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

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

The 2018 beach volleyball season is, remarkably, upon us. In a way, at least.  The FIVB kicked off the 2018 year in the very first week of the year, hosting an indoor beach tournament at The Hague, a four-star event to open the season, hauling in a variety of new partnerships and unfamiliar faces. One of those new partnerships, of course, was that of April Ross and Alix Klineman, who took the longest road possible, battling through a pair of country quota matches, two more in the qualifier, and then running off six straight-set wins in the main draw to claim gold, beating Brazil’s Maria Antonelli and Carolina Salgado – another team that came out of the qualifier – in the finals. “I’m going to be riding high on this win for awhile and this week in The Hague was a blast,” Ross wrote on Instagram afterwards. “Pretty excited or this journey.” It was Klineman’s first international beach tournament, though far from her first time on a big stage, having played on both the Brazil and Italian indoor leagues. As for the rest of the U.S. teams, though, it wasn’t quite the start to the year many would have desired. Sara Hughes and Kelly Claes finished ninth, while Brooke Sweat and Summer Ross took a 17th and Lauren Fendrick and Karissa Cook finished 25th. The men didn’t fare much better, with the new partnership of Billy Allen and Ryan Doherty claiming the highest finish of American teams at ninth. Casey Patterson and Stafford Slick and Miles Evans and Billy Kolinske both finished 17th. "It was definitely a little weird overall," said Trevor Crabb, who failed to make it out of the qualifier, on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. "Me and [Sean Rosenthal] pretty much decided we won't practice together before we left for the trip because I went back to Hawaii for the offseason and pre-season for six weeks, doing some training there, and I'm not exactly sure how much training he was doing. It was so early in the year, it's the end of off-season and beginning of pre-season, and it affected us for sure."

9 Jan 201826min

Much to the disappointment of the listeners of Coach Your Brains Out and SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, there will be no Anchorman-esc battle between the two podcasts. We’re now on the same team. That’s right. VolleyballMag.com is now the distributor for both podcasts, which are as similar as they are different, both focusing on the same sport while diving into it in vastly dichotomous angles. Coach Your Brains Out began as many podcasts do: A few friends with a similar interest, an iPhone, and a bit of editing know-how. John Mayer, Billy Allen and Nils Nielsen put an iPhone on a table and just talked about whatever volleyball and coaching topics came to mind. Allen would edit, they’d post, and, as they joke frequently on the show, maybe a few people would even listen.    They enjoyed doing it. Soon, they realized more than a few actually enjoyed listening. The show expanded in every way a podcast could. The audience grew, the technology evolved from one iPhone to a few mics. Guests have been some of the top performers in their respective spaces, including the likes of volleyball legends Phil Dalhausser and Karch Kiraly, authors Joshua Medcalf and James Kerr, and coaches John Kessel and Tom Black, among dozens of others. It isn’t just coaching they analyze, but traits and features of high performing individuals and teams, digging into the various recipes for greatness, both physiological and psychological. “Around the time we were starting it we were turned on to ideas like Train Ugly’s website, a lot of ideas like motor learning and different ways to teach the game,” Allen said. “That was a lot of what sparked our first couple episode and we were fired up on that. Before we did the podcast it was fun to pick [John’s] brain and just talk, that kind of stuff, and now we’re still able to do that and get some great coaches from around the world too.” “We try to find people striving for mastery in whatever they do,” Mayer added. “Whatever ways we can find to be our best.” Coach Your Brains Out publishes on Thursdays, typically in 30-minute episodes.

3 Jan 201844min

It has become impossible to ignore: The top players in the United States are getting older. Nick Lucena is 38. John Hyden, ageless as he may be, is 45. Casey Patterson is 37, as is Phil Dalhausser and Sean Rosenthal. Jake Gibb is 41. “We’re definitely holding it down for USA Volleyball,” Phil Dalhausser said last week on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. Holding it down until a new wave of talent establishes itself to fill in for the longtime veterans and representatives of the United States on the world stage. Chase Frishman is one of the most likely members of that next wave, and he considers himself to be, as he should. In just his second year on the AVP Tour, Frishman, partnered with Avery Drost, made his first semifinal, in Hermosa Beach, where, he admits on SANDCAST, “we got our bell rung.” By year’s end, the 26-year-old nearly tripled the prize money from his Rookie of the Year campaign in 2016, taking five top-10 finishes in 2017 as compared to two in 2016. With Lucena, Hyden, Patterson and Rosenthal having, at most, one more quad left in them, Frishman sees himself as part of a group of four up-and-coming defenders under 30, including 25-year-old Taylor Crabb – “the golden boy,” Frishman says – 24-year-old Eric Zaun, and 28-year-old Miles Evans. He’s not wrong. One aspect the three of them have in common is a Rookie of the Year Award, with Frishman succeeding Crabb and Zaun succeeding him. Evans has only played in one AVP main draw, choosing instead to compete internationally this past season with Billy Kolinske. But Frishman, of course, has one element those three – or anyone else on tour not named Sean Rosenthal, for that matter – do not have: Ledge’s Legion. Aside from the infamous Rosie’s Raiders, Frishman boasts the largest, loudest, rowdiest crowd on tour. They’ve bestowed themselves the nickname ‘Ledge’s Legion’ as an eponym of Frishman’s nickname, ‘Ledge,’ doled out because, as his former partner Mike Brunsting said, “When you watch him play, he just looks like a legend.”

27 Dec 20171h

There is little that Phil Dalhausser has yet to accomplish in beach volleyball. He’s won more than 50 tournaments domestically and another 30-plus internationally. He’s won an Olympic gold medal and owns the longest active win streak on the FIVB Tour, having won a tournament in each of the past 12 years. But the 37-year-old Dalhausser isn’t finished. Not yet. He has a Defensive Player of the Year to win. Just kidding. Maybe. You’ll recall that Dalhausser did make the finals in the AVP’s season finale in Chicago split-blocking with Nick Lucena, and the one award that the Thin Beast has yet to win in his lavishly long list of awards is a Defensive Player of the Year. “If I could play with Evandro [of Brazil], we could just sit back and bomb serves and whatever, if we dig a ball it’s a bonus,” Dalhausser said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “And playing behind Evandro would be a lot easier than playing behind Nick.” He’s joking, though it speaks to Dalhausser’s brilliant career that he is devoid of just one accolade, for a position he doesn’t play. He has no plans – “no shot” – to split-block (Chicago is likely a one-time ordeal), for Dalhausser does indeed still have mountains to climb. He wants a World Championship. He wants another Olympic gold in Tokyo 2020. But first, he’s bidding farewell to California. Dalhausser and his family are packing up and moving to Orlando, just a few hours from Lucena in Tallahassee. “It’s a little bit of risk as far as volleyball goes,” he said on SANDCAST. “There will definitely be a transition.” A transition back to their roots. Dalhausser and Lucena have been close for more than a decade, having met playing against one another in Florida, when Dalhausser was at Central Florida and Lucena at Florida State. Their respective journeys have taken them from northwest Florida to South Carolina to Southern California and now, for the final act of their decorated careers, back home. “I’d like to grab the 2019 World Champs and 2020 Olympic gold,” Dalhausser said. “That’s the goal. We’ll see what happens.”

20 Dec 20171h 16min