SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features one of our most requested duos: Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander. Fresh off a rejuvenating off-season, Crabb and Sander are looking to follow up on a phenomenal first year as partners, one in which they made five finals and won two events, including the Phoenix Gold Series Championships. We chatted about all ma...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Silila Tucker, the most secret Hawaiian on the AVP Tour – so secret even Tri didn’t even know that Tucker spent a good chunk of his childhood summers on Oahu. We talked a ton about that, as well as: Tucker’s HUGE 2022 season, one that ended with a win at the Laguna Open and a third at the Huntington Beach Tou...

This is Episode No. 2 of The Road to Paris, a monthly Olympic Beach Volleyball breakdown hosted by Travis Mewhirter. The Doha Elite 16 marked the opening event of the Olympic qualifying process, and while it might prove to be relatively inconsequential in the long run, big moves were still made, namely by Italians Adrian Carambula and Alex Ranghieri, the European women, and Kristen Nuss and Taryn...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Delaynie Maple, a junior at USC and one of the most talented, must-watch players in NCAA beach volleyball this upcoming 2023 season. When she was still in high school, Maple took a fifth at AVP Hermosa with Megan Kraft. At USC, she’s already competed on court one, going 36-1 as a sophomore alongside Julia Sco...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features our regular guest host, Savvy Simo, who is currently in Doha, competing in her first OLYMPIC QUALIFYING event, and Lexy Denaburg, her former partner at UCLA who is now charged with leading a deeply talented Bruins team. Denaburg is, simply, awesome. A lovely, gracious, humble 21-year-old out of Florida who you...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter is our FIRST MAILBAG OF THE YEAR! It was a full one, too, and Tri Bourne was firmly on the hot seat, answering all sorts of questions, including: What happened to him and Trevor Crabb? How did Trevor take the news? What aren’t Tri and Chaim Schalk playing the Doha Elite 16? What are Phil Dalhausser’s plans for the upco...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter is, incredibly, our first podcast IN HAWAII!! Tri Bourne took the mic on the road with him to sit down with Carly Kan, the newest AVP champ and the first woman from the state of Hawaii to win an AVP, as well as her coach, the founder and master of secret training himself, Danny Alvarez. Kan is one of many bright young...

This episode of SANDCAST features Savvy Simo, our favorite female host, and Toni Rodriguez, her partner for this season and, at least, the next as they begin their push to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. It has been quite an off-season for Rodriguez, who suffered a season-ending knee injury at AVP New Orleans in 2022. While she rehabbed, Simo played with anyone who would, anywhere in the...

The Road to Paris is a new series we're doing, with host Travis Mewhirter breaking down the Olympic race, which begins this February in Doha, Qatar. Here Mewhirter explains everything you need to know about the beach volleyball qualification process for the 2024 Olympic Games, from when it begins to when it ends to how every single one of the 24 teams can qualify for Paris 2024. What did you think...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Jaden Whitmarsh, a court two defender for UCLA and one of the most clutch players in NCAA Beach Volleyball. She is also, as you may be able to gather from her last name, the daughter of Mike Whitmarsh, the 1996 silver medalist at the Atlanta Olympics. We chatted about her family, as well as: What it was like...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Sean P. Murray, the author of If Gold is Our Destiny: How a Team of Mavericks Came Together for Olympic Glory. The book is a deep study of the 1984 men’s Olympic volleyball team who would win gold and kick off a dynastic decade of dominance – and forever change the culture of volleyball in the United States....

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter is our always popular fan question segment, a Christmas special! Savvy Simo is typically our lovely host of these episodes, but she’s been out of town for a bit, coaching at SOB Volley Vacations and spending time down in New Orleans. So it’s just the boys, answering as many of your (nearly 100!) questions as we could,...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Carly Skjodt -- pronounced Scott -- one of the brightest rookies on the AVP Tour this season. An All-American and All-Big 10 outside hitter out of Michigan, Skjodt began playing beach as a graduate transfer for Pepperdine, learning under coach Marcio Sicoli. After a brief stint playing indoors in Portugal, sh...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Ed Keller, the biggest superfan there is in the sport of beach volleyball. How big? Keller went to 18 tournaments this season – nine Beach Pro Tour, nine AVP… and he thinks it should have been more. Ah, well, guess he’ll have to hit more in 2023. (he will) What all this traveling has done, something he’s been...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson, one of the most fascinating – and soon to be most popular – teams on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour. Good friends for more than a decade, Humana-Paredes and Wilkerson have played against one another for years and years, both rising through the ranks, both bei...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Maddison McKibbin, one of the biggest – if not the biggest, alongside his brother, Riley McKibbin – trailblazers in the world of beach volleyball content. Together, the McKibbins founded and have grown the McKibbin Brothers YouTube Channel to more than 100,000 subscribers, developing one of the biggest, most...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, is an absolute blast, as we brought in a pair of our favorite Brazilians, Leandro Pinheiro (the VolleyballMag Coach of the Year) and Dan Waineraich, the man who led Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson to the Chicago finals. Brazilian coaches have become all the rage in California, and the world, really, as ev...

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 car...

Last week marked FIVE STRAIGHT YEARS OF SANDCAST! In five years, somehow, Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter haven't missed a single episode. So much has happened: - Travis made his first AVP main draw (then a bunch of international medals) - Tri battled an autoimmune disease...then became an Olympian...then a two-time Manhattan Beach Open champion - Tri had a kid, Naia Bourne, who makes many appeara...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features Tim Brewster, a breakout star on the AVP this season who had career-highs in so many categories in 2022 that it’s difficult to count. For starters, he made his first main draw, won his first international medal (then added two more, and will likely add at least one more before the year is out), won his first A...

This week’s episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Molly Turner, one of the toughest, grittiest, go-get-after-it players on Tour. She had a choice this year: To play the points game and scramble around just to be directly into the main draw, or play the game to win, in which she’d begin in the qualifiers but give herself the highest ceiling possible. T...

This week’s episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features the man who is not only the most formidable blocker in the United States, but also the guy who is quietly the funniest guy on the AVP Tour: Theo Brunner. At 37 years old, Brunner is finally coming into his own, on and off the court: Creating a hysterical Instagram persona, delivering hilariously candid...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, is our semi-monthly, always-popular edition of our mailbag, where we take your fan questions and answer them alongside UCLA’s finest, and now one of USA Volleyball’s brightest, Savvy Simo. We’re calling this the season-ending mailbag, although that might be a bit of a misnomer, as the season isn’t technically over, wi...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Julia Scoles, the VolleyballMag 2022 Rookie of the Year and one of the toughest – and also sweetest – people you’ll ever meet. Scoles had one heck of a season this year, winning a second straight NCAA Championship with USC before embarking on a wildly successful AVP campaign, making five semifinals and two fi...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features Dain Blanton, one of the most accomplished people in the sport of beach volleyball. As a player, Blanton won an Olympic gold medal, completing a Cinderella run in the 2000 Sydney Games with Eric Fonoimoana. As a broadcaster, you can hear Blanton’s voice on the AVP’s livestream, NBC – wherever volleyball needs...