SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

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.”

22 Jan 202054min

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 should probably go. He won the gold medal in 96, c’mon, he’s Karch, he won ’84, 88, 96,’” Blanton recalled. “So that put a chip on our shoulder.” Not that he’s ever really needed a chip on his shoulder. Blanton’s found a way to earning everything he has in his remarkably decorated life. Which is why he had no problem shadowing a reporter for a high school football game, which led to a gig as a sideline reporter for high school football, which turned into a Clippers game, which turned into more Clippers games, which turned into five years of covering every single Clippers game, flying with the team, being the face of Los Angeles Clippers basketball media. “I remember I got on the [team plane] for the first time, and in the galley in the back there’s sushi, it’s a nice layout, and I’m just killing it,” Blanton said. “I’m thinking ‘Oh wow, this must be the food for the plane!’ So I’m grinding, feeling good, and I get in, no announcements, no anything, no one’s telling you to buckle up. Five minutes into the flight, the flight attendant says ‘What do you want to eat for lunch?’ And I’ve already killed it. But this was just appetizers. But then you land, you go to Four Seasons, the Ritz, you’re living the good life. It was a great experience.” And for five years, it was. But there was always a pull back to volleyball. Blanton knew it. Though the break away from the game was nice, at the back of his mind, it was always there. When he began entering the coaching ranks, he began – where else – at the bottom of the ladder: volunteering at USC, learning under Anna Collier. There, he’d win multiple national titles, coach the most dominant team in all of college sports in Sara Hughes and Kelly Claes, and observe Collier and how she ran the program. When Collier resigned, and the job opened up, Blanton, among dozens of others, jumped at the chance. By now you know what happened next: He succeeded. Because this is Dain Blanton we’re talking about here, and Dain Blanton is going to succeed. “It’s a totally different experience, being the assistant to being the head coach because every little detail, the buck kinda stops with you,” he said. “You can’t be like ‘Oh, what do you want to do?’ You need to be there and constantly be making decisions which is a lot of responsibility and you just want to create an awesome experience for the players, get them a good education and get them a couple of rings on their fingers because you know that’s what it’s all about. I’m having a blast so far for sure.” So Blanton is going to smile, because there really isn’t any reason for him to be doing anything else, is there? At 48 years old, Blanton’s still just living his best life.

15 Jan 20201h 5min

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.

8 Jan 202050min

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 argue the impact that Smith has had on the sport. The AVP continues to operate as the only domestic professional tour, with prize money that is now eclipsing all but three events on the world tour. The world, which lagged considerably in Smith’s days as a player, has caught up, with teams from Norway, Latvia, Germany, Brazil, Russia, Italy all populating the top-10 rankings. “It took a little while but players started adjusting to the beach,” Smith said. “We were so good because we had a tour. We had a place to compete, and when you have that tour and you can make money and travel around and you can make a lot competing, you have an advantage over any country that’s not competing.” Now they’re all competing. They’ve all either caught up or are catching up. And Smith still can’t get enough. “We couldn’t get enough volleyball, indoor, outdoor, it didn’t matter,” Smith said. “We just wanted to play. It was pretty awesome.”

2 Jan 202039min

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.”

25 Des 201957min

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 to their partners, similar to how they talk to their wife or girlfriend. You don’t want to nag, you know? You want to build each other up. In the end, my why is about getting a platform and helping, even a couple people. It’ll make their lives a little bit easier.”

18 Des 20191h 23min

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.”

11 Des 20191h 9min

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 that love of the game that Dodd wants to see. Who wants it more?   Who wants to be king of the jungle?

4 Des 20191h 23min