Podcasts about dalhausser

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Trevor Crabb, always one of our most popular guests who is onto a new phase of his career: Partnering with Phil Dalhausser for the 2025 AVP season and partnering with Cody Caldwell for the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour season. We chat about all of that, as well as: How the partnership with Dalhausser and Caldwell came about Why he hasn't played as much international beach volleyball as of late, and his plans for that moving forward His thoughts on the AVP League And, of course, whiskey, because it's Trevor SHOOTS! *** WE'VE GOT NEW MERCH! Check it out here!! Get 20 PERCENT off all Wilson products with our code, SANDCASTVB. https://www.wilson.com/en-us/volleyball Want to get better at beach volleyball? Use our discount code, SANDCAST, and get 10 percent off all Better at Beach products!  We are FIRED UP to announce that we've signed on for another year with Athletic Greens! Get a FREE year's supply of Vitamin D by purchasing with that link.  If you want to receive our SANDCAST weekly newsletter, the Beach Volleyball Digest, which dishes all the biggest news in beach volleyball in one quick newsletter, head over to our website and subscribe! We'd love to have ya! https://www.sandcastvolleyball.com/  

Rick is joined by AVP beach volleyball pro, Phil Dalhausser this segment. The 6'9″ hitter is still going strong in 2023 on the AVP Tour. He and his former playing partner, Todd Rogers, were the 2007 AVP Tour and FIVB world champions. Dalhausser and Rogers dominated both the domestic US tour and now the FIVB … Continue reading Phil Dalhausser, AVP Beach Volleyball Pro, Four-time Olympian →

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features Phil Dalhausser, one of the greatest – and some would say, THE greatest – American players of all-time. Since he and Todd Rogers won the Olympic gold medal in 2008 in Beijing, Dalhausser has been the most dominant blocker in the United States, and remains that way. We chatted all about Dalhausser's storied career, as well as: His wild experience in the Tokyo Olympics How drastically the World Tour has changed since he made his debut in 2006 The regrets his has on his career as a player, and the untold potential he and Sean Rosenthal could have had together What his future looks like, both as a player and a budding businessman And so, so, so much more. This is honestly one of the best episodes we've ever had on SANDCAST, as Phil completely opens up in a remarkably honest, funny, and reflective two hours. ENJOY! *** NEW BOOK ALERT!!! Travis Mewhirter and Kent Steffes just published a seminal work on the history of beach volleyball in their new book, Kings of Summer: The Rise of Beach Volleyball. Check it out on Amazon!! https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Summer-rise-beach-volleyball/dp/B0B3JHFKM7/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1WGJFWHPBGPQ2&keywords=kings+of+summer+book&qid=1658922972&sprefix=kings+of+summer+book%2Caps%2C1328&sr=8-1 We are FIRED UP to announce that we've signed on for another year with Athletic Greens! Stay healthy with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter and get your greens today! https://athleticgreens.com/partner/d35ctoffer-strength/en?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=influencer&utm_campaign=sandcast_d35ct__a3172__o27&utm_term=cac__a3172__o27&utm_content=sport__a3172__o27 We now have SANDCAST MERCHANDISE!! Rock the gear of your favorite podcast today! https://www.sandcastmerch.com/ If you want to receive our SANDCAST weekly newsletter, the Beach Volleyball Digest, which dishes all the biggest news in beach volleyball in one quick newsletter, head over to our website and subscribe! We'd love to have ya! https://www.sandcastvolleyball.com/ 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 Check out our book, Volleyball for Milkshakes, written by SANDCAST hosts Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter: https://www.amazon.com/Volleyball-Milkshakes-Travis-Mewhirter/dp/B089781SHB

Butch Discusses:- The 2020 Olympics, including his take on the USA women's indoor team thus far, the USA men's indoor team and where they need to improve moving forward,  and which indoor teams he thinks are the favorites to medal.   He then touches on the beach volleyball games, what went wrong from Sponcil & Claes, and Dalhausser & Lucena, and who the favorites are to medal. Support the show (https://godstoghosts.com/donate/)

MLB – Major League Baseball Yesterday Detroit Tigers 6, Minnesota Twins 5 – F/11 Innings Chicago White Sox 5, Kansas City Royals 3 Cincinnati Reds 7, Chicago Cubs 4 Tigers 6, Twins 5 – F/11 – Cabrera, Haase power Tigers past Twins 6-5 in 11th innings Miguel Cabrera hit a run-scoring single in the 11th inning after Eric Haase tied the game with a grand slam in the top of the ninth as the Detroit Tigers beat the Minnesota Twins 6-5. Cabrera’s hit scored automatic runner Jonathan Schoop. The Tigers tied the game with a homer in the ninth inning for the second straight game. Robbie Grossman, who singled to start the ninth-inning comeback, hit a two-run homer on Monday night before Minnesota won 6-5 in 10 innings. Mitch Garver hit a first-inning grand slam for the Twins. White Sox 5, Royals 3 – Jiménez hits 3-run HR, rallies White Sox past Royals 5-3 Eloy Jiménez logged his first big hit of the season, launching a go-ahead, three-run homer in the eighth inning that sent the Chicago White Sox over the Kansas City Royals 5-3. The 24-year-old slugger, who was the 2019 AL Rookie of the Year and then kept up his power surge during the pandemic-shortened season, tore a pectoral muscle in spring training. He hadn’t played in the majors until going 0 for 4 Monday night. But Jiménez quickly made up for lost time in his second game. After hitting a single in his first at-bat, he came up in the eighth after a two-out intentional walk to Jose Abreu with Chicago trailing 3-2. Jiménez connected for a 459-foot drive to cap a four-run rally for the AL Central leaders. Reds 7, Cubs 4 – Votto hits 2 more homers as Reds roll past Cubs 7-4 Joey Votto continued his power surge with two home runs and started a dazzling double play as the Cincinnati Reds pulled away to a 7-4 victory over the Chicago Cubs. Votto has homered in a career-high four consecutive games for the second time, one game shy of the team record. The Reds hit four home runs in winning for the third time in five games. The Cubs lost for the sixth time in their last 10. Cincinnati rookie Vladimir Gutierrez pitched 6 1/3 innings of five-hit ball to earn the win. Cubs starter Adbert Alzolay allowed three home runs in five innings. Tonight Detroit Tigers at Minnesota Twins, 1:10 p.m.                    94.9 WSJM/103.7 Cosy-FM 12:50 Cincinnati Reds at Chicago Cubs, 8:05 p.m. Chicago White Sox at Kansas City Royals, 8:10 p.m. NHL – Vegas trades Fleury to Chicago as goalie carousel spins, get Johnson from champs The Vegas Golden Knights have traded reigning Vezina Trophy-winning goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury to the Chicago Blackhawks. Vegas got minor leaguer Mikael Hakkarainen in return, indicating the move was a salary dump. Fleury counts $7 million against the salary cap next season. Chicago was not on the 36-year-old’s 10-team no-trade list. Agent Allan Walsh says Fleury will be taking time to talk to his family and evaluate his hockey future.  Chicago wasn’t done there, the Blackhawks also acquired forward Tyler Johnson from the Stanley Cup Champion Tampa Bay Lightning in exchange for the contract of injured Blackhawks defenseman Brent Seabrook.  The move by Tampa takes Johnson $5-million contract off the salary cap. Seabrook announced his retirement during the past season citing injury, he is listed on long term injured reserve and his contract does not count in the salary cap calculations.  Seabrook had 3 years left on his contract and will make $6.875 million each year.   The trade also sent a 2023 second round pick from Tampa Bay to Chicago. NCAAFB – Big 12′s Texas, Oklahoma make request to join powerhouse SEC Texas and Oklahoma have made a request to join the powerhouse Southeastern Conference. A day after the Big 12 schools notified the league that they would not be extending an agreement that binds conference members to 2025, the schools publicly stated for the first time they want to join the SEC.  SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey says his league will consider the request in the “near future.”  The SEC would grow to 16 teams with the additions of Texas and Oklahoma, half of which have won at least one national championship in football since 1980. NFL – Bears’ QB balancing act begins with training camp The balancing act for Matt Nagy has begun. The Chicago Bears coach made it clear as players reported Tuesday for training camp why the team is starting veteran quarterback Andy Dalton first before it turns to rookie first-round pick Justin Fields. The season amounts to weighing how much Dalton can win against the potential problems associated with starting a developing rookie like Fields. Nagy realizes the excitement building throughout Chicago to see Fields play, but for training camp, preseason and at least the first game, the Bears know Dalton is the starter. NFL – Rodgers arrives in Green Bay for start of training camp Aaron Rodgers has made it to Green Bay on the eve of the Packers’ first training-camp workout. Rodgers was seen arriving at Lambeau Field on Tuesday morning, the day after NFL Network and ESPN had reported the reigning MVP was closing in on a deal that would keep him with the Packers this season. The Packers open training camp Wednesday. Rodgers hadn’t participated in organized team activities this spring and skipped the Packers’ mandatory minicamp. His return makes the Packers legitimate Super Bowl contenders. NFL – Rivera opens Washington camp frustrated by vaccine hesitancy Ron Rivera opened Washington’s training camp expressing frustration about a lack of vaccinations among players. Rivera says he believes Washington is now over 50% of players fully vaccinated. Only five NFL teams are at less than 70% of players who have either received one vaccination shot or both. The low vaccination rate is one of many questions facing Washington going into camp. It has caused Rivera to wear a mask around unvaccinated players because he says he is immune deficient. Rivera was treated for a form of skin cancer last year. Offensive tackle Cornelius Lucas was placed on the NFL’s COVID-19 reserve list Tuesday. NBA – The play-in tournament officially returning to NBA in 2022 The NBA’s play-in tournament is back for at least one more season. As expected, the league’s board of governors gave approval Tuesday to the plan that would bring back the event in April 2022. The format will be the same as it was this past season: the teams that finish seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th in each conference will play to determine the No. 7 and No. 8 playoff seeds. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had said on multiple occasions in recent weeks that he expected the play-in to return. It was utilized this past season for the first time on an experimental basis. NBA – Former President Obama buys stake in NBA’s Africa business Former U.S. President Barack Obama has bought a stake in the NBA’s Africa business through his foundation. The NBA says Obama will have a minority equity stake in NBA Africa, a new entity set up this year to run all the league’s business on the continent. The NBA adds Obama will use any profits to fund the Obama Foundation’s youth and leadership programs in Africa. Obama has been linked to the NBA’s Africa operations since 2019 but it wasn’t clear until Tuesday’s announcement exactly what his involvement would be. NBA Africa and world body FIBA have combined to set up the first pro basketball league in Africa. It held its inaugural season in May. HSFB – Georgia 15-year-old collapses, dies after football practice A 15-year-old high school football player died after collapsing at the first day of practice amid 97-degree temperatures in middle Georgia.  Bibb County school district officials say Joshua Ivory of Macon’s Southwest High School went into distress Monday, leading coaches to call an ambulance. He later died at a hospital. No cause of death has been announced and an autopsy is planned. MILB – Minor League Baseball – High-A Central Yesterday West Michigan Whitecaps 6, Great Lakes Loons 3 Fort Wayne Tin Caps 3, Lansing Lugnuts 1 Quad Cities River Bandits 4, South Bend Cubs 2 Tonight West Michigan Whitecaps at Great Lakes Loons, 7:05 p.m. Fort Wayne Tin Caps at Lansing Lugnuts, 7:05 p.m. South Bend Cubs at Quad Cities River Bandits, 7:30 p.m. Tokyo 2020 – Summer Olympic Games – Games of the XXXII Olympiad Volleyball – US beats Tunisia 3-1 in men’s volleyball The U.S. men’s volleyball team has improved to 2-1 in pool play at the Olympics by beating Tunisia 3-1.  The Americans bounced back from a loss to the Russians on Wednesday. They knocked off the lowest-ranked team in their group 25-14, 23-25, 25-14, 25-23.  The victory keeps the U.S. in good position to advance to the quarterfinals as one of the top four teams in Pool B. Tunisia has lost all three matches so far in Tokyo. Beach Volleyball – US men, women both win in beach volleyball prelims Americans April Ross and Alix Klineman have guaranteed themselves at least one more beach volleyball match at the Tokyo Olympics. U.S. men Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena helped their chances of making the knockout round as well. The U.S. women beat Spain 21-13, 21-16 for their second straight win. They can do no worse than a three-way tie for first. Dalhausser and Lucena improved to 1-1 in the round robin by beating Brazil’s Alison, the reigning gold medalist, and Alvaro Filho, 24-22, 19-21, 15-13. The Americans will meet Argentina on Thursday. Gymnastics – Russian team topples American powerhouse with Biles out Though the history books may mark Tuesday’s victory with an asterisk due to American star Simone Biles’ early withdrawal, the Russian women’s gymnastics team’s dazzling performance is the result of a concerted transformation since they finished a distant second to the American team at the 2019 World Championship. They beat the Americans by nearly 3.5 points, a significant margin in the sport. Their victory came just a day after the Russian men also won. The country swept the gymnastics team gold medals, among the most coveted at the summer Games.  Biles has also withdrawn from the individual all-around competition. Swimming – "Just proud": Ledecky finally wins gold at Tokyo Olympics Finally, a gold medal in Tokyo for Katie Ledecky. The American star bounced back from the worst finish of her brilliant Olympic career to take the first-ever gold medal in the women’s 1,500-meter freestyle. It wasn’t quite the breeze everyone expected in the metric mile. Ledecky built a big lead right from the start, then worked hard to hold off American teammate Erica Sullivan’s blazing finish. But it was Ledecky touching first in 15 minutes, 37.39 seconds. Sullivan claimed the silver, while the bronze went to Germany’s Sarah Kohler. Ledecky bounced back from a fifth-place showing in the 200 free. Softball – Japan beats US 2-0, turns incredible DP to win softball gold Japan won its second straight Olympic softball gold medal, beating the United States 2-0 in an emotional repeat of their 2008 victory in Beijing that again left the Americans in tears. Yukiko Ueno took a one-hitter into the sixth inning five days after her 39th birthday, and Japan snuffed out an American rally attempt with an acrobatic double play in the sixth inning. Mana Atsumi, the No. 9 batter, had a run-scoring infield hit in the fourth inning and Yamato Fujita lined an RBI single off Abbott in the fifth. Softball will not return to the Olympics until at least 2028. NBC’s Tokyo Olympics viewership gets off to rough start NBC Universal is still waiting to see if there will be a surge of interest in viewership for the Tokyo Summer Olympics. During each of the first three nights of coverage, viewership was down more than 30 percent compared to corresponding nights at the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016. NBC’s audience this year was its largest on Sunday night, but that still represented a 43 percent drop from five years ago. Viewing habits for live television have changed dramatically in the past five years, so it’s difficult to determine how much NBC’s Olympics slump has to do with that, and how much with the underwhelming performance in Tokyo.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features Nick Lucena, one of the top defenders on the AVP and FIVB tours of his generation. In this episode, we discuss: What this year has looked like for Lucena, which began in Doha and ended in a wild trip to Australia Playing a fun, no-block tournament with Taylor Crabb Why he and Phil Dalhausser decided to split-block in the AVP Chicago tournament in 2018 What motivates Lucena, who is 41 years old, to continue playing The competitive streak that has kept him at the top of his game since his early 20s The four-week expedited training schedule he and Dalhausser undertook to prepare for the AVP Champions Cup How crazy the U.S. will look without Dalhausser and Jake Gibb in the game after this season This episode is, as always, brought to you by Wilson volleyball. They make the best balls in the game, and you can get 20 percent off by using our discount code, Sandcast-20.  Be sure to check out our new book, Volleyball for Milkshakes, on Amazon and, if you're feeling extra magnanimous, drop us a review! It goes a long way.  Thanks as always for listening! SHOOTS!

John Vallely.John Discusses:- His youth growing up in Newport Beach surfing, working for his dad, playing basketball, and learning the sport of volleyball, his journey as a talented basketball player starting out at Orange Coast Community College where he met his amazing wife, Karen, transferring to UCLA and playing guard for John Wooden at UCLA and winning 2 NCAA Championships in '69 & '70, what he learned at his 2 years at UCLA from Coach Wooden, his career on the beach playing volleyball and the players he played with up to landing Ron Von Hagen as a partner in '69, what it was like winning beach opens alongside the Legendary Von Hagen, including the '69 Manhattan Beach Open against Rundle & Bergmann, plus beating them at the Jonathan Club, what he remembers about Bergmann & Rundle, what made Von Hagen such an incredible player and role model to play with, his recollection of some of the other players he played with: Brian Lewis SR, Pete Ott, and Bobby Garcia, his time playing indoor for Wilt's Big Dippers, his recollection of many of the legends and characters he played with and against ( Larry Rundle, Ron Lang, Keith Erickson, Gene Selznick, Kirk Kilgour, Bob Vogelsang, Ron Coon, and Dave Bordwell), the 3 best hitters he saw, the best diggers he recalls, and the best team he competed against, his favorite win on the the beach, his thoughts on the sport today with the new rules, including what strategy he would use playing against a team like Dalhausser & Lucena under the old rules, what he's most proud of from his career, and what he is up to today!Support the show (https://godstoghosts.com/donate/)

Buzz Discusses:- His thoughts on the rule changes to the short court and rally scoring, how he would do competing against a modern day dominant team like Dalhausser & Rogers playing them under the old school rules ( including his strategy and partner he'd pick to battle them), the 5 best men's beach players he ever saw ( including an amazing story about seeing a 15 year old Karch Kiraly playing with his dad Las at the Santa Barbara Open), his answers to fan questions ( including how his legendary south bay surfer dad Hoppy had a significant role in professional surfing that not many people know about, how Buzz was the catalyst in getting the volleyball courts built at Hermosa Beach in the 70' (even though he is too humble and nice to ever take credit for it!), what he misses most about his days competing in the sport, what he is most proud of from his career as a player, how he would like to be remembered, and what he is up to now days after retiring from the Fire Department as a Captain, and enjoying life with his beautiful family.Support the show (https://godstoghosts.com/donate/)

Matt Gage Discusses:- How he would do competing against a modern day dominant team like Dalhausser & Rogers playing old school rules, some of his most memorable moments as the AVP Tournament Director ( including a classic OB story when OB mouthed off, Sinjin taking a stand, a tussle in Muskegon, Michigan between Brian Lewis and Kent Steffes he had to break up in the food tent, and Pat Powers swinging a milk jug filled with water at Randy Stoklos during the heat of the battle in Wildwood, New Jersey), what he's most proud of from his career as player and tournament director, what his nephew Scott "The Bomber" Ayakatubby is up to now days, what Matt's doing these days in retirement down in Carlsbad, CA living the good life, and how proud he is to be a LBSU 49'er alum, and Wall of Fame member..Support the show (https://godstoghosts.com/donate/)

On this episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, the hosts discuss the first of the AVP Champions Cup Series, the Monster Hydro Cup.  Bourne and his partner, Trevor Crabb, finished third in the event, which was won by Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena on the men's side, and April Ross and Alix Klineman on the women's.  In this episode, Bourne and Mewhirter discuss: - How it felt to be competing again for Bourne, who hasn't played many AVPs in the past few years.  - How the site setup in Long Beach was, and playing without fans.  - What players performed the best over the weekend, including: Skylar del Sol, Sara Hughes and Brandie Wilkerson, Sarah Sponcil and Kelly Claes, Dalhausser and Lucena, Traci Callahan and Crissy Jones.  - The improvement Bourne and Crabb have had on defense.  - What the rest of this three-week sprint will look like.    Thanks, as always, for listening to the show! This show is brought to you by Wilson Volleyball. To get a 20-percent discount on the best volleyball in the sport, head over to Wilson and use the code, Sandcast-20 for 20-percent off!

2008 Olympic Gold Medalist Todd Rogers joins the show! Todd is a 2x Olympian, he's won 54 AVP Championships, when partnered with Phil Dalhausser the pair played in 57 events and played for a medal 44 times, winning 23 times! From 2008-2010, Rogers and Dalhausser won nine of the 13 FIVB Grand Slams they played! Todd is also a 4x Defensive Player of the Year on the FIVB, Best Setter (2005), Most Inspirational (2008), Team of the Year with Phil in 2010, and Tour Champion in 2010. After retiring Todd continued his coaching career taking the lead as the Head Coach of the Cal Poly Women's Beach Volleyball program!  Huge thanks to Podcorn for sponsoring this episode. Explore sponsorship opportunities and start monetizing your podcast by signing up here: https://podcorn.com/podcasters/  We hope you enjoyed this episode! Please subscribe, leave us a 5star review, follow us on Instagram and send us any comments you have about the show. Thanks friends, stay excellent!

Lang Discusses:- Why he thinks Gene Selznick is the best American Volleyball player ever despite my argument that Karch Kiraly is, his recollection of his time on the '64 Olympic team, how he would have played against Dalhausser on the beach ( regardless of his partner), classic stories of playing against Jim Menges back in the day when Lang served a sky ball that was going to land out on a woman and her child and Jim Menges caught the ball before it hit them and Lang said, that's a point!, the advice he gave to a young Kent Steffes in the early 90's over dinner when Kent shared with Lang how the rest of the players on tour didn't like him ( Lang said: SO WHAT!), how he moved on from the aging Gene Selznick as his partner to the young upstart Ron Von Hagen, his strategy as a defensive player when it came to digging ( his knowledge is PRICELESS), , the best hitters he played against during his era, his recollection of the classic '68 Manhattan Beach Open when he and Von Hagen lost in the dark against Larry Rundle & Henry Bergmann, how he won 70% of the tournaments he played in from '58-'68 in his prime, what he thought of Wilt Chamberlin's volleyball skills ( or lack there of), classic stories of Steno Brunicardi, and Jack Backer, how amazing Mike Bright was as player, and more!Support the show (https://godstoghosts.com/donate/)

On Tuesday morning, what seemed to be the inevitable alas became a reality: The 2020 Olympic Games were postponed, to sometime in 2021. For some, it’s heartbreaking. “I can understand why other people are devastated,” said Sarah Sponcil, who is third in the Olympic race with Kelly Claes. “They waited literally four years and now they have to wait five.” Notice that Sponcil said “others” when mentioning those who are devastated. For some, the Olympic postponement is devastating. For others, it’s a blessing not even in disguise: It’s just a blessing. This week on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, we discussed, among a number of covid-19-related topics – is there anything else to discuss at this point, anyway? – how each team in the Olympic race could benefit or set them back from the postponement. We dug into how, depending on the FIVB schedule and any changes the IOC makes regarding the qualification process, the postponement could put additional teams in the race. Here’s a team by team breakdown of the impact the postponement could have.   Women April Ross, Alix Klineman U.S.A. rank: 1 Points: 8,760 This one is difficult to pin down whether it hurts or benefits. On the one hand, Ross and Klineman were coming off their best season together, with five AVP finals in five tournaments and three wins on the world tour. They could have continued that upwards trajectory all the way to Tokyo. On the other hand, it gives Klineman another year to develop on the beach, which she has done at such a rate you’d be forgiven to think she hasn’t been playing on the AVP her entire volleyball career. It’s a bit neutral for these two, who are still all but a lock to go to Tokyo, no matter what year the Games are held. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry to play this year as it was, as they decided not to play in the Cancun four-star that was eventually cancelled, so perhaps this will be a good rest period to heal up the nagging injuries that build up. Until then, you can find Ross going viral with what has become the April Ross Challenge.   Kerri Walsh Jennings, Brooke Sweat U.S.A. rank: 2 Points: 6,960 The immediate reaction when thinking of these two is that it would have to negatively impact them. But the more one would think about it, the more that might not be entirely accurate. Yes, Walsh Jennings and Sweat are on the older side of the athletic spectrum, at 41 and 33 years old, respectively. Yes, they have quite a list of injuries and surgeries on the ledger. But Sponcil said it best: “Kerri is a machine,” she said on Tuesday. “She’s just going to keep going all out.” If there is one athlete in the world who can take this and benefit from it, it might be Walsh Jennings, whose three gold medals and five Olympic appearances did not come by accident. That, and she gets time at home, with her family, when she would otherwise be circumnavigating the world.   Sarah Sponcil, Kelly Claes U.S.A. rank: 3 Points: 6,640 There are two teams that I really don’t see any downside to this: Sponcil and Claes, and Kelley Larsen and Emily Stockman. For these two, it’s all upside. “Everyone’s been asking how we feel about it and I feel great because the last year I’ve just been like ‘Ok, let’s get as many points as we can, let’s pass Kerri, it’s crunch time,’” Sponcil said. “It would have been crunch time right now and now I have the time to process the opportunity I have in front of me. I’m trying my hardest to slow down and be like ‘Whoa this is an amazing opportunity having another year to get experience, to slow down a little bit, and take it all in.’ It’s the best thing for our team and for me personally.” It gives them more time to develop, both as players and professionals, and it allows them, as Sponcil mentioned, to finally slow down. Catch a breath. Sleep for a change. Sponcil has been competing at a breakneck pace for the previous few years, going from UCLA to the AVP then back to UCLA straight into the Olympic race. A break could be just what she needed. It could be exactly what the team needed.   Kelley Larsen, Emily Stockman U.S.A. rank: 4 Points: 6,080 It is positively bananas that the fourth-ranked U.S. team is also the seventh-ranked team on the planet. America is deep. When you’re as good as Stockman and Larsen are, and you’re behind in the race, time and more events are what you need, and time and hopefully more events is what they’ll get. If they have a dozen more events to climb the ladder and take the second American spot, as they could, depending when the FIVB reschedules its laundry list of postponed events, they could very well do so. Their win in Warsaw proved they can compete with any team in the world. They just need some more time to do so. Now, they might have that time.   Men Taylor Crabb, Jake Gibb U.S.A. rank: 1 Points: 6,680 It is hard to imagine how another year added to Gibb’s career would be a positive for these two, but it’s also hard to imagine how Gibb played some of his best volleyball at age 43 as he did in 2019. He, like Phil Dalhausser and John Hyden, have hoarded a gallon from the fountain of youth and just continue to defy athletic norms. For Crabb, it’s just another year to get better. With his trajectory the way it is – a sharp incline upwards – the postponement isn’t going to do any harm. Perhaps this will be a useful rest period for Gibb, a bit of a sabbatical before one final charge in 2021.   Tri Bourne, Trevor Crabb U.S.A. rank: 2 Points: 6,360 Like Sponcil and Claes, and Larsen and Stockman, this is another team where it’s almost only upside. They held a slim lead over Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena for the second spot, slim enough where it was basically a tie. But now Bourne and Crabb have another year to dial in their team dynamic, which both admit they’re only just beginning to figure out. Bourne can dial in his world-class blocking again, while both can dig into the nuances of defense and different roles in transition. It’s inconvenient for anyone to have to wait another year, but as this is this only team where age is not a factor at all, there isn’t much downside to the postponement for Bourne and Crabb.   Phil Dalhausser, Nick Lucena U.S.A. rank: 3 Points: 5,840 It is impossible to say how this will impact Dalhausser and Lucena. Dalhausser has readily admitted that Tokyo was it for him. Then it was onto family time and working at his new facility in Orlando, Fla. This news obviously pushes that timeline back. Like Walsh Jennings, though, it could just mean more time at home with their families for what could be the remainder of the year. They live close enough to one another that practicing won’t be a burden. If there isn’t another meaningful event until, say, August, maybe later, that’s another five months at home they otherwise wouldn’t have had. It could be exactly what they need, or it could be difficult to sustain the motivation needed to make an Olympic push for another year and a half. Time will only tell. And time is exactly what we have in abundance.

Kim Hildreth and Sarah Schermerhorn have been to California. They’ve seen the dozens of AVP main draw-level teams practicing up and down the Hermosa Beach strand. They are not unaware of the talent level in Hermosa Beach, in Huntington Beach, in Manhattan Beach. Which makes them quite familiar with the question they, and other top-level players living out of state, get year after year: When are you moving to California? “Well,” Hildreth said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “we just bought a house, so…” So they’re not coming. They’re happy in Florida. More than happy. They’re thriving in St. Petersburg. “I’d say we’re ok out here,” said Schermerhorn, who won the AVP Rookie of the Year in 2019. In saying that, they are flipping every piece of conventional beach volleyball wisdom on its head. It is almost unanimously viewed as a requirement to live in Southern California to excel on the AVP Tour. If you’re to take this sport seriously, you have to pack your bags, stuff them in your Corolla or Camry or Civic or RV or plane, train, or automobile, and make the trek. Doesn’t matter if the inflated cost of living makes you broke, and you have to work three jobs, skip sleep, and live off of canned tuna and pasta. It’s a rite of passage. Hildreth looks at all of that and wonders the exact opposite of what people often wonder of her. She is often asked how she makes it as a professional beach volleyball player in Florida. She’s curious how in the world people do it in California.   “I wouldn’t call it a disadvantage,” she said of living on the opposite side of the country from the beach volleyball capital of the country. “Seeing how the training and stuff here goes, I feel like unless you’re at where [Tri] is at, where you get to pick whoever you want to train with and you’ve got you’re full-time coach, but the girls where we’re at -- we’re main draw, qualifier range -- they’re maybe getting coached twice a week. I don’t know how you’re able to afford it with the cost of living out here. In Florida, we have a full-time coach, five days a week. It’s consistent. It’s five days a week. We know who’s going to show up to practice. It’s progressive.” Hildreth goes as far as to call it an advantage to live in Florida, and it’s fair to wonder: Is she wrong? In the AVP’s halcyon days, Clearwater was every bit as popular of a stop as any Southern California tournament not named the Manhattan Beach Open. Fort Lauderdale was the site of one of the world’s best tournament as the opening event of the Major Series. Its beaches are lined with beach volleyball courts, and there is a rich culture in every corner of the state, be it Orlando, where Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena train, or St. Petersburg, or Clearwater down to Miami and the cluster of beaches in the south. Dalhausser recently moved back to Florida, where he and Lucena first learned the game, for similar reasons that Hildreth and Schermerhorn are staying put: The cost of living, astronomical in Southern California, is maybe a quarter of what it is on the West Coast; the weather is excellent year-round; the talent level is high enough to produce bona fide AVP Sunday talents. Last season, two Floridian teams – Hildreth and Schermerhorn, Katie Hogan and Megan Rice – made AVP finals, in Austin and Hermosa Beach, respectively. Hildreth, a defender who played indoor at Eastern Michigan and a season of beach for North Florida, and Schermerhorn enjoyed the best seasons of their career, their prize money ballooning from $1,500 in 2018 to $17,000 in 2019. “We’re making it work,” said Schermerhorn, a 6-foot-1 blocker who played at Elon before a professional indoor career in Denmark and south France. “It’s not too hard to get out [to California, where there are three AVP stops per year, plus another in Seattle]. Our goal is to spend more time out here during season, playing with different people, training a little bit. But for the most part, it’s doable, and you got a decent amount of teams coming out of Florida that are making it happen.” This year, for the first time, they’re branching out of the domestic game and into the international. In February, they traveled to Siem Reap, Cambodia for a two-star and qualified. Currently, they are in Guam for a one-star, seeded fourth in the qualifier.   “We’re ready to make those steps and if we need to jump into competition a little bit earlier then that’s what we’ll do,” Schermerhorn said. “We definitely shifted our training and what we were doing to prepare for match play earlier. It’s good to get one under our belt and we’re ready to get some more.”

Tri Bourne found a funny way to describe a learning moment he and Trevor Crabb had towards the end of the 2019 season, their first as partners and first as split-blockers. “Only at the end of the year did we figure out: ‘Oh, our timing is off. We’re not doing defense right,’” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. Not doing defense right? And still finishing 2019 as the second-ranked American team in the Olympic race? Still being ranked tenth in the world, finishing the season with a bronze medal at the Chetumal four-star? “It seems simple, but when you’re in the middle of the game, it’s really hard to implement a high level, sophisticated defense with all the right movements and everything,” Bourne said. “So in the middle of the year we were learning and trying to apply it but only some of it stuck. Basically, we think of last year as our foundation and now it’s time to grow on that.” Bourne and Crabb may be in the most interesting position as any team in the United States, male or female. They enter the season as one of the coveted two American teams who, if the Olympics were to take place tomorrow, would be competing in Tokyo. But the race is close enough that it doesn’t really matter, because the Olympics are not going to take place tomorrow, and at the end of the day, it will likely come down to the Rome Major in June. What Crabb and Bourne do have is this: An upside – and downside – that is entirely unknown. As Bourne mentioned, neither of them really knew what they were doing on defense last year, and they still finished fourth at the World Championships, taking both Russia’s Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Norway’s Anders Mol and Christian Sorum to three sets. Who knows what the potential upside could be? Then again, who knows how quickly they can begin to, in Bourne’s parlance, do defense right? Such a quandary is not a quandary at all for either Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb or Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena. Gibb, Dalhausser and Lucena have seven Olympics between them, and Taylor Crabb is on the short list of best defenders in the world. In other words: Defensively speaking, you know exactly what you’re going to get on their side of the net. With Bourne and Trevor Crabb? “There’s a lot of stuff to clean up,” Bourne said. “Continue to buy into the stuff that [coach] Jose [Loiola] is bringing to the table. We were spending so much time learning how to play this new style of volleyball that I don’t feel like I ever blocked the way I used to, not even close. So I’d like to get back to that for sure.” What Bourne is grateful for, at the moment, is the fact that he’s back in this situation at all: Six months of Olympic qualifying to go, sitting in the second American spot. It was only two years ago, sidelined with an autoimmune disease, that Bourne wasn’t sure if he’d be able to play beach volleyball again, let alone at a level that could qualify him for the Olympics. Now here he is, autoimmune disease under control, tenth-ranked team in the world – and he didn’t even “do defense right” the whole time. “If we play well and get better at volleyball, if we’re a better team, and we play better, and I become a better volleyball player, I’m good with the result,” Bourne said. “I’m gonna be pissed if we don’t make the Olympics. Don’t get me wrong. That is the goal, but what are you going to do? You got better. You improved. And these other teams did better? Ok, I’ll live with it. “Right after the last Olympic quad I was like ‘This is my time.’ It’s cool to be in this position and I’m super grateful and it’s going to be fun no matter what happens.”

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.”  

It was almost as if Sean Rosenthal didn’t believe the words that had just come out of his mouth. “Leaving Jake [Gibb] for Phil [Dalhausser],” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “might have been the worst volleyball decision of my career.” He smiled, laughed. Then said it again, as if to cement it into reality what he had just admitted. Rosenthal’s partnership with Dalhausser was a fascinating one, though the reactions to it, including Rosenthal’s own, are complicated. By conventional standards, they were the best team in the world, winning their first event together in 2013, piling on two more Grand Slam golds. Rosenthal had never won that many tournaments on the world tour in a single year. And then he did it again, as he and Dalhausser tacked on three more FIVB golds during a run of four consecutive finals appearances in Navanger, Gstaad, The Hague and Long Beach. Less than a month later, they won the Manhattan Beach Open. For two straight seasons, they were the leading gold medalists on the world tour and also took home the biggest domestic tournament. By any human standard, the partnership was incredibly successful. But Rosenthal isn’t considered human. No, this is the Son of Jorel, the kid from krypton. This is Superman we’re talking about here, and Superman doesn’t live by the mortal standards the rest of us do. “For two years, we were the best team in the world,” Rosenthal said of his partnership with Dalhausser. “I think a little bit of it is because we didn’t win as many tournaments on the AVP as we were expected, but we won a lot on the world tour. Leaving Jake for Phil was the worst volleyball decision of my career. It’s crazy, it’s hard to say, but I think it might be true.” It might be true not because Rosenthal and Dalhausser were disappointing – they played together two years, they were the best team in the world for two years – but because Rosenthal and Gibb were just that good. They had just won the FIVB Team of the Year. Rosenthal, in an era of Emanuel Rego and Alison Cerutti, of Dalhausser and Todd Rogers, of Reinder Nummerdor and Richard Schuil, was named the best player in the world. Even after the FIVB season closed, they followed it up with a win in Santa Barbara during the AVP’s truncated, two-event revival season under Donald Sun. And then Rosenthal gave Gibb the call. He had already been in touch with Dalhausser. He knew, no matter what happened in Santa Barbara, he was going with Dalhausser for the next season. “[Phil] was just like, ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to play together next season?’” recalled Rosenthal. “And I was just like, ‘Uh, yeah.’ If your boss comes up to you and asks you, ‘Do you want a raise?’ It’s not like, ‘No, I’m good where I’m at.’ It’s kind of one of those things, not only from prize money but sponsor money, which went way up, too. Got RedBull and UnderArmour and a couple others, like SmartCar, which were basically through Phil.” But would he do it again? “I’d probably do it again,” Rosenthal said. He’d do it again because Dalhausser is a name that belongs in discussions with those of Kiraly and Smith and Stoklos and Steffes, the best the game has ever seen. He’d do it again because, even with a rash of injuries and awful timing to both Rosenthal and Dalhausser, they still finished as the best team in the world in consecutive years. Such is the standard of Sean Rosenthal. When finishing as the top on the world tour is cause for questioning a partnership change. We are now in the final act of Rosenthal’s brilliant career, one in which he has accumulated more than 20 wins, compiled a resume that will rank him amongst the all-time greats and won with a playing style that will immortalize him in the South Bay community. His focus is still on volleyball, yes, but it’s turned more to his kids, constant bundles of energy. It’s turned to taking some time off. Golfing. Enjoying beach volleyball for what it is – a wonderful sport, an incredible way to make a career. More important, a way to get the kids out of the house and spend some energy. “We all,” Rosenthal said, “need to get down to the beach and practice.” One generation of Rosenthal gradually fades out. The next charges in.

To be honest, the sound bye you’re looking for in this podcast comes around the three-minute mark. You can fast forward there if you’d like. Tri Bourne, taking SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter on the road for a training camp in Florida, asks Phil Dalhausser and his coach, Jason Lochhead if they are all in for the upcoming quad. “Yep.” “Yep.” Two words. All you need to know. Dalhausser and Nick Lucena are all in for the two-year push for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.   Over the past few months, as it goes with beach volleyball, there has been no shortage of speculation in regards to the career plans of Dalhausser and Lucena. Rumors of retirement. Rumors of partner switching. Rumors of one final push. All of those rumors, dispelled with a simple yep. “It’s going to be quite a battle this time around,” said Bourne, who narrowly missed qualifying for the 2016 Olympics with John Hyden, edged out by Dalhausser and Lucena and Casey Patterson and Jake Gibb. With Dalhausser and Lucena confirming they’re intentions for the upcoming Olympic race, a battle is exactly what it will be. Dalhausser and Lucena will be slotted as the unquestioned favorites, followed by Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb and then a mess of three to six teams – Bourne and Trevor Crabb, Billy Allen and Stafford Slick, Reid Priddy and Theo Brunner, Ryan Doherty and John Hyden, Miles Evans and Billy Kolinske, Casey Patterson and Chase Budinger – all of whom could reasonably make an international push. Which makes the preseason work all that more important. After the Fort Lauderdale Major was cancelled, Bourne and Crabb simply kept their tickets and decided to train with Dalhausser and Lucena, hence the Florida-based podcasts and a week of two-a-day practices and Brazilian BBQ with coach Jose Loiola and the girls team, Sara Hughes and Summer Ross, at night. “Jose saw we had a big break after Fort Lauderdale got canceled so he wanted to get us out of California and switch it up,” Crabb said. “It’s a good idea. You get, over and over again practicing the same thing for two months straight in California is a little much. Especially when you get the opportunity to train against Phil and Nick, one of the best teams in the world, it’s good.” Bourne and Crabb are still experimenting with their approach to an Olympic quad. They’re trying out a new system – split-blocking – new sides, new offenses, new everything. For Dalhausser and Lucena, who have a combined four Olympics between them, while Lucena had a narrow miss in 2012, this is nothing new. “When I come in, it’s not like I tell you what to do,” said Lochhead, who coached Canada in the 2016 Olympic Games. “It’s, ‘We have three minds, let’s check out ideas and what things are going to be the best.’ It won’t work if I just come home and tell them what to do. They have a ton of experience. They know what’s going on. I always think, if you tell someone what to do, in their mind, it’s hard for them to really do it because they don’t truly believe it but if you talk it out with them and hear their thoughts and hear their ideas it almost becomes their idea and their thought then they truly believe it and go 100 percent at it.” For one final Olympics, Dalhausser and Lucena are 100 percent in.  

Travis Mewhirter published his book, We Were Kings, on December 5. You can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble! I’ll always remember the first interview. It was September of 2016. I was sitting on my bed in my studio in Newport Beach. That bed also doubled as my office, seeing as my apartment was roughly 600 square feet and had room for a bed, kitchen, and TV, all within arm’s length of each other. On the other end of the phone was Tri Bourne – Tri Bourne! The guy I watched roof John Mayer on match point of the 2015 AVP Huntington Beach Open on the first weekend I had moved to California. The guy I had dug deep into YouTube to watch virtually every snippet of film I could find. That Tri Bourne. And for an hour and a half, Tri talked about whatever it was that I wanted to talk about. You’re writing a book? Cool. What’s it on? It was a great question at the time, and it remained a great question over the next two years. The umbrella topic was easy enough: It was on beach volleyball. It was on beach volleyball because, when I had first picked up the game at a bar in Florida called Juana’s Pagodas, I had done what all good nerds do when assuming a new hobby: I went to Amazon and ordered every piece of literature I could on the topic. Which was nothing. There were drill books, sure, and instructional stuff. But I wanted to know about the game. I wanted its history, in all its rich detail. I wanted to know the players, the people, the events. I wanted to know everything. Only, in book form, there wasn’t much of anything to know. So my second interview was with a man named Kevin Cleary. My good friend, John Braunstein, set it up in a way. I told him I was working on writing a book o beach volleyball, and he told me Cleary was a guy I needed to talk to. So I sent Cleary a message on Facebook, waited a month or two for a reply, and when he did, we decided to play a AA CBVA in Manhattan Beach together. It wound up being an all-day affair, Cleary regaling me tales of beach volleyball’s past, how he became the AVP’s first president, how the AVP was formed in protest of rule changes, how things were done in the old-school days. Slowly, I began picking the contact lists of Bourne and Cleary. From Bourne’s list, I was digging into the modern player; from Cleary’s, the first generation of professionals. In a single week, I’d speak to Sinjin Smith and Carl Henkel, the 1996 Olympic team and the cause of so much unnecessary controversy, and also Riley and Maddison McKibbin. I’d talk to Karch Kiraly and Tim Hovland, followed up by Casey Patterson and Jake Gibb – the legends of past and present. Within a year, I had interviewed more than 100 players across various generations of beach volleyball, and when I sat down to look over the roughly 800 pages of notes, I still had absolutely no clue where to begin or what, exactly, I was doing with all of this information, which was pure, untainted beach volleyball gold. Becoming a player helped clarify that. To be clear, my name, in the context of playing beach volleyball, should not be mentioned in the same sentence as men like Bourne, Patterson, Gibb, Dalhausser, Lucena, all of whom have enormous roles in the book. But becoming a player, experiencing the wondrous grind of working up the ranks in beach volleyball as it stands today, illuminated exactly the project I wanted to publish: Why in the world do people spend so much time, energy and money and sacrifice so much of themselves to play beach volleyball? Financially, it makes no sense. The term fiscal responsibility is a paradox when spoken of in the realm of beach volleyball. In the mid-to-later playing days of Kiraly, Dodd, Smith, Stoklos – all the names you’ll see in the CBVA Hall of Fame – it wasn’t so incomprehensible, to be financially stable and a beach volleyball player. They could gross half a million in a single year. But over the years, with the AVP changing hands so frequently, from Leonard Armato to Jeff Dankworth to Jerry Solomon to Armato to Donald Sun with various hedge funds and financial institutions subbing intermittently in between, the game has struggled to find a firm footing. As such, it’s struggled to provide the type of consistency that its athletes could live off of, all of which served to create two fascinating questions for me: How do men even stumble into this game, and why do they continue to do it? I sent my first manuscript, a 120,000-word monster of a thing, to my wizard editor lady, Ann Maynard, who has overseen a number of New York Times bestsellers. The content was great, she said, and the stories captivating. But I covered too much ground too fast. She felt like she was in a literary drag race that was at once exhilarating and severely confusing. She gave me two options: Pick half the book and focus only on that, repurposing the other material for blogs, stories, magazines, whatever. Or just split the book in two – one digging into the modern player, the other detailing beach volleyball’s ascent to becoming an Olympic sport. It made sense to publish the former option first, seeing as the information was going to be dated very quickly, while the latter, being historical, has no expiration date or need for expediency. So the next year, that’s what I set out to do, separating the information, outlining, outlining again, outlining one more time, then another, before sending it to Ann.  We settled on a structure, with each chapter being a stop in the 2016 season, each stop digging into a different facet of the game – the difficulty of qualifying, the difficulty of qualifying enough to be a consistent main draw player, the difficulty of sustaining being a main draw player while also holding enough side jobs to stay afloat, the difficulty of sustaining being a main draw player while also holding enough side jobs to stay afloat while also attempting to raise a family. Each chapter adds another layer, another dynamic of this game that, to me, is nothing short of fascinating. Throughout, you’ll read the stories of men who are at the top and the bottom, of the Dalhaussers of the world and the Chris Luerses – the legends and the constant qualifiers. You’ll read about men who have made it and men who are still trying and might never actually do it. And you’ll read about why – why they continue going for it, despite so much suggesting they should do otherwise, why they love the game that so rarely loves them back in any tangible way. Why they continue to push for just one more day at the beach.

There are exactly two indicators in Jake Gibb’s house that there is a professional volleyball living there. One is a panorama of the 1976 Manhattan Beach Open, the year Gibb was born. The other is a panorama of the 2005 Manhattan Beach Open, the first of three occasions in which Gibb would win and cement his name onto the famed Manhattan Pier. “It’s just kind of cool to see what it was when I was born, and you see the crowd just lined up like 30 deep watching, I think it was [Steve] Obradovich and I forget who he was playing with,” Gibb said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Then I have my first win, we played actually Nick and Phil, and I played with Stein [Metzger], and it’s a picture that Stein gave me after.” After that? Nothing. Nothing from the guy who has been to three Olympics and once, in 2012, finished ranked No. 1 in the world alongside Sean Rosenthal.   “Those,” he said of the Manhattan panoramas, “are the only volleyball pictures I have.” It really shouldn’t be all too surprising coming from Gibb, who has for years been one of beach volleyball’s most humble ambassadors. It’s not uncommon that his fellow AVP veterans liken him to Tim Duncan, the soon-to-be Hall-of-Famer after a brilliant career with the San Antonio Spurs. It’s easy to see the comparison, for the most notable characteristic the two share – aside from being excruciatingly modest, rarely succumb to any theatrics, unanimously respected by their peers – is this: They just get the job done. Since the AVP began hosting full seasons again in Donald Sun’s second year of ownership, in 2013, Gibb has won 16 AVP tournaments and competed in five more finals. He has won in Salt Lake City and Cincinnati, in Shanghai and New York, St. Pete’s and Atlantic City. He has won in the torrential rain, as he did in New Orleans of 2015, and stifling heat (Manhattan Beach, 2016). And, age be damned, at 42 years young, he’s doing it as well as he ever has. In four events this season, his second with Taylor Crabb, Gibb has made at least the semifinals in all four and thrice competed in the finals, beating Dalhausser and Nick Lucena in Seattle. “I feel like age really isn’t in the equation for me,” he said. “It’s how I’m playing and how I feel and my desire to play and I love playing and I feel like I’m playing well and I feel like I can keep increasing my knowledge of this sport so I want to keep doing it.” At the moment, it seems he’ll be doing it for another several years longer. Throughout the year, he and Crabb have only improved, finishing their last three FIVB events in the top 10. They claimed a fourth in a major in Gstaad, losing a thriller against current world leaders Anders Mol and Christian Sorum that would have pushed them into the finals. Two weeks later, at a major in Vienna, they came out of the qualifier to take fifth. Two weeks after that? Manhattan Beach, Gibb’s favorite stop. Again, he was in the finals, and had it not been for a swing that went two inches too long at the score freeze in the second set, he’d have had his fourth plaque on the Manhattan Beach Pier with his fourth partner. “It’s raw right now is where it is,” he said. “I’m going to need some time to let it sit. Like anything, you need time to learn from it, because right now I’m not in that space. Right now, it’s a car ride home by myself with a lot of F bombs and grabbing the wheel.” There’s not much time for reflection. Two days after Manhattan, Gibb began coaching duties for his son’s soccer team. Then a NORCECA qualifier on the day after that, one that begins the Olympic qualification process. Then it’s onto Chicago, the Netherlands, Hawaii, Vegas, maybe China, he isn’t sure yet. What he is sure of is this: He wants to go to Tokyo. And he isn’t ready to retire just yet.

Phil Dalhausser stands, hands on his hips, shaking his head. “That,” he says, “looks so boring.” He’s watching a young man play volleyball by himself, tossing a ball, hitting it line, tossing another, hitting a cut, tossing another, hitting a high angle. Over and over and over, nearly two hours on end. Many of the passerby on the Manhattan Beach Pier that day could have reasonably concluded one of a few things: the guy was either bored, as Dalhausser suggested, had no friends to play with, or was just borderline crazy. There was, however, a fourth option. Tri Bourne was actually having the time of his life. Weeks later, Bourne is in Bear Valley, California. He skipped out of AVP San Francisco early. It’s tough to be around the sport you once dominated, watching others who had never beaten you win titles you’re sure would be yours for the taking. So he’s visiting his sister, Kai, and his nieces and nephew instead. They’re barefoot minions, those three, ages two, four and six, charging around the forest, biking down hills, rumbling through creeks and swimming in the lake nearby. It’s suggested that they’re already addicted to exercise, and it’s also pointed out that it’s not the worst addiction to have. Bourne purses his lips, looks down. “It is,” he says, “when the one thing you can’t do, is exercise.”   ***   This is not a comeback story. No, no. That’s not how Bourne views it, and it’s not how he’d like you to view it, either. This is a reinvention, a rebirth, though not of the holy sort. Tri Bourne isn’t returning to the AVP Tour, to beach volleyball, the same person he was when he and John Hyden finished second in the world rankings in 2016. He’s coming back as Tri Bourne 2.0. More well-rounded. A different person with a different perspective. A mindset that goes far deeper than pass, set, hit. A skill set that is relevant east of the Pacific Coast Highway, too. Weeks before the onset of the 2017 season, Bourne and Hyden were registered to play the Fort Lauderdale Major. Bourne was still on the heels of ankle surgery, but all seemed fine. His mobility was good enough, jump felt no different, cardio was up to his world-class standard. Except there was something going on with his hands. He’d block a ball and his hands would sting and throb, eventually swelling to the point that he wore mitts at practice. He thought it was carpal tunnel syndrome, where the hands experience tingling and numbness from a pinched nerve. He got it checked out. The doctors didn’t know what it was, just that it was not carpal tunnel. Neither did the next doctors. Nor the next. It wouldn’t be until Bourne went to the University of Utah, site of the United States Olympic Committee’s medical center, that he would receive a diagnosis. It wasn’t carpal tunnel syndrome, the doctors confirmed. It was an autoimmune disease, something called myositis, which means, generally speaking, inflammation of the muscles that you use to move your body. It means Kryptnonite to the boy who grew up paddling, surfing, canoeing, playing volleyball, basketball, hiking – “just charging,” as he would put it. The boy whose life was, to that point, based on movement, was no longer allowed to move. “Basically,” he said, “I just had to shut it down.” Friends began to see changes in him. He wasn’t quite the same. Something was off. Because of course something was off. Bourne’s entire life, entire existence, had been flipped upside down and inside out. “You know when it’s raining and you have to sit in the house all day?” he said. “Yeah, that was me, every day. It was basically that. That’s what it was like. Everyone who knows me knows I’m pretty damn ADD. I come from a family that’s pretty much addicted to working out, that’s definitely a thing. Yeah, man, it’s intense. That’s why I had to go internal with everything because it was a lot, it was getting to be too much. It was, uh, it sucked. It sucked for a while, because I still had that drive, coming out of the Olympic qualifier, and my ego was just huge, I was ready to be the top guy in the U.S. “I was still ready to work hard, but what could I do? It was ‘Do nothing.’” He couldn’t surf, so he would body-surf occasionally, until his heart rate went too high and he’d have to sit back down. He couldn’t play volleyball, and watching film was almost as tortuous as blocking with the mitts. He couldn’t eat, well, anything. Anything that could potentially inflame his muscles – dairy, gluten, alcohol, just about everything not named broccoli, rice, and organic chicken breasts – was removed from his diet. The snacks in his pantry shifted spectacularly, from chips and salsa to dry-roasted peanuts and pumpkin seeds. His weight plummeted, nearly going south of 170 pounds.   “It was definitely one of the tougher things to see someone go through,” Trevor Crabb, Bourne’s partner for AVP Manhattan, said. “You can’t imagine missing out on a whole year and a half of your job and your love. Seeing him last year, when it first started, basically his muscles in his arms were as skinny as my legs. It was crazy just to see how his body changed so drastically.” It was, for an athlete who had competed in 13 different countries in a single year and took a bronze at the World Tour Finals, rock bottom. But that’s the thing about rock bottom. The only direction you can go is up.   ***   It began with the livestream. The AVP was expanding its coverage to Facebook live on stadium court. Bourne was asked if he might want to commentate. Seeing as he didn’t have anything else going on, sure, he could do that. It was an easy way to stay relevant and involved in the game, while expanding his skill set as a human being. What he discovered was that, while he may have been a little rough around the edges in terms of live commentating – considering he had never once done the job and had precisely zero training prior to his debut in New York of 2017, he did, objectively speaking, an excellent job – he found he quite liked talking about the sport. Later that year, he teamed up with a journalist and launched his own podcast, SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, which has since become a popular listen among the beach volleyball community, to the point that Bourne is now lightly chided about being the podcast guy rather than one of the world’s most formidable players. While his old identity as an elite athlete was one he missed, to be sure, it was also fun to learn, expand, grow. He began reading, picking up books on everything from Georges St. Pierre’s memoir to one titled “Becoming Supernatural,” which details, per the book description, “that we have the capacity to tune in to frequencies beyond our material world and receive more orderly coherent streams of consciousness and energy; that we can intentionally change our brain chemistry to initiate profoundly mystical transcendental experiences; and how, if we do this enough times, we can develop the skill of creating a more efficient, balanced, healthy body, a more unlimited mind, and greater access to the realms of spiritual truth.” Right. No book was off limits. He even wrote a forward for one, to be published later this year.   When Bourne was going to come back, he wasn’t going to return the same player or man he was. He was going to be something entirely new. His skill set continued to expand, enrolling in hosting classes to taking on a meditation challenge in which he had to meditate 45 minutes a day. The kid who couldn’t stop moving? Meditating 45 minutes a day? “Eventually I got the hang of it. It naturally progressed, and I don’t have that deep anxious feeling where my heart rate’s going up from being anxious just to do something,” he said. “It’s good.” The time for sitting and thinking is, to the delight of the beach volleyball world, over. Weeks ago, Bourne was cleared by his doctors to begin exercising again. Just light stuff. Nothing serious. But this is Bourne we’re talking about. He got in the gym, then in the sand. He felt fine, fine enough to register for FIVBs in Moscow and Vienna. He nearly pulled the trigger on Hermosa but decided against it. He had just begun a new treatment – “half great white shark, half puma stem cells,” he likes to joke – and didn’t know how his body would react. The initial plan was to wait for Hawaii, the AVP’s final, invitation-only stop of the year. But still: This is Bourne. He couldn’t help himself. He texted Crabb, his best friend since the days of the Outrigger Canoe Club in Honolulu, Hawaii. “It would be fun,” Bourne said in a text. That was all Crabb needed. He was in. They were in. Tri Bourne was back on the beach. “I was bored as hell this past year and a half,” Bourne said. “Trevor was the one friend who came over the most and spent the most time with me, and I was pretty boring, because I couldn’t do the activities we normally do. He’d just sit on the couch with me and just be dumb.” Because sometimes, being dumb is the best rehab a doctor could prescribe. They do not expect to win Manhattan, despite the last three Manhattan finals featuring one of them every year. Making a Sunday would be an accomplishment. It could be a long-term partnership or just a fun experiment, a welcome back party. It’ll likely be emotional, hearing his name called. His wife, Gabby, is already prepping for the inevitable waterworks to come. But when the first ball is served, the past year and a half is finished, done with, over. It may be a new Tri Bourne coming back to the beach, but he’s still here, he said, “to slay the dragons.”

Lay out? Was that what Adam Roberts’ friends said? He didn’t even know what that meant. So you just walked down by the ocean, put a blanket down, and… laid there? Nope. Not Adam Roberts, this week’s guest on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. His whole life, then as it is now, had been based on movement. Raised in High Point, North Carolina, Roberts grew up on a steady diet of soccer, cross country, track and basketball, receiving offers from ACC schools to run the 800 meters but also an offer from Elon College, which was just 30 miles down the road, to play point guard on its basketball team. He took the full ride to Elon, started every game in his last three years and earned All Colonial Athletic Association honors. During breaks, however, he would live at his parents’ house in South Carolina, and it was there, rather than laying out, that he discovered volleyball, a game that was quite similar to basketball in its movements – lots of quick lateral steps and explosive leaps – but it was on a beach. So he would play pickup beach volleyball every day over the summers, and it paid off with an eight-inch increase in his vertical leap in the gap between his sophomore and junior years. In his junior season, he was leaping so high that he won four dunk contests. “I had tried everything, man,” he said in a previous interview. “I tried the strength shoes, the SuperCat Jump Machine. It wasn’t until I began training on the sand with a weighted vest that I saw that increase, so I just used it as a cross-training sport.” And when he graduated with a dual-degree in business and econ, Roberts was good enough that he had some small-time offers to play basketball professionally in Europe. He wasn’t interested. “I was way too into volleyball,” he said. So he spurned the offers overseas and moved to Myrtle Beach, where his parents had built a three-bedroom house on the beach. “I said ‘Sure I’ll live for free on the ocean and play beach volleyball,’” Roberts said, laughing. “It has a full hot tub, fire pit, a really nice volleyball court on the property on the ocean. It’s a great set up and very conducive for guys to train in.” It didn’t take long for word to spread of the Roberts House of Volleyball in South Carolina. For nearly a decade, players cycled in and out, drinking and playing volleyball, living a life many dream of but few realize. And in the spring of 2003, when Roberts and his roommate, Matt Heath, a 6-foot-6 former collegiate soccer player turned blocker from Fort Myers, Florida, were playing in a tournament in south Florida, they happened across “a skinny white kid and a tall guy wearing steel-toed boots” that were damn good. “That,” Roberts says, “is how I met Phil Dalhausser.” Not long after, Dalhausser and the skinny, fiery white kid, Nick Lucena, moved to South Carolina. They were going to become beach volleyball players. “We would go out, I don’t know, probably on average four times a week,” Dalhausser said in a previous interview. “Adam pretty much ran the town so we’d drink for free. And those days we would roll out of bed at eleven or something like that and we’d stroll out to the courts at two.” After the hangovers had been massaged and they were able to play, they’d head out to the court and train for a few hours and then, in between marathons of Halo, pour over film of Karch Kiraly and the greats at night. “That house was volleyball one hundred percent of the time,” Heath said. “We’d be on a road trip discussing ‘Hey what do we do in this situation?’ It was just kind of an open forum and we just did a lot of homework on it. It was a good time. We all raised our level.” But still, even in the Adam Roberts House of Volley, Dalhausser was different — “a freak,” Heath says, and he means it as the highest of compliments. “His improvement was meteoric, to be honest.” When they popped in movies or played X-Box, Dalhausser would grab a volleyball and set to himself for all two hours. “His concept was that he wanted really soft hands, almost that you couldn’t hear it coming in and out,” Roberts says. “That was his thing that he would set the ball so quietly that we could still watch the movie.” During the winters, Dalhausser and Lucena would pick up shifts as substitute teachers and Roberts would help out with Showstopper, his parents’ dance competition production company. When it would be too cold to play on the beach, they took to the basketball courts, joining men’s leagues and dominating pickup games. And it was there – not during passing drills or watching Dalhausser set to himself during movies or winning tournaments over the summer – that Roberts knew just how limitless Dalhausser’s potential was. “I had seen some good athletes, Division I basketball athletes, but when I saw Phil’s touch on the basketball court – he could dribble, he had a good hook shot, he could bring the ball up the court – I was like ‘Wow,’” Roberts says. “We played in a winter league, Nick is flying all over the court. I was like ‘Man he is fast. Wow, these guys, especially Phil – their potential is limitless.’ “I had always equated beach volleyball with touch. You kinda have to shoot seventy percent as a basketball player from the free throw line to be a good beach volleyball player. The reasons being, I don’t think Shaq could play beach volleyball because he couldn’t set. But Phil had this touch. He’s a different breed. Even to this day, being one of his best friends, knowing so much about him, I think you could do sports psychology just on Phil. He’s just so laid back, so chill. You read these books and stories about Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and their whole life goal was to win a gold medal and be a world champion and MVP, and that’s not Phil.” Dalhausser’s story is by now well-documented, as is Lucena’s. Roberts’ though, has not received the proper amount of ink. This was the man who all but discovered arguably the greatest beach player of his generation and the partner who helped get him there. He has played in more AVP events than anyone on tour, including John Hyden. Just as he did with Dalhausser, he develops talent, sometimes traveling the world to do so, working with Marty Lorenz and Brian Cook, Brad Lawson and Eric Zaun, and now 23-year-old Spencer Sauter, a blocker out of Penn State with every indication of being a main draw mainstay. This is what Roberts does. He plucks talent. Grooms it. Succeeds with it. Anything but standing still.    

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.”

He is The Thin Beast, a gold medalist, perhaps the greatest American blocker of all time, if not in the whole world. But if you'd have asked him in college if he would have ever been a beach volleyball player, his answer would have been a resounding no. But when you're nearly 7 feet tall, can set better than anyone on the planet, side out nearly every time and are peerless at the net, well, a career on the beach is a no-brainer. Enjoy my conversation with Dalhausser, and excuse the rough sound quality.

In the echelons of the best defenders in beach volleyball history, Todd Rogers was a transcendent figure in the sport of beach volleyball. The 1997 AVP Rookie of the Year went on to win 54 domestic events and 24 international, including the 2008 Olympic gold medal in Beijing with partner Phil Dalhausser. On the podcast, Rogers will discuss how he almost pursued soccer instead of volleyball, his legendary partnership with Phil Dalhausser, and the role he has taken on since as the head coach of the Cal Poly volleyball team. Thanks for listening and don't forget to drop a review on iTunes!

Phil Dalhausser won gold in men’s beach volleyball at the 2008 Olympic Games with Todd Rogers. The American also became World Champion in 2007 in Gstaad. Phil is this week’s guest on the Best in the World with Richard Parr. Known as the Thin Beast, Phil tells Richard what it’s like to meet the U.S. President, when he started volleyball and how it is similar to tennis. Phil also explains why he was booed at the 2016 Rio Olympics and tells us about getting a blood clot before the London games in 2012. You can follow Phil on Twitter and Instagram.   This episode is brought to you by Sportuccino, a new sports breakfast show on