SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter

In this episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, we have one of the most unique teams on the AVP and Beach Pro Tours in Tim Brewster and Kyle Friend. What makes them unique? They are, as far as we know, the only male partners who are also dating, making for a fascinating dynamic on and off the court. We get into that, as well as: Their recent NORCECA win, and the...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Sophie Bukovec, one of the top players in Canada and a silver medalist at the 2022 Beach Volleyball World Championships. The last three years haven’t been, as Bukovec says, “exactly seamless,” with three partners in as many seasons, but like when most things don’t go to plan, Bukovec came away with a bounty o...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features our annual Spring-is-here episode with our neighbors up North: Sam Schachter and Dan Dearing. Per usual, they dropped by Hermosa Beach for a month for a pre-season training camp, gearing up for a final push at the 2024 Paris Olympics. On this episode, we chatted about: What lessons Sam Schachter and Dan Deari...

This episode of The Road to Paris, Travis Mewhirter’s breakdown of the Olympic Beach Volleyball race to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, follows the season-opening Doha Elite16, where Stefan Boermans and Yorick de Groot won a shocking gold (not shocking that they won, but shocking in how they did it), Tina Graudina and Anastasija Samoilova took a critical fourth, Laura Ludwig and Louisa Lippmann made...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features an annual fan-favorite: Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth. In for a month-long training camp in California, Nuss and Kloth are perhaps the most unique team in the sport, and maybe the most unique pair USA Volleyball has ever had. Living in Louisiana? Five-foot-6 defender? A blocker from South Dakota? And they’re…No...

Welcome back to the Road to Paris! Travis Mewhirter previews the final three months of the Olympic qualification cycle, which is about to begin with this week's Doha Elite16. Doha kicks off a sprint of the next three months, which feature 10 events on four continents. On this episode: - Travis provides a statistical analysis projecting the odds for every team remaining in the race - Why Tri Bourne...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Michael Gervais, one of the most well-known sports psychologists in the world and the man who worked with Misty May-Treanor, Kerri Walsh Jennings, and April Ross and is currently working with Olympians Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson. Gervais is the host of the Finding Mastery podcast, which boas...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball With Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features one of our favorite coaches in the world: John Mayer. As a player, Mayer was one of the best defenders of his generation, the 2015 AVP Defensive Player of the Year and the 2015 AVP MVP. Since 2018, he has been a full-time coach, leading the LMU Beach Volleyball team to new heights: four straight WCC Champions...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, is our season-opening mailbag episode. As always, thank y’all tons for the questions. If you want to ask a question for the pod, drop one in the comments section or send us a DM on Instagram. With the AVP schedule being released the day before we recorded, much of the conversation centered around that, as well as: Wha...

At USC Beach Volleyball, Dain Blanton, Delaynie Maple and Megan Kraft are looking to do something unprecedented in the world of NCAA Beach Volleyball: Win four consecutive NCAA Championships. They’ve won three straight, with 2023 being the biggest surprise of the bunch, if there is such a thing at USC. Now, they’re back for a fourth, doing everything they can to not think about winning a fourth st...

The UCLA Beach Volleyball team has been one of the most dominant in the young history of NCAA Beach Volleyball. Three of its four decorated seniors – Jaden Whitmarsh, Devon Newberry, Lexy Denaburg – came on SANDCAST to chat about the last dance for this group, and how much winning the elusive NCAA Championship would mean, especially in a transition year with a new head coach in Jenny Johnson Jorda...

Betsi Flint is, at 31 years old, somehow a veteran on the AVP and Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, a seven-time AVP champion who is currently ranked in the top 10 in the world alongside Julia Scoles. But she is far more than another talented defender. Flint occupies a rare space in the world of beach volleyball: A mom who continues to make her full-time living playing the sport. We chatted quite a...

Cody Caldwell is one of the faster-rising talents in beach volleyball, both on the AVP and Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour. After playing indoors in Greece and France, Caldwell decided to “try my hand on the beach,” and the results have been promising, with three career Tour Series wins and three third place finishes in 2023 alone. All of this has been done with one goal in mind: Fun – and he’s ma...

Corinne Quiggle had one of the most volatile seasons of her burgeoning beach volleyball career. From losing in three straight qualifiers and barbequing in the first AVP of the year, she took that adversity and flipped it into the first AVP win of her career, in Hermosa Beach with Sarah Schermerhorn. What once looked like an awful start actually set her up to enjoy the most unforgettable year to da...

Matt Prosser is one of the most well-rounded talents in the sport of volleyball. An All-American at Long Beach State, Prosser took his size to the beach, where he won an AVP with Matt Olson and enjoyed immense success with John Mayer. In 2018, despite having been only a year out from chemotherapy, Prosser qualified for the Manhattan Beach Open with Eric Beranek, retiring afterwards on his own term...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball With Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter is a unique one: The top moment from every single podcast we did this year from A – Andy Benesh, April Ross – to Z – Zana Muno, and everywhere in between – Miles Partain, Taylor Crabb, Taylor Sander, you get it. This was, by a long, long, long shot, the most successful year the podcast has had, exploding through record...

This is the FINAL Road to Paris of a long and wonderful 2023 beach volleyball season. This is a comprehensive recap of which teams are all but assured spots in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games – aka SHARPIED! – which teams are favored and in contention of the remaining spots, and which teams are the dark horses vying for the few spots remaining. As always, if you have any questions about the complicat...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter is our always-popular, semi-monthly mailbag episode. And boy oh boy did we have questions for this one, largely on the same topic: What’s up with the new AVP and its proposed league model? We delve into that for a large portion of the episode, as well as: What are our Paris 2024 predictions? What does off-season look l...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, is with volleyball strength and conditioning coach, and the man whom Mewhirter calls the “knee whisperer,” Nathan Michaels. Mewhirter began working with Michaels in 2021…and hasn’t taken a single Ibuprofen since, playing pain free, as strong and mobile as he’s ever been, all the while playing the best beach volleyball...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Mason Briggs, an All-American at Long Beach State and one of the best liberos in the world. But he’s far more than that. Briggs is a trailblazer, a 22-year-old who has amassed one of the biggest followings in all of NCAA Volleyball, a following he is using to expand the reach of the game in new and innovative...

Daniel “Frito” Freitas is one of the most prolific content creators on the AVP Tour. Ever wonder where many of those videos come from that so many players – Molly Turner, Tri Bourne, Zana Muno, Trevor Crabb, David Schweiner, Kelly Cheng, Ondrej Perusic, you name it – post with virality on their social media accounts? A large percentage of those are shot, edited, and produced by Frito, the man behi...

This episode of The Road to Paris breaks down the two most recent  @volleyballworld  events, a Challenge in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and an Elite16 in Joao Pessoa, Brazil. The highlights, per Travis Mewhirter, are: - A Netherlands race that is heating up with a gold won by Steven van de Velde and Matthew Immers and a bronze taken by Stefan Boermans and Yorick de Groot - George and Andre reasserting t...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features Terese Cannon, who is annually one of the world’s most improved players. Initially an indoor player for Georgetown, Cannon transferred to USC, won a handful of National Championships, and has since become one of the top blockers in the USA. A run at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games with Sarah Sponcil was abruptly...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, features Seain Cook, one of the funniest personalities in the entire sport of beach volleyball – or just volleyball as a whole – who is also, despite what his Instagram might lead you to believe, a very, very good player. Had it not been for his own partner, Cody Caldwell, Cook would have been the 2023 Most Improved P...

This episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter features Megan Rice, or Megan J. Rice, or M.J. She’s gone by a number of different names throughout her 2023 season, one in which she won the VolleyballMag Rookie of the Year. Rice was the year’s biggest breakthrough star, on both the men’s and the women’s side, exploding onto the scene at AVP Hermosa Beach, where she...