SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter is with Avery Drost, a longtime pro who has been competing on the AVP Tour for 10 years.  On this episode, we discuss: - Drost winning the Hyden Beach AVP Next with Miles Partain - Just how good the 18-year-old Partain is becoming - Drost finding the best practice regimen and weight lifting schedule for his body - Find...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter , is with Jordan Cheng, the coach of Kelly Claes and Sarah Sponcil , the 10th-ranked team in the world and No. 3 in the American Olympic race.  On this episode, we discuss: - Cheng's career as a coach, how his intentions to play professionally were constantly derailed by "once in a lifetime" coaching opportunities at P...

On this episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, we answer fan questions in our "season ending" episode, even if there wasn't much of a season in the first place. Some of those questions include: - What's this secret event Tri has been training for? - Who are some of the younger players, other than Andy Benesh and Eric Beranek, we should be looking out for? - Is...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, is with one of the greatest players of all-time, with 123 victories, including four at the Manhattan Beach Open.  More than that, Stoklos, along with his partner, Sinjin Smith, is one of the most influential individuals in beach history, instrumental in pushing beach volleyball worldwide. Without Stoklos and Smith, it...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, is with the legendary, and ageless, John Hyden. At 47 years young, Hyden is still one of the best defenders in the United States, with his own beach facility just outside Nashville, Tennessee. On this episode, we discuss: - Hyden’s transition from an indoor Olympian to a beach volleyball player grinding in qualifiers...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Canadians Grant O'Gorman and Ben Saxton, who are the second-ranked Canadian team in the race for Tokyo 2021.  More than pushing for Tokyo, however, they -- and especially O'Gorman -- are pushing for men's health awareness, as O'Gorman was diagnosed with, and beat, testicular cancer.  On this episode, we cover...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, is with Livingstone "LT" Treumann, who has established one of the best unofficial beach volleyball training centers in the United States.  On this episode, we cover: - Treumann's days growing up in Brazil, and how a white lie turned into a career in volleyball - Training with the best in the world, including Ricardo S...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features Adrian Carambula. Nicknamed Mr. Skyball for his towering, spinning serve, Carambula is one of the best players in Italy and in the race to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics with Enrico Rossi.  On this episode, we cover: - Carambula's move from Uruguay to the United States, and how he discovered volleyball on the...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Traci Callahan, who has been competing on the AVP Tour since 2010, with a brief break in the 2015-2017 seasons.  We talk a lot about that break, as well as: - A journey down the Camino de Santiago, and how it inspired her to get back into beach volleyball - Her time as a coach, yoga instructor, bee farmer, or...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, is with Wilco Nijland, the CEO of SportWorx, based in Utretcht, Netherlands, and the creator of the wildly popular King of the Court Series. On this episode of the podcast, we discuss: - How Wilco was able, despite all the Covid precautions, to hold a King of the Court - Innovative ideas in the sport of beach volleyba...

On this episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, we bring on host Tri Bourne, who just won his first AVP tournament in five years!  Since launching this podcast, Bourne has battled -- is still battling -- an autoimmune disease, enrolled in acting classes, hosting classes, improv classes, begun reading books regularly, authored a book of his own, and is back in th...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, takes a little turn off the beach and onto the grass. Two weekends ago, the legendary and annual Waupaca Boatride, known as the U.S. Open of grass volleyball, was held, and two brothers by the name of Joe and Gage Worsley took over, becoming the Cinderellas of the Boatride.  Joe, who now sets in Germany, was one of th...

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:...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features AVP professional beach volleyball players Rafu Rodriguez and Piotr Marciniak, former partners in 2017 who have agreed to compete together again during the AVP Champions Cup.  On this episode, we discuss: - Rafu's recent cross-country move from Southern California to Florida. - Piotr's move from Poland to Flor...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Casey Patterson, one of the biggest personalities and talents on the AVP Tour since Donald Sun brought it out of bankruptcy in 2012.  In the past nine seasons, Patterson has won 14 AVPs, qualified for the Rio Olympics with Jake Gibb, and was named the AVP Team of the Year three times. He has since partnered w...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features a fun announcement from the hosts: They have co-written and published a book! Their book, Volleyball for Milkshakes, is out today! The easiest place you can find it is on Amazon , and the audio version will be out in a week or so! This episode covers, first and foremost, the book: how it came about, what it’s...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Falyn Fonoimoana. Times have, obviously, been a bit fraught lately. Between Covid-19, George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing riots, tension has been high. Fonoimoana, one of only a few black athletes on the AVP Tour, has been outspoken on social media on the racial issues throughout the United States. This con...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features University of Hawai'i assistant coach Evan Silberstein.  Silberstein is a New York native turned full-blown Hawai'ian. He has been the assistant at Hawai'i for six years now, helping the Bows become one of the perennial powers in NCAA volleyball.  In this episode, we cover: - How Silberstein came to Hawai'i f...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features longtime beach volleyball coaches and advocates Megan Burgdorf and Michelle Meyer.  The two have been involved in the sport in virtually every capacity. Both were players at the college level -- Burgdorf at Cleveland State, Meyer played club at UC Santa Barbara before an overseas career in Denmark -- and have...

The idea for this episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter came, as most do, on a whim. Tri had been talking to Wilson, our main sponsor of the show and who also sponsors some of the most talented athletes on the AVP. Wilson wanted to know if we could do a roundtable of sorts: All seven Wilson athletes – Tri Bourne, Stafford Slick, Riley McKibbin, Madison McKibbin...

Madison and Riley McKibbin can still remember -- with much amusement, as memories go – one of their first disasters as producers of beach volleyball videos on their eponymous YouTube channel. Not that it seemed like a disaster at the time – they rarely do. Riley probably thought it was a stroke of genius when the wind had muffled up the sound of one of those early videos, and rather than redo it,...

 The idea began, like all viral ideas do, with something so blatantly obvious it had been overlooked by everyone. Parker Conley was the rare type of teenaged boy in Arizona who was obsessed with beach volleyball. It isn’t entirely unheard of. A handful of professionals hail from Arizona, and the sport has a small presence. But it is rare, to be sure. Conley sought any resource he could to learn th...

On the evening of January 14, UCLA women’s volleyball coach Mike Sealy had the mic. As he expounded on the tremendous careers of his seniors, of which there were just two – setter Cali Thompson and outside hitter Savvy Simo – he turned to Simo and, instead of gushing about her laundry list of accomplishments, said a joke. “You’re one of my favorite players I’ve ever coached,” he said. At least, Si...

After a few minutes of cordial catching up and introductions, Mike Lambert paused, sitting in his office in Lucca, Italy, and wondered, on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter: “What should we talk about?” The conversation would be wide-ranging, covering a vast canvas of topics. Midway through, however, it became comically evident what Lambert didn’t want to talk about:...

Typically, I’d be a bit neurotic by now. Short on sleep. Distracted. Mind ping-ponging back and forth, looking at the draw, then looking again – did it change did it change? This, of course, is not the typical pre-AVP Huntington Beach qualifier eve. This is just a Wednesday like any other in the off-season: no events on the foreseeable horizon. Nothing specific to train for. Sleep comes easy. In s...