Beach Pro Tour Finals Recap: USA Dominance Continues; Norway Delivers "Psychological Damage"

It’s fitting that John Mayer would spend much of his retirement podcast talking about everyone except John Mayer. Much of it was spent discussing Trevor Crabb, despite Mayer even catching himself midway through and mentioning that he didn’t want it to be “a full Trevor Crabb podcast.” It didn’t stop him from singing Crabb’s praises further, though, nor did it stop him from elaborating on the positives of former partners Jeremy Casebeer, Ryan Doherty, Brad Keenan as well as his podcast partner, Billy Allen. Almost anyone who Mayer came into contact with over the course of a career that spanned from 2003-2018, he made sure to bring up. It was a podcast as fitting as the manner in which he made his retirement known, which is to say, completely on accident. “I didn’t want to make a deal of it,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I had known this year – it’s just been so hard to do LMU and play at a high level, and I felt like I was being average at both. And plus, my passion’s gone to coaching. I just love it, I get consumed by it. I thought this might be my last year [playing]. I just thought I’d see how I feel in the off-season, if I felt like I was missing something. I still loved all the coaching and I wasn’t missing the lifting and conditioning. “I told my wife on our way to the AVP banquet, because she’s the one who would say something, just ‘Please don’t say anything. I don’t have a speech prepared, not that anyone would care’ but I knew she might say something to Mark [Schuermann, the AVP’s emcee]. She said ‘Oh, yeah, I won’t say anything,’ so the night was going through fine, ‘Alright, I’m off the hot seat, having a good time, just hanging out,’ and at the end of the night, Mark starts talking about me, and I’m like ‘What is he doing?’ And he says ‘Come up here!’ And I’m like ‘Why do I have to go up there?’ And he says ‘You gotta say something!’ My absolute nightmare.” The reception, of course, was warm across the board. Quiet and humble, soft-spoken and endearingly self-deprecating, Mayer is retiring as one of the most respected players in the country, both for the way he played and the manner in which he carried himself. Retiring, too, almost seems like a misnomer. He’s retiring as a player, yes, but Mayer actually might be on the beach more now than in the past decade. With the time he’d typically devote to the weight room, he’s now available to coach beach teams, the first of which to hire him is Billy Allen and Stafford Slick. He’s helping launch a beach division of Gold Medal Squared. He’s devoting more of himself to Loyola Marymount, the program he has helped improve from 6-17 to 15-14 to 22-14. And even the unquestionable, objective improvement he has overseen at LMU, he had to shed the credit. “I think I just scheduled more matches so we could get more wins,” he said, laughing. Ah, yes, it’s never to his own credit. The four AVP wins, two FIVB gold medals, 2015 AVP, 2015 Best Defensive Player – all a credit to someone else who helped him along the way, be it a coach (“I owe Tom Black everything,” he said), a partner, his wife, anyone. That’s Mayer. He even mentioned that perhaps he would have had a more successful career in spots had he chosen to focus on improving himself a little more as opposed to always, always, always attempting to bring the best out of his partner. But that just wouldn’t have been Mayer. He’s a coach, after all. Through and through. Now he’s set aside to become the best he can be at that, a role in which his own improvement will mean the inevitable improvement and development of those around him. A role befitting the man who has always put others first.

21 Nov 20181h 17min

It was funny, what kept happening over the course over the year, a comical little motif that never failed to boggle my mind. People would thank me. They thanked me in Austin. To the great amusement and bafflement of my parents, they thanked me in New York. They thanked me in San Francisco. One person went as far as to ask for my autograph in Seattle. Mark Schuermann thanked me during my introduction on my stadium court match in Hermosa. A few lovely Georgians expressed their gratitude in Chicago. Not for playing, mind you. No, for speaking. No, that’s not quite right, either. For asking questions, and then taking the audio answers of those questions from very accomplished individuals and putting them on iTunes, where people can then listen to them in podcast form. They thanked me for SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, which as of a few weeks ago hit its one-year anniversary. These thanks have always been curious to me. Thank me? No, no. Thank Tri Bourne. The podcast was his idea, anyway. We initially met over the phone, the first interview I conducted for a book I’ve been working on that’s set to release this December. Then we met in person at the Manhattan Beach Open, where we did the livestream together. He loved it. I loved it, mostly because I got to talk to Tri Bourne – Tri Bourne! THE Tri Bourne! Ranked top-10 in the world Tri Bourne! He liked the give and take we had, with his deep knowledge of how to play the game and its various nuances and my geeky knowledge of the game and an abnormal capacity for random and mostly useless numbers on BVBinfo. So we met at the Ocean Diner a month later and hashed out some ideas. He needed something to do while he was recovering from an autoimmune disease. I was the only beach volleyball writer or media member or whatever it is you’d like to call me that he knew. He thought we’d make a good team. Turns out, he was right, the first of many times he has steered us in the correct direction. Thank me? No, no, thank the players. They’re the ones who voluntarily – though sometimes coaxed with wine and podsnacks – give up the two most precious things in life, the ones you cannot get back: time and stories. April Ross gave up two-plus hours despite a schedule I cannot begin to describe in terms of busyness. Same with Phil Dalhausser. Two of the most successful players in the history of beach volleyball volunteered a good chunk of their time for no other reason than because – well, I don’t really know why. But they’re two of the most popular episodes we’ve done, despite being so early in our podcasting journey. Ah, yes, the start of the podcast. For that, you can thank VolleyballMag, and the editor, Lee Feinswog, who oversees all of the stories that accompany the episodes. He’s the one who landed our initial sponsor, Marriott Vacation Club Rentals, which fronted the money for all of our equipment. It kept us from, at any point, going in the red. We launched a project without a single investment from our end. Thank me? No, thank the sponsors who have continued to climb aboard to keep the show running. Thank Firefly Recovery and Wilson. Thank Pacific Coast Wealth Management and VolleyCamp OC. Thank the anonymous donor who funded our pet project, the SANDCAST Wildcard. Tri and I had been looking for a way to truly help grow the game. So often we were thanked for the work we were doing, but what were we really doing? We were providing a platform, dispensing information, sure, but nothing to really help the players. We came up with the idea of a wildcard, a way to fund qualifier players to their next tournament, to remove the sting of the $500 plane ticket and $100 entry fee to maybe, maybe, make $1,000 in main draw. Only, we didn’t have the funding. Until we did. An email from a fan of the show, looking to help. And help he did, giving us the cash we needed to help 14 teams get to their next tournaments. A project that cost well into five figures, one that we didn’t fund on our own. And we got the credit? Nah, don’t thank me. Thank that guy (except he’s chosen to remain anonymous, so thank him mentally or something). We have not been a perfect show. We’ve had our fair share of mishaps and audio bungles, and for that, we thank you for your patience. I accidentally deleted what is quite possibly the best interview I’ve ever done in 11 years as a journalist. Thank me? Nah, thank Ed Ratledge, who delivered that perfect, perfect interview, and is willing to do another, despite my bungling of his first. We’re figuring this thing out, Tri and I. Our first few shows were clumsy at times, mostly because I used to loathe interviews with multiple interviewers. I typically have topics and paths I’d like to steer the interviews towards, which is why I hate press conferences and other multi-interviewer formats. Tri would want it to go one way, I’d take it another. It took a minute for us to develop a working rapport, a type of silent communication where I could feel when he was ready to go and vice versa. And while we’re on Tri, I’ll say this: He is without a doubt the most invaluable aspect to the show. You want to know why April and Phil and Taylor Crabb, three typically reserved athletes, were suddenly so open, so vulnerable, so phenomenal on the mic? Because Tri was there. He bridges the gap between the athletes and the, ahem, dreaded journalist – me – in the room. He keeps it conversational. If the podcast is a road trip, I’m simply the GPS. I get us where we need to go. Tri is in the passenger seat deejaying and divvying out snacks (he literally divvies out snacks, too). He keeps it fun, casual, conversational.  So no, there is little need to thank me. I’m simply hanging on for the spectacular ride this podcast has taken me on this past year, and hopefully will continue to run for years to come. I appreciate your thanks and gratitude. I really do. It’s fun, and I hope listeners continue to approach me in future events. I love talking to y’all, to hear your feedback, to get your insight. Thank me? Nah. You’re the listeners. You’re the ones who make the show worth making. So thank yourselves. Tri and I are beyond thankful for you.

14 Nov 20181h 2min

You’d have thought he was busy enough, Wilco Nijland. His plate of responsibilities includes only, oh, a 10-stop beach volleyball tour in the Netherlands, his role as the Controlling Operations Officer at Sportworx, and subbing in as the coach for the Dutch team of Sophie van Gestel and Marloes Wesselink. Why not add an entire new concept, a four-stop, international beach volleyball tour, on top of all that? In a year that was replete with new developments – a massive event to kick off the AVP season, a domestic invitational in Hawai’i, record FIVB events, the establishment of p1440 – Nijland’s brainchild, King of the Court, was the smash hit of 2018. “It was 15-20 tournaments in a row,” Nijland said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “It was a lot. And, of course, it was the first time with the King of the Court so there was a lot of pressure. And the world was watching us so at times it was very heavy, but most of the time it was very good.” All of the time, it seemed, it was very good. It was good for viewers, who packed stadiums in the Netherlands, Belgium, Hawai’i, and Huntington Beach for all four events. It was good for players, who were treated like, well kings, with hotels for a week, events every night – Dodgers games, dinners, parties, surf lessons, the works. It was good for the game, which received a jolt of fresh energy, a new format, new partnerships – the Netherlands’ Alex Brouwer and Russia’s Oleg Stoyanovskiy, for example, or Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Martins Plavins – and a pace of play that was at once exhilarating and fascinating. “It’s so extremely fast. If you take a look in the stadium and you’re sitting there for five minutes, you already saw three amazing rallies going on. It’s completely different from normal beach volleyball, which is already fun. It’s a next level thing, I guess.” Five teams play on a single court, in a hyper-speed display of offensive prowess and the occasional bicycle kick, the method used by Austria’s Alexander Horst to score a point in Utrect, the first event of the series.   “It’s engaging the entire time,” Bourne said. “The fans are getting to watch three plays in the time it would normally take one, but you’re also thinking strategically: ‘What should this team be doing? What are they trying to do?’ You’re constantly looking at the score so the fans are engaged the entire time.” Bourne competed with Trevor Crabb in the Hawai’i and Huntington Beach King of the Court events, eliminated early in Hawai’i due to some alliances formed against them in order to push another team through to the next round. By the next event, such tactics were banned, as the rules are still in constant flux, able to change on the fly.   “Each tournament did something a little better,” Nijland said.   And there will continue to be more tournaments. Four more, which will be cooperatively scheduled with the FIVB, is the plan for 2019, with designs on adding events all the way up to 10. “Of course, there were things going wrong but it went very smooth and we succeeded in adding a different kind of beach volleyball format in the beach volleyball world,” Nijland said. “It was very successful because the players like it a lot, the fans like it a lot, the FIVB thought it was fantastic. We have some good partners. We can be very proud of our team and we can be excited about the possibilities we have.”

7 Nov 20181h 12min

Tri Bourne and Evie Matthews are the first to admit it: They were not the thinkers of the trio between those two and John Hyden. Bourne was the up-and-coming player, a green, mid-20s blocker making his first rounds on the FIVB. Hyden was the veteran who preferred to fly on his own. Matthews was the coach who just preferred to fly with Bourne -- "A lot more fun," he said, laughing. That fun, of course, came with its share of hilarity. “One time,” Bourne said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “me and Evie are sprinting, our names are getting called, we’re dripping sweat, he’s running upstairs, getting through all of these places, going from Germany to Cincinnati, and we get to the gate, and I’m like ‘Thank God, we made it!’ I gave the lady my ticket, I walk through, and I go on the plane, sit down and like ‘I didn’t see Evie sit down, he must have been behind me.’ “Legit four hours into the flight I’m like ‘I wonder where he’s at. I’m gonna go walk around.’ I walk around the plane like four times, and I cannot find him and we got to the plane together. We made it. Has he been in the bathroom the whole time? “The whole flight happens, I land, and I check my phone. Evie didn’t make the flight. Somehow, he’s a foot behind me, sprinted to the gate, and didn’t make it.” Stories like that one are hardly in short supply for beach volleyball coaches, and they certainly are not so with Matthews, whose list of players continues to grow at every level of the game. Bourne estimates that four out of 10 flights they’d take – and they took many – they lost Matthews’ bag. In Qatar, they were stranded a full extra day because everyone on the trip forgot when their flight was.   He’s funny, Matthews, with the stories to prove it. But he’s also exceptional at his craft. He’s worked with Hyden, one of the most successful beach players of the past two decades, for 15 years now. “I love his mindset,” Matthews said of Hyden. “You know when you show up to practice with him, we’re all in. We’re all in. There’s no B.S. It’s super-efficient.” In just their fifth international tournament as Team Bourne-Matthews-Hyden, they won a Grand Slam in Berlin, ushering in a quick-setting, spread offense where options were used regularly, an offense that has since become vogue on the FIVB circuit. “I really believe that he evolved the game,” Matthews said. “He started running stuff that people were like ‘Wait, what?’ The hard part is you know it’s going to happen but it’s still hard to deal with.” Everyone Matthews is working with is now becoming hard to deal with. Canadians Heather Bansley and Brandie Wilkerson, whom Matthews has coached, have established themselves as the best team in the world, winners of three straight, the most recent being in Chetumal, Mexico. Under Matthews' tutelage, Americans Miles Evans and Billy Kolinske have climbed from one-star qualifiers to four-star main draws. “You just have to find the right way to work with everybody,” Matthews said. “You’ve gotta be mindful. It’s been fun to coach other people and figure out how to make them better,” He’s working with everyone from the best in the world to the up-and-comers in the qualifiers to the veterans like Casey Jennings making comebacks to Canadian-American transfers in Chaim Schalk. He’s learning how to adjust his coaching style for each. He’s learning how to get his guys the right training, the right diet, the right playing weight. He’s watching film religiously. He is, in short, becoming one of the best in the world at what he does, in order to make those he works with the best in the world at what they do. “I think the game is starting to speed up,” he said. Now he’s the one helping to set the pace. Evie Matthews isn’t going to be left behind again.

31 Okt 20181h 18min

In 1997, there were six countries with beach volleyball coaches for their national teams. Perhaps one of the most unqualified to do so was one of them. Jeff Alzina had never coached on the beach prior to ’97, nor had he ever really played at much of a high level, having made just one AVP main draw, in Chicago of 1992. But he still trained with the top guys, setting up drills and competitive practices, making it so that his “biggest experience [on the beach] wasn’t necessarily competing at a high level, but training at a high level,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. Being the practice guy everyone turned to paid off far more than being one of the top guys there to practice. In September of 1997, the FIVB held a stop in Los Angeles, at the UCLA tennis center. Not long prior, Athens had been awarded the bid to the 2004 Summer Olympics, meaning Greece would have a bid for a beach volleyball team. Only, they didn’t have a team to send. So a few Greek representatives went to the U.S., then the unquestioned beach volleyball powerhouse of the world, to recruit someone who could launch their beach program. It would be someone young, preferably without a family, seeing as they’d have to relocate to Greece. Someone crazy enough to take on a beach volleyball program without a single beach volleyball player. Someone like Jeff Alzina. “They liked the way I worked with young people and thought I’d do a good job,” Alzina said. “So I was the national team’s director and head coach for men’s, women’s and junior volleyball.” He got an apartment, was assigned an assistant, and then began scouring the country for beach volleyball players, with the goal to recruit a team who might become good enough to be competitive by the time the 2004 Olympics rolled around. Alzina had a more expedited mission in mind. He found two indoor players by the names of Vasso Karadassiou and Efi Sfyri. They had played a few beach events, enough to be ranked 63 in the world. Within a year, they were ranked No. 12, qualifying for the Sydney Olympics. “It was surprising to a ton of people but I saw the talent in them right off the bat,” Alzina said. “To this day, I think the right-sider, [Karadassiou], was one of the best right-side defenders to ever play the game. They won a European Tour stop they had never won – they had never even medaled. So these girls just became national heroes and the federation went bananas too and went ‘Oh my God, let’s keep funding this thing. This is great.’ So the national tour grew, the juniors tour grew, those girls went on to be legends.” And the legend of Alzina began. In Sydney, Alzina ran into Barbra Fontana, one of the best to ever play the game for the U.S. She had seen the work Alzina had done with Greece and offered to hire him to coach her and Elaine Youngs. “After that hire, Elaine was good friends with Kevin Wong, Kevin said Elaine had only told him good things and…” the rest, you could say – and Alzina later would – is history. He was hooked. And because he still hadn’t been coaching for long, his learning curve remained steep. He watched 25 hours of film a week, cutting it up on VHS tapes he still has at home. He began statting matches, reading everything he could get his hands on. “It was like getting your 10,000 hours of coaching in one year,” he said. “It’s just a little bit of dumb luck, right place, right time, with some motivation.” Since leaving the Greek program, Alzina has coached nearly three dozen Olympians and several hundred professionals in 83 open finals and counting. He has coached the USAV’s Elite Developmental Program and is currently overseeing its youth teams, which recently returned from a successful trip in Argentina, with two top-fives from the boys and girls teams. This year, he helped with Trevor Crabb, who not coincidentally enjoyed the most successful year of his career internationally, with two gold medals and nearly a bronze in a four-star Olympic qualifier in Las Vegas.   In January, he got the call from Stein Metzger, whom Alzina coached in the 2004 Olympics, asking if he’d like to be his volunteer assistant. Alzina left a post at Long Beach State, where he had helped turn a program around from 13-14 to 26-10 in two years, and took the volunteer spot with the Bruins. Metzger told the Daily Bruin that with Alzina, UCLA might be able to become a top-five team in the country. In May, they won their first National Championship. “I kinda thought Pepperdine was going to win it all and I thought USC had the talent to be in the finals again,” Alzina said. So it wasn’t going to be easy. He knew that. And when they lost in Gulf Shores to Florida State in their second match, he didn’t turn to the film, as he is wont to do, or to more reps, or to the weight room. No, one of the best coaching moves Alzina made as a Bruin was take the girls mini golfing.   “After that game, one of our freshmen said ‘I got something to say,’” he recalled. “And she said ‘Guys, we were supposed to lose this game. This year is not supposed to be a runaway for us. We’ve got to have a wakeup call and we’ve got to grind and that was the loss we needed. And it just sent this chill vibe to everyone where we’re not panicking, not going back to video to find out what was wrong with them. They just had to shed something off their back and look forward and be positive, and they did.” So underestimate Alzina if you will. But from Greece to Fontana to the USAV youth to Crabb and now UCLA, Alzina is going to find a way to get his team – guys or girls, old or young, foreign or domestic – to win.

24 Okt 20181h 8min

John Mayer stood outside the player’s tent, not looking particularly disappointed despite being knocked out of the Huntington Beach Open less than an hour prior. He and Trevor Crabb had played their best match yet, he said. Norway’s then-relatively unknown youngsters, Anders Mol and Christian Sorum, had simply played better. “The blocker,” Mayer said, “reminds me of Phil [Dalhausser].” A 20-year-old kid? Compared to Phil Dalhausser? Had it been almost anyone else making that statement, an eye roll, a sigh, would have been acceptable. But Mayer isn’t one to simply dole out hyperbolic comments or undeserved praise. By year’s end, his comparison didn’t seem absurd, rather prescient. Eight months later, Mol and Sorum are the undisputed best team in the world, and indeed, Mol was named the FIVB Blocker of the Year, with Sorum claiming Defender of the Year. As a team, they won Gstaad, and Vienna, and Hamburg, and then made yet another final in San Jose. “If you would have told me at the beginning of the year that anyone would win three tournaments in a row,” Sorum said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “I would have said absolutely not.” Perhaps only Mayer could have foreseen it. There’s no real reason anyone could have forecasted the breakthrough, not to these heights, at least. Prior to the Gstaad Major in mid-July, a Norwegian beach volleyball team hadn’t won a medal since 1997. The same year Mol was born. It was uncanny, their poise in such a moment.   “We didn’t think about that at all,” Mol said. “You can’t think about that at all or you’ll lose. You have to stay in your own bubble. We don’t think about the crowd. We don’t think about what if we win and what can happen if we win. We just think about our game and the next ball and what we’re going to do and make a plan for every ball. “When you see the videos we are really calm and really focused and not that many emotions from us.” “We also,” Sorum added, “had a little bit of luck.” They’re endearing, these Norwegians. Impossibly humble for such accomplished athletes, ones who rose from the qualifiers to the top of the world in half a year’s time. It’s a humility begat from both being products of a small town – Mol’s village has 500 “inhabitants,” as he described it – and taking the time to see the world in all of its massive beauty. They’re volleyball players, yes, but they’ve taken on much more than that. They don’t simply bounce from hotel to hotel, AirBNB to AirBNB. There’s more to life than volleyball for them. “I was sad for like two minutes in Hawai’i,” Sorum said, “and then I was like ‘Yes! We get to go see Hawai’i!’” “I was stoked!” Mol’s brother, Hendrik, a University of Hawai’i alum, added. They’ve explored, drinking in not just the beach volleyball life but the lifestyle that comes with it. In the gap between Warsaw and Espinho, Portugal, they saw a good deal of Poland. After getting knocked out in Russia, they saw Jay Z and Beyonce. Between San Jose and Las Vegas, they’ve become honorary South Bay residents after checking Yosemite off the bucket list. It’s how they stay fresh, enthused, thrilled about this warp-speed lives their living. “I think that’s really important just to get our minds off of volleyball for a little,” Mol said. “There is so much volleyball and also, in our family, we talk volleyball all the time. It’s really good just to get some days off when we’re not playing. I think that’s really important to keep our minds fresh and not always think about volleyball.” While they give their minds a rest from volleyball, nearly everyone in volleyball is thinking about them. “This off-season,” Jake Gibb said, “there’s going to be a lot of Norwegian film going around.” You don’t have to look hard for it. They upload every match, along with highly entertaining vlogs of their travels, onto their YouTube channel, Beach Volley Vikings, for all the world to see. And that’s exactly the point: They want to grow the game. If they can put out information that will help others learn, that’s exactly what they’ll do. “Just watch some video of these guys,” Hendrik said. “It’s great learning from these guys. They’re great athletes, they have some of the best technique in the game. Check them out for sure.” Lord knows the rest of the world is. As for the Norwegians? They’re checking out the rest of the world.

17 Okt 20181h 1min

Nick Lucena winked, and only one person in the stadium could have possibly seen it: head ref John Rodriguez. Lucena had always been known for his fiery demeanor, and though Rodriguez cannot recall the exact year of the wink, he estimates it came at a tournament in Florida, when Lucena and Phil Dalhausser were playing Matt Olson and Kevin Wong, which would date it to the mid-2000s, which also dates it to when Lucena’s temper was nearing its zenith. Or was that temper just theatrics? Something for the crowd to enjoy, an added element to an excellent match between one storied team and the next great one? Perhaps, as it goes sometimes, it’s a bit of both. “Phil [Dalhausser] chucked a set,” recalled Rodriguez, one of the most well-known and well-respected refs on the AVP Tour and p1440. “Which is rare but it happened, and I tweeted it. Nick [Lucena] comes – they were getting killed in the second set against Kevin [Wong] and Matty [Olson] – flying over to my stand.” And here is where the disconnect between crowd and players and refs begins, in that intimate space between ref stand and player, where only two individuals know what’s being said in the conversation. “He goes ‘John, give me a yellow card, I’ve gotta get fired up,’” Rodriguez, said, laughing. “And he’s flailing his arms at me, and I’m like ‘Oh, alright, this isn’t so bad.’ And he says ‘Play along with me’ and I’m pointing at him and he’s pointing at me, and we’re not going overboard with it, but he says ‘Give me one more second and then give me a yellow card.’ So I said ‘Just don’t slam my stand or hit anything because then I have to give you a red card.’ “So he goes around a little bit longer and finally I tweet, give him a yellow card, and the audience goes ‘Booooo!’ And Nick’s pointing back at me and then he winks at me. It was just a fun time.” Ah, yes, few on top of the stand, or maybe even in the entire game, players included, have as much fun as Rodriguez, this week’s guest on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. The paths for a male to become a professional beach volleyball player are few and far between, no two the same. The paths for a male to become a professional beach volleyball referee are even more circuitous.   “We do not,” Rodriguez said repeatedly, “do this for the money. We do this because we love the game.” Rest assured, Rodriguez does not, or initially did not, get into the game for the money. For the first handful of years in which he was involved in the game, he was a volunteer, a 20-something-year-old ball shagger. “The opportunity as an adult ball shagger, I’m like this older guy amidst all these kids chasing balls next to me and just loving it, loving the game, getting to play afterwards on the pro courts,” Rodriguez said. He shagged balls for so many years, in fact, that the AVP finally shrugged its shoulders and figured why not get the guy involved in a few more capacities? Maybe put him in the information booth, chat with the VIPs? After a few more years of that, the head ref at the time approached him and said “Hey, I know you know the game, and you’re already traveling with the AVP, so I know you could save me a lot of money if I could just use you for one day, maybe two days if we use you as an official,” Rodriguez recalled. “’So I said ‘Yeah, sure, that’ll be cool.’” He worked Thursdays and Fridays as a ref, and when the bigger matches began, the more established refs were called in and Rodriguez, known affectionately as J-Rod among players and fans alike, would return to the information booths or wherever his talents and passion were needed. Soon enough, Rodriguez could no longer be found in information booths or with the VIPs. No, John Rodriguez was a ref, from Qualifier Thursday to Finals Sunday, culminating in his Twitter handle becoming @avpjrod.   “I had no idea it would go on this path,” he said. “I’m loving it. And we do this because we love the sport. I think I’ve said that, sorry, but we enjoy what we do, and I think it shows from, all of us, sometimes we’re at the site from 6:30 to 7, whatever it is. It is a long day, but when we look back, and the day closes, we’re like ‘Hey, that was a great day! We had the best seats in the house, or standing, whatever it may be, we saw some amazing volleyball, and it’s all worth it.’ The fatigue seems to go away and you wake up in the morning, get on your horse, and do the same thing again. We really love it.”

10 Okt 20181h 8min

Martins Plavins requested the mic from Aleksandrs Samoilovs. Had to set some matters straight. “I know,” Plavins said on Saturday night at p1440 San Jose, “that Edgars misses me.” He was joking – maybe, possibly, perhaps – but Sunday’s result, when the Latvians upended the world’s best in Norway’s Christian Sorum and Anders Mol in the finals, proved that there’s likely a bit of truth to the notion that Edgars Tocs, Plavins’ typical partner, may have been missing his defender. Plavins and Tocs, Latvia’s No. 2 team behind Samoilovs and the injured Janis Smedins, were one of the world’s most delightful surprises in the 2018 FIVB season. Entering the year, Tocs, a 29-year-old from Madona, had never eclipsed the five-figure threshold in prize money, with just three main draws to his name in all of 2017. Yet there they were, on podium after podium to begin the year – gold at The Hague in January, silver in Kish Island a month later. By the end of the year they had played in 13 events, nearly as many main draws as Tocs had played in his entire career. By season’s end, they were ranked fifth in the world, three spots behind Samoilovs and Smedins, and a country that is roughly the size of Nebraska in terms of population was suddenly home to two of the world’s beach volleyball powers. Not that Latvia is an upstart. Not by any means. Ten years ago, Samoilovs and Plavins authored arguably the greatest upset in Olympic beach volleyball history when they stunned Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers in the first round of pool play. In 2012, Plavins did it again, this time with Smedins, upsetting Jake Gibb and Sean Rosenthal – then the No. 1 team in the world – in the quarterfinals of the 2012 Olympics in London. “We used to play good together,” Samoilovs said. “[Martins] agreed to come to San Jose so I’m very happy he had a chance to join me.” In two years, for the second time in three Olympics, they might very well join each other as teammates on separate teams. While Plavins was winning a bronze medal with Smedins in 2012, Samoilovs took a ninth with Ruslans Sorokins. “Martins is one of the best defenders in the world,” Samoilovs said, which explained why, in San Jose, Samoilovs, typically a split-blocker, stayed at the net. “It doesn’t make sense to go block.” Indeed it seemed they found the right defensive system, as they lost just one set the entire weekend in San Jose, to Austrian Olympian Alexander Huber and Leo Williams in the first round. After that, it was dominant win after dominant win, over Piotr Marciniak and Canadian Olympian Chaim Schalk, Spaniards Adrian Gavira and Pablo Herrera, Americans Miles Evans and Billy Kolinske and the world’s best in Noway’s Mol and Sorum. More important for either than the winning, though, is the fact they have a chance to win anything at all. Samoilovs remembers what it was like post-2016, when the world tour had just eight events big enough for the best to play, when beach volleyball was somewhat of a wasteland. With the advent of the King of the Court series and p1440, as well as the extension of the FIVB season, the sport has become nearly year-round. “This is really great,” Samoilovs said. “I remember after the Rio Olympics, in 2017, it was a disaster. It was only eight World Tour events, so you spend three months preparation just to play eight weeks, two months, so for us players we’re relieved because of these tournaments. Our families live because of these tournaments. It’s important to have more opportunities and more tournaments to earn money and to have a better life.”

3 Okt 201833min