SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

It was somewhere in the space between the Gstaad Major and the Espinho four-star when the façade came crashing down. How long had it been since Sarah Sponcil had decompressed? Relaxed? Reflected on all that had happened in her life in the past six blurs of months? In that span, she and Lily Justine, her partner at UCLA, established themselves as the best No. 2 NCAA beach pair in the country. In Ma...

There was a time – a very brief time in the middle of a jet-setting, globe-trotting season – where Kelley Larsen had the correct count of how many tournaments she and Emily Stockman had played at that point in the year. “We did count at one point,” Larsen, an Olympic hopeful with Stockman, said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We did a certain amount in a row, w...

Of all the indelible moments we’ve had on SANDCAST these past two years – and there have been countless many, with massive lifetime milestones from both Tri Bourne and I – none stood out quite like the moments after our latest podcast, which published today. For the first year and a half, our typical post-show routine was a bit collegeish: We’d barbeque, drink a few beers, watch some football or a...

  It took a matter of weeks for Lee Feinswog to rebound from being laid off. Not a month had gone by from the moment he received a call from the higher-ups at Turner, for whom he freelanced to write college volleyball stories on NCAA.com, when he began scrolling through his phone, idea and contact in hand. His passion for writing about the sport came as a surprise, even to him. Here was a guy who...

Kevin Barnett has never been required to do just about anything he does in his current chapter of life. He doesn’t need to be out there on stadium court, swinging a homemade hammer at miniature volleyballs into a crowd of thousands. He doesn’t need to make art for the Amazon Prime set that becomes his home away from his Redondo Beach home for four months out of the year. He doesn’t need to dress u...

This SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter is with Kyle Friend and was recorded in Bonaire, where Friend and Mewhirter are competing in a NORCECA.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It almost seemed as if Trevor Crabb couldn’t believe what was coming out of his own mouth, when he recalled his conversation with Casey Patterson following his victory at the Manhattan Beach Open. Crabb’s first AVP win came after seven losses in AVP finals. It came after the beach volleyball world populated the hashtag #NevorTrevor, where some pushed it in their posts seriously and others just jok...

Good luck in your search. You can travel to every tournament, watch every match, pour over film for hours. Good luck finding a moment on a beach volleyball court in which Delaney Knudsen is not smiling. She’ll pop up smiling after losing a point, because what a rally it was. She’ll smile after making an error, because sometimes errors can be funny, you know? She’ll smile after her partner makes an...

Two years ago, maybe it would have worked. Maybe, when Miles Evans put a ball away, looked directly at Reid Priddy and Trevor Crabb, flexed and yelled with everything he had, “C’mon!” it would have done the trick. Thrown Priddy off. It had worked two years ago, from the guy who was now on the same side of the net as him. Crabb, in the semifinals of the Manhattan Beach Open, had famously run his mo...

You know what they say about plans. Some say that when God hears you making plans, he just laughs. Mike Tyson claims that everybody’s got plan, until they get punched in the face. Eric Beranek had plans this year. He was going to get a coach. Play the year with one guy. Do it the right way, finally. Then God chuckled, and Beranek was, proverbially, punched in the face. He began the year well enoug...

In 2016, Brandie Wilkerson saw everything there was to see, up close and in person. She saw the ceremonies. The athletes, both beach volleyball and otherwise. She practiced on stadium court with the women. She practiced against the men. An alternate for the 2016 Rio Games with Melissa Humana-Paredes, she did just about everything all of the other beach players were there to do, save for compete an...

Anna Collier is sitting on Tri Bourne’s couch, and she is – if you can believe it – relaxed. She hasn’t been to the beach in months, aside from when she rides her bike down the strand. She’s getting facials, going to the spa. Reconnecting with old friends. Getting fit. “Just call me Soccer Mom Anna Collier,” she said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. For anyone wh...

It almost didn’t happen. The Cinderella run. The upsets over the 16, the four, the eight, the 22. The AVP semifinal that would be host to the highest seed – Q47 – in the tour’s history. The 8-3 jump Zana Muno and Crissy Jones would get on top-seeded Betsi Flint and Emily Day, on stadium court, on Sunday. All of that was nearly lost before any of it even got started. Towards the end of Jones’ and M...

The first notes on the Book of Andy Benesh came a little less than a year ago, about a six-hour drive north of Hermosa Beach. Adam Roberts was there to watch Benesh’s second-round match. Playing in just his second AVP qualifier, with little points to his name, Benesh came in as the 33 seed, meaning, after a pigtail round, he, with Cole Fiers, had top-seeded Myles Muagututia and Kyle Friend. “I saw...

It was an otherwise innocuous Monday when the Canadian beach volleyball community reached and unleashed its peak fury which, because it’s Canada, really wasn’t much fury at all. Tri Bourne had put up a picture of Chaim Schalk. No, no. Not just Chaim Schalk. “American Chaim Schalk,” Bourne put on Instagram. For nearly a decade, Schalk had represented Canada on the beach. He had been an Olympian for...

    The most difficult transition of Ryan Doherty’s new partnership, from John Hyden to Miles Evans, might not be the difference in playing style or personality or skill level or experience or energy level or setting preferences or serving or any of the other obvious tangibles that can make partner switching a sometimes-difficult ordeal. It might just be the high five. We joke, kind of, sort of. B...

It wasn’t exactly an audacious start, was it? September 12, 2016. The first match of Melissa Humana-Paredes’ and Sarah Pavan’s partnership: A country quota against Brandie Wilkerson and – who else? – Pavan’s former partner, Heather Bansley, in Toronto, no less, the training center for the Canadian national team, where Pavan has played something of a revolutionary role. She did not, however, play t...

It was the running joke in the player’s tent of AVP New York: Nobody really wanted to play any of the teams on the bracket. Of the seven teams Tim Bomgren would end up playing in New York, five included Olympians, and the other two were teams currently pushing for Tokyo 2020. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Bomgren said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “You l...

With one, final Jeremy Casebeer – or Uncle Jer Bear, as he was known at Lake Sammamish – swing in Seattle, the AVP officially reached the midpoint of the 2019 season. It has, by any measure, been a rollicking success. Every event has been home to packed stadiums and sold out VIP areas and flowing beer gardens. Most importantly, it’s been home to excellent beach volleyball. Upsets have become the n...

I’ve always been one for mythology. I loved reading the tales of Zeus and Poseidon, Hades and Hermes, Athena and even those of the Norse orient, Thor and Loki and Odin. One of my favorites has always been the myth of the Phoenix, that stunning bird that never really dies. It burns, sometimes spectacularly in in a show of flames and combustion, sometimes in a simple and subtle decomposition. Either...

It seems an idyllic existence, to be a professional beach volleyball player. Travel the world. Explore the planet’s most breathtaking beaches. See everything there is to see, both inland and coastal. Play in front of thousands of adoring fans. Sign autographs. Take pictures. Live the life Instagram would love you to have. That’s all true, yes. Tri Bourne gets to travel the world. He gets to explor...

Kim DiCello was never a bad teammate, same as she has never been a bad co-worker, a bad wife, a bad anything, really. But she did have her moments where “I was this intense, fierce competitor,” she said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Not angry, but a little feisty. Without meaning to, I probably gave a couple stare-downs here and there, just having that fierce...

Chris Geeter McGee isn’t technically involved in the sport of beach volleyball anymore. He’s passed on his metaphorical emceeing torch to Mark Schuermann . But he’s still a South Bay guy, still plays in all the four-man tournaments, still watches the livestream and keeps up with the sport he’s still fully, unquestionably enamored with. So when there was a NORCECA qualifier this past spring, after...

It was, of all places, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where Corinne Quiggle discovered her ideal method of travel. It isn’t by car. Or Uber. Or ferry. Or train. Or plane. It is, instead, a tuk-tuk, a type of pulled rickshaw where most have three wheels. It’s how Quiggle and her partner, Amanda Dowdy, got around Cambodia for a two-star FIVB earlier this year. Maybe it’s the tuk-tuk, though it could just as...

You could have seen this path a long time ago, had you been paying close enough attention. When Nicole and Megan McNamara, identical twins from Vancouver, Canada, were on the same indoor team. One set, the other hit. Four others were on the court, sure, but “she would set me every ball,” Megan said, as the two broke out in fits of laughter. “And our coach was like ‘You gotta give other people some...