Podcast appearances and mentions of brooke sweat

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features recent USA Volleyball GOLD MEDALISTS Corinne Quiggle and Allie Wheeler, who took home the gold at the Bulgaria one-star. After winning there -- coming out of the qualifier to do so! -- they went to Sochi, where they nearly made it through a brutal country quota against Sarah Schermerhorn and Aurora Davis and Kerri Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat.  On this episode, we discuss: - Corinne Quiggle's wild travels, in which she almost had to drop out of the event - The difference between competing in practice and competing in an FIVB event - How Quiggle and Wheeler overcame the nerves of their first international tournament to win gold - How their partnership formed, and the progress they've made as a team - What's next on the schedule, and the big goal up ahead And much, much more.  *** This episode, as always, is brought to you by Wilson Volleyball, makers of the absolute best balls in the game, hands down. You can get a 20-percent discount using our code, SANDCAST-20! https://www.wilson.com/en-us/volleyball This episode is also brought to you by Chasing Gold, a new non-profit founded by Matt Callahan and SANDCAST host Travis Mewhirter, aimed at funding aspiring Olympians to relieve the financial burden of traveling around the world. Read more and donate today at www.chasinggold.org! SHOOTS!  

4-time AVCA All-American at Stanford. 5-time Olympian. 3-time Olympic Gold Medalist. Unsurpassed victories with Misty May-Treanor on the AVP and FIVB tours. Throw in inspiration, idol, motivator and one of the GOATs.  Kerri Walsh-Jennings joins Rob Espero on this episode of the Viral Volley Podcast/Vodcast to discuss what makers her aspire to greatness, the 2019 FIVB season, her new partnership with Brooke Sweat, 2021 Tokyo Olympic Qualification and her off-court pursuits.   

Boomer celebrates the summer with three-time Olympic volleyball gold medalist Kerri Walsh-Jennings and her new Olympic partner "Defensive Player of the Year" Brooke Sweat, as they prepare for Tokyo 2021. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

:00 Intro2:15 Interview with Brooke Sweat about the 2020/2021 Olympics, her volleyball career, growing up in SWFL, playing at FGCU while they became D1 and her hopes for next years Olympics with her new partner!36:35 Reaction to Brooke Sweat interview. 42:00 Sports are allllll the way back. 42:45 Baseball's COVID problems. 43:20 Opening weekend of the NBA's bubble.48:55 Sixers rant before their last second win over the Spurs.56:00 NBA predictions. 59:15 Return of the NHL in a bubble North of the border.1:04:50 UFC Fight night reaction. 1:07:10 The Rock buys the XFL. 1:11:50 Pac 12 list of demands.  

Olympian and former FGCU Beach Volleyball player, Brooke Sweat talks about the Postponement of the 2020 Olympics. NFL Insider, Pat Kirwan takes us AROUND the NFL. & Mark Miller's Good, better, Best

It was somewhere in the space between the Gstaad Major and the Espinho four-star when the façade came crashing down. How long had it been since Sarah Sponcil had decompressed? Relaxed? Reflected on all that had happened in her life in the past six blurs of months? In that span, she and Lily Justine, her partner at UCLA, established themselves as the best No. 2 NCAA beach pair in the country. In May, the Bruins repeated as NCAA champions. Days later, Sponcil was on a flight with Kelly Claes, her professional partner, to Itapema, Brazil, for an FIVB four-star where they’d play Kerri Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat in a country quota. They lost in 28 minutes. “It’s such a surreal fast-paced experience,  national championship to pro in three days, trying to adjust my game to match the opponents, the best in the world,” Sponcil said when she and Claes joined us on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I’m just speechless when I’m asked that question. You’re never ready. You never know what you’re really doing and if I didn’t (go for the Olympics), I’d regret it for the rest of my life.” On the outside, though, it very much appears as Sponcil is ready for all of this, as if she has keeping up with her rapidly-changing world, no problem. She and Claes rebounded from Itapema with four straight top-10 finishes, including a ninth at the FIVB World Championships. They didn't just look like they knew what they were doing. They made it look -- dare we say? -- easy. On top of all of that, in Warsaw the week before, while the rest of Sponcil’s teammates and classmates at UCLA were walking across the stage back home, Sponcil and Claes put on a comical photo shoot of Sponcil “graduating,” cap and gown included, diving for a ball on the sand. It can all look so glamorous sometimes -- the world traveling, the funny Instagrams, the hilarious videos of them running through airports and Sponcil walking around the world doing handstands -- that it’s easy to forget that she’s never done any of this before. “Sometimes I can’t even wrap my head around how stressful this year has been for her,” Claes said. “I think back to my first season coming out of college. We finished the USA Pairs Championship and jumped on a flight to Rio. We jumped on the world tour and it was so stressful and we had so many new things coming at me and I felt like my head was spinning and on top of that it’s an Olympic qualifying year for her.” And then, after dropping in the qualifier in Gstaad, now two months on the road with stops in Portugal, Tokyo, Vienna, and Moscow still looming, Sponcil let down her guard. “Sarah sent me a text to come outside and she’s balling,” Claes said. “And I’m like ‘OK, we’re doing this.’” They’re a fun-loving duo, Claes and Sponcil. They’re goofy and happy and wildly talented, two of the top players in the country despite being in diapers when Kerri Walsh Jennings, who they’re trying to beat out for the 2020 Olympics, was making her Olympic debut on the beach. But they are -- in spite of how magnificently tailored their lives may look at times -- human. Three months on the road is a monumental task for a human being, much less one who had never done any of this before. Full-time World Tour, Olympic race, figuring out flights and hotels and meals and how in the world to survive this thing. “Honestly, I felt like I had nothing together,” Sponcil said. “I was missing home, I felt like I was trying to change so many different things in my game, and you can’t change a whole lot and still feel like you’re playing free. Everything was just crazy in my mind, and definitely had some teary moments, and I was just honest with Kelly and open and vulnerable and I was like ‘I am not OK right now.’ “To get closer you have to be vulnerable in those positions and it sucks to acknowledge that you don’t have it all together, especially coming off of college where you had everything. You did so well and now you’re being pushed in ways you didn’t think you could be pushed because you won a month ago, on cloud nine, and now it’s ‘Oh, shiz.’ “But Kelly had been in the same position and her listening to me means everything. It was a step in the right direction to know if we win, we lose, whatever, we’re still in this together, and that’s really powerful. That was a huge moment for us.” Claes may be the perfect partner for Sponcil, old enough to have done this for three years now, young enough to still be able to fully empathize with where Sponcil is in life. Perhaps that explains why, once considered underdogs by many in this race, these two are eighth in the world in the Olympic ranks and third in the U.S. They trail only April Ross and Alix Klineman and Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat, with another 12 or so events -- depending on what they want to play -- left in the qualification period. Theirs is a chemistry wholly unique to them. Last October, Claes was still unsure with whom she was going to partner for this run. She and Walsh Jennings played a few events, and when Walsh Jennings turned to Sweat, Sponcil turned out to be an easy decision. “Chemistry is huge for me. So that’s why when Sarah and I initially started talking I was leaning towards her,” she said. “Once we started talking and hanging out and training together, I was like ‘Shoot, we line up on so many things.’ I get that a lot of people see a partnership as more of a business but I think it’s important to have that chemistry. There’s so much time off the court.” On flights, they write rap songs together, which they debuted, hilariously, terribly, on SANDCAST. How much fun they can have off the court allows them to play free and creative on it, allowing them to stretch their full skillsets without fear of making mistakes. “We had a flight from Czech to LA, and literally the entire flight we wrote songs,” Sponcil said. “The lady was like ‘Do you want something?’ and we were like ‘No! We’re working on something!’” Indeed they are. They’re working on an Olympic run. A full album of songs. How to get from one place to the next, be it in the air or on the ground. They’re figuring this thing out, Claes and Sponcil, and the first step to doing so is acknowledging that they have absolutely nothing figured out. “You’re trying to force yourself to figure it out, whether it’s transportation or strategy in a game. It’s so different than in college and I think when you accept that you’re never going to have it all figured out and just accept it -- moral of the story, we don’t have it figured out,” Sponcil said. “So don’t try to figure it out. Delayed flights, canceled flights -- just smile and wave. We’ll somehow find our way to the next destination, we just don’t know how yet.”

It seems an idyllic existence, to be a professional beach volleyball player. Travel the world. Explore the planet’s most breathtaking beaches. See everything there is to see, both inland and coastal. Play in front of thousands of adoring fans. Sign autographs. Take pictures. Live the life Instagram would love you to have. That’s all true, yes. Tri Bourne gets to travel the world. He gets to explore the planet’s most breathtaking beaches, eat all the world’s best and unique foods. He gets to see everything there is to see. Including 2 a.m. in Jinjiang, China. A world away from his family, his pregnant wife, running on two hours of sleep per night for the previous few nights, having just spent the previous 45 hours on planes and buses and shuttles, crammed into spaces not made for abnormally large men who need to use their bodies to make a living. That, and Bourne’s body has been notoriously rebellious these past two years, with an autoimmune disease that has made traveling the world to play a sport with exceptionally high demands on the body that much more stressful. Most don’t recognize that side of the sport. Bourne, back full-time on the world tour for the first time since 2016, is again feeling its effects. “I was up at 2 multiple times,” he said of his time at the Jinjiang four-star, where he and Trevor Crabb finished fourth. “Dude, just freaking lay there. It’s brutal. We kept losing time. We kept going the same direction without going back, so we were going around the world and you had to adjust. So when we got used to it being 7 a.m., we had to adjust.” Adjusting is the name of the game for professional beach volleyball players. As Kerri Walsh Jennings said from Ostrava, the tournament following Jinjiang – where her and Brooke Sweat claimed their first gold medal as a team – “jet lag doesn’t discriminate.” Then she was off to the sauna to sweat out some of that jet lag. Which brings up the next aspect of life on the world tour: Staying fit and healthy, maintaining those lean bodies seen on livestreams and TV, is not the easiest of tasks. Hardly. “It’s difficult,” Bourne said. “A lot of times, we’re using our matches to get us into shape. These tournaments where we’re going seven matches in, you have two days of travel and then you need to recover from that travel, then you have a day or two before you play, so you don’t really have any time. “Our lifts were super jet lagged. We were just trying to open the body up because everything is super locked up from the plane. And when you haven’t gotten great sleep, you’re sore, you don’t want to push it, because that’s how you hurt yourself. There’s really not much lifting or practicing.” So they play. They play in Brazil and China and Czech and, hey, last week they even had the chance to play in the United States, for AVP New York! It wasn’t home, necessarily, but it was as close as it gets for life on the world tour. Everyone speaks English. The food is familiar. There’s family. Gyms. And now, after a quick stay, Bourne and the rest of the U.S. Olympic hopefuls are back on the road, to Warsaw, Poland. Some had to play a country quota, hardly a day to prepare for the cut-throat nature of the single-elimination format. Others will be in the qualifier. Everyone will be fighting the same, tired, thrilling, exhausted, rewarding, wonderful battle. “You watch some video, you’re playing,” Bourne said, “then you’re back to preparation.”

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.”

What drives a five-time Olympian? Today, we hear from the true legendary champion Kerri Walsh Jennings. The best beach volleyball player in the world sits with us for a conversation all about drive and inspiration. "My bronze completes me. My dark side completes me... You need to have both." - Kerri Walsh Jennings Discipline Liberates and Consistency Feels Great One of Kerri's favorite quotes is Jocko Willink's “Discipline equals freedom.” A lot of high-performing people get either flak for being so disciplined or pity for being “punished”. But discipline liberates and allows Kerri the space to breathe and accomplish things. Discipline is all about showing up and doing what it takes on the daily. And it is as beautiful a word as competition despite the negative connotation often attached to the two. “It makes me feel good to be consistent and to do the hard things when things are hard and to do it until they're done.” - Kerri Walsh Jennings Love for Winning Always Wins Like most athletes, Kerri loves winning. But her relationship with it is as unique as it could get. The joy of winning motivates and inspires her more than the pain of losing. People would often say that losing motivates them, but Kerri thinks that losing is like a chronic injury or a weight on one's shoulders. It gets into your psyche in a way that drives you crazy. It is a toxic feeling despite the positives to it. “I love winning more than I hate losing, which I think is why I'm still going.” - Kerri Walsh Jennings Feeling at Home in the Olympics With her veteran status in the Olympics, one would think that she felt the pressure of having basically the entire world watching her either win or lose. But not once has this ever occurred to Kerri. The Olympics is fun, and she has always found it helpful to create a bubble around her to make her feel safe and not get caught in the noise. She has found her home in the Olympics, and not even the millions of spectators would take her off her game. To hear more about Kerri's distinction between inspiration and motivation and a whole lot more, download and listen to the episode. Bio: Kerri Walsh Jennings has been called, “the Best Beach Volleyball Player in the World”. Kerri is a five-time Olympian, three-time Olympic gold medal winner, and a one-time bronze medalist. She is the beach volleyball career leader in career wins. And Kerri is half of what has been called "the greatest beach volleyball team of all time," with her longtime partner Misty May-Treanor. She is currently training and competing with her partner Brooke Sweat to compete in the 2020 Games in Tokyo. Walsh Jennings is also an entrepreneur. She is the founder of p1440,  a beach volleyball event series launched in September 2018 with eight events in the 2018–2019 season, showcasing the best in women's and men's beach volleyball from around the globe. Links: p1440.com Instagram Twitter Facebook Wikipedia Parade - Three-Time Gold Medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings Says Change Is a Process—and an Opportunity VICE Sports - What Makes Kerri Walsh the Best Beach Volleyball Player in the World?  We hope you enjoyed Kerri Walsh Jennings on this episode of Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and subscribe on iTunes!

It’s funny, sometimes, the path the universe can choose to take you. One minute, you’re lying on a training table, your torn shoulder being worked on. You’re pondering if this is it, the last tear. Perhaps it’s time to move back to Florida. Have kids. Raise a family. Move on. The next, you’re on a call with Kerri Walsh Jennings, the greatest to ever play the game, one of the most dominant athletes not only in the sport of beach volleyball but of all time. She’s looking for a partner, someone to make a run at the Tokyo Olympics. You’ve been to the Olympics before. You fell short, going 0-3. The sting is still there. You want more. So you take the offer. Your career isn’t over. In fact, this may just be the beginning. This could be the exact moment everything – the knee surgeries and shoulder tears, moving across the country to a state you never wanted to live to, making a career out of a game that you didn’t pick up until after college – has circuitously led to. Maybe this is the reason for all of that. Such is the story of Brooke Youngquist Sweat, one filled with tremendous adversity but magnificent toughness, both of the mental and physical sort. She never meant for beach volleyball to be a career. Her boyfriend in college, Nick Sweat, played. Every now and then she’d hop in. She gave it a go for a bit but didn’t like it much. Wasn’t for her. Then she tried again. Suddenly, the gal from Estero, Fla., the one who would work on her dad’s rock quarry over the summers, was moving to California. Suddenly she was traveling to AVP qualifiers. And then she was qualifying. And winning. Suddenly Brooke Sweat had become the very personification of all things Southern California, the one chasing a pipe dream on a beach, dropping everything to do so, traveling with the rolling circus of grinders and hopefuls that is the AVP Tour. Only it was working. It was in 2012 that Sweat moved to California. Not coincidentally, a year later, partnered with Jen Fopma at Huntington Beach, she won her first tournament. When she wasn’t winning, she was contending, as Sweat, in 2014 with Fendrick, made five straight finals, meeting the same foil every time: Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross. “I just wanted to be on the court against her, she’s always going to make me better,” Sweat said. “I never thought I would be playing with Kerri. Like, no. So it’s kind of cool to be in this position, especially after not knowing if I was going to be playing ever again.” So now here she is. Her knee is healthy. Her shoulder, as is Walsh’s notoriously troublesome shoulder, is rebuilt. On the road with them will be physical therapist extraordinaire Chad Beauchamp. The next two years will be the final push for both Sweat and Walsh Jennings. And then Sweat will return to Florida, where her heart has always been. It will have been a long and winding journey, though what else would you expect from this wonky universe of ours? What fun would the straight path have been, anyway?

No matter the country or tournament or prize money on the line, it is never an especially difficult task to identify which is the room of Chad Beauchamp. It’s the one overflowing with overgrown humans, with massagers, tables, tape, ice. “Chad has a bed for the athletes, a table, his bed that we’re not supposed to use but most of us sit on it anyway,” Tri Bourne said, laughing on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We get legitimately excited when we know Chad is traveling with us.” Beauchamp is, among many roles, one of the physical therapists who travels for USA Beach Volleyball. It’s a position he stumbled into beginning in 2012 with a combination of a phenomenal education, innovative techniques, and, of course, a small dose of serendipity. “I had been doing some U.S. Surfing stuff,” Beauchamp said. “At that time, I got asked to do a tournament with USA Beach Volleyball.” They wanted to know if he could go to Germany in a month. He had no idea it was a $300,000 Grand Slam. That it was a critical tune-up for the London Olympics two weeks later. “I was like, ‘Alright,’” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I just kind of got thrown in there.” Now he’s going on seven years with USA Beach Volleyball and is also the trainer tabbed to work with Kerri Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat, a pair of athletes with notoriously cranky shoulders. “This year is going to be cool,” he said. “I plan on going to Moscow with USA Volleyball but this year, specifically, Brooke is coming off her last surgery, it’s been challenging for her the past couple of years, so I’m going to travel a little more specifically with her and Kerri.” For the past several seasons, Beauchamp has been the man trusted with some of the most valuable shoulders in volleyball, from Casey Patterson and Jake Gibb in their leadup to the 2016 Olympics to Irene Pollock and now to Walsh Jennings and Sweat, who are making the push to Tokyo’s 2020 Games. “I’ve always looked at rehab and recovery as the glue that holds it all together, all the training and all that kind of stuff,” Beauchamp said, which is why stretching is as important as lifting, massaging as critical as setting, breathing as vital as hitting. “It’s all connected, and sometimes people don’t know, either. You may not even know that if you get a little more range of motion in your t-spine or if you can open up your hips a little more you can jump higher or cock your arm back more and can give you more power. Those are the things we’re looking for. We’re trying to find all of those things. “If you lack the range of motion in your hips, and you’re not getting the muscles firing in the right sequence, and if you’re not able to twist in your t-spine the right way or engage your core the right way, you’re losing power in your shoulder. And then what you try to do is you try to force it more and that’s when you start to tear your labrum and your rotator cuff and whatever else.” A conversation with Beauchamp is almost like a lesson in Kinesiology 101 combined with Meditation 101 combined with Weight Training 101, and that’s sort of the point. A visit with Beauchamp won’t result in a simple diagnosis and recovery plan – no more “ice and rest” advice. It will be specific, catered to each individual, an all-encompassing calendar hitting every aspect, from the mental side of things to the strengthening to the recovery. “Piecing all those components together,” he said, “is how we get the better performance.” And how his hotel room is the one perpetually overcrowded. 

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." 

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." 

Brooke Sweat and Country music is all you need to know about this episode of The Net Live.