SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

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...

It was a little more than two months ago that Brooke Niles and the Florida State team suffered their first failure in a season without too many of them. Niles had made a commitment to herself, promising that she’d have the lineup figured out by the fall, before her Seminoles went off for winter break. It was mid-February. Days before the season-opener against LSU. She still had no idea. “There’s s...

The voice is feeling good. “Oh, yeah,” Mark Schuermann confirmed on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, and if you’ve listened to the episode and just those two words, you can confirm it as well. The voice of the AVP is ready to go. In eight days, the AVP season will begin. Which means that in eight days, listeners, fans, and viewers will be treated to the majestic bar...

Tyler Hildebrand doesn’t really know what you should call him. “Official title is Director of Coaching,” he said of his new role at USA Volleyball. But they’re working on title changes because, candidly, nobody really knows what that means. “At the end of the day,” Hildebrand said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “who really cares? I think some people call it coa...

It was Yogi Berra who best expounded upon the upside of mental performance in athletics: “Sports are 90 percent mental, and the other half is physical.” Questionable math aside, the former Yankee catcher, and indelible quote machine, had a point. Sports, and the majority of facets of life which require exceptional performance, are rooted vastly in mental strength and fortitude. It made for an intr...

The Big Game Hunters. That’s what they’d call themselves. Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos and Brent Frohoff and Karch Kiraly could have the Rhode Islands. They could have Dallas. They could have Phoenix. But the big ones? Oh, no. Those were reserved for Tim Hovland and Mike Dodd. “We’d win Manhattan, Hermosa, the Cuervos,” Hovland said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhir...

Troy Field had to pause for a second on the set of SANDCAST to catch himself. “Back in the day,” he repeated, laughing. “Back in the day, like, three years ago.” It seemed to catch him off guard as much as it can oftentimes do to those who have seen Field play. Three years ago, nobody had seen the kid in the pink hat. Hadn’t seen him flying around with a vertical north of 40 inches out of sand. Ha...

There is no shortage of ways in which to describe the absurd depth on the World Tour. You can start with the obvious, the upstart Chileans who many might claim to have come out of nowhere but, really, they’ve been here, hiding in plain sight all along. In 2011, Esteban and Marco Grimalt – cousins, not brothers – played in their first FIVB event. In the time between then and Sydney, a three-star ev...

Maybe Emily Day should just come on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, every week. The first time she hopped on , she did so with her partner, Betsi Flint, on the first on-site podcast, just behind an outside court at AVP San Francisco. Two days later, her and Flint were the last team standing, beating Geena Urango and Caitlin Ledoux in the finals, 21-17, 16-21, 15-7,...

The relationship between brothers is often too complicated for even brothers to fully understand, let alone communicate to the world beyond, especially when their immediate world beyond knows their life history – where they grew up and went to high school, where they went to college and what they’ve done since. When you throw into that the fact that the two brothers in mind – Taylor and Trevor Cra...

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 partnersh...

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 t...

Alas, we get our first look. It was supposed to come this past week, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., site of the late Fort Lauderdale Major. But with the plug pulled on the season-opening Major of the beach volleyball season, we were forced to wait. For some, that wait ends this weekend, as four U.S. women’s teams, all new partnerships, will make the trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia for a two-star FIVB. Typ...

It’s funny, sometimes, the path the universe can choose to take you. One minute, you’re lying on a training table, your torn shoulder being worked on. You’re pondering if this is it, the last tear. Perhaps it’s time to move back to Florida. Have kids. Raise a family. Move on. The next, you’re on a call with Kerri Walsh Jennings, the greatest to ever play the game, one of the most dominant athletes...

No matter the country or tournament or prize money on the line, it is never an especially difficult task to identify which is the room of Chad Beauchamp. It’s the one overflowing with overgrown humans, with massagers, tables, tape, ice. “Chad has a bed for the athletes, a table, his bed that we’re not supposed to use but most of us sit on it anyway,” Tri Bourne said, laughing on SANDCAST: Beach Vo...

The talk always turned to Taylor. As Taylor Crabb and Jake Gibb grew and developed as a new team, climbing the world ranks, piling up wins that once could have been perceived as upsets – over 2017 World Champs Andre and Evandro, over Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena, over Italians and 2016 silver medalists Paolo Nicolai and Daniele Lupo – most looked to Crabb, the 26-year-old quicksilver fast defen...

Carly Wopat acknowledges that there are a number of skills that need to be refined, so be smoothed over, to be fully beached from their indoor counterparts. But she’s been an athlete all her life, a state champ in high school, an All-American at Stanford, a professional overseas. It’s simply a matter of time for most, and anyway, the majority of the fundamental skills are already there. There’s ju...

There they stood, the four Americans, bundled in four to five layers of UnderArmour and other form-fitting warm weather gear. Bundled in beanies and gloves, headbands and, underneath it all, hand and feet warmers tucked in their makeshift soccer cleats and gloves. They – Emily Hartong, Katie Spieler, Karissa Cook, Allie Wheeler – had descended upon Moscow, Russia less than a week before Christmas...

It began as something fun. Nothing much more than, well, why not? Why not put two childhood friends on the same team? Friends who play the same side, the same position, who had never played defense at a professional level. And yet there Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb were, winning in Manhattan Beach, finishing with a seventh. Winning in Chicago, improving to fifth. Winning in China, claiming a gold m...

Jon Mesko sincerely hopes you had a merry Christmas. He really does. He’s no Scrooge or Grinch. But there’s another holiday he loves, a “Festivus for the rest of us!” Those not indoctrinated with the classic Seinfeld episode, allow Frank Castanza, father of George Castanza, explain. “At the Festivus dinner, you gather your family around, and tell them all the ways they have disappointed you.” “Is...

Bill Kolinske won’t forget looking at the hill, the one with his car parked at the top. Earlier that morning, he had parked there for his first beach volleyball tournament, and he did what he had always done for all of his grass tournaments: He lugged a cooler packed of food and drinks for the day. At the earliest, he’d be finished by one in the afternoon, maybe, if the day went well, 5 p.m. But t...

It’s difficult to blame Grand Canyon beach volleyball coach Kristen Rohr for forgetting. That when she looked around at her group of players, the one that began the 2018 season ranked No. 10 in the country, and said how they had chosen every one of them to come there, she forgot about Molly Turner. “I was like, ‘Not me,’” Turner said, laughing, on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Tra...

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 o...

As if his path to beach volleyball wasn’t unique enough – raised in Minnesota, little to no volleyball background aside from a little club indoor, not a clue who men named Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser were – in his nine-year career thus far, Stafford Slick may have authored his own personal record book. Name another who has played with six different Olympians, including three gold medalists. Or...

It’s fitting that John Mayer would spend much of his retirement podcast talking about everyone except John Mayer. Much of it was spent discussing Trevor Crabb, despite Mayer even catching himself midway through and mentioning that he didn’t want it to be “a full Trevor Crabb podcast.” It didn’t stop him from singing Crabb’s praises further, though, nor did it stop him from elaborating on the posit...