SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

A few weeks ago, Kawika Shoji and Taylor Crabb escaped the tedium of quarantine to do some hill sprints near their houses in Manoa. There is nothing new or special or spectacular about this. It is, actually, the most normal, mundane, practiced bit of Shoji’s life up to this point. It isn’t necessarily the hill sprints that are typical, but the fact that Shoji was there. Leading. Forever leading. M...

Hector Guitierrez sat outside of his home in Fort Worth, Texas, a purple TCU sweatshirt protecting him from a cool breeze, and hat shading him from the sun. “You never know,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “what life can bring you, right?” Currently, everyone in the world, no matter location or industry or title, can empathize. This time of year is typi...

It was 2005 when Tatiana Minello and Mimi Amaral needed a coach. Not just any coach. The natives of Rio de Janeiro were making the move to the AVP. They needed someone who could speak English. “You speak English!” they said to Marcio Sicoli. “Let’s use you!” The United States didn’t know it at the time, but one of the most successful beach volleyball coaches of this generation was about to cross i...

Alex Brouwer sought the source of the voice. The one that perpetually stood out from among 13,000 screaming Germans at the World Championships in Hamburg. The one that was always heard by any player competing against an American team. When he found the bearded face of Christian Hartford, the Dutchman pumped a fist and said “Let’s go U.S.A.!” That is but a brief but encompassing glimpse into the en...

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 menti...

CABO, Mex. – When the final point was won, and Eric Beranek and Bill Kolinske moved on at AVP Hawai’i, a seam ace putting the final nail in the coffin for Troy Field and Tim Bomgren, there was no tantrum. No throwing of hats or punting balls. There was hardly even a shake of the head. Field simply walked under the net and wrapped up Beranek, his good friend, in a sandy, sweaty hug. “When you see y...

The lead was gone, momentum completely flipped, and Melissa Humana-Paredes was, in her own words, crapping her pants.   That’s what she said to her partner after their 14-10 lead in the third set of the World Championship semifinals had disappeared. Nobody wants to be in that situation. Nobody asks to miss on four match points of the game’s biggest stage. And yet it was perhaps the most critical m...

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 yo...

The coronavirus may be decimating the global and American stock markets, but one place you won’t find its impact is the annual SANDCAST Beach Volleyball Stocks to Buy. This week, as we did in 2019, Tri Bourne and I broke down the top up and coming prospects of the season as our stocks to buy this year. I’m only writing about 10 – five men, five women – so to find the rest, you can listen to our po...

It’s May 16, 2018, the eve of Camryn Irwin’s debut as an Amazon Prime broadcaster calling AVP tournaments. She gets a call from the AVP. They inform her that she’ll be calling play by play. “Ok!” Irwin says. “That’s new!” “We don’t know what the format is going to look like, we’re just going to figure it out as we go.” “Ok,” Irwin replies again. “Don’t screw up. This is our brand.” Now it’s Amazon...

A GARAGE IN AN UNKNOWN LOCATION – It was all wrong. Mykel Jenkins is all about the soundtrack of not just sports, but life. He wants it to be beautiful, and when something is done right, it doesn’t just look beautiful, it sounds beautiful. It’s a symphony, with violins and cellos and tubas, all working in perfect harmony. And here was Tri Bourne, “thundering in here with his heavy feet, ‘Boom! Boo...

Mike Placek was just looking for the simple stuff. He didn’t need to know tendencies or flaws, what his opponent’s strongest and weakest shots were. He didn’t need to know serving habits or whether they preferred a backhand or a forehand. All he really wanted to know, as the top-ranked youth tennis player in Southern California, was whether he was playing a 5-foot-9 guy from Argentina or a 6-foot-...

It’s a late Tuesday morning, and Falyn Fonoimoana has brought the goods again. She’s even brought some freshly baked banana bread, for her coaches, Arthur Carvahlo and Pompilio Mercadante, who smiles and says that happiness is bread and sugar. Happiness is a great many things for the 27-year-old Fonoimoana. It’s getting a big kill and celebrating it loudly, with a beat of the chest. It’s putting p...

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 20...

Dain Blanton is smiling. For almost an hour and a half straight, sitting in a room talking about beach volleyball and a life that has revolved around it for almost three decades now, he smiles. At some point in the conversation, it just becomes almost impossible to be in anything but a great mood, because you’re around Dain Blanton, and Dain Blanton is, at 48 years old, living his best life, and h...

Sinjin Smith knows the world is different now. That guys just can’t play volleyball for four hours, jump train for one, take a ride down to South Mission Beach and then play for another four. Jobs. Kids. Families and responsibilities and such. But he is curious. Curious as to why the beach volleyball culture has changed so much from his days. Days when he and the boys would put a ball down on cent...

On April 10, 1995, Carl Henkel was studying for his law school finals when one of the strangest, most unpredictable and, at that time he would have likely surmised, miraculous phone calls rang in around four in the morning. “Hey,” said the voice on the other line. “I need you to play this weekend in Spain. Can you make it?” Henkel nearly dropped the phone. Was that Sinjin Smith on the other side o...

Joe Houde had just begun his career with USA Volleyball, and there was a dead man was in the road. “Oh, yeah,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Just not a good day.” It was certainly one way to start his stint as USA Volleyball’s newest traveling physical trainer. His first trip with the U.S., to a NORCECA in Guatemala. First time to a third-world countr...

Mark Burik tried it. You will notice that to be a theme of his life: The man just tries everything. In this case, a young Burik was trying his best, as a freshman at the University of Delaware, to sell his father on a month-long semester in New Zealand. His father balked. Fourteen-thousand bucks? What was Mark going to learn in New Zealand that could possibly be worth $14,000? Well, Mark replied,...

  There is a moment before every practice that is so innocuous, so easy to forget that it’s not all that uncommon for teams to go about practicing without remembering it at all: putting up the antennas. And yet it is that moment that Kelly Reeves loves – or, in her vernacular, “gets jazzed about” –as much as she loves anything, and allow us to inform you early in this story that Kelly Reeves loves...

Mike Dodd apologized. He’d been getting all wound up, or as wound up as the man, labeled by anyone you ask as one of the nicest guys in the world, can get. He even dropped the f word not once, but twice. “Sorry about that,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I think I said the f word.” You can forgive the man for being impassioned. He’s seen beach volleyba...

This week on SANDCAST, Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter break down all of the partner switches happening in United States beach volleyball.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Theo Brunner was in need, he says, of a rebirth. Not quite a religious ceremony, but something to revitalize a beach volleyball career that had, while not sunk, gone a bit sideways. There was the chronic calf injury that flared up, a nod to the fact that he hadn’t really taken a full off-season in several years. There were the flashes of success – a silver at the Kuala Lumpur three-star with Reid...

TEL AVIV, Israel – Tim Brewster was thousands of miles from his classrooms at UCLA. His seat in his 300-plus-student lectures was empty again, as it had been for the previous two weeks while he was in the Dominican Republic and the Middle East. And yet, while his classmates and peers were in their seats like good students, listening to the professors, taking their notes, studying, Brewster was get...

Karissa Cook is a self-dubbed “inside cat.” She doesn’t need to go anywhere to have fun. Doesn’t really need to see anybody, aside from her fiancé, Shayne Skov, and her pup. She’s good with that.   So when Katie Spieler, her partner throughout the 2017 and 2018 beach volleyball seasons, asked if she wanted to play in a NORCECA playoff for a one-off event in a pinprick of an island named Martinique...