SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

It’s not a tour. That’s the first thing that Dave Mays, this week’s guest on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, wants you to know about p1440, of which he is a founding partner. It is many different things with many different meanings. Take, for example, the name itself. The 1440 is assured: It represents the 1,440 minutes we all have per day. But the p? Platform seems to be the most popular word for it, though, as Mays says, it’s up to your own interpretation. It could be purpose. Or power. Or people. Or whatever word that starts with ‘p’ you’d like to use to represent how you’d like to use your 1,440 minutes in a day. Would you like to use it to strengthen your relationship with people? People it is. Or strengthening your mind, body and soul? Power it is. That sort of the point: p1440, and how you spend your minutes, is up to you. To some, yes, that means it’s a beach volleyball tour or league, and currently, there are eight events on the schedule, which bridges 2018 and 2019. The first four are set – Chicago in September, with Huntington Beach, San Diego and San Jose to follow – while the next four, which will be held in early 2019, are in limbo, though the sites have been whittled down to a few catchy options. There’s Vegas – Vegas! – a major city in Texas (Dallas and Houston, namely), Miami, Hawaii. An ambitious start. An exciting start. And that hardly scratches the surface, for each event is not just a beach volleyball tournament. It is, as Kerri Walsh-Jennings, a co-founder along with her husband, Casey Jennings, and Mays, has taken to saying: “Part Wanderlust, part Coachella, part beach volleyball league.” Each event, tantamount to the World Series of Beach Volleyball, will feature a tournament, but it will also serve as a music festival of sorts, replete with concerts and fanfare and everything you’d expect of the triumvirate Walsh-Jennings mentioned. How, you may be wondering, can an upstart tour fund eight events while also doubling as a music festival? Beach volleyball has been a notoriously volatile space in the market, in spite of the sport itself growing every year, to the point that more girls play volleyball than soccer or track and field or basketball. For females, it’s the most popular sport in the country. And yet nobody has been able to monetize the market in a sustainable enough fashion for it to work. The business model has remained the same since a company named Event Concepts began putting on professional events in 1976. They’d find a sponsor – Schlitz Beer was the first – or many sponsors, to throw in money, and that money would then be translated into prize money, which would draw talent and a crowd to watch that talent. Sponsors would be happy because they got the eyeballs they wanted, players would be happy because they got the prize money they wanted. And so it went. Until, of course, the tabs being run up by the tour were too hefty for the sponsors to cover, and one gigantic failure led to the next. Event Concepts was booted in 1984, thanks to a player protest at the World Championships of Beach Volleyball, and in came the AVP, an organization led by the players and a young, savvy agent named Leonard Armato. The AVP changed hands in 1990, when Armato was replaced by Jeff Dankworth, who in 1994 was replaced by Jerry Solomon, whose gross mishandling of the finances led to a bankruptcy, only for the AVP to be revived by – who else? – Armato in 2001. Nine years later it was bankrupt again, and in 2012, Donald Sun took over and put on a pair of events, and since then he has done a fine job of steadying the frighteningly tenuous heartbeat of beach volleyball, increasing prize money and events and introducing a “Gold Series” and putting the sport back on television. And yet the business model remains relatively the same, though there are certainly various nuances, as 1976: sponsor-driven. “If we were to start a new pro beach volleyball tour tomorrow, we would fail,” Mays says on SANDCAST. “So that’s why we’re not starting a pro beach volleyball tour. We’re taking the sport of volleyball and we’re celebrating it, what works and what doesn’t. We’re applying some principles of what have worked and what do work, to this.” And here is where the differentiation between p1440 and the AVP Tour begins. p1440 will charge a $40 gate fee, every tournament. The AVP allows its fans, which pack stadiums, for free, though there are paid box seats. But the entry gate will hardly be the chief source of revenue for p1440. That’s where the “platform” comes in. Above all else, above volleyball and music and entertainment, p1440 is built upon four pillars: competition, development, health and wellness, entertainment. The platform, an online resource featuring myriad digital media, will host webinars, coaching, nutrition, live clinics – any type of wellness resource you might need, be it mental, spiritual or physical. It’s not live yet – it is scheduled to launch in July – and until 2021, it will not be monetized. The content will be entirely free, with the goal of reaching 4 million subscribers by 2021, by which point a subscription fee will be required. No numbers are for sure in terms of the subscription fee, but on SANDCAST, there was a $5 estimate. If p1440 hits its goal of 4 million subscribers at $5 a month, you can do the math – $20 million in revenue per month from the platform alone. If successful – an admittedly large “if” in this sport – the subscription model answers, in part, where the prize money and funding for the tour will stem from. Which leads to the next inevitable question: Who will be receiving those paychecks? Mays, who built and sold a shipping business for a not-so-small fortune and was looking for a new project to work on, thinks it’s no question at all: p1440 will feature the finest talent in beach volleyball, and not only because there will be more prize money – he gave no definitive figure on what the breakdown will be, only that it will be more – but there will be more talent. The failure to retain the game’s highest talent led to the breakdown of the NVL. Players want to play against the best, which was why, when Sun revived the AVP in 2012, and the top players returned, the NVL lost momentum and, eventually, financial backing. The best currently play on the AVP and FIVB tours. There will be a battle over loyalty, the AVP’s non-compete (p1440 has no exclusivity clause in its contract), and, when it comes down to it, prize money and sponsors. Mays intends on bringing in the best, not only in this country, but overseas. Each tournament will feature a 24-team main draw. Sixteen of those teams will be Americans automatically seeded in. Four will come out of the qualifier. And four will be international wild cards. Want to play against the best? p1440 could have Alison and Bruno, or Evandro and Andre, or Nicolai and Lupo. For the women, it could be Ludwig and Walkenhorst, Agatha and Duda, Talita and Larissa. Walsh’s reach, even if she has been on the peripherals of the game as a player lately, is still extensive. You don’t win three gold medals and suddenly lose all of your contacts. Those players mentioned will be available, too, for Mays and Walsh-Jennings and Casey Jennings have made it a point to schedule around the AVP as well as four- and five-star FIVBS. The plan is to have the best in the world, playing for the best prize money in the game, with some music and entertainment to cap the night. It’s a lot. It’s big. It’s potentially transformative. It might work, it might not. That’s part of the excitement around this movement. And maybe that all sounds a bit crazy, though it is worth reminding that the most successful ideas and businesses were, at one point or other, invariably labeled “crazy.” As Walsh-Jennings wrote on Instagram: “It’s go time.”

21 Feb 20181h 4min

Contrary to popular belief, the first gold medal of the winter was not, in fact, won by 17-year-old snowboarder Red Gerard, who snatched the slopestyle gold medal in the 2018 Olympic Games from Canadian Max Parrot. The initial golds of the month were not even won in PyeongChang, but in Shepparton, Australia, on a beach, and not in the perversely intriguing snow volleyball, which is currently an exhibition event for the Winter Olympics. The first went to Amanda Dowdy – one of two guests this week on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter – and Irene Pollock, who won five straight matches, the last three of which went the full three sets. Shortly after, Avery Drost – Dowdy’s partner on SANDCAST – and Chase Frishman, playing in their first international event together, claimed a gold of their own, making for the first gold medal sweep of the winter season, soon to be followed by American snowboarders in the halfpipe and slopestyle in the PyeongChang Games. “I’m so happy,” Drost said afterwards. “They’re a great team. They play a fun style of volleyball. It was our privilege to play against them, in Australia. To be doing this with Ledge here, who’s become like a brother to me – I love this guy, and just so humbled by this moment, with this guy, with you guys, it’s so wonderful.”   Yes, it is wonderful. And, for Drost, entirely unexpected. He had written off the one-star events for the obvious reason: They’re entirely, financially speaking, unfeasible. “I remember looking at the star system when it first came out and breaking it down and thinking these one-stars don’t make sense,” said Drost, who split 1,000 with Frishman, as did Pollock and Dowdy. “Financially it doesn’t add up. Points are great but this is kind of ridiculousness when it comes to finances.” The NORCECA path seemed more doable, though the continental tour is notoriously mercurial, known for cancelling events last second. Then again, as Drost said: “There’s not an abundance of doing things other ways.” So there was this: world tour competition, available points, far less of a chance of an abrupt cancellation. And, of course, Australia. “There are worse places to go,” Drost said. Indeed, and Dowdy and Pollock actually one-upped their male counterparts in that department, hitting New Zealand’s tour for an event prior to claiming the top of the podium in Australia. It underscores a slight difference between the goals for the two teams: Pollock and Dowdy are looking for points, yes, as are all teams seeking the climb the international ladder, but perhaps more than that, they just want to play some ball. “The more I can play the better it is for me,” said Dowdy, a 27-year-old who set the all-time kills record as a four-year starter at Texas Tech. “We see it as opportunity. We’re trying to climb that ladder and it’s more of a sacrifice right now because it’s not great financially, I’m not going to sugarcoat that. For us, we’re using it as opportunity. You can only control what you can control, that’s the position we’re in. We’re trying to close that gap.” And the gap is beginning to close, much faster than they could have anticipated. The points boost they received pushed them into the country quota in the Fort Lauderdale Major. It’s a position some teams justifiably loathe, but to Pollock and Dowdy it was a welcome surprise. They had initially planned on potentially playing in four-stars in April. In a matter of five matches, they’re in a position to compete in a five-star in February.  “That just goes to show how important these smaller tournaments are,” Dowdy said. “We got that opportunity a lot sooner than we thought we would.” And a gold medal before the rest of Team USA’s winter athletes. GIVEAWAY: Our first Wilson giveaway will be a SIGNED WILSON VOLLEYBALL BY AVERY DROST AND AMANDA DOWDY. To enter, follow us on Instagram, @sandcast_podcast and comment with your FAVORITE QUOTE from any SANDCAST episode. Tri and Travis will select the winner based on their favorite quote from the comments.

14 Feb 201856min

Forget daggers. The look that Brittany Hochevar gave on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter could bore a hole straight through a human soul. The discussion had turned to partnership dynamics, and how it was with Hochevar and her partner, Emily Day. Day, it turns out, is the more organized one – there is always a more organized one – and I said something along the lines of Hochevar just sort of following along from there. No no. Brittany Hochevar? Just sort of following along? Brittany Hochevar doesn’t simply follow along. She gets after it. You can look at her workouts on Instagram or her website. They have a ballistic focus and can be slightly terrifying, though Hochevar also blends this with a focus on mindfulness and equanimity. Stillness. It’s a unique approach, one she labels as “all in but also all out,” and it’s also inarguably working. In 2017, at the age of 36, Hochevar won three AVPs and took third in another two. Her 14th year on Tour was, crazy as this might sound, her breakout. “I feel like I’m in my prime,” she said. “It’s wild. I can do stuff – wisdom, timing, that’s another piece. There’s a different timing to things. It’s fun to see that slowdown. When you arrive you just know it and sometimes that’s at 36.” Who would have guessed she would have arrived here, at 36, in her 14th season, at the top of the game? Of all people, Hochevar wouldn’t have been one of them. Prior to 2016, Hochevar’s career had been a Sisyphean one, rolling that boulder all the way to the top – only to see it tumble back down.  “I was that 13th player on a 12-man roster type of kid,” she said. “It’s my blessing and my curse.” At Long Beach State, she replaced Misty May as the setter, took the 49ers to a pair of Final Fours and a national title game – and lost in the final. In a three-year stint with the United States National Team from 2002-2004, she worked her way onto the roster – only to be the first alternate in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. In 2009, her 51st event on the AVP Tour, she made a final with Jen Fopma, losing in three sets to Dianne DeNecochea and Carrie Dodd. It would be seven years until she took one home. But what a platform on which to do it: the 2016 Manhattan Beach Open. Hochevar’s first career victory came on the sport’s biggest stage, with a plaque on the Manhattan Beach Pier to prove it. “Bout time,” May texted her. “Sometimes,” Hochevar said, “timing is funny.” Somehow, she had done something exceptionally few athletes across any sport have ever been able to do. Hochevar had begun to reach her athletic peak at age 35. She opened the 2017 season with a win in Huntington Beach and then won back-to-back championships in Hermosa Beach and Manhattan again. By season’s end, only one team had won multiple events on the AVP Tour: Hochevar and Day. Together, they had flipped the script, broken the narrative. Had Hollywood been writing the 2017 season, with Kerri Walsh-Jennings forgoing the AVP and April Ross in partner limbo, it would have been time for the youngsters to take over. Oh no. Not yet. Hochevar had fallen in love with the game again, “fallen in love with passing again,” she said. All those years of coming so close to the peak, of being the 13th on the 12 man roster, of rolling that boulder so high, only for it to tumble back down, had paid off. All those years in Puerto Rico and Spain and Turkey and Siberia had paid off. All of those ballistic workouts and pilates and meditating and taking care of her body had paid off. She has a pair of tattoos on her arms, “Here” written on the left, “I am” written on the right. At 36 years young, here Hochevar is. Sometimes, you arrive, and you just know it.

7 Feb 201859min

Perhaps you needed proof. Proof that Sara Hughes is, indeed, the one to fit the headline of this very podcast: That she is fit to become the next face of beach volleyball. Had you stopped by Huntington Beach last Friday morning, you’d have had all the proof you’d need. There, on court one, was Hughes, this week’s repeat guest on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, and partner Kelly Claes. There was coach Jose Loiola and mentor Misty May-Treanor. There was Ben Vaught and Tanner Woods, because, yes, Hughes and Claes train with professional men on occasion.   And there, lining the court was a dozen or so girls, member of the Long Beach City beach volleyball team, watching, studying, looking on. Taking notes on Hughes. Yes, they were at the Huntington Beach Pier that day because they had practice – but a Long Beach-based team doesn’t necessarily need to come to Huntington Beach to practice. There were there because that’s where May-Treanor, the director of beach volleyball operations at LBC, was, and May-Treanor was there because, well, Hughes. There’s a reason Hughes and Claes have landed one Hall of Famer (Loiola) and another who could go down as one of the greatest talents in volleyball history as their coaches. It could be argued – and it often is – that Hughes and Claes, both 22 years old, have more potential than any individual or team in the world, more, even, than the precocious Duda, the 19-year-old Brazilian star and 2016 FIVB Rookie of the Year. Already, Hughes and Claes have won an AVP, the 2017 season-finale in Chicago. Already they have reached FIVB quarterfinals and landed some of the game’s top names as sponsors. Already they have broken previous goals and established new ones. In their first season as professionals, breaking pool in international play was the goal. In their first event, a four-star in Rio, they finished fifth. Now, in just one season as full-time professionals, and a truncated one at that, seeing as they had to miss the early season events while they wrapped up what figures to be the most dominant college run for quite some time, Hughes and Claes see anything less than a podium finish as a shortcoming. Finishes, though, are but one tangible measurement for the success of Hughes and Claes. There is no barometer through which to measure their “inspiration” to the next generation of beach volleyball players. For now, you can see it yourself, right there, on the sidelines of court one, watching, observing, taking notes – figuring out ways to become the Next Sara Hughes.

31 Jan 201843min

On one of the walls in Sara Hughes’ bedroom is a poster of Misty May-Treanor. It’s been there since she was little, when Hughes began getting into volleyball, serving as a reminder of what she might become one day should she continue to pursue this beach volleyball dream of hers. So it struck her when, during a tournament this season, a parent of a young fan approached her and told Hughes that, on one of the walls in her daughter’s bedroom, is a poster of Hughes. “I was like ‘No way that’s actually happening,’” Hughes recalled on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I am so grateful for that and I hope I can keep being a person young people can look up to for a long time and thank you to everyone who does.” Did you catch that, at the end? Hughes thanked the fans for looking up to her, not the other way around. In an era where celebrities grow more and more closed off, taking instead to social media to communicate behind iPhones and laptops, Hughes remains open, willing to talk to anyone, pepper with anyone, give back any way she can. “I’m always just trying to help people,” she said. “If anybody wants to ask, just come up to me, you can ask me directly.” No different than May-Treanor continues to treat her.  When her age could still be measured with a single digit, Hughes would head down to the Huntington Beach Pier and sit on the wall, waiting for a chance, any chance, to simply shag balls for May-Treanor. Sometimes May-Treanor would let her pepper or hop in for a drill or two, creating an indelible memory that Hughes will cherish more than likely the rest of her life. “I love talking to people and I love talking to young girls because I don’t think I’d be in the position I am today if I didn’t have the coaches I had and people like Misty May taking the time to talk to me,” she said. “I love doing the same to everyone else.” She’s a sponsor’s dream, Hughes. She has the looks – blonde hair, blue eyes, Colgate smile – the smarts – she’s currently on a one-year track to earn her Master’s degree, just a year after delivering a graduation speech at USC – the media savvy, the talent, a voracious competitive drive juxtaposed with a disarmingly charming personality. Oh, yes. She has earned this position, the right to have Mikasa run her through photo shoots and turn those shoots into posters for young girls to hang on their walls, to point to each night and morning and say “I want to be like that.” Her accolades at USC could fill a small book’s worth of pages, and it’s a wonder if some of her records – four consecutive national titles, a winning streak that eclipsed 100 matches, a perfect 48-0 junior season, four-time All-American – will ever be broken. Justifiably, this drew no small amount of media coverage, and while she was appreciative – always thanking anyone for taking the time and interest in her – it drove her a bit insane, how those reporters would invariably walk right past her exceptionally talented teammates. On the occasion that the media showed interest in the rest of USC’s indomitable team, more often than not they’d ask questions not about how their match went, but what they thought about Sara and her partner, Kelly Claes. “I hated that when it was just ‘Oh! Sara and Kelly and Team USC!’” Hughes said. “I was like ‘No, you don’t realize, these girls who are on [teams] two, three, four, to the eighth team, they’re our support system. We would not be close to being good or successful without our teammates. They deserve just as much fame and respect as we do because we’re out there on the same hot court at USC and we’re training, every day, together.” Her teammates, as she said, were plenty talented, and a number of them – Nicolette Martin, Terese Cannon, Jenna Belton, Sophie Bukovic, Allie Wheeler, to name a few – have already begun making a name for themselves on the AVP Tour. Yet Hughes, as May-Treanor was, will be the name fans point to as the next in this massive wave of beach volleyball talent rising from the college ranks. She will be the one on the posters, and in the commercials for Oakley and KT Tape and Mikasa and any other sponsor wise enough to sign her.   She’s becoming the next generation’s version of May-Treanor – the one everyone looks up to – quicker than she could have possibly realized.   The final question of SANDCAST is reserved for the athletes to discuss anything else they’d like to discuss, anything the hosts may have missed. Most demur, maybe shout out a sponsor or two, thank us for the time. Hughes, instead, had a message for her fans: “For the young players and any parents who are listening, I love the indoor game and the beach game, of course. So a lot of players are making this decision where they love the indoor but they have to play the beach in college because they think that’s the only thing they can play. I just think it’s huge for young girls to play both if they love both.” You can teach any volleyball skill there is. But to become the next face of a sport, as May-Treanor once was? That’s a trait passed down, from one legend to the one who might just become the next.

24 Jan 201840min

In this episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, we discuss SANDCAST host Tri Bourne's current health situation as he continues to wait patiently for the doctors to clear him to play again.   ‘Patience' is the word that continues to cross my mind as I keep my vision set on Tokyo 2020. We also dive into what it's like stepping away from the game of volleyball, both physically and psychologically, with 2011 NCAA Player of the Year and 2016 Rio Indoor Olympian, Murphy Troy.    My blood test levels are back into the safe and normal range that the doctors and I have been waiting for. So now it's a waiting game to see if these results from the blood tests stay in this range as I wean myself off the medicine that got me here. If my body maintains the healthy levels once the medicine gets to a low enough dosage then the doctors will clear me to play. This would allow me to begin my comeback within five weeks -- just more than a month!   Once I'm cleared by the doctors, I'll begin training with rehab in the gym to balance the body out, then move into light technique work, then weight/ resistance training and playing. Needless to say, I won’t be back on Tour immediately upon getting cleared. I have committed to training “smarter not harder” this time around.    As you can imagine, being forced to step away from the game you’ve played your whole life in the prime of your career is very difficult, to say the least. While I can definitely give us an intimate perspective on what it like to be forced to undergo that processs, we were able to bring in a special guest who has also stepped away from the game in his prime but for for a different reason.  Murph Troy, joins us to share his insight and perspective after voluntarily retiring from volleyball after the Rio olympics.

22 Jan 201829min

If you didn’t get to the Hermosa Beach Pier early on July 22, you would have been too late. There would have been no seats left, nowhere for you to watch the first clash of the Crabbs, Taylor and Trevor, brothers and former partners turned, it seemed, bitter rivals. This wasn’t even the final – that would be a day later. This was the quarters, an oft-ignored round, one normally you’d sit and watch should you be there but not one to schedule your day around. And, yet, of course, this was no ordinary quarterfinal. This was a can’t miss match, on a Saturday. The reason can be effectively summarized in two words: Trevor Crabb.   *** You may not like Trevor. You may love him. There’s a better chance you’re in one camp or the other, and not in the gray area in between, which is as much a societal trend as it is one regarding the elder of the Crabb brothers. He likes that it’s quite possible he’s in a similar – relatively speaking – popularity category as Tom Brady and LeBron James, who are, paradoxically, both the most liked and disliked players in their respective leagues. He digs how much attention his verbal digs get – sand-throwing fools and goggle-wearing fools and a hungover fool. His mouth has earned him almost daily jabs on social media from Ty Loomis (the sand throwing fool) and the on-court animosity of his brother, Taylor (the hungover fool), who reserves stare downs across the net almost exclusively for Trevor. Maddison McKibbin was at his most vocal when he and Loomis played Trevor and Sean Rosenthal in Hermosa Beach on July 21. It wasn’t much of a match, with Crabb and Rosenthal winning 21-16, 21-13, and yet the interest in it never waned, so close were the possibilities for explosions. Thanks, in large part, to the fuses that Crabb had lit.  He did not invent trash talk on the beach. But Crabb has done what we can to revive it in what has been a largely amicable half-decade for the AVP under Donald Sun.   He still laughs at the attention it gets, because when you think about it, what, in the wide scheme of sporting trash talk, has Trevor Crabb really done? He called Loomis a sand-throwing fool, though Loomis is the first to take immense pride in his quirky celebrations, in which he is, indeed, making himself as sandy as possible, either by showering himself with it or rolling in it. Crabb called Slick a goggle-wearing fool, and indeed, Slick does wear military-grade goggles to shield his eyes. Taylor Crabb’s hard-partying ways are hardly breaking news. All three give it right back, too. Most of this is good-natured. Some of it flirts with the line of needling and perhaps a bit too far. He’s not altogether concerned either way. “That’s what makes it fun,” Crabb said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. His most notorious rub is with Reid Priddy, a four-time indoor Olympian who, in his first year full-time on the beach, made the semifinals of the Manhattan Beach Open, where he met Crabb and Rosenthal. Crabb blocked Priddy early, and by Crabb’s accounting of the event, he waved for the crowd – and particularly to Rosie’s Raiders – to grow louder. Priddy, according to Crabb, told him to try to block the next one with his eyes open. Crabb says he told Priddy to go back to indoor. Some have said Crabb went further, that he made things personal. On SANDCAST, Crabb shrugged it off and said that was basically that. Either way, when the match ended, there was an icy standoff between the two. The beach volleyball world subsequently lost its collective mind, and had you been following it purely on social media, you might have thought they brawled instead of played. They simply walked opposite directions. It’s a wonder what the reaction would have been to a player like, say, Kent Steffes, or Tim Hovland or Steve Obradovich, some of the sharpest, brashest trash talkers the game has known, bastions of a bygone era. In 1992, three years after Crabb was born, Steffes, who remains one of the most well-known American beach volleyball players, told the Los Angeles Times that "I'd been taught aggressive, loud-mouthed, obnoxious volleyball. You try to humiliate the other team because they're trying to humiliate you. I didn't go out to win, I went out to destroy." And, much to the delight of beach volleyball fans – and there were tens of thousands of them back then – that in your face style made for some provocative matches, on the court and off. Later that year, Steffes had Randy Stoklos running so hot that Stoklos followed him to his hotel after a match and they nearly came to blows. Steffes told the New York Times the next day that "you know why Randy and I got in that fight? Because I blocked him at 13-all to break open the game, 14-13. And I went, 'Yeahhhh.' And I turned around and high-fived Karch. And he thought I shouldn't cheer when I blocked him, that he'd been involved in the sport for so long, he'd played for 10 years, that I ought to respect him enough not to cheer when I block him. Have you ever heard anything so asinine in your life?" Sound familiar? In 1996, when Steffes was informed that Stoklos had twisted his ankle and wouldn’t be anywhere close to 100 percent for their Olympic trial match the next day, the one to qualify for Atlanta, he shrugged and deadpanned: “Good. I hope it’s broken.” That was volleyball then – loud, merciless, unapologetic.   “Anything goes,” Sinjin Smith told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “Yelling, screaming, fighting – and all of it happened. In any given match, it was pretty crazy. And very, very entertaining to the public. Players would end up going into the crowd and actually mixing it up with the crowd and each other. You just don't see that today." It wasn’t only reserved for the bad boys. No, even Karch Kiraly, the G.O.A.T, the golden boy, one of the most likable humans there is, took swipes at Smith prior to the 1996 Olympic Games. He told the press that Smith, who was nearing 40, might need a wheelchair to be brought out on center court. He lashed out at – and has since apologized to – Carl Henkel, Smith’s partner in the 1996 Olympics, too. “Every time Karch had a microphone he was badmouthing Sinjin,” Henkel told me last winter, during an interview for a beach volleyball book. Karch Kiraly? Bad mouthing? Are Crabb’s antics all that different? Perhaps the beach volleyball world has become a bit sensitive. Crabb’s volume of trash talk pales in comparison to the Golden State Warriors’ Draymond Green, whose prodigious mouth earns him technical fouls and fines by the month. And besides, Crabb’s never intentionally kicked someone in the nuts. It pales in comparison to the Redskins’ Josh Norman, or former Viking great Randy Moss. Heck, even Jordan Spieth will mix it up on the PGA Tour. Perhaps you’d like Crabb to shut up. Just play volleyball. Maybe win a tournament before chiding those who have, like Taylor or Loomis or McKibbin or Slick. But you cannot deny this: When Trevor plays, you’re going to watch. You’re going to listen.

17 Jan 20181h 9min

It’s a wonder how they’re not brothers, John Mayer and Billy Allen. Similar demeanors – calm, collected, neither too high nor too low. Similar styles of play – crafty, ball-control-oriented, hyper-efficient. Similar hobbies – reading, coaching, dadding. Mayer thinks Allen has always been the better of the two. Allen thinks the same about Mayer. Any pandering to the crowd is done mostly in jest, Allen flexing after a float serve ace or a poke kill, though that’s more than Mayer will generally do. He might offer the slightest of smiles. One of their chief similarities one might notice – and will inevitably notice if you listen to their podcast, Coach Your Brains Out – is the importance they place on mindset, emphasizing the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. “One thing I’ve learned is that we all have fixed mindsets and we don’t even realize we have fixed mindsets,” Mayer says on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “It’s really hard and the shift is never ending.” And neither, it’s become evident, is their improvement. Mayer, after making just three career AVP finals in his first 11 years on Tour – it should be noted that he also made a pair of Corona Wide Open finals in 2011 – made four in 2015 alone, winning in New Orleans with Ryan Doherty. It culminated in him being named AVP MVP. Allen has seen a similar ascent. From 2004-2015, he failed to make a single AVP final, which set up a breakout pair of seasons in 2016 and ’17, winning his first career AVP in Seattle in 2016 with Theo Brunner and following it up the next year with Stafford Slick. His win with Slick was sandwiched between a pair of finals appearances, the first in New York, where he fell to Taylor Crabb and Jake Gibb, and then San Francisco, where an injury limited Slick. Allen and Mayer discuss their ascents, their shifts in mindsets and what their future looks like on SANDCAST.

10 Jan 201844min