Alexis Durish: Taking FSU Beach Volleyball to "A Whole 'Nother Level"

Rolling with laughter. That’s likely what Steve Obradovich would be doing at the level of trash talk – what little there is, anyway – on today’s AVP Tour. Passive aggressive Instagram comments? Staredowns under the net? A few over the top celebrations? Ha. That's peanuts. Especially to the old school bona fides, the entertainers like OB. Take this snippet from an LA Times article from August of 1989: “You see, Obradovich is the bad boy of the beach. He's "OB," the last of the old-time volleyball rogues. Brash and colorful, an entertainer and, well, not exactly humble. One volleyball publication described him as "the best *!%$&!*% player on the beach (just ask him)." Anyone who has come upon a beach volleyball event since the mid-1970s would likely remember him. He's the quintessential beach boy with the wavy blond hair and piercing eyes who was doing some or all of the following: (1) shouting at his partner; (2) shouting at the referee; (3) shouting at a loudmouth in the crowd; (4) shouting at himself and (5) using a tremendous leap and lightning quick arm swing to spike the ball at improbable downward angles. Such an athlete. And such language . Enough to make Zsa Zsa blush. "I've got a kid on the way, I've played 17 years--I've given half my life to the game--and it's time to move on," said Obradovich as he sat at an outdoor table at Julie's, the restaurant across from USC that his family bought 10 years ago and OB now runs. "I don't want to go out mid-year like Mike Schmidt, hitting .220. I didn't want to go out kneeling in the sand getting the . . . beat out of me." Memorable? Oh, yes. Obradovich’s name still carries weight, a Hall of Famer with a bigger reputation that is as much about his behavior as it is his talent and record.  “A lot of it was just play acting,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “That’s what it was. I figured that volleyball just needed somebody like that. I’ve always been a clown, always been loud. I was kicked out of a lot of classes. I wanted to be an entertainer. It was just ‘You guys are so boring. We’re never going to get anybody watching us unless there’s some idiot out there. I don’t think they have any idiots now. They put some tight control on them.” So talented was he that when Chris Marlowe discovered Obradovich finished his career with 11 open wins, including the 1976 Manhattan Beach Open, he was genuinely confused, telling the LA Times that, had OB put his min dto it, he could have won 30 or 40. Not that OB disagreed. The two-sport athlete at USC was a known critic of everyone else, but he was hard on himself, too, the first to admit that “I didn’t practice.” Which isn’t to say he didn’t improve alarmingly, staggeringly fast. The first time he played beach volleyball he was 16. By the time he was 21, his name was on the Manhattan Beach Pier. But he knew the beach, financially, was never a career option, not in his time period, at least. He had to work full-time, selling liquor, driving from Manhattan Beach to Huntington, working at “grubby bars that were open until six in the morning.” Then he worked at his parents’ restaurant, Julie’s, of which he was a part-owner.  “The question of why I kept playing?” he said. “Well, I was good at it, and I liked playing. I just couldn’t – I had to work. I always had to have a job. I wasn’t the type of guy to go lay around, and I didn’t want to be a waiter. I wanted to do something legit.” He did. He moved to Laguna Beach, got into real estate. Had a family to provide for, you know? It wasn’t the illustrious year of some of his peers like, say, Sinjin Smith and Karch Kiraly or Mike Dodd or Randy Stoklos. But it was equally as memorable. “I got more out of it winning 11 tournaments than guys who won 40 tournaments. Everyone wants to talk to me because I was the John McEnroe, I was the color. Nobody wants to talk to a boring guy. People still come up and talk to me…they remember me, because you’re loud.”

1 Aug 201849min

Rafu Rodriguez-Bertran was not supposed to win an AVP this year. Heck, he wasn’t even sure if he’d play an AVP this year. This past winter, he had a son, Nico, his first child. His club in Temecula, Viper Volleyball, was growing and taking off. He’d had an excellent career, one that took him as high as the 2015 World Championships. It was time for a shift in priorities. He told this to his partner, Piotr Marciniak, who nodded and went to Ty Loomis for Austin. Rafu sat out. And then beach volleyball happened. Partners changed. Eric Zaun moved from Ed Ratledge to Tim Bomgren, leaving Ratledge without a partner. Which brings us to another point: Ed Ratledge was not supposed to win an AVP this year. He’s 41, been trying for 18 years. Dumped by the partner with whom he’d had his most career success, Ratledge, it seemed, was on his way out, no different than Rafu. Like Rafu’s club, Rateldge’s business, VolleyOC, was constantly expanding. And so the most wonderful band, one quasi-retired, one sort of reprioritizing, was formed. “It’s sort of stepping out, kind of doing it part-time slash full-time,” Rafu said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I have some other stuff to do but I still want to train and I still want to compete because In like competing but for sure, I never had it in my mind that I would be in that final. Ed is the same way: he loves playing. We do it for fun because that’s what we want to do. That takes away all of the pressure.” So what did their pre-semifinal routine look like? What was the master strategy to toppling Billy Allen and Ryan Doherty and then Sean Rosenthal and Chase Budinger? What was the key to unlocking 18 years of championship buildup for Ratledge? “It’s like, ‘Let’s just go out and play.’ We didn’t even have a strategy going into the semifinals,” Rafu said, laughing when saying it aloud, as if it just occurred to him how outrageous that is. “[Sunday] morning he was on the phone, setting up his tournaments back home, on the phone, and then we skateboard down to the site and ‘Hey, let’s just play!’ It worked out. I don’t know why. No pressure. Just play. It’s so fun because there’s never a single drop of pressure between us.” They play free and weird, and in this world, weird is the most supreme of compliments. Ratledge’s dialogue with the fans is one of a kind, and his arm swing, coined the “wet noodle” by Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb on the New York livestream a year ago, is the most frustrating swing on tour, one that doesn’t bring a tremendous amount of pace but was, by tournament’s end, the most effective of any player in San Francisco. “And,” Rafu added, “he optioned at least 50 percent of balls I passed.” Unconventional. Weird. Quirky. From the dialogue to how they’ve both taken half-steps back in order to achieve their career bests. But really, is there any other way it could have gone? “It’s kind of crazy, all the messages and all the people that are interested and are aware of what’s going on and watching,” Rafu said. “It’s pretty fun, it’s pretty cool to have all that support. Even when you don’t know there’s not many people watching you. It’s cool.”

25 Juli 20181h 12min

In December of 2017, the AVP made a landmark announcement: It would be partnering with Amazon Prime for the upcoming season, and several seasons after that. The partnership would include a much-improved livestream experience, with viewers able to watch on one of the most rapidly growing platforms, with a professional announcing team and a camera crew and interviews and features and everything one might expect when an athletic league teams up with one of the country’s most popular businesses. It was a widely lauded move, and it has since been met with enthusiasm and approval -- and the occasional critique, an inevitable side effect of launching a new platform -- from the beach fans that be. Yet here’s what hasn’t been announced in any official capacity, since the individual in question does not operate under any official capacity anyway: the launching of Brian Cook’s wildly popular Instagram stories, in which he follows and posts about the AVP from his apartment in Manhattan Beach, creating a character that is at once overtly sarcastic and deeply knowledgeable, hilarious yet also sort of correct in his analysis, and the best brand ambassador Michelob Ultra never knew it wanted. “The whole thing started with the first tournament in Austin,” said Cook, who isn’t playing because of a series of surgeries required after years of playing indoor in college at Stanford and overseas in Italy and Greece. “I was just watching the livestream, and that one was kind of a negative story, it wasn’t the nicest story, but I had no bad intentions and still don’t have any bad intentions for anyone. But I gained a little following because a lot of people were frustrated with the Amazon Prime stream. It was their first time, it was understandable, and I just wanted to let them know – look, you gotta make it a little better.” And, uh, you know, he had just undergone hip surgery, so “I was also on a lot of Percocet and was a lot more vocal.” Indeed, the sarcasm, and brutal honesty, is strong with this one.   It has become something of a phenomenon, though. At most AVP events, a good number of the players closely follow Cook’s stories, some of which contain legitimate, if not barbed, feedback… and some of which just contain hysterical, mostly nonsensical posts about Michelob Ultra. He’s here to make you laugh. And he’s very good at it – so long as you don’t take him too seriously. And besides, he doesn’t mean most of what he says. Like all jokes, only a kernel of it is true, the rest is exaggeration, entertainment for the masses. “Let’s give [Amazon Prime] some credit: What they’re doing is hard,” said Cook, whose sister, Karissa, made the semifinals with Katie Spieler in Austin. “They’re going eight-hour days on stream? That’s insane. That’s really hard. But when you’re watching every single second of the coverage, you’re going to catch some bloopers, and I’ve documented them.” And it’s not only Amazon that is on the receiving end of Cook’s jokes. He pokes fun at April Ross and Alix Klineman, who hug between each point, whether it’s an error or an ace. “I’m all about Team Hugs,” he said. “They’re great sports about me counting how many times they hug. In two matches I think they eclipsed 300. It’s exciting if you’re not at the event. You can definitely catch the livestream and count the hugs yourself.” Sometimes the jokes go well. Sometimes, as it goes in comedy, they don’t. Cook couldn’t resist the opportunity to lean into Reid Priddy’s struggles at the score freeze, posting a picture of a frozen man stuck in a freeze. “Little did I know he’d get a little mad,” Cook said, “and block me on Instagram.” He said this after acknowledging that Priddy has long been one of Cook’s idols, someone he looked up to throughout his prolific indoor career. “He’s one of the best players of all time,” Cook said. Sometimes sarcasm gets you laughs. Sometimes it gets you blocked on Instagram. In any event: Cook has picked up quite the following from his satirical stories, a fun way to bide his time while he recovers from surgery before he can get back out on the beach himself. In the meantime, "There is,” he said, “an absolute revolution going on.”

18 Juli 201821min

It was a look that featured a strange blend of joy and exhaustion, one athletes know all too well. Emily Day and Betsi Flint had just wrapped up their first day at AVP San Francisco, playing the maximum number of sets (six), two of those going into extra points. Worse yet, they had lost their second match of the day, relegating them to the contender’s bracket, portending a long grinder of a road ahead if they were to make the finals in San Francisco and defend the Seattle title they earned two weeks before. And oh, they were only getting started. Before they would cap the weekend with another AVP title in San Francisco, finishing with a 21-17, 16-21, 15-7 win over Geena Urango and Caitlin Ledoux, before they would play 16 sets in three days, before they would win their second title in as many AVPs, they had a plane to catch. “We went straight from Seattle,” said Flint, who alongside Day beat April Ross and Ledoux in the finals 19-21, 21-19, 18-16, “just jumped in the lake and hopped on a plane to Poland, where we had to qualify on Wednesday.” And they did, winning both matches, the second, of course, going to three. They “came out flat,” Flint said, in the main draw, losing to Agatha and Duda in the first match and another pair of Brazilians, Josemari Alves and Liliane Maestrini in the second. Not that they had much time to wallow and recover, for it was straight to San Francisco. “We definitely have to stay hydrated,” Day said. “That flight to Poland was pretty rough. I may have cramped in the airport changing room. But that’s what we want to do. We want to play every weekend and so we’re out there to play every weekend. We’ll do whatever.” So they do what every over-traveled, underslept, exhausted athlete does: They convinced themselves they were fine.    “It’s interesting because you think you feel ok,” Day said. “You talk yourself into it, like ‘I feel good, blah blah blah, I came off a win,’ then you get on the court and it’s like ‘Oh, God, don’t feel as good as I thought.’ But mentally we know that every team is good on the world stage so we just need to take it point by point, but winning Seattle gave us confidence. We actually had a huge comeback to qualify for Poland. We might have been down 8-2 in Poland and we came back to win 15-12. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen again but we took it and ran with it.” Evidently so. They took it and ran with it all the way back to San Francisco, coming back – again – in the contender’s bracket, rallying from a first-set loss to Lara Dykstra and Sheila Shaw to win 20-22, 23-2, 15-12. A win and a forfeit later, they were in the semifinals, rematched with the team that put them in the contender’s in the first place: Brittany Howard and Kelly Reeves. They won, 21-14, 21-13. A finals rematch with Ledoux awaited, and again, it went – and how could it not? – to three sets, where Day and Flint prevailed, 15-7.   Three weeks, three tournaments, 16 matches, 37 sets, two AVP wins, one FIVB qualification. Standard month for Day and Flint. “Qualifying is an awesome accomplishment and not something we ever take for granted,” Day said. But it’s pretty special winning an AVP and getting the champagne, family and friends. Just trying to win.”

11 Juli 201823min

Oh, God. It was happening again. Chase Budinger had felt this before. He’d felt these nerves, that extra surge – no, surge might not do it justice, the extra deluge – of adrenaline. He knew what happened the last time. And here it was, all over again. His first point as a professional beach volleyball player, partnered with one of the all-time greats in Sean Rosenthal, matched up with the hottest team in the world in Alexander Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen, set on stadium court of the biggest domestic tournament of the year, was a swing into the net. Then another. Then another in which he got stuck in the sand, to the point that the guy who was once in an NBA Dunk Contest couldn’t get his feet off the ground. “I don’t think that’s ever happened to me in practice,” Budinger said. “And in that game, it happened to me twice.” This type of debut might scar some. Budinger? Not really. He’d been here before. On a bigger stage, with more viewers, higher stakes. In his first game with the Houston Rockets, who had traded for Budinger after he was drafted by the Detroit Pistons with the 44th pick of the 2009 NBA Draft, he had two straight turnovers and an airball. “I get taken out right away, and I’m like ‘Wow, that was embarrassing, there’s no way he’s going to put me back in,’” Budinger recalled. “And he actually does put me back in in the second half and I finally got a fastbreak layup and I remember after I got that layup my nerves just kind of flushed.” Then he hit a jump shot, put down a dunk, finished with six points in 15 minutes. A quick recovery after an inauspicious start. So yes, Budinger had been there before when he struggled in that opening match against Brouwer and Meeuwsen. He knew, just as Rosenthal did, that it would take time, that his body would soon learn to not freak out prior to a match, that the adrenaline drip would be a bit less intense. That he’d be just fine. And he would be. A week later, he and Rosenthal would travel to Lucerne, Switzerland, seeded No. 28 in the qualifier. They mopped up two qualifying matches in straight sets, and promptly upset the No. 1 team in the tournament, Switzerland’s Nico Beeler and Marco Krattiger, in consecutive sets as well. “I never had that moment where the nerves went away,” Budinger said. “It just went away over time. Winning those games definitely helped with the confidence.” With each tournament, the wins mounted, and the confidence seemed to subsequently bloom. In New York, for the second AVP of the season, Budinger helped Rosenthal knock out his old partner, Trevor Crabb, and John Mayer. Then he toppled Olympian Casey Patterson and Stafford Slick before succumbing to John Hyden and Theo Brunner, finishing fifth. In just two tournaments, Budinger had eclipsed the best finish of his older brother, Duncan, who has been playing in AVPs since 2005. Ah, yes, Chase’s older brother plays professionally, too. As does his sister, Brittanie, the only volleyball player in University of San Francisco history to have her number retired. Funny story about that, too. When Budinger was still in the NBA, he had a practice at the University of San Francisco, and there, at the top of the rafters, was a jersey with the last name Budinger on it. His teammates looked up, laughed, wondered what the heck that was all about, and Chase just shrugged. Yep, his family can ball. So competitive were the Budingers that Duncan and Chase were barred from playing one-on-one basketball. Even board games were nixed. Such are the compromises a family must make when all three children reach the top levels in their respective sport, and in Chase’s case, sports is plural. He has a long way to go. He knows that. The Olympics are a goal, yes, but right now the focus is on fine-tuning – subtle nuances of blocking, setting, passing, siding out more consistently.

4 Juli 20181h 25min

I’m not exactly back, BUT things are finally getting interesting for me! I’ve been touching the ball and hitting the gym for a few weeks now and mentally it feels amazing. Physically, it hurts so good. My health is not totally under control but things seem promising. Can your health ever be totally under control? Despite being asked [rightly so] almost daily about when l’ll come back and who I’ll be playing with by fans and peers, over the last year or so I did my best to not think about what the future might hold for me in the beach volleyball arena. Now that I'm feeling better and getting my health under control, I’ve finally allowed myself to start thinking about what kind of future I want to manifest for myself for [the beginning of] the rest of my career.  I’ve been enjoying watching NBA free agency because I feel like I can relate those athletes who have to decide where to play and what contracts to take. It’s exciting, yet stressful… I wish I had their “$$ problems". ;) As of right now there are still quite a few unknowns, but I've recently learned to embrace the challenges that the unknown brings to my life. A quote that has stuck with me over the last few months is, “The best way to know the future is to create it.” - Honest Abe. So despite currently not knowing whether I’ll for sure be ready to play, I signed up for the Moscow and Vienna FIVBs after realizing that in order to even have an opportunity to play I had to sign up 37 days in advance. So there’s a possibility that I play this season… As far as the domestic tour, I don't know what my plans are yet. Luckily they don't make you sign up over a month in advance. Anyway, listen in to the podcast for updates on my status… Shoots then!

2 Juli 201839min

It’s just after 6 a.m. on June 23, and Nicolette Martin leans into her seat at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, a massive cup of coffee in hand, exhausted from both an early morning travel-day wake up and seven matches in the past three days at AVP Seattle. Her voice is gone, as it should be, for it was hardly 12 hours ago that she was battling in a white-knuckler of a three-set quarterfinal match against Amanda Dowdy and Irene Hester-Pollock. Up 13-12 in the third set, Martin and Allie Wheeler couldn’t hang on, their legs finally giving way to 18, seven of which came during Thursday’s qualifier. She doesn’t mind the qualifiers. They’re good to build a rhythm and get live reps before the main draw, but it would be nice, she admits, not to have those extra three matches, to not be so worn down by the quarterfinals. Seattle marked the second time in as many tournaments that Martin made the quarterfinals after coming out of the qualifier. She did the same in Austin with Sarah Day, succumbing in the quarters to Katie Spieler and Karissa Cook. An hour prior to the quarterfinal match, Spieler couldn’t believe that Martin and Day had already begun warming up. Hadn’t they already played 15 sets that weekend? In heat that had regularly eclipsed triple-digits? How were they still going? Just Nicolette being Nicolette.   To catch Martin in the airport is to catch her on the strangest of days: A day off. No volleyball. No reps. No working out. Just coffee and naps.   “I don’t know where that came from,” she said of her nonstop motor. “Just being at [USC], they really pushed us. We were training six days a week and Sunday was our rest day. It was an hour lifting then a three-hour practice. Doing that for four years, it’s like ‘Ok, we won three national championships. Something about that worked, so I need to keep going, I can’t stop.’” It is that type of work ethic – or play ethic, really – that has enabled Martin to steadily climb the ranks of the AVP, from making one of three main draws in 2016, to six of seven in 2017 with a best finish of seventh, to two for two in 2018 with consecutive fifths. “We started in Huntington and did awful,” Martin said, laughing. “We got a wild card into the main draw and went 0-2. The two games we played went to three and we lost both of those, so I think we used that as our fuel for our fire for Austin, so we went into Austin and yeah, we took a fifth. “I think behind all of that, we’ve been working with our coach and we’ve been super open with each other and talking about our goals and how we’re feeling. We would just talk about things, where we’re at with our bodies, what we can give each other today, learning to talk to my partner more and being super open and honest and really trusting your partner and knowing they’re going to give 100 percent made me more free with my volleyball.” And free, it seems, no matter who she’s playing with, whether it be Sarah Day, with whom she took a fifth in Austin, or Allie Wheeler, her former teammate at USC with whom she took a fifth in Seattle. It would be difficult to miss the joy with which Martin plays. She’s constantly talking, cheering, yelling, smiling, laughing – something is coming out of her mouth. Sometimes it’s a joke, as it was when she found herself down 11-9 in the third set of the second round of the qualifier. Sometimes she’ll ask her partner what she wants to dinner, “just to put your mind somewhere else for a second,” Martin said. “Like, ‘Ok, relax.’” Whatever works. At the moment, that seems to be mostly everything for Martin.

27 Juni 20181h 10min

The pause, so slight, so innocuous, but present nonetheless, said more than words could. And, to be fair, Melissa Humana-Paredes did put a nice verbal spin on her and Sarah Pavan’s quarterfinal loss against Brooke Sweat and Summer Ross in Fort Lauderdale earlier in the year. She called it thrilling. “But…” and then came the pause, ever so brief, just enough to know that a fifth place for Canada’s top team, even in an FIVB Major, even in the first big event of the year, is nowhere near this team’s expectation. And justifiably so. In their previous six international tournaments, their worst finish had been fourth, in a run that included a silver in Poland, bronze in one of the top events of the year in Gstaad, and a gold in Porec. “I can tell you guys are cringing about it,” Tri Bourne said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We don’t want people to think ‘Oh, fifth, terrible,’” Pavan said. “Like, for all intents and purposes, it is a good finish but our goal is to be in the semifinals or on the podium every tournament, because that means we are playing well. Fifth is not bad, but we have high expectations.” It hasn’t taken long to build them. This is just the second year of the Pavan-Humana-Paredes partnership, and in that short time they have already raced to the top of the FIVB rankings and finished on a podium in six different countries, three of those podiums resulting in medals of the gold variety. “We kind of became addicted and wanted it to happen all the time,” Pavan said. “Even though we are in a second year and every team is elevating their level, we still have been able to hold onto that spot. And we still have so many things we want to get better at and that we’re working on and we know that we can still get so much better so we’re excited about that. The first year was about laying the foundation, now it’s time to find our identity as a team.” As it goes in a search for identity, and switching sides, and switching partners, there are inevitable stumbles along the way. And as it goes with exceptional, world-class athletes, sometimes those stumbles, such as a fifth place in one of the biggest events of the year, are to most accomplishments. And, of course, sometimes those stumbles may seem more obvious, such as their upset at the hands of Delaney Knudsen and Jessica Sykora in the AVP New York qualifier a week ago. “We’re having some ebbs and flows,” Pavan said, as Humana-Paredes laughed in the background. “Some ups and downs, which I think is normal in the second year of a partnership. We are having moments where we are playing great and amazing and we are having moments where we finished the game wondering ‘What the heck just happened? What were we doing?’ “Obviously, we always want to win. We all do. But I’m glad it’s happening now because we do have time to work out those kinks and have those hard conversations because we’re always learning and always looking at the opportunities in front of us. So yeah, it’s been a little up and down but heading into this next phase of the season, we’re looking to get our feet under us and make some big strides.”    Those strides will, however, be taking place exclusively on the FIVB, and no longer on the AVP. According to Pavan, due to a new rule instated by the USAV, unless the AVP, or any domestic tour, pays a fee to the USAV for each event featuring international players, said international players will not be permitted to play on the AVP Tour. “This has never been a rule before,” Pavan confirmed. “So yeah, Mel and I talked about it and if we were in the AVP’s position, we would find it hard to reason paying that much money too.” Twelve hours prior to New York, Pavan and Humana-Paredes didn’t know if they were even allowed to play. So they missed their initial flight from Canada to New York because they weren’t sure. Then they moved it back and missed their next for the same reason. Then they got the OK from the AVP. They were good to go. So they woke up at 3 a.m., jumped on a plane at 6, landed at 8, rolled into Manhattan at 9, snuck in a quick nap, grabbed some oatmeal, jumped onto the court and attempted to play the world-class volleyball they were accustomed and expected to play. “We’re not going to make excuses,” Humana-Paredes said. “Those qualifiers are deadly. They are crazy. We had three games within a span of three or four hours, which I haven’t done since youth. It was definitely a challenge, both physically and mentally.” Indeed. Physically, they – somewhat hilariously – may have mixed up creatine and electrolytes. Mentally, they were playing a brutal qualifier with no sleep, little food, no warm ups – and with a freeze rule Humana-Paredes had never experienced before. And though the loss is fresh, and it is not difficult to see the disappointment, they cannot help but laugh a bit at the mania of it all, from the missed flights to the quick nap to the accidental nutritional mishap. “It was definitely not our finest,” Humana-Paredes said. “It was really unfortunate because it was my first AVP, you’re on Pier 25, you can see the Freedom Tower in the background – gorgeous, it’s just beautiful. You wanted to soak it all in and get the whole AVP experience. We were bummed we couldn’t get to do all of that.” They’re bummed with fifths. They’re bummed they can no longer play on the AVP. But they’re infectiously excited about what the future has in store for their nascent yet impressively successful partnership. They’re excited about Olympic qualification, which begins as early as this fall. They’re excited about a three-week FIVB trip beginning next week in Poland. They’re excited for events in Vienna and Gstaad and Germany. "We're still learning so much," Humana-Paredes said. "That's comforting for us and exciting for us because we have so much more that we need to improve on and that we can improve on and I think our potential -- it seems limitless right now."

20 Juni 20181h 5min