SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

You could have seen this path a long time ago, had you been paying close enough attention. When Nicole and Megan McNamara, identical twins from Vancouver, Canada, were on the same indoor team. One set, the other hit. Four others were on the court, sure, but “she would set me every ball,” Megan said, as the two broke out in fits of laughter. “And our coach was like ‘You gotta give other people some love.’” Not really, actually. There was beach, too. Nobody else to set. Nobody else to hit. Just the twins. Even in a quasi-team environment at UCLA, where they ushered in a new, small ball, fast movement offense that is becoming vogue in the college game, it was still just the McNamaras on court one. They could win and the Bruins could lose, or vice versa, which, Megan admitted, “is bizarre. It’s a bizarre feeling.” “You can win your match but then UCLA loses and you’re happy, then you’re bummed or vice versa,” Nicole said. “You’re all pissed about your loss but the team’s all stoked.” It was a bizarre and perfect four years in Westwood. Two National Championships. One of the most successful partnerships the game has seen in its nascent stages at the collegiate level. Now it’s back to their roots: Just the two of them. No scheduled practices with Stein Metzger and the crew. No team nutritionist or personal trainers or world class weight facilities. Just Megan and Nicole, taking on the world. That’s where they are right now, actually. Out in the world. Itapema, Brazil, specifically. Thousands of miles from home, whether that home be considered Vancouver or Westwood at this point. Recipients of the wild card, they’re straight into main draw, an excellent welcome to the tour gift from the FIVB, which is suddenly becoming replete with Canadians playing at a world-class level. Two different Canadian teams – Melissa Humana-Paredes and Sarah Pavan, Brandie Wilkerson and Heather Bansley – held the top spot in the world at one point last season. The McNamaras are already high enough in the world ranks that they’ve earned a spot in the World Championships during the last week of June and first of July, in Hamburg, Germany. “Our main goal for the summer was going to be to qualify for some of the bigger tournaments, and also to get settled with our new life in Toronto,” Nicole said. “Those were our main focuses so even qualifying for World Championships was amazing. We wouldn’t have expected that. If you would have told us that last year, we wouldn’t have believed you. It’s unbelievable.” What’s unbelievable now will be the standard soon enough. It would have been unbelievable, when they were freshmen Bruins, to conceive of a time when a school not named USC would win back-to-back national titles. Now that’s the new standard. It would have been unbelievable, when they were pre-teens, watching Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May Treanor, to conceive of a time when they’d not only be competing at their level, but pushing them. Now, after taking Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat to three in Mexico in October, that’s the new standard. So they’ll continue setting standards, blowing past expectations, making the unbelievable quite real quite regularly. And they’ll do so, as they’ve always done so, together.  “If it’s just the two of us out somewhere in the world we just need to lean on each other a little more,” Megan said. “I think that kind of helps because we were kind of cushioned at UCLA with all the support, and also knowing that our two through fives have our back. Knowing we’ve invested a lot of time, money, it helps us come together.”

15 Maj 20191h 1min

Let it sink in, if just for a second, that in a tournament where a pair of Sunday regular teams – John Hyden and Ryan Doherty, Reid Priddy and Theo Brunner -- were elsewhere in the world, Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena and Taylor Crabb and Jake Gibb were in an elimination match for fifth. Six of the eight AVP tournaments in 2018 were won by either Dalhausser/Lucena or Gibb/Crabb. And they had to play one another, in the contender’s bracket, on a Saturday evening, for fifth. Meanwhile, the eight seed – Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb – had emerged unscathed from the upper half of the winner’s bracket, and the six – Casey Patterson and Chase Budinger – from the bottom half. Yes, yes, the one seed still won the tournament. In an event in which Crabb and Gibb didn’t really play their finest volleyball until that late Saturday evening, they still emerged victorious. But gone, possibly, are the chalk-walk days of the men’s AVP, where one can safely bet on few upsets, where qualifier teams are dismissed quickly, painlessly, where the mid-tiers are the mid-tiers and the top teams are untouchable. The same team that won the entire tournament was pushed to three sets in its first match, by qualifiers Kyle Friend and Duncan Budinger. Then they went three, again, with Riley and Maddison McKibbin, and again with Dalhausser and Lucena, and again in a semifinal rematch with Bourne and Crabb. This was a tournament where the 21 seed – qualifiers Logan Webber and Christian Honer -- beat the 11 – Chase Frishman and Piotr Marciniak – 21-11 in the deciding set, and that 21 then pushed the 14 – the McKibbins – to three. It was a tournament where Sean Rosenthal, one of the best defenders in United States history, paired with Ricardo Santos, one of the best blockers in the sport’s history, were relegated to the contender’s bracket after a first round loss to Troy Field and Tim Bomgren. “What kind of a draw is that?” Field said, laughing. It’s a draw begat from an ever-deepening talent pool, where the older establishment continues to win – “Old man Jake Gibb, still doing it,” Bourne said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter – and the younger generation, with the likes of Field, is pushing its way up. “I’d like to see a year where, unless it’s me, we see a new winner every time,” Bourne said. “We went for a while where it was always Phil or Jake and Casey.” That era may be gone. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see a record for new winners this year. Same goes, too, for the women’s side, which is seeing its average age of main draw players sink and sink and sink, as 16-year-olds Delaynie Maple and Megan Kraft qualified, along with high schoolers – and USC recruits – Audrey and Nicole Nourse. “We’re getting to a point where there’s no good draw,” Bourne said. “A few years ago, we were watching blowouts in the finals…the better our domestic tour is, it’s good for the sport. And if the AVP keeps growing, adding more prize money each year, more points, that’ll create enough opportunity for the back of the main draw players to stay afloat, to keep living. That’s the goal.”

8 Maj 201940min

It was a little more than two months ago that Brooke Niles and the Florida State team suffered their first failure in a season without too many of them. Niles had made a commitment to herself, promising that she’d have the lineup figured out by the fall, before her Seminoles went off for winter break. It was mid-February. Days before the season-opener against LSU. She still had no idea. “There’s so many combinations,” she said back then. They’ve figured it out. The tinkering is, with just a few days before the NCAA Tournament, where Florida State is the three seed, alas finished. Lineup’s set. Three wins, potentially, to earn their first NCAA Championship. “Playing all the West Coast teams in the beginning, we thought we had the right pieces, we just didn’t have the right partnerships,” Niles said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “So we changed a lot, and the second time we played UCLA we had the right partnerships but they were still kinda new.” Nothing is new now. The five starters who replaced half of the team that graduated from the 33-7 team that fell in the NCAA finals from a year ago are now experienced. The fresh partnerships have settled in, and it has shown to the tune of 17 wins in their past 18 matches, including a sweep of LSU in the CCSA finals, the fourth straight conference title for the Noles. “Our goal is to get better every time we’re out on the sand whether it’s practice or a tournament, and I think we’ve been able to do that consistently over the last ten weeks or so,” Niles said. “It’s hard because a team could start off as your ones pair and other teams can progress at different rates. You’re supposed to set your lineup how it plays our in practice so those things, so we’ve had some teams progress at different rates than other teams and we’ve had new partnerships which has been exciting as a coach. You can drive yourself crazy with how many matchups you can have on your own team.” Niles has found the sweet spot with Alaina Chacon and Madison Fitzpatrick on one, Sara Putt and Payton Rund on two, Brooke Kuhlman and Avery Poppinga on three, Molly McBain and Payton Caffrey on four and Macy Jerger and Kate Privett on five. Each has found their stride, particularly courts two, four and five, all of which are the second-ranked pairings in the country on their respective courts. Rund and Putt have gone 13-2 since the switch; Caffrey and McBain are second-ranked on four trail only LMU’s undefeated Veronica Nederend and Emma Doud; Jerger and Privett are 14-1. Niles may have genuinely had no idea, as she said back in February, what her lineup would look like come May. With a 28-5 record, another CCSA championship, a three-seed heading into the final weekend of the year, it seems the Noles have figured it out just fine. “I’ve learned a lot in the past four years just being in that title game or close to it,” Niles said. “I want to treat every match the same way we’d treat a National Championship match. It’s just another beach, playing a different team across the net, and we just really want to focus on ourselves. We are getting better and better each time we’re on the sand.”

1 Maj 201953min

The voice is feeling good. “Oh, yeah,” Mark Schuermann confirmed on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, and if you’ve listened to the episode and just those two words, you can confirm it as well. The voice of the AVP is ready to go. In eight days, the AVP season will begin. Which means that in eight days, listeners, fans, and viewers will be treated to the majestic baritone of Mark Schuermann. To describe Schuermann as the emcee of the AVP would be a great disservice to both Schuermann and the AVP. He’s far more than that. He’s the emcee, yes. But he’s also an entertainer. A man of the people. A volley nerd who just so happens to be equipped with a magnificent voice, a natural knack for commentating, and a microphone that will keep all on stadium court more than pleased. That was the idea, anyway: He wanted to call the matches like the fan he was. So you’ll hear him react like a fan – “What just happened?” Say things fans say – “Taylor Crabb, you are ridiculous!” And he’ll do it among the fans themselves. Inexhaustible. Indefatigable. Ever-enthusiastic. “You don’t want to distract from what’s going on,” he said. “You want to enhance what’s going on.” It’s largely self-taught, too, his one-with-the-fan style of calling matches. At Cal State Northridge, after experimenting with majoring in math – “I like math, but nobody wants to do that much match,” he said – and anatomy, Schuermann enrolled in a broadcast journalism class. As it can often go with epiphanies, “I knew,” he said, “in the first three minutes that ‘Yes, this is what I want to do.’” A classroom, though, can only take you so far. Much of journalism, whether it be print or broadcast or entertainment, is experimentation. Finding what works for you. Discovering your own voice and style. It’s for that reason that Schuermann is glad he went to Northridge over USC, which offers one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country. The advantage CSUN held over USC? The fact that, while it was a good program, it didn’t attract droves of prospective journalism majors. It allowed for Schuermann to create his own opportunities, such as when he began calling CSUN indoor matches. “Still some of the most fun I’ve ever had,” he said. “I’m not sure I would have been able to do that at the well-oiled machine that is USC. CSUN said ‘Oh, jeez, this kid wants to put on a show? Great! Let’s do it!’” It’s such a practical major. The more you’re willing to do something, the more they’ll get behind you.” So before he became the voice of the AVP, Mark Schuermann was the voice of all things CSUN: water polo, soccer, basketball, volleyball, “probably ten different sports,” he said. From there, the branches of networking and talent and willingness to create began to intertwine. While his peers took jobs in smaller markets, Schuermann stayed in the Los Angeles area, taking a menagerie of jobs calling sports at Harvard Westlake, a sports powerhouse in Los Angeles, calling USA Volleyball matches, calling professional indoor matches. One such match took him to a World League event in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “That was a big moment for me,” Schuermann said. “When I got to those matches, something I never planned, something I never expected to happen – it was the second day of matches, and I was sort of bored. I was announcing, somebody else was running the music, I wasn’t running the music, I was like ‘Yeah, this is volleyball, I’m calling the game, but what else can I do?’ So I turned around to my supervisor and I was like ‘Hey, I know all the players’ names, I have a wireless mic, can I go into the crowd?’ And she’s like ‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’ So I went into the crowd and announced the rest of the match that day in the crowd, and it was so much fun. That’s when I realized ‘I really want to do this. I really want to get into entertainment.’ I’d never seen anybody do this. I might be onto something here.” And thus Broadcast Mark came into his own. In eight days, should you be in the stands, or on the beach, in Huntington, you’ll find him right there with you. The only difference is that he has a mic, his reactions are heard all over the beach, and, well, he’s probably having more fun.

24 Apr 20191h 8min

Tyler Hildebrand doesn’t really know what you should call him. “Official title is Director of Coaching,” he said of his new role at USA Volleyball. But they’re working on title changes because, candidly, nobody really knows what that means. “At the end of the day,” Hildebrand said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “who really cares? I think some people call it coach, head coach, director of coaching. I did some presentations at the AVCA and nobody knew what the heck the title was.” What matters is not the title Hildebrand takes – or doesn’t take – but the role he plays. He was hired by USA Volleyball, after just a year at Nebraska in which he won a national championship as an assistant coach, to push the United States back on top of the world of beach volleyball. Ask most any player, and you’ll get the same response: They picked the right guy. Hildebrand is what you could call a player’s coach. He was there at Long Beach State, his alma mater, last Friday night, watching the 49ers take on then-undefeated Hawai’i. He was there with Taylor Crabb, arguably the most promising and talented beach player in the United States. Beach in the morning. Indoor at night. Volleyball all day long. That, if nothing else, is why Hildebrand is so good at what he does. And he is good. After setting for Long Beach from 2003-2006, leaving as a three-time All-American, Hildebrand has enjoyed success everywhere he has gone. As an associate head coach for Long Beach in 2016 and 2017, he helped the Niners to consecutive NCAA semifinals. In his lone year at Nebraska, in 2017, the Huskers won an NCAA Championship. On the beach, he oversaw the most successful run of Casey Patterson’s career, there in the box as Patterson and Jake Gibb established themselves as the top team on the AVP Tour, winning more than double the next team. He was there for a Manhattan Beach Open win and an Olympic berth.   But again: Don’t call him coach. Hildebrand doesn’t just oversee one team anymore – he oversees the development of all of the top teams and prospects in the USA Volleyball system, everyone from the established talents in Jake Gibb and John Hyden to the promising prospects in Carly Wopat and Troy Field. “Our vision right now at USAV Beach, it’s to be the best students at our craft,” Hildebrand said. “And I know that sounds like a big scoop of vanilla ice cream, blah blah blah. But the people who are really excelling right now are at the learning or technological edge.” Hildebrand has an old soul, but still: There’s a wealth of technology and statistics in the sport. It’s time the United States began using it to its advantage. Which is why, more often than not, you can find Hildebrand in the film room, either with the athletes or just by himself. It’s possible that nobody on Earth has watched more film in the past year than Hildebrand, who is constantly searching for trends – quick sets, shoot sets, options, jump serving, float serving, whatever. “In beach volleyball, what I realized when I came out here five or six years ago, it was like ‘Whoa, in indoor we would use video,’” Hildebrand said. But in the beach? “We’d watch maybe a set,” Bourne said. It’s something Hildebrand is trying to change. Not radically. Not revolutionarily. Just a bit here and there. An hour or so every few days. Watch yourself. Watch opponents. Just watch the game. See what you can find. “One thing I’ve been doing, probably more than any other coach in the United States, is watching the game,” Hildebrand said. “Watching the world. That’s the one I’m pushing big with our athletes and coaches. All of this stuff, maybe we’ll see something, ‘Wow! That’s useful!’ And then asking the question why. “The hardest part about beach volleyball is that everybody is on their own. You can have great practices. You can work really hard. You can be really tough. But in the middle of the game, how do we think through the game? Let’s say we watched a couple matches, we can think through them.” So he’ll pour over the film. He’ll find the trends. He’ll present them to the athletes and from there, they can make of it what they will. It’s not his job to coach every specific team now. It’s to simply put them in a position to be as successful as possible. So if there’s one thing you could label Hildebrand – not coach, not director, not a director of coaching – it’s this: He is, simply, one of the most passionate people in beach volleyball.

17 Apr 20191h 41min

It was Yogi Berra who best expounded upon the upside of mental performance in athletics: “Sports are 90 percent mental, and the other half is physical.” Questionable math aside, the former Yankee catcher, and indelible quote machine, had a point. Sports, and the majority of facets of life which require exceptional performance, are rooted vastly in mental strength and fortitude. It made for an intriguing question for Leon Abravanel, a former professional soccer player for the Kitsap Pumas, Los Angeles Blues and Athletico Paranese. If sports are, indeed, 90 percent, “even 99 percent,” Abravanel suggested, mental, “then why is nobody focusing on this stuff?” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “If it’s 99 percent of the game, of the performance you’re about to go do, why is there no training around this? And if there is, where do we find it?” His search led him, at first, to an alarmingly high price tag. Sports psychologists run about $250 an hour. And those are the low end. The top in the business can be as much as five figures. Abravanel was good at soccer, but he wasn’t five figures an hour for a sports psychologist good at soccer.  As it can often go with retired athletes – Abravanel retired from soccer when he was 25 – his mind needed a new project, a new something at which to be exceptional. To sports psychology he went, partnering with former football coach and current Mental Performance Coach Zack Etter. Together, the two sought to make sports psychology more available. Available to athletes of all ages and sizes, of all socioeconomic statuses. Available via a book, “My Mental Playbook: The optimal performance system for athletes” which they co-authored and published this past October.  “We tried to condense all the information that we would learn from 30 sports psychology sessions into one customizable mental performance playbook that you fill out,” Abravanel said. “It has tons of exercises to create your own routine, and that’s a huge piece of the sports psychology world. It can’t be cookie cutter. It has to be very specific to the particular athlete.” This is not your normal book you’d pluck off the shelves at Barnes and Noble (if anybody still shops at Barnes and Noble). For one, it’s only 70 pages long. Abravanel knows what it’s like to be an athlete. Two practices a day. Lifting. Recovery. By the time all of that is finished, most don’t have the time or the mental bandwidth left to read a 400-page non-fiction dive into sports psychology. Two, it’s more workbook than traditional book, two parts journal, one part reading. It provides leading questions for the athletes to answer, literally, in writing. “This kind of stuff can help you in so many other ways as well,” said Bourne, who has explored his fair share of mindfulness exercises throughout his recovery from an autoimmune disease. “You can easily translate everything you learn, from learning the mental aspects of sport to dealing with pressures and whatnot to any aspect of life, which is great. To actually put it on paper in a log or a journal is great, it’s something I’ve been meaning to do.”

10 Apr 201951min

The Big Game Hunters. That’s what they’d call themselves. Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos and Brent Frohoff and Karch Kiraly could have the Rhode Islands. They could have Dallas. They could have Phoenix. But the big ones? Oh, no. Those were reserved for Tim Hovland and Mike Dodd. “We’d win Manhattan, Hermosa, the Cuervos,” Hovland said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We had a lot of finals together, that’s for sure.” Eighty-one finals, to be exact. In 150 tournaments played together. A remarkable success rate for one of the most legendary and well-known partnerships in the game’s history. You can still find those boys together. They commentate on livestreams together. They play fours and sixes together. They talk trash together. “Can’t hit like we used to,” Hovland said. “But we go out there, lip them off the court, make them feel bad. Then destroy them on the dialogue. There’s been crying out there. A couple of guys never came back. It’s fantastic.” Sixty years young. Same old Hov. That was his thing. He was loud. He was brash. He had swagger. He knew he was going to beat you and he wasn’t going to hesitate to let you know it. “We showed up, we worked hard at it,” Hovland said. “We’d play all day. We’d get down there at 10 in the morning, we’d get our court at Marine, we wouldn’t lose a game, we would take pride in beating everybody down there, and everybody would come to us. We’d play seven hours of volleyball, hard games, and that was just normal. If you did that, you’d have to play seven hours on a Sunday to win an open, and these guys weren’t in that kind of shape, even though we were going out and running around. We were in great shape, and we’re bigger, faster, stronger than most of the guys anyway. They weren’t ready.” There was one team, for the most part, who always was: Smith and Stoklos, perhaps the only partnership with more sustained success than Hovvy-Dodd. In the first five seasons of the AVP’s existence, from 1984-1988, they met in the finals 43 times. In ’87, seven consecutive tournaments featured Smith-Stoklos vs. Hovland-Dodd in the finals. “It’s kinda like the old Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers,” Hovland said in a previous interview. “You’re going to get through these other guys. They might get you once in a while, but very rarely. And when they did, you go through the loser’s bracket, and you’re only going to get better and better, because you’re playing more games and you’re not going to get tired. So we just had more determination. We worked harder. That’s the damn truth.” He’s seen every iteration and change and version of beach volleyball one can imagine. He’s seen the bikini contests during tournaments. He’s played under side out scoring. He’s played under rally. He’s played with a clock. He’s trained like a typical 9-5 work day – get to Marine Street, win games until one or two, grab lunch, win games until five, call it a day. It’s a different world now, for better or worse. He loves the development of the international game, talent he was able to see, first hand, commentating at p1440 Las Vegas and Huntington Beach. “It’s apples and oranges,” he said. “The game was so pure before. There’s some great athletes out there. It’ll just get better and better… These Norwegian guys are flat out good. These Russian kids can play. It’s a different time.” Indeed it seems it is. The Norwegians, Anders Mol and Christian Sorum, are the Big Game Hunters now. The trash talk is fading. Some things change. Some things change. Some things don’t. “I’ve been all over the world,” Hovland said. “But right here, the South Bay, is the best place in the world.”

3 Apr 20191h 4min

Troy Field had to pause for a second on the set of SANDCAST to catch himself. “Back in the day,” he repeated, laughing. “Back in the day, like, three years ago.” It seemed to catch him off guard as much as it can oftentimes do to those who have seen Field play. Three years ago, nobody had seen the kid in the pink hat. Hadn’t seen him flying around with a vertical north of 40 inches out of sand. Hadn’t seen him reverse wind-milling, evoking images and comparisons to a young Sean Rosenthal. Hadn’t seen him at the South of the Border Volleyball Vacations. Hadn’t seen him medaling at NORCECA’s with Reid Priddy, one of the greatest the indoor game has known. Hadn’t seen him donning those signature Slunks boardshorts of his. Hadn’t seen all of that coalesce into his being named the winner of the Top Gun Award at the AVP banquet, given to the male and female who, well, most look the part of volleyball players in the Top Gun movie. “It’s been a roller coaster,” Field said. “Just up and down.” Mostly up. Both physically and metaphorically. Field’s matches invariably draw some of the biggest crowds to watch him go up up up. He wishes he could explain it, too, that massive, explosive, enviable vertical of his. Wishes he could give a legitimate answer to the legions of fans who ask how he jumps so high and if he can teach them. He feels bad that his only answer is really a shrug and a sheepish grin that implies the gift of God and genetics. "I feel so bad because I'm not that person who trained it out," Field said. "I'm not the guy who repped it out. That's kind of it." Field is more than an enormous vertical. Far more. When the AVP needs a volunteer for its AVP First events, Field is one of the first to sign up. During season, at the Sunday clinics, lest Field be playing in the semifinals or finals, he’ll be coaching the kids. This off-season, he’s been traveling back and forth, doing South of the Border Volleyball Vacations and multiple events in Texas. He’ll be the first to engage with fans, both in person and on social media. Shoot, the guy is the first to offer help to the guys he’s playing against. When he’s knocked out of tournaments, he’ll go grab a camera for the McKibbins or Casey Patterson. He’ll run up to the Amazon booth and hop on the mic with Camryn Irwin and Kevin Barnett. Immediately after finishing this podcast, he offered to do video, photo, whatever SANDCAST might need, just give him a call. Just Troy being Troy. “With the AVP 2018 season being his first full year on tour,” the AVP wrote on Instagram. “Troy Field immediately made his presence felt! Between incredible plays on the court, engaging with the AVP Family and working with the community through AVP First, Troy is becoming the ultimate AVP pro.” Three years ago – or, “back in the day,” as Field likes to say – such praise from beach volleyball’s biggest tour would have been unthinkable. Three years ago, Field had been playing ball in Doheny where "the youngest guy was, like, 45 years old." Working odd restaurant jobs. Watching enough film of Karch Kiraly that he eventually adopted his signature pink hat and the goofy-footed approach. “Now,” he said, “it’s onto the mental side of things… I went from qualifier, right on the cusp to a main draw athlete and now I have to be the guy who qualifiers are thinking about. I was that guy, like ‘I have to beat Tri and Trevor’ or ‘I have to beat Rosie.’ I don’t want to be the guy that people are watching film on. It’s weird. Roles have reversed and switched and doors have opened.” And they’ll continue to open, to the point that, not too far from now, he’ll look back on this story, laugh at where he was at that point in his career, and say “Back in the day…”

27 Mars 20191h 22min