Roles have reversed and switched and doors have opened.” And they’ll continue to open, to the point that, not too far from now, he’ll look back on this story, laugh at where he was at that point in his career, and say “Back in the day…” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There is no shortage of ways in which to describe the absurd depth on the World Tour. You can start with the obvious, the upstart Chileans who many might claim to have come out of nowhere but, really, they’ve been here, hiding in plain sight all along. In 2011, Esteban and Marco Grimalt – cousins, not brothers – played in their first FIVB event. In the time between then and Sydney, a three-star event in early March, they had competed in 59 tournaments. They never switched partners. Nor were they ever really much of a threat at all. And yet there they were in Sydney, winning six straight matches, including the gold medal, over qualifiers Enrico Rossi and Adrian Carambula. Though perhaps that should be your measurement of depth – the fact that Rossi and Carambula could march out of the qualifier and straight to the gold medal match. But just when you might think that’s impressive, the Grimalts one-upped them the following week, at a four-star in Doha. Now, it was their turn to begin in the qualifier, smoking a talented German team in Nils Ehlers and Lars Fluggen, 21-16, 21-13. It didn’t matter that every elimination match in the bracket rounds, save one, the finals, went three. Didn’t matter that they had played six matches the week before. By the time the finals rolled around, the Grimalts seemed as if they were playing their first match, not their 14th in 11 days, with international travel and time zone switches and all other manner of mental and physical obstacles to throw them off. “There’s no good draws,” Tri Bourne said on his eponymous podcast, SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “How many times do you see a qualifier team win it?” It happens, though it’s rare. Bourne and John Hyden did it in Berlin of 2014. Poland’s Piotr Kantor and Bartosz Losiak did it in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Same goes for Alvaro Filho and Saymon Barbosa at the Fort Lauderdale Major in 2017. The difference with those teams, however, is that they were all new. The Chileans have been around for nearly a decade, and now, suddenly, they’re winning back-to-back tournaments, the second of which out of the qualifier. “It’s so gnarly,” Bourne said. “I was just talking to my agent about it and he was asking about, saying ‘Oh, seventeenth doesn’t sound very good for us, does it?’ And I was like, ‘Honestly, when any given team can win on any given week? It’s not like the top ten teams in the world are never taking seventeenths. The World Tour is just constantly getting mixed up.’” Perhaps the best measurement of depth, then, is to look at the bottom, not the top. At the gold medalists and world champs who, having already proven they are the best in the world at what they do, either barely cracked pool or didn’t even make it to pool play in the first place. A week after playing in the finals, Rossi and Carambula failed to qualify. Fellow Italians Alex Ranghieri and Marco Caminati fell to the same fate. Filho and Ricardo Santos, the most decorated blocker in beach history, didn’t make it past pool. Joining Bourne and Trevor Crabb in seventeenth were 2016 Olympic gold medalist Bruno Oscar Schmidt and 2017 World Champ Evandro Goncalves. Alongside them were former world No. 1 Alex Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen. Bruno’s partner in those 2016 Olympics, Alison Cerutti? Another seventeenth, alongside Andre Loyola, one of the most promising talents in Brazil. Such is the state of the world tour. "I'm obviously not happy with our finish," Bourne said. "But I'm super happy with our team." Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maybe Emily Day should just come on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, every week. The first time she hopped on, she did so with her partner, Betsi Flint, on the first on-site podcast, just behind an outside court at AVP San Francisco. Two days later, her and Flint were the last team standing, beating Geena Urango and Caitlin Ledoux in the finals, 21-17, 16-21, 15-7, marking their first win as a team. “We should do that more often,” she said, and whether she was talking about coming on the podcast or winning, either would have sufficed. In the next AVP, on Lake Sammamish in Seattle, her and Flint won again, no good luck podcast necessary, as they did in Haiyang, China, two weeks later. Then again, when she came back on SANDCAST for her second appearance, she left the studio and went straight to the podium again, returning home from a three-star in Sydney with a silver medal around her neck. “We tend to have that effect,” Bourne joked. In reality, of course, it is the ever-so-humble Day who has that effect on her own career. She always has. She’s won with virtually everyone she’s played with, on virtually every tour she’s played. Doesn’t matter if it’s the old-school Wide Open series with Heather McGuire or a NORCECA with Summer Ross or Whitney Pavlik or an AVP with Jen Kessy or the Manhattan Beach Open with Brittany Hochevar or internationally with Flint. She’ll win split-blocking or full-time blocking. She’ll win with loud partners and quiet partners and goofy partners and intensely competitive partners. And it is that ability to win, with personalities and skill sets of any shape or size, that recently helped land Day in the Loyola Marymount Hall of Fame. “I was honored,” she said. “Absolutely shocked. It was such a cool weekend, just felt a part of LMU athletics.” It’s no wonder that she still does. Though she finished competing for the Lions in 2008, her team is still very much an LMU one. Her partner, Flint, is in her fourth year as an assistant coach for the Lions after a beach career in which she was twice named All-American. When the college season ends, they’ll be helped by John Mayer, currently the head beach coach for LMU. As it stands right now, Team LMU is second in the world in the push for the Tokyo Olympics, behind only Brazilians Rebecca Cavalcanti and Ana Patricia Silva. This will be Day’s second attempt to qualify for an Olympic Games. The first was a shot at Rio de Janiero in 2016 with Kessy. They finished as the first team out, U.S. No. 3. “It was tough,” she said. “We had chances and opportunities but of course you always look back and think ‘If we would have done better in this one then our draw would have been better for this one. It’s a grind. It was a grind. A roller coaster.” Now it’s onto grind No. 2, roller coaster No. 2. “We just can’t let the highs get too high and the lows get too low,” she said. “I think something that Betsi and I have done well is – you go from winning San Francisco to a four-star in Poland and nobody cares that you won in San Francisco. The highs and the lows, you gotta stay even-keeled. You’re going to get good draws, and you’re going to get bad draws. It’s all about what you do with what you have in front of you.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The relationship between brothers is often too complicated for even brothers to fully understand, let alone communicate to the world beyond, especially when their immediate world beyond knows their life history – where they grew up and went to high school, where they went to college and what they’ve done since. When you throw into that the fact that the two brothers in mind – Taylor and Trevor Crabb – were, for a period of two years, also simultaneously maintaining the most volatile of relationships – business partners, roommates, volleyball partners, running among the same group of friends – it would have been quite curious if they didn’t fight a bit than to the extent they did. So yes, when Taylor and Trevor Crabb played beach volleyball together, as they did at the professional level in 2015 and 2016 and in various tournaments in 2011 and 2013, there were times they didn’t get along. And there were times – almost all the time, really – on the court, that it just didn’t matter. “It’s every partnership,” Taylor said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “The longer you’re with someone, the more stuff is going to get on your nerves. Being brothers just amplifies it that much more. For the most part we were able to put it behind us and perform, and we played great for the year and a half that we were together. But just like every partnership it gets harder and harder as it goes on.” Watch any sibling partnership and you will see much of the same. Nicole and Megan McNamara at UCLA “will say things to each other they would never say to a different partner,” former Bruin assistant coach Jeff Alzina said. But they’re able to snipe at each other, to demand more, because they’re sisters. The McKibbins, Riley and Maddison, are no different. This is just what siblings do. They demand more. Expect more. And besides, it’s not as if a true blood relationship is needed to dig at one another. Growing up, the Hawaiian crew – the Crabbs, Bourne, McKibbins, Brad Lawson, Spencer McLaughlin – simply labeled Taylor “little shit.” Nobody is quicker to talk a little trash to Trevor than Bourne, his own partner, and vice versa. “They still try to give me crap,” Taylor said, “but it’s getting harder to.” The point in their careers is a rare one for siblings of any sort in the sense that, 18 months from now, it is not all that unlikely to see both Crabbs in the Olympic Games, Tokyo 2020. Taylor and Jake Gibb are the No. 2 team in the U.S., Bourne and Trevor No. 3. “You really gotta stay present in it,” Bourne said. “It’s such a long process. As much as our sport weighs on Olympics, you want that label, that’s everyone’s dream, it’s literally one tournament of your whole career. If you get caught up in two years of that certain event putting pressure on every other event, you’re really wasting your time. You just had a great finish on the world tour? Enjoy that. Be there.” And so the process begins. Taylor and Gibb are in Sydney this week for a three-star, their first event of the Olympic push and of the 2019 season. Trevor and Bourne skipped Sydney, focusing instead on a four-star in Doha the following week. By 2020, three kids from the Outrigger Canoe Club could be donning the red, white, and blue. “It’s pretty nuts,” Bourne said. “We were – well, we still are – cocky little shits.” You see, whether the birth certificates say so or not, this Hawaiian bunch is a family. And, like most competitive siblings, the trash talk never stops, no matter what side of the net you’re on. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It was almost as if Sean Rosenthal didn’t believe the words that had just come out of his mouth. “Leaving Jake [Gibb] for Phil [Dalhausser],” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “might have been the worst volleyball decision of my career.” He smiled, laughed. Then said it again, as if to cement it into reality what he had just admitted. Rosenthal’s partnership with Dalhausser was a fascinating one, though the reactions to it, including Rosenthal’s own, are complicated. By conventional standards, they were the best team in the world, winning their first event together in 2013, piling on two more Grand Slam golds. Rosenthal had never won that many tournaments on the world tour in a single year. And then he did it again, as he and Dalhausser tacked on three more FIVB golds during a run of four consecutive finals appearances in Navanger, Gstaad, The Hague and Long Beach. Less than a month later, they won the Manhattan Beach Open. For two straight seasons, they were the leading gold medalists on the world tour and also took home the biggest domestic tournament. By any human standard, the partnership was incredibly successful. But Rosenthal isn’t considered human. No, this is the Son of Jorel, the kid from krypton. This is Superman we’re talking about here, and Superman doesn’t live by the mortal standards the rest of us do. “For two years, we were the best team in the world,” Rosenthal said of his partnership with Dalhausser. “I think a little bit of it is because we didn’t win as many tournaments on the AVP as we were expected, but we won a lot on the world tour. Leaving Jake for Phil was the worst volleyball decision of my career. It’s crazy, it’s hard to say, but I think it might be true.” It might be true not because Rosenthal and Dalhausser were disappointing – they played together two years, they were the best team in the world for two years – but because Rosenthal and Gibb were just that good. They had just won the FIVB Team of the Year. Rosenthal, in an era of Emanuel Rego and Alison Cerutti, of Dalhausser and Todd Rogers, of Reinder Nummerdor and Richard Schuil, was named the best player in the world. Even after the FIVB season closed, they followed it up with a win in Santa Barbara during the AVP’s truncated, two-event revival season under Donald Sun. And then Rosenthal gave Gibb the call. He had already been in touch with Dalhausser. He knew, no matter what happened in Santa Barbara, he was going with Dalhausser for the next season. “[Phil] was just like, ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to play together next season?’” recalled Rosenthal. “And I was just like, ‘Uh, yeah.’ If your boss comes up to you and asks you, ‘Do you want a raise?’ It’s not like, ‘No, I’m good where I’m at.’ It’s kind of one of those things, not only from prize money but sponsor money, which went way up, too. Got RedBull and UnderArmour and a couple others, like SmartCar, which were basically through Phil.” But would he do it again? “I’d probably do it again,” Rosenthal said. He’d do it again because Dalhausser is a name that belongs in discussions with those of Kiraly and Smith and Stoklos and Steffes, the best the game has ever seen. He’d do it again because, even with a rash of injuries and awful timing to both Rosenthal and Dalhausser, they still finished as the best team in the world in consecutive years. Such is the standard of Sean Rosenthal. When finishing as the top on the world tour is cause for questioning a partnership change. We are now in the final act of Rosenthal’s brilliant career, one in which he has accumulated more than 20 wins, compiled a resume that will rank him amongst the all-time greats and won with a playing style that will immortalize him in the South Bay community. His focus is still on volleyball, yes, but it’s turned more to his kids, constant bundles of energy. It’s turned to taking some time off. Golfing. Enjoying beach volleyball for what it is – a wonderful sport, an incredible way to make a career. More important, a way to get the kids out of the house and spend some energy. “We all,” Rosenthal said, “need to get down to the beach and practice.” One generation of Rosenthal gradually fades out. The next charges in. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.