~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
The matchup in the finals of AVP Denver, between Brazilians Lili and Larissa Maestrini and Carly Kan and Kaitlyn Leary? Rewind it back a few months and pop on a flight into Panama City, where the Brazilians won, 21-15, 17-21, 18-16, in a thriller, one in which Kan and Leary sealed up a main draw bid into AVP Austin while the Maestrinis won yet another title in Florida.
The eventual victors of the second Tour Series stop of the year? You just need to take it back a few weeks and a bit East, to Muskegon. The Brazilians won there, too, beating another pair of up-and-coming youngsters in Geena Urango and Julia Scoles in the finals.
But that’s the hallmark of greatness, is it not? To win, in all conditions, in any state, against any opponents. The Maestrinis win on virtually every beach they step on, and this 2022 season has been a tour de force of new lands conquered. Never before had they competed in Michigan.
Consider it conquered, with a run of five straight matches won in Muskegon while dropping only a single set.
Never before had they stepped foot on a beach volleyball court in Denver. Consider the Mile High City conquered as well, as the Maestrinis delivered another virtuoso performance at The Island and its massive 18-court facility that was packed from sunup to sundown all weekend long.
They were challenged in Denver, surviving a 21-18, 18-21, 16-14 white-knuckler in the second round over Savvy Simo and Abby Van Winkle, former teammates at UCLA who would finish ninth. Then they bounced back from an upset at the hands of Mackenzie Ponnet and Chelsea Rice, the 13 seed who swept their way into the semifinals, finishing third. The Maestrinis responded with a 21-16, 21-18 win over Molly Turner and Jessica Gaffney in the quarterfinals – then had to rebound once more, just an hour later.
In the semifinals, they met a white-hot Scoles and Urango, who jumped out to a 21-15 win in the first set, putting the Brazilians in unfamiliar territory: On the brink of elimination.
There would be no elimination. Not here. Not in Denver, where new lands could be conquered. The Maestrinis did what they are already so known to do: They responded, winning in three, 15-21, 21-16, 18-16. That momentum carried them into the Panama City finals rematch against Kan and Leary, a pair of Hawai’ians who recently won a gold medal at a NORCECA in La Paz, Mexico.
There was never any doubt in Denver. No white-knuckling. No nerves. No tense moments, really. Lili and Larissa jumped out to a 7-1 lead in the first set and controlled everything about the match there was to control until a 21-13 win was sealed with a superbly placed high angle poke from Lili. The second set featured much of the same: An early 8-5 lead became a 16-12 edge, which then became 19-13.
The Maestrinis don’t give up six point leads. Not in the finals. Not ever, really.
No six-point lead would be given. They’d push it to the finish, winning 21-13, yet another impressively dominating performance in a season already full of them, and this 2022 AVP season is just getting started.
“Just really, really, really happy,” Lili said afterwards, crystal plaque in hand. Not that they’ll be able to celebrate long, the Maestrinis. They’ll rest for a day, maybe two, then it’s onto Hermosa Beach for the third Pro Series tournament of the season. It’s another land yet unconquered. Never before have the Maestrinis competed in Hermosa.
Another weekend – another opportunity to stake their claim on a new beach.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>But things have not gone to script. Even by beach volleyball standards, the initial plan has been scrapped and shredded and tossed into the breeze and Benesh has been scrambling more than a bit, becoming, by his own admission, a readily available substitute partner for anyone who happens to need a 6-foot-9 blocker.
As it so happens, that’s a highly sought-out skill set.
On Sunday afternoon, under a gray and spitting Denver sky, Benesh embraced Miles Evans, another new partner – his fourth in four AVP events thus far – at a new event. The only element that tends to remain the same is the result: A win in hand. Benesh and Evans, who competed for the first time together at a Volleyball World Futures event in Songkhla, Thailand, in April, where they won silver, made it gold at the AVP Denver Tour Series, beating Evan Cory and Bill Kolinske, 22-20, 21-17.
“It was a great win against some great athletes,” Evans said.
Some athletes is quite an understatement.
Benesh and Evans made their road to the final virtually as long as possible. A hiccup in the first round, losing to 16th-seeded Travis Mewhirter and John Michael Plummer, 20-22, 21-15, 10-15, sentenced them to a long and grueling road through the contenders bracket. Four matches they’d play on Saturday, requiring wins over Raffe Paulis and Brian Miller, Phil Dalhausser and John Sutton, and Peter Connole and Silila Tucker just to make it into the seventh-place rounds. There, on Sunday morning, they’d meet Mark Burik and Brandon Joyner, authors of one of the biggest upsets of the tournament when they stunned second-seeded Billy Allen and Jeremy Casebeer, 19-21, 21-17, 20-18, in one of the finest matches of the tournament.
There would be no upset on Sunday. Evans and Benesh, with four matches worth of reps at the Denver altitude, had found their groove, winning 21-11, 21-15, which preceded another clean sweep, this time a vengeful win over Mewhirter and Plummer in the quarterfinals, 21-17, 21-16.
It may not have been the way they planned it – what about this season has gone to plan for either of them, anyway? – but Benesh and Evans were back in the semifinals, matched up with the only team who had yet to drop a set: Miles Partain and Paul Lotman. So efficient were Partain and Lotman about their business in Denver that you could be forgiven for forgetting they were there at all. They had played three matches and won all three, sweeping Tim Brewster and Kyle Friend, Connole and Tucker, and Dave Palm and Rafu Rodriguez.
There would be no sweep over Benesh and Evans. It would take three sets, but Benesh and Evans would prevail, 21-16, 19-21, 15-11, setting up a final with Cory and Kolinske. All four players on the court on Sunday afternoon were no stranger to such a stage.
Evans competed in his first AVP final in Hermosa Beach of 2019 with Ryan Doherty, losing a thriller to Casey Patterson and Chase Budinger. Benesh’s first AVP win came just two months ago, in Austin, Texas, with, of all people, Phil Dalhausser, while Lucena was coaching Florida State at the NCAA Championships. Cory and Kolinske, meanwhile, had made their first AVP finals each in Muskegon, falling to Rodriguez and Palm, 14-21, 24-26.
The experience showed, as the four put on an excellent final at The Island’s colossal 18-court facility. Big serves, big swings, big blocks, clutch digs. It was the big swing from Evans, though, into the angle, too sharp for Cory to dig, that provided the final, championship-sealing point, the first, long-awaited win of his AVP career, and the second this season alone for Benesh.
They hugged. Slapped hands. Evans, briefly, bowed to Benesh, in appreciation for his massive block.
That final point marked both a perfect end and a strange beginning to their partnership.
This weekend, for the Pro Series in Hermosa Beach, they’ll be on opposite sides of the net once more, with Benesh resuming his partnership with Lucena, and Evans turning to Ed Ratledge, with whom he qualified in Muskegon. And then, of course, because this is beach volleyball, they’ll be right back together, jet-setting across the globe, to Portugal and Morocco for Volleyball World Challenger events.
None of this may have been the way either of them planned it, when this season began. But with a pair of AVP wins for Benesh, and the first for Evans, who needs plans, anyway?
Going off script is working out just fine.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>In 1987, Denver was added to the schedule – and then it never came back.
Until this weekend, for the fourth stop of the 2022 AVP season and its second at the Tour Series level.
This preview will take on a different form, so as to break up the monotony of the previous ones and to throw a new look at events. If you like it, let us know. If you don’t, also let us know. We’re open to all feedback.
Here’s a glimpse at the AVP Denver Tour Series, by the numbers.
0: Matches lost by Dave Palm and Rafu Rodriguez in Muskegon
Dave Palm and Rafu Rodriguez became partners in a roundabout way, thanks, in part, to an unfortunate injury to Mark Burik. After qualifying for AVP Austin with Palm in Panama City, Burik broke his foot, meaning Palm would need an injury sub for Austin and, likely, beyond. In came Rodriguez. One month later, in Muskegon, they won, doing so by winning six consecutive matches en route to Palm’s first AVP victory. They enter Denver as the 7 seed, earning a crucial first-round bye.
2: The worst finish Jake Dietrich and Hagen Smith have had this year
Thus far in 2022, Jake Dietrich and Hagen Smith have played three tournaments. They’ve won two, in Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach, sealing up a bid to Hermosa in the process. Last weekend, at a CBVA in Santa Barbara, they finished second, falling in the finals to Lev Priima and Jake Landel. It’s an auspicious start to the season. Their fourth tournament comes this weekend in Denver, as the No. 3 seed in the qualifier.
2: Major tournaments won by Nolan Albrecht and Tomas Goldsmith this season
Late Sunday evening, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Nolan Albrecht and Tomas Goldsmith sealed up their second straight victory on the AVP Grass Tour this season, coming from behind to defeat Nate Miller and Ian Capp, 15-11, at the 30th annual Pottstown Rumble. It’s a quick turnaround to Denver, especially as both are playing with different partners: Albrecht is the 15 seed in the qualifier with Kevin Knight, while Goldsmith is the 6 in the qualifier with Bruno Amorim.
6: Big Money events being hosted by Volleyball of the Rockies this year
While it may have been 35 years since the AVP came to Denver, Volleyball of the Rockies (VOTR) has been hosting – and will continue to host – big money events all season long. The Denver Tour Series is one of six big money opportunities VOTR is putting on in 2022. While the $50,000 purse is by far the largest of the season being offered at a Denver-based event, VOTR has five other events this year boasting at least $5,000 in prize money, including tournaments on July 21-24, August 12-14, and August 27-28.
7: Countries Adam Roberts and Cody Caldwell have played in 2022
When I played with Adam Roberts last year, I constantly felt like Robin Williams did in Jumanji, when he initially is called out of the board game and back into real life. A haggard-looking Williams, with a long, unruly beard, and a turtle shell on his back, wonders, after nearly getting hit by a police car, “What year is it?” Such is the nature of playing on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour and traveling from country to country, continent to continent, time zone to time zone. Roberts is, again, hitting the road hard this season, having competed in seven different countries already. He and Caldwell will come into Denver seeded ninth on the backs of consecutive events in Turkey and Poland.
8: The seed of John Sutton and Phil Dalhausser
In the immediate moments after winning AVP New Orleans with Casey Patterson, Phil Dalhausser was asked who we would be playing with at AVP Hermosa.
“John Sutton,” he said with a wry smile, to which much of the unknowing world collectively wondered: “Who is John Sutton?”
It called to mind the famous line from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “Who is John Galt?”
Sutton is, in short, a 39-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, who is one of the most brilliant businessmen you’ll ever meet in person and a volleyball enthusiast. He has finished as high as third in a tournament this season, at the 2022 Rockstar Season Opener with good friend Adam Roberts. And now he’s playing with one of the greatest to ever play the game in Dalhausser, who has won both AVPs he’s played this season.
12: Players to made their first main draw in Muskegon
Muskegon was everything the Tour Series is meant to be: An opportunity for the lower main draw, upper qualifier level talents to begin breaking through. Seain Cook, TJ Jurko, Dylan Zacca, Brandon Joyner, Tim Brewster, Brad Connors, Brett Greiner, Nolan Albrecht, Mark Bucknam, Jake Fleming, Frank Field and Tyler Penberthy all made their main draw debuts in Muskegon.
How many will do the same in Denver? Already, at least one, John Sutton, is guaranteed for Denver.
73: Total entries on the men’s side
The Denver entry list began to resemble more of what you might see in Manhattan Beach, with 73 teams signing up. Only 64 are able to actually compete, due to space limitations, but still: That’s a huge number for a Tour Series event outside of California, and 20 more than were originally registered for Muskegon. The highest seed to qualify in Muskegon was Frank Field and Tyler Penberthy, who were 15th in the qualifier.
Denver’s looking even deeper.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>That is the number of AVP tournaments that have been hosted in Denver that featured a women’s field.
Granted, there’s only been one AVP in Denver, back in 1987. At the time, the women competed on the WPVA, and Nina Matthies ruled the world. But there’s still something undeniably historic about the fact that this weekend marks a first, in a world where doing so becomes more and more difficult.
Four AVP champions will be descending upon Denver this weekend for the fourth stop of the AVP’s 2022 season, and a host of young talent will be pushing for their first AVP titles.
Among the exorbitantly talented youth is, quite literally, the youngest main draw player of them all: Sarah Wood.
14: The age of Sarah Wood
This past June, in Muskegon, Sarah Wood shattered the record for the youngest player to make an AVP main draw, doing so at the age of 14 years, 1 month, and 16 days old, alongside Ashley McGinn. More than just qualify, she won a pair of main draw matches, eventually finishing 13th. Now she’s back in Denver, seeded eighth in the qualifier with 18-year-old Florida Atlantic recruit Ashleigh Adams.
2: International events played by Brook Bauer and Katie Horton since Muskegon
It has been a busy few months for Katie Horton and Brook Bauer, the top seeds in Friday’s qualifier. After finishing 13th in Muskegon, they readied the passports, winning a silver medal in a Futures event in Turkey – Bauer’s first international event, no less – then claiming fourth the following week in Poland. They’re heading straight from Europe to Denver, seeking to make it a third straight successful tournament.
8: Time difference, in hours, between Denver and Bialystok, Poland
Speaking of Poland: It’s no easy feat, competing on consecutive weekends in Poland and then the Western half of the United States. It’s not only Bauer and Horton doing it, either. Molly Turner and Jessica Gaffney, seeded second in the main draw, are making the jump across the pond as well.
50: Percentage of quarterfinalists in Muskegon who attended USC
Now on the heels of back-to-back NCAA Championships, the world didn’t need further notice that USC is the most dominant three-letter acronym in beach volleyball. But Muskegon only served to perpetuate the narrative, with half of the quarterfinalists being Trojans: Julia Scoles and Geena Urango, Allie Wheeler, Falyn Fonoimoana and Hailey Harward. Seven Trojans are competing in Denver, with Jo Kremer, and Audrey and Nicole Nourse joining the entry list.
11: Sets played by Larissa and Lili Maestrini in Muskegon
The Brazilians are seeking their second consecutive AVP win after cruising through the field in Muskegon. They won five straight matches, winning 10 of 11 sets. The question, now: Can they make it two straight, and can anyone do it in a perfect 10 sets?
1: Finish from Savvy Simo and Megan Kraft in Balikesir, Turkey
Poland, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany – players are flying in from all over the globe to compete in Denver. Savvy Simo and Megan Kraft are coming off an enormous success overseas, winning a gold medal in a Futures event in Turkey. Kraft then made it two straight with a gold in Poland with Emily Stockman. Kraft is still in Europe, but Simo is returning home to play with former UCLA teammate Abby Van Winkle as the No. 9 seed in the main draw.
2: Straight wins from Aurora Davis on the AVP Grass Tour
Supermom Aurora Davis did it again last weekend, winning her second straight Pottstown Rumble – this year she did it with Teegan Van Gunst – and her second straight AVP Grass Tour title of the season. Davis and Van Gunst, who have enjoyed success on all surfaces and weather this season, are seeded eighth in the main draw, earning a coveted first round bye.
8: Matches played by Kahlee York and Kylie Deberg at the CBVA Santa Barbara Open
Pottstown wasn’t the only tournament with major implications last weekend. At East Beach in Santa Barbara, Kahlee York and Kylie Deberg, who qualified for main draw in Muskegon, played eight matches en route to a CBVA title, and a huge win in the first of the Manhattan Beach Wild Card Series. They are seeded 17th in the qualifier and are certainly one of the odds-on favorites to engineer an upset or two.
10: Months since Kelly Reeves has competed in a tournament
Welcome back to the beach, Kelly Reeves! After crisscrossing the globe, competing in country quota after country quota to begin the 2021 season, Reeves claimed three straight top-10 finishes on the AVP, all with Karissa Cook. But since taking ninth in Chicago, Reeves hasn’t competed. During the spring, she coached at LMU with John Mayer and Angie Akers, and is now back on the AVP, seeded fourth in the main draw with Delaney Mewhirter.
839.75: Points owned by Amy Ozee
Sandbagger alert! Kidding. But seriously: After a few years off, Amy Ozee doesn’t even have 1,000 points to her name, though if points were earned via talent alone, she’d be around the 3,000 mark. So her and Charlie Ekstrom, a four-year starter for Stanford, are a land mine, seeded 20th in Friday’s qualifier, and could make a run deep into the main draw should they qualify.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>While nothing extraordinary had happened on the play before – it was, in fact, so par for the course that hardly anyone in the crowd, several hundred strong, even bothered applauding – the score, 13-11, was a significant one for Albrecht. He had been here before, exactly a year ago, almost down to the minute. He and Marc Fornaciari had led Eric Lucas and Andrei Belov in the finals of the 2021 Pottstown finals, 13-11. They were two points away from what amounts to grass volleyball immortality.
They lost.
“To be up 13-11 on the same side in the same game, roughly the same time at night, and that thought came in my head that ‘Oh man, this is where I was last year,’” Albrecht said. “Instead of dismissing the thought, I said ‘I was here last year, but I’m a different player than I was. And I’ve dedicated a lot to this and I’m going to embrace this.’”
Call it cosmic fate or just a missile of a serve from Goldsmith, but in the immediate wake of embracing the odd parallel from a year ago, Albrecht received a gift: Goldsmith bombed a jump serve into the seam, forcing Miller to dive just to get an arm on it. But the pass sailed over the net, into the awaiting right arm of Albrecht, who rocketed it off either Ian Capp or Miller or both, it’s difficult to tell from the twilight livestream. In a single swing, the pattern was broken: Albrecht wasn’t giving up the 13-11 lead he did last year; he and Goldsmith were now up 14-11, one point away from winning the 2022 Pottstown Rumble.
“There isn’t a higher level or bigger grass tournament in the world that I know of,” Goldsmith said. “You look at the list of people who have won Pottstown before and it has quite a list of names on it.”
That list now includes the names of Nolan Albrecht and Tomas Goldsmith. Capp and Miller staved off one match point each, but on the third, Goldsmith sent another jump serve down the seam. There would be no overpass. There would be no pass at all, as the ball curved just out of the reach of Capp’s diving arms, a 15-11 final win sealed.
“It was definitely emotional,” Albrecht said. “Just overwhelmed with gratitude, I had to walk away and brush off a few tears.”
Neither Albrecht nor Goldsmith are strangers to winning major grass events. Two months ago, alongside Schylar Lillethorup, they won The Clash, the season-opening event on the AVP Grass Tour. Six months before that, Albrecht finished off the 2021 season with a victory at Grass Nationals. But Pottstown sits on a tier of its own.
“I knew it was a big deal. I knew it was a lot of money, but I hadn’t invested a ton into learning about it,” Goldsmith said. “When we actually won, it was an incredible feeling. I’ve actually never felt quite like that after winning a tournament. I felt like a little kid. I didn’t know what to do.”
It’s earned, that childlike feeling. Albrecht and Goldsmith played 13 sets of old school scoring in two days. Not that anyone came particularly close: There wasn’t a single match that was decided by two points. Kam Beans and David Evans provided the closest match, a 15-12 quarterfinal win. Capp and Miller were the only other team to manage double-digits.
Still: 13 sets of old school scoring, on a big court, in just two days, where the heat nudged above 90 degrees frequently, will leave anyone feeling empty afterwards, even if they finished on top.
“Halfway through the final, I looked up at the ref, and I said ‘I hate this tournament, but I love this tournament so much,’” Albrecht said. “It is a fun reunion of all the same ballers, and it’s terrible, it’s so bad, but it’s so fun, because at the end of it, you’re depleted, you’re done.”
In the immediate moments following their win, Albrecht was interviewed by a reporter for a local newspaper.
How, he was asked, did he feel?
“Dude, I am hurting. I’m tired, and I feel awesome,” Albrecht responded then.
“And that’s still how I feel,” he added, laughing. “Same as I did right after the game. It was good to be able to outlast the elements as well as get that final win.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Instead, as Van Gunst backpedaled to create an approach, Davis set her, and Van Gunst subsequently buried an angle swing around the block of Kelly Vieira. To those well-initiated with Pottstown, this play is as regular as a deep angle swing or a cut shot in front of a pulling blocker. But a year ago, Davis was not among the well-initiated. Prior to the onset of pool play, she inquired about the specific rules of the event, which are famously unique: big court, sideout scoring, with a dash of indoor in which a block touch does not count as one of your three touches.
That play, then, innocuous to most, was actually quite daunting: Aurora Davis knew the rules.
Uh oh.
Davis and Van Gunst would go on to win that final over Crum and Vieira, 15-8, completing a perfect run of uninterrupted dominance through the Rumble: 10 sets played, 10 sets won, by an average of 15-4.3. The final, crazy as it sounds, was actually the closest set the two played all weekend.
That’s how good they were.
Crum and Vieira, for their part, were equally as dominant in the leadup to the finals. They won their first six sets of pool play by a total of 90-13, then marched through bracket play with a 15-11 win over Lexi Morrow and Brittney Moyer, 15-10 over Ashley McGinn and Sarah Wood, and a forfeit to Bri Civiero and Denise De Vine, who finished third. Sydney Alvis and Maddy Kline were the other third place finishers.
It’s Davis’ second attempt at Pottstown and her second consecutive title; Van Gunst, like Davis a year ago, won on her first go at it, a rarity in an event with a $70,000 prize purse and the invaluable pride that comes with winning such an iconic tournament.
“It was so cool to be able to defend the title from last year,” said Davis, who won in 2021 with Lydia Smith. “Everyone’s so good, so to be able to pull that off was awesome. Teegan was an absolute beast at everything. It was such a blast getting to share the court with her.”
They have been sharing the court on whatever surface they can find this year. Van Gunst’s usual partner, her twin sister Annika, is pregnant, which left her in search of a new defender. What she has found, as so many have, is that picking up with Davis is remarkably easy. They played in Panama City Beach and finished fifth, good enough to qualify for the main draw of the AVP Pro Series in Austin, Texas, where they’d take ninth. In Muskegon, Michigan, an AVP Tour Series, they claimed seventh, a career-high for both.
They’re both well-versed on the beach – Van Gunst competed at Georgia State; Davis at Florida State – and the partnership made perfect sense. But on the grass? A surface in which neither have much experience? At a marathon of a tournament with strange rules, where the opponents are far more familiar with the grass and its unique style of play?
“It was pretty cool to win the title my first time there,” Van Gunst said. “Old school volleyball rules definitely take a different level of persistence and patience that were both tested at different points throughout the weekend, but I thought we battled well and took advantage of the extra court space on the other side of the net than we’re used to.”
True to her words, rare was the occasion that Van Gunst, who stands 6 feet tall, had her hands on the ball and didn’t score. Davis, who possesses one of the more formidable jump serves on the women’s side of the AVP Tour, not necessarily for its pace but its precision, used every extra inch of available space, picking up timely aces time and time again. Those aces provided more than just valuable points, too.
“I’m actually not as wrecked as I thought I would be,” Van Gunst said. “Shout out to Aurora’s serving runs giving me breaks up at the net.”
Good thing, too, that neither is all that wrecked from the bodily punishment of the grass. In a few days, they’ll be on another plane, this one bound for the Denver AVP Tour Series. Currently seeded seventh in the main draw, they’ll return to the familiar: small court, soft surface, three touches only, with points won on every rally. The rules, the surface – at this point, it doesn’t seem to matter much where and how they’re playing volleyball.
Aurora Davis and Teegan Van Gunst simply adapt and advance, leaving a trail of wins in their wake.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Despite being raised on the East Coast, in Fayetteville, Georgia, Teegan Van Gunst had never heard of the Rumble, which seems almost impossible. The East Coast is, in a volleyball sense, the Grass Coast. The biggest grass tournaments are – at least prior to the quick rise of the Out of System boys, Joe and Gage Worsley and Micah Ma’a – largely won by those who hail from the East: New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina.
Yet there was still a certain independent, underground element to many grass tournaments. The marketing and promotion for such events was largely word of mouth, spread from player to player, until the AVP legitimized it, in a sense, and Pottstown – like the Clash, Crown, Waupaca, and others – became the colossal affair that it is now: A $70,000 stop on the AVP Grass Tour.
“I’d only heard about it two years ago when the AVP started the pro Grass Tour and it was one of the stops,” Van Gunst said. “Prior to that, I didn’t know it existed.”
She was intrigued, but scheduling conflicts kept her out of the competition until this season. Despite this being her first Rumble, Van Gunst enters as an immediate favorite, partnered with the defending champ in Aurora Davis. It’s a friendly atmosphere to rookies, Pottstown. Only a year ago, it was Davis who made her debut at Pottstown, without a clue about the rules. Didn’t matter: She won with Lydia Smith. Now it’s Van Gunst who is making her debut.
“I’m excited to see what all the hype is about,” she said. “It’ll be fun getting to play against a lot of new people who play grass all the time and I’ve heard some players have been coming to this tournament since they were little kids! What a legacy to be doing this for 30 years. There must be something special about it.”
Indeed, nearly every competitor in the field will note that ambiguous ‘something special’ about the event, without being able to point to exactly what it is that makes Pottstown arguably the most significant stop on the Grass Tour. Mark Burik called it a family reunion, a sentiment also shared about the Clash.
Andrew Dentler, a two-time champ, said there’s no better-run tournament on the schedule, beach or grass. Shane Donohue particularly enjoys the endurance element to it, something of which Van Gunst has heard plenty.
“I’ll most definitely be sore for several days afterwards – my neck and lower limbs from the knees down get wrecked – but in the moment it’ll be all fun and games,” the 27-year-old said. “And getting to play with Aurora and hang out with the whole Davis clan is always a blast. I feel honored to have been asked to play it with the defending champ. Hopefully we can get her a repeat title.”
It won’t be easy. The field is, as always, deep at the Rumble. While it is not the 104-team monster that the men’s field is, it’s dense, with Jessica Crum and Kelly Vieira leading the seeding. Sarah Wood, a 14-year-old who just broke the AVP’s record for youngest to qualify for a main draw in Muskegon, is third alongside Ashley McGinn.
“Insane,” is how Adrianna Nora, Wood’s teammate during the Clash, which they won alongside Davis, described Wood. Insane though she may be, they’ll all have to battle through four separate Kleespies: Haley and Chloee, the 4 seed, and Cassaundra and MacKenzie, the 5. Like any grass tournament, there will be landmines, lower-seeded teams who can beat anyone in the field – like Davis and Smith a year ago.
“After playing Pottstown for the first time last year it is definitely a tournament I don’t want to miss,” Davis said. “I loved the atmosphere, the fans were amazing, the competition was great, and I loved throwing it back and playing on a big court with side out scoring. I thought it added a fun twist to the game. And definitely had to have a different mindset with so many points happening but the score staying the same. Can’t wait for it.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Of course he said yes.
“I played and couldn’t walk for three days after,” Dache said, laughing. “I’m too old.”
And yet, peruse the entry list for this weekend’s Pottstown Rumble, and you’ll see a familiar name: Andrew Dentler – and Angel Dache. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter how bad it hurts.
Because this is the Pottstown Rumble. And one does not simply skip the Pottstown Rumble.
For 30 years now, this tournament has been held. Depending on your viewpoint of things, it has an argument as the most iconic stop on the nascent AVP Grass Tour, though nobody can really specify exactly why.
It’s just Pottstown.
“For me it’s a mix of it being a family tournament where I get to see all of my guys,” said Mark Burik, who is playing with perennial Pottstown contender Shane Donohue. “All of my best friends are there and are going to show up.”
The fact that Burik is showing up is a surprise to some. After finishing third at an AVPNext in Panama City this past April, qualifying for the AVP Pro Series in Austin, Texas, Burik broke his foot. He dropped out of Austin, skipped San Antonio, skipped New Orleans, skipped Muskegon, and only two weeks ago began an expedited rehab process to get his foot ready in time for Pottstown.
Risky to rush a return from injury to play on a harder surface? Sure.
Is Pottstown worth the risk?
Every time.
“A lot of people questioned me for the broken foot on grass thing but if you’re ready to play volleyball, you’re ready to play volleyball,” Burik said. “The fact that it’s such a huge event, that so many families and friends treat it as a reunion and more than a tournament, and it’s got that huge family and friend vibe, and these guys – it’s a crew of just awesome people who you think wouldn’t have any business running an event like they do. But they have an army of volunteers they pay in beer, and they slave for a week. They run one event, and they crush it.”
Indeed, legends of the allure of Pottstown are nearly endless. There is the time that Avery Drost and Eric Zaun were eliminated earlier than expected in AVP Seattle, and rather than mope on their losses and explore Lake Sammamish, they hopped on the earliest flight they could find to make a late entry into Pottstown. Burik has executed similar slapdash adventures. Cash games abound. Eric Lucas’ family has attended Pottstown for nearly two decades, if not more. Last year, with Andrei Belov, he finally got his win – and the two are somehow seeded No. 14 this year.
Ah, yes, that’s another element to this beast of a tournament: The field. The top is unbelievably strong, but it’s littered with landmines throughout, making for a wondrous mess of things when pool play is finished and the brackets are made.
“It’s a different game. It’s for sure a different game. Any team could get knocked out by somebody who can just go nuts on jump serves,” Burik said. “So you’re passing and setting just need to be ultra-focused. You cannot fall asleep for a single serve receive. Just some 23-year-old kid with a cannon can get three or four points in a row just by jump-serving on big court.”
Need an example? You’ll likely have heard of the obvious contenders at the top: Ian Capp and Nate Miller, Tomas Goldsmith and Nolan Albrecht, Marc Fornaciari and Liam Maxwell, Donohue and Burik, Dentler and Dache. But you needn’t go far to find more bombers who can author an upset or two or three or four: Nick Drooker and Brett Rosenmeier (18), Josue Castillo and Jake Urrutia (19), Kyle Mariano and Kris Fraser (28), Kyle Radde and Michael Michelau (50), Chris Long and Kyle Stevenson (59), Anthony Winter and Will Veverka (63) – and on and on it could go, all the way into the triple-figures.
“That bracket is so big, there are so many land mines,” said Dentler, who has won Pottstown twice, in 2017 and 2019, both with Donohue. ”Winning Pottstown is probably second to finishing fifth in New Orleans. I would rather win Pottstown than get 13th on the AVP, no doubt.”
By virtue of playing, everyone wins in their own way. The word “family reunion” was used by every single player who was spoken to.
“It’s more than just a tournament,” Donohue said. “It’s a time to reunite with my volley family and compete against some of the best competition on the East Coast. It’s a two-day, 125-plus team tournament on the grass, so it’s more than your typical volleyball tournament. It’s a marathon test of endurance and determination. Maybe you can’t walk for a week or two after, but it’s totally worth it.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>The plan was also flexible.
The first bit of that plan went smoothly enough, as Jon Mesko and Kacey Losik won their first match of the Muskegon qualifier. And then things got interesting. In the second and final round, Mesko and Losik fell to Floridians Dylan Zacca and TJ Jurko 21-15, 20-22, 20-22, in one of the wildest matches of the entire weekend.
To most, it would seem that their hopes of a main draw had been snuffed. The weekend, however, was just getting started.
Mesko and Losik weren’t going to sit around and watch the rest of the tournament play out that weekend. Oh, no.
They were heading to Virginia Beach.
When the AVP announced its new structure, with three tiers of tournaments – Gold, Pro, and Tour Series – it left out an additional tier, for the semipro players around the country: The Big Money Tour. In addition to the 16 stops on the AVP, the Big Money Tour, run and operated by AVPAmerica promoters, offers 27 more tournaments, all with a minimum of $5,000 in prize money, some with the additional carrot of an AVP main draw on the line.
Such was the case last weekend when Mesko and Losik bought last-minute flights out of Grand Rapids to Virginia Beach, home to a Big Money Tour event being hosted by the Tidewater Volleyball Association. Not only was there a $5,000 purse to be won but also a main draw berth into the Tour Series stop later this summer in Virginia Beach.
“It was pretty last second,” Mesko said of the trip further down the East Coast. “I almost think I jinxed myself because I saw it in an email on the flight the day before: There’s a wild card tournament in Virginia this weekend. The seed was planted in my mind.”
It wouldn’t be until 2 in the morning that Mesko and Losik landed in Virginia Beach. No matter: The two finished first out of the field of 28 teams, beating Andrew Holman and Adam Hartmann in a wet and windy finals in which the weather was so severe they had to move the event indoors. Not only did Mesko and Losik split a $1,200 check for the weekend, alongside Meredith Rosenberger and Gabriella Bramante, they also earned a main draw berth into an AVP event – even if it was a different one than they were initially after.
“I took a dip in the fresh water, it was amazing. I said ‘I don’t want to stick around here all weekend. Let’s channel this energy we have that we should have won that match and go win Virginia Beach,’” Mesko said. “It’s hard to say you’re going to win a tournament and then go do it.”
Such is the beauty of the Big Money Tour: There is almost always an event to play, somewhere in the country, for a decent bit of prize money and sometimes a coveted main draw. Six of the events on the Big Money Tour schedule are in Florida, kudos to SSOVA, the Panama Jack Summer Slam, and East End Volleyball. Volleyball of the Rockies (VOTR) on its own is hosting five this summer, all over the state of Colorado: Denver, Steamboat Springs, Vail, Breckenridge, and Broomfield. 210Beach, in San Antonio, Texas, also offered to host a pair. And then there are promoters and organizations all hosting one-off events, such as Volleyball Beach Ozark, Wilmington Volleyball Series, Vollis Beach, Albuquerque Juniors, Great American Volleyball, Third Coast Volleyball, Pittsburgh Grass Volleyball, Carpe Diem Volleyball, Hyden Beach, Pleasure Island Volleyball Club, and Myrtle Beach Volleyball.
Oftentimes, the Big Money Tour events will collide with AVP events.
And sometimes, that’s no problem at all. In fact, it’s a sublime solution to what would have otherwise been a disappointing weekend for Mesko and Losik.
It might not have gone as planned, but it’s also possible that last weekend went even better.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>You see Rodriguez pump his fists and turn to his partner. You see Palm drop to his knees, spent, every last ounce of energy expended. Six matches in two days would deplete any man. The emotional volatility of contending, and winning, your first AVP, as Palm did, would leave anyone empty.
And, really, you’d have no idea.
No idea that just two days before Palm and Rodriguez would take AVP Muskegon by storm, winning all six matches while dropping just two sets, they very nearly dropped out of the tournament. Whatever Palm ate for lunch on Friday afternoon didn’t sit well; by 8 p.m., just 12 hours prior to the first serve of the main draw, he was curled up on the bathroom floor of his hotel room.
The first AVP title of his career couldn’t have seemed further away.
“Massive pain,” he calls what he was feeling that evening. But he was already here, in Muskegon, a lovely little laketown on the shore of Lake Michigan. He was in the main draw. And he had a partner in Rodriguez who could at least partially carry the load, with a devastating serve made all the more wicked by the consistent 12-15 mile per hour gusts off the lake.
“I woke up Saturday morning, and I said ‘Well I gotta play,’” Palm recalled.
Play they did.
Down went qualifiers Tyler Penberthy and Frank Field. Down went eighth-seeded Chase Frishman and Noah Dyer. Down went top-seeded Avery Drost and AVP Austin champion Andy Benesh. Three matches in eight hours, all fueled by a single protein bar.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Palm said. “It was definitely God’s gift to me: You’re going to win, but you’re going to struggle a little bit. Mentally, physically, during the play, it was something I’ve never experienced due to the sense of knowing I had to deal with that every single point.”
It helps explain why, when Cory’s line shot in the finals went long, Palm didn’t sprint around the stadium in a celebratory victory lap. He didn’t beat his chest and shout with joy. He simply collapsed, depleted, and looked upwards, allowing Rodriguez to pull him to his feet. It might not have been the manner many imagine winning their first, long-awaited AVP, but Palm wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I didn’t think about it so much as ‘Oh I won!’ It was more of ‘Wow, I won with everything that I just went through,’” Palm said. “There’s only one possible explanation of that even happening: I believe in God, and I definitely believe that was his hand upon me going ‘Hey, you’ve gone through some stuff, but you put your love and faith in Me and we’re going to show the world how great things can be.’ That’s why, towards the end, I broke down after the match.”
There was no breaking down for Rodriguez. No falling to the sand. He’s been here before, almost exactly four years ago, when he and Ed Ratledge danced their way to a Cinderella win in San Francisco.
“Different and the same,” Rodriguez said when comparing the two wins “Different in every way, from partners to opponents to site to I was in better shape then. Same in the way of, it’s almost like a blur how everything went. From Dave barely bearing pain Friday night to battling against really good players but at the same time, just getting out there without much of a plan and letting instincts take over. Being in the moment, as an older partner of mine [Ratledge], used to say.”
The win qualifies Palm and Rodriguez for what will be their fifth main draw of the season, in Hermosa Beach. Also qualifying for Hermosa are Dyer and Frishman, Miles Evans and Ratledge, and Cody Caldwell and Adam Roberts, who finished seventh.
“We’ve been qualifying in the main draws but we’ve been doing pretty bad,” Palm said of AVP Austin and New Orleans. “It was tough to find a rhythm but for some reason this weekend was different. It was interesting, but overall, a fun weekend.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>It’s a fitting descriptor, magic. Other than dipping into the realms of the ethereal, how else can you really explain Larissa’s amassing the type of resume that puts her firmly in the Mount Rushmore discussion for the greatest to ever play this sport?
Ten times, Larissa was voted by her peers on the World Tour as the best setter – 10! Despite standing a full head shorter than many of her opponents, thrice was she named Best Offensive Player, and twice more as the Best Hitter. In a mind-bending nine seasons did she finish atop the world rankings.
It’s magic. Fairy dust. Sorcery. An enchanted beach volleyball life she’s lived, one in which she continues building her legacy ever higher.
It’s reached a point that it’s a legitimate wonder what’s more impressive: Her uninterrupted dominance representing Brazil on the World Tour, or the fact that, on Sunday afternoon in Muskegon, Larissa conquered yet another mountain, when it seemed there were so few of them left to conquer.
They’ve now won on legitimately every single stage they’ve played, Lili and Larissa. Heck, in 2022 alone, they’ve already won four tournaments, including an event of similar size and magnitude: An AVPNext in Panama City that served as a tune-up of sorts for the Tour Series events to come.
Tune up they did.
Five matches did they play in Muskegon, the third stop on the AVP Tour this year, and five matches did they win. The only team who managed to steal a set off the Brazilians were fellow Tour veterans and AVP champions Kim DiCello and Kendra VanZwieten, who did so in the quarterfinals.
Aside from VanZwieten and DiCello? Not a single team managed to even push the Maestrinis to within two points. Qualifiers Ashley McGinn and 14-year-old wunderkind Sarah Wood scored 18 in the second set of their second round matchup – and that’s as close as anyone would come. That’s how dominant the Maestrinis were, and are: A 21-18 set is a relative barnburner.
“I love playing this sport,” Lili, the 34-year-old blocker, said afterward. “We’ve been doing this the most part of our lives. Of course, when you do a lot of matches, you feel tired. But again, it’s always what you say to yourself. I’m always telling myself that I can play my best every single game. It doesn’t matter if we need to play 10 in one tournament like last year. I will always do all I can to win.”
The win is a seminal one for both, no doubt. Twice in 2021, they came close to claiming their first AVP title, finishing third in Manhattan Beach and second in Chicago after coming out of the qualifier. They played a whopping 10 matches that weekend at Oak Street Beach, where they eventually fell to April Ross and Alix Klineman.
Only five matches and 11 sets were needed in Muskegon, exactly half of the workload they experienced in Chicago.
“Every tournament we play, we try to do 100 percent,” Lili said. “Here in Muskegon, our first goal was to help each other and support all the time.”
They’ll carry that support into Denver, for the next stop of the Tour Series, on July 2-3, then again into Hermosa Beach the following weekend. Joining them in the main draw of Hermosa Beach will be Urango and Scoles, Deahna Kraft and Allie Wheeler, Hailey Harward and Falyn Fonoimoana, DiCello and VanZwieten. Of note, however, is that three American teams – Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, Corinne Quiggle and Sarah Schermerhorn, and Megan Kraft and Emily Stockman – are signed up for the Volleyball World Gstaad Elite 16, which conflicts with the AVP Pro Series in Hermosa Beach. Should any of those three teams drop from Hermosa Beach to compete in Switzerland, their main draw spot would trickle down to the next highest finishing seed in Muskegon, which would be, in order: Kaya Marciniak and Megan Rice, Aurora Davis and Teegan Van Gunst, and Lexy Denaburg and Kim Hildreth.
“Denver, Hermosa -- we want to play all the tournaments,” Lili said. “We love playing.”
And when they do, it’s magic.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Ronda has a bit more info on her, details of a college career at Grand Valley State, where she was the league’s Freshman of the Year and the first player in school history to make the First Team All-Conference in her first season.
As for any beach information, though, you’ll be left in the dark.
That’s the scary bit about qualifiers in towns outside of California and Florida: You’ll see teams you’ve never heard of, teams who are talented and can more than hold their own, and you’ll wonder where they’ve been all this time. Such is the story of Ronda and Sheldon who, according to Logan Webber, the local expert on matters of Michigan beach volleyball, is one of the best teams in Michigan; they just don’t travel much, or at all, really.
One of many teams, sneaky or otherwise, looking to win a berth into the AVP Muskegon main draw.
Melissa Powell, Tambre Nobles
Finally, these two are playing an event in the United States of America! Thus far, they’ve played in Volleyball World events in Itapema, Brazil, Doha, Qatar, Kusadasi, Turkey, and Klaipeda, Lithuania. Powell has also played another in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with Jade Race. If they can play high-quality volleyball on that many miles flown, they can play high-quality volleyball in what is, comparatively speaking, just a quick flight up the road.
Ali Denney, Kenley Adams
There’s only a small sample size on how these two perform together. In October of 2021, they competed in Open Beach Nationals and finished 17th. A few weeks ago, in San Antonio, they also finished 17th. The bad news is that 17th is never the goal for any team when entering a tournament. The good news? A 17th here would mean that they made the main draw, which would be a first for both, who are more than capable of doing so.
Raelyn White, Jenna Johnson
The College Mafia is conspicuously absent, for the most part, from the Muskegon qualifier. The dominance of NCAA beach players on the women’s side must be held up, then, by Raelyn White and Jenna Johnson, an excellent duo out of Florida State, one of the perennial powers in the country. Johnson’s record as a Seminole is an impressive 47-13, while White, a true sophomore, is 39-12 after a breakout 2022 season in which she finished 30-10 and made her second straight CCSA All-Tournament team.
Kahlee York, Kylie Deberg
The LSU program just keeps churning out talent after talent. A year after Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth won their first AVP, in Atlanta of 2021, Toni Rodriguez won her first international medal, a bronze in Coolangatta, Australia, with Zana Muno (Nuss and Kloth, it should be noted, also won their first medal in Australia, making it gold). And just a few months after Rodriguez broke through, Kahlee York was making hers, qualifying for the main draw in AVP New Orleans via a successful run in San Antonio with Meg Gebhard. Now she’s teamed up with another Tiger in Kylie Deberg, who finished up a decorated collegiate career as a graduate transfer in Baton Rouge. How’d she do in her first year on the beach? Winning 33 matches while losing just 10, almost all of which came on court two. They should settle in just fine together on the AVP.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
We’re more interested in the team who finished 13th: Albert Hannemann, and Jon Mesko.
There are two players in the field for this week’s AVP Tour Series in Muskegon who competed here in 2009 and are doing so again 13 years later: Mesko, and Adam Roberts. They are locked in a funny little battle for who can play at a higher level for longer; Mesko is 45 years old and will soon compete in his 100th AVP; Roberts is 46 and is, incredibly, closer to 200.
On Friday, Mesko will be playing alongside a partner, Kacey Losik, who was just 9 years old the last time the AVP was here. While Mesko is no longer the 33-year-old pup he was in 2009, Losik is no longer a starry-eyed 9-year-old kid from Santa Cruz. He’s a legitimate main draw player, with four AVP main draws to his name, with a veteran, Michigan-native of a partner by his side.
TJ Jurko, Dylan Zacca
It’s far more difficult to spot and track the next generation of male AVP players than it is for the females. The women now have a robust and thriving NCAA system in which to develop and prove their mettle. The men have whatever beach tournaments they can find during their free time in the summers. Dylan Zacca has used that free time well, and the 20-year-old is, make no mistake, one of the more promising talents making his way through the AVP system. While his partner, TJ Jurko, isn’t literally as young as Zacca (Jurko is 29), he’s almost equally as new to AVP competition, with just three AVP qualifiers to his name. They may be young, but the Floridians are talented.
David Vander Meer, Christian Honer
While Logan Webber will undoubtedly get the lion’s share of the local love throughout the weekend, David Vander Meer will be a close second. Like Webber, he’s a native of Grand Rapids, which is just a half hour’s drive from Muskegon. Like Webber, his career-high finish on the AVP is a fifth, which he took in Atlanta a year ago, stunning Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena with Mike Groselle in the first round of the main draw. Now he’s seeded third in Friday’s qualifier, with journeyman Christian Honer, who hasn’t played an AVP since 2019, but who has proven, many times over, that he can compete at the highest level.
Garrett Peterson, Joseph Reysen
Straight out of the Justin Phipps School of Young and Talented Floridians have these two united. Both emerged onto the scene partnered with the veteran Phipps, and both have a similar style of play that Phipps seeks: young, energetic, bouncy, physical. Both have significant wins to their name, and both are also seeking their first AVP main draw via qualifier (Peterson earned a wild card into Manhattan Beach in 2018).
Charlie Van Rees, Jordan Drake
Much love must be given to the locals, and Van Reese and Drake are as local as it gets: Van Rees is literally from Muskegon, while Drake, a 28-year-old blocker, lives down the road in Grand Rapids. While they don’t boast the abundance of experience as, say, Mesko and Roberts do, they’ve played plenty of beach volleyball. Van Reese has competed in nearly 20 AVP tournaments, and together, in San Francisco in 2018, they pushed Andy Benesh and Cole Fiers into a third set in the third round of the qualifier. All Benesh has done since is, oh, get picked up by Billy Allen, Nick Lucena, and Phil Dalhausser and win an AVP.
Mark Bucknam, Jake Fleming
This team has been unofficially dubbed “The AVP Uncovered guys.” Bucknam is one of the minds behind the upcoming docuseries, AVP Uncovered, though prior to this year, not many really knew he played beach volleyball, much less that he’s actually good at it. But they are good. Both of them. This year, they’ve finished second in a pair of AVPAmerica tournaments in Texas, including a $5,000 open in San Antonio on April 30, and won an event at Highline Arena in New Jersey. They’re now looking to make their first main draws.
Ryan Ierna, JD Hamilton
JD Hamilton thinks it’s a curse to be written about in these little previews since he has made it a habit of beating teams who were written about. But he and Ryan Ierna have more than earned a few words of praise for their play thus far this season. They finished second at the Summer Kickoff at Rock Star Beach on May 7 and took a ninth in San Antonio, just one or two wins away from making both of their first career main draws. Hamilton’s been playing volleyball for longer than most in this field, and Ierna possesses the athleticism of a 6-foot-5 forward who played college hoops for Hastings College.
Brad Connors, Brett Greiner
Brad Connors, The Mouth of the South, will if nothing else, keep the qualifier mood lively and loud. For as much attention as his ubiquitous trash talk gets, he’s also a very good volleyball player, as is Brett Greiner, his 30-year-old partner. The two have both come close, so many times, to qualifying for an AVP, including last year in Chicago, when they fell to Chase Frishman and Piotr Marciniak, 20-22, 22-24. Perhaps Muskegon is the proper venue for their first main draw.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Those were the first dollars Logan Webber won playing beach volleyball.
“It was the first time somebody had given me money for beach volleyball,” Webber said. “I think they’re still somewhere in my mom’s house. I can vividly remember – I basically just got my entry fee back but I felt so cool.”
He’s come a long way from Grand Rapids, Webber. No longer is he winning A-rated tournaments against a handful of teams in Michigan. He’s traveling the world, winning a silver medal in Greece on May 22 with Miles Evans, taking a fifth in Mexico with Tim Brewster on May 15. One of the top-ranked blockers on the AVP, Webber set a career-high with a fifth-place finish in Austin, Texas, with John Hyden.
This week, when the AVP comes to Muskegon, the beach on which Webber first began playing beach volleyball, his career will come full circle in a way. This is the beach on which he groveled in B tournaments as a 12- or 13-year-old. This is where he won a handful of junior medals that are still dangling from his mom’s rearview mirror. This is where he could very well set another career-high on the AVP Tour.
“It’s kinda crazy to go from, basically since I started playing volleyball, there has never been a tournament in Michigan worth more than $1,000 for first and $500 for second,” Webber said. “That’s been the highest. And even for those, the most teams we’ve had for a men’s top division has been maybe 20? So it’s crazy to go from no big tournaments to all of a sudden, here’s the third-highest level tournament you can get.
“It’s going to be weird for me to go back and see all of you guys and everybody I know in Muskegon where that’s basically where I started playing.”
This weekend’s AVP Tour Series, as expected, blew well past the previous unofficial record of 20 teams that Webber mentioned. When registration closed, there were 56 men’s teams signed up and another 34 women. Sixteen of those teams for each gender will be seeded directly into the main draw; for those that do not make it out of Friday’s qualifier, there’s a stay and play AVP America event with a $1,000 purse per gender.
“Even the stay and play tournament has a $1,000 purse, which is still larger than any other tournament I’ve seen in Michigan,” Webber said, laughing.
The beach, too, will be teeming with juniors, coming into town from all corners of the country for the second stop on the AVP Juniors Tour. Currently, 15 juniors are registered for what could become an annual visit to Muskegon, and what was an annual visit from 1998-2001 for the AVP.
For the first time since 2009, when Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers defeated a young Brad Keenan and Nick Lucena in the finals, the AVP is returning to Muskegon. It’s doing so with the debut event of the Tour Series, the third tier of its newly restructured system, with a 24-team main draw and $50,000 in prize money.
“It’s going to be cool to see what they do with these Tour level events,” Webber said. “I’m super interested to see if they’re going to be like the AVPNext Gold Series were last year in terms of production.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>What had begun as a handful of kids playing beach volleyball in Genovich’s private court exploded, in the blink of an eye, into a 300-plus kid operation.
“It went from 20 to almost 300 that summer,” Genovich said of the summer of 2020. “I was just doing it in my backyard court. I’d have four or five kids at a time, and it was great, really. I didn’t think it was going to be much more than that.”
We all know what happened that summer: COVID hit. Gyms were shut down. And when you shut down gyms in Big 10 country, where volleyball viewership and participation are at their highest in the United States, the appetite for the sport doesn’t wan – only the locations in which to play it. Genovich’s backyard was one of the few havens in which volleyball-starved athletes could still get a few reps in. When the township supervisor caught wind of the pop-up beach volleyball club in Genovich’s backyard, he knew he had to shut it down. Individuals could run businesses out of their homes, yes, but they couldn’t do it out in the open.
But he’s a good man, that supervisor. He saw the hundreds of kids reaping the benefits of what Genovich was doing. He saw them exercising. Getting fresh air. Socializing. Building community. Could he really shut that down?
“We kept talking and talking, and he decided that I could help him build a court or two at one of the parks,” Genovich recalled. “And that’s how we ended up at eight courts and built T.A.G. Beach. It turned out from him coming down to shut me down and we ended up talking, and he said ‘Honestly, it takes me a while to write letters, and I have to write you a letter before we can shut you down, and I see all these kids out here and active, and they’re all cooped up right now, you’re doing a good thing. How long would it take you to build some courts for us?’
“That’s how we came up with T.A.G. Beach. He came out and I said ‘Hey, do you want me to call parents? Send everyone home? You let me know what you want me to do.’ As we continued the conversation, he came around to: ‘Nope, these kids are having fun and they’re outside.’”
And just like that, the state of Michigan had beach volleyball again.
Register for the AVP Junior Tour in Muskegon!
Register for Muskegon Stay & Play Amateur Divisions!
Next weekend, there might be more beach volleyball being played in Michigan, in Muskegon, roughly an hour’s drive from Genovich’s eight-court T.A.G. Beach, than ever before. There will be the first Tour Series stop of the AVP’s 2022 season, as well as the second AVP Junior Tour stop, a three-star held at the same time as the professionals.
“Honestly, when I started eight or nine years ago, youth tournaments would have four or five teams in each division,” Genovich said. “That’s all they’d get.”
Now? It’ll take you a few moments to scroll the entirety of the entry lists for the upcoming tournaments. Already, 58 teams are signed up for the AVP Tour Series for the men, 42 for the women, and 13 for the youth in the area.
“I’ve been promoting: Get out in Muskegon, play,” Genovich said. “All the kids.”
It can be an uphill battle, to convert the indoor types onto the beach, particularly in an indoor-centric area such as Michigan. Genovich estimates that there are 50,000 kids aged high school and younger who play volleyball, but only a few thousand who play on the beach. That ratio is quickly shifting, thanks in part to the pandemic, but also thanks to the community being built both by Genovich, the AVP, and AVPAmerica, all of whom are making an impact.
“I ran a 12U tournament after school ball started in the fall last year and I had 24 12U teams in that tournament,” Genovich said. “There are tournaments where they’ll get four or five 12U teams, but they’ll get a lot in the 14, 16, 18U. I just decided I want to grow it from the elementary, the middle school level, and get these kids climbing up.”
That begins next weekend, with the AVP Junior Tour.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>There was, really, no celebration at all. They were sort of sure they had won the CBVA wild card series, earning a spot into the AVP Hermosa Beach Pro Series main draw – but they also didn’t want to bank on some sketchy math they did in their heads and begin celebrating too soon.
“We were pretty sure we got it, but I didn’t want to celebrate until we had official confirmation,” Friesen said. “It was a bit of a mental roller coaster.”
For four days, the CBVA and AVP kept Pregowska and Friesen – as well as contenders Lauren DeTurk and Katie Lindstrom – dangling on a cliffhanger, until finally, the email came in: Pregowska and Friesen had officially won the bid.
After 22 attempts in AVP qualifiers, Friesen had made her first AVP main draw, doing so alongside Pregowska, who is still not even a year out from giving birth to her first child.
“I’m proud of myself as a new mom but I’m really excited for her,” said Pregowska, who has made two AVP main draws, her first coming in San Francisco of 2018. “After we finished our last match of the day on Saturday, she said ‘I didn’t want to tell you this, but I’ve never made it into the main draw, so this is a big deal for me.’ That pressure, she could have put it on me beforehand, but I’m glad she didn’t tell me. It’s really special to know that this is her first one, this is huge.”
Indeed, few moments are as deeply etched into a beach volleyball player’s memory as a first main draw – even if it was, as Friesen says, a bit anticlimactic to receive the news via email, four days after the final ball landed.
“The last five years, I’ve imagined qualifying for a main draw and celebrating right there on the court, dogpiling, getting it all on video,” she said. “But there was none of that, so it was a little discouraging to not have those expectations met. However, I’ve realized it’s not the celebration and the approval and congratulations from others that matters; this is just one step in the long journey I’ve had since my accident, and I want to continue being faithful to whatever God puts in front of me every day.”
Friesen’s accident, in 2016, is a harrowing one. Hiking Honolulu’s Ka’au Crater Trail, she slipped down a waterfall, free-falling nearly 50 feet, breaking 10 rips to go along with a collapsed left lung and a broken left shoulder.
Now here she is, six years later, fully healed, playing the best beach volleyball of her career, making her first AVP main draw. Thriving.
“I’ve been working for this for five long years,” Friesen said. “It feels amazing to have finally made it into the main draw.”
She isn’t the only one earning her main draw debut via the wild card series. Jake Dietrich left no doubt when it came to who qualified, winning all three tournaments in the series, two with Hagen Smith, the final with Seain Cook, to punch his ticket into Hermosa. While he won tournaments with two different players, he’ll be competing in Hermosa with Smith.
Both teams will now have a full month to train and prepare for their AVP debut as a team – and Friesen’s debut as a bona fide AVP main draw player.
“She’s worked so hard. She’s worked with coaches and she’s been trying for five to six years and it’s so special,” Pregowska said. “I just cannot even put it into words.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>And so it is with Hogg.
“I was on the first boys' team that C2 ever had,” Hogg said. “I was grinding it out on the 18s as a 16-year-old just starting out.”
With that two-year age gap in their competition, playing on a team assembled from all corners of the country, where practice time was minimal and the experience of competing in high-level tournaments was scant, they lost. A lot. Which is an unfamiliar concept to those in the C2 program now.
Now? The 16s team finished the year 56-1, ranked No. 1 in the nation. Every single team in the program finished top 10 in the country.
Now? That initial team of seven outmatched boys has exploded into a bona fide powerhouse of a program with seven boys teams, 33 girls, 370 athletes in total, and a thriving environment in which beach and indoor are taught, and athletes of all sizes and ages are developing into legitimate college prospects.
“I’ve seen this club come from nothing to No. 1 in the nation, getting killed by these teams that we’re now killing,” Hogg said. “I’m grateful to be a part of that inaugural team. It’s definitely special, and I’m excited for what we’re doing in the future.”
Many in the volleyball community, and the beach community in particular, are excited about what C2 is doing in the present. Every year, they’ll send a team to Fuds, the bi-annual four-man tournament in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., one that has recently become a favorite stop for professionals. Ed Ratledge was one of those professionals, and he took note of the undeniable talent from the teenagers donning C2 gear.
Someone, he said, needed to show them some love for what they’re doing.
In a sport that is still so dominated by women, with a booming NCAA system and a trickle-down effect that is more like an avalanche to the grassroots level, C2 is one of the rare clubs providing beach training for boys. It makes sense, of course, that there are few options and avenues for boys to pursue beach.
As Cullum Miller, the boys and beach director for C2 said, “there are two things that don’t make a lot of money and take a lot of effort when you put them together: boys and beach volleyball.”
Yet C2 is doing just that. And it’s doing it exceptionally well.
In the first year that C2 expanded to include a beach component, Miller expected around 20 boys to participate.
Nearly 70 signed up.
Not only was it more than triple what they expected, but it was also more than they could really handle. The facilities in the Nashville area are still lagging behind the natural beaches of California and the massive complexes throughout the state of Louisiana and other beach-centric areas such as Ohio. C2 practices at a local park with two courts, and sometimes those two courts will have 32 kids on each at a time.
They make it work.
“You’ll see four to six balls going at one time on a court,” Miller said. “We do everything we can to maximize the space.”
With close to 70 percent of the beach players hailing from outside of the Tennessee area, either driving or flying in from 11 different states, C2 practices around once per month. They’ll drill for three to four hours in the morning, compete in the afternoon, then compete in an intraprogram competition of some kind the following day. It’s a lot of volleyball in a compact amount of time, yet the benefits are undeniable.
Tracy Stevens and her son, George, currently live in Selma, Alabama, yet are relocating to the Nashville area this summer to be closer to C2.
“C2 has been amazing for his development in the sand and indoors, and has given him such a passion for the game,” Stevens said. “I love that every middle on our boys teams can step in and set the ball beautifully because they have developed every skill due to beach.”
And if you think that might just be the simple praise of a doting parent, think again.
“Finding a boys club option like C2 has been a huge blessing for our family,” said Travis Hudson, the head coach at Western Kentucky University whose son, Drew, competes for C2. “It has been an incredible combination of quality instruction plus a caring environment where our son has grown tremendously as a young man.”
There is still no option for boys to play beach volleyball in college, but there are nationwide competitions nonetheless. You’ll see C2 tanks and t-shirts at AVP America Nationals, at the East Coast Championships, the West Coast Championships – if there’s a sizable competition to be played on the beach, C2 will be there.
“There’s no bench in beach,” Miller said. “A parent gets to see their child play 100 percent of the time. They never come off the court. It’s going to make them a better volleyball player.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>He’s the man who founded the place, back in the mid-1980s, when it was just a single sand court installed to replace the baseball fields where too many fights were breaking out. He saw that expand to five courts when a man named Bruce White popped by and informed him he built the courts all wrong, and together they renovated and added more. He’s seen the greats play and win on those courts – Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos, Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes, Tim Hovland and Mike Dodd. And he’s seen those courts get washed into nothing when Hurricane Katrina swept through Louisiana in the summer of 2005.
“There wasn’t a stick standing,” White said.
Drury has even seen those courts move, over to Kenner, and double, then triple, then quadruple… and then add three more, just for good measure. He’s seen those courts, now numbering 23, become the largest man-made sand complex in the entire United States of America.
So when Mike Drury doesn’t recognize someone on his courts at Coconut Beach, after nearly four decades of being in business, well, it can be a bit strange. When he introduced himself, he asked where the woman was from, and what she was doing in town.
She drove in from Orange Beach, Alabama, she said. Her daughter had a lesson with Joey Keener, a local player and coach who oversees more juniors than he or Drury could have ever imagined.
“I said ‘You gotta be kidding me. You drove all the way from Alabama to have a lesson with Joey?’” Drury said, laughing. “It astounded me that she drives all the way from Orange Beach to have lessons with Joey.”
Next weekend, juniors will be driving and flying from all over the country – far further than Orange Beach – to descend upon Coconut Beach. They’ll be doing so for a host of reasons: the first stop on the AVPJuniors Tour, a three-star event with bids to Nationals for teams finishing first through fifth; a Collegiate Clinic with LSU and Tulane, headed by LSU assistant coach Cati Leak and Tulane assistant Jade Hayes.
Register for the AVPJuniors NOLA Collegiate Coaching Clinic!
It is as much an opportunity to win a beach volleyball tournament as it is to improve at the game – and to get noticed doing it. Colleges around the nation are taking note of the hotbed of talent that has become Louisiana, most notably because of LSU’s perennial success, and the success of so many of its players – Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, Toni Rodriguez and Kahlee York, all of whom are in the main draw of AVP New Orleans.
Register for the AVPJuniors Tour New Orleans Open
“I can’t even believe where we are now,” Keener said of the talented juniors in the area. “I counted the other day, and I stopped counting around 30 – I’ve got 30 kids or more playing college ball or committed to play college ball. It is crazy. I don’t even think about it until I take a step back.”
As more clinics and tournaments like these continue to fill out the schedule every summer, it only serves to attract more eyes and attention to the area, and all those who travel to it.
“I bet you Louisiana has 40 girls on scholarship right now. Tulane practices at [White Sands],” White said. “When Kristen started making a name for herself, some people said ‘Bruce she works for you, why didn’t you get her to go to Tulane?’ I said ‘She was going to LSU at birth!’ She didn’t recruit. There was nobody looking at her.”
There are multiple elements to that story that are difficult to imagine now: That nobody was looking at Nuss, and that few coaches bothered to sleuth the Louisiana area for talent.
Now? It’s a can’t-miss area, hosting can’t-miss tournaments for juniors around the country.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>But in making the first main draw of her young and promising career, Kahlee York will have her equal share of local support.
While she may not be a born and raised local, as Nuss and Toni Rodriguez are, York was still a three-year starter for the Tigers, closing her career at LSU with a 24-8 record on court five. Now she’s making her professional debut an hour from Baton Rouge, alongside Megan Gebhard, who is also making her domestic professional debut. Already this season, however, Gebhard has competed professionally internationally, making a pair of semifinals on the NORCECA circuit alongside Savvy Simo – more on her and Rodriguez below – and winning a bronze medal in La Paz, Mexico.
It’ll be a Cinderella team with a Cinderella-style fanbase, exactly the type of support you’d want when stepping onto the game’s biggest stage for the first time.
This will not be the first time Turner and Gaffney step onto the game’s biggest stage. They’ve been in and out of AVP main draws for years now, and Turner has been deep into AVP – and Volleyball World – Sundays before, finishing third in Atlanta a year ago with Terese Cannon. They ran the table in San Antonio, winning every single set en route to their first sizable win as a partnership. They’ll look to keep that momentum going on the second of a three-tournament road trip that will end next weekend in Lithuania.
Savvy Simo, Toni Rodriguez
Toni Rodriguez has baby pictures of her in a full LSU getup.
“It’s home. It’s always been home,” she said. “I bleed purple and gold. This is my school.”
As it should be. Injuries and COVID pushed her eligibility to a staggering seven years in Baton Rouge, where she became an integral member of both the indoor and beach teams at LSU. Now she’s all-in as a professional, winning a bronze medal in Australia earlier this year with Zana Muno, claiming a seventh in Austin with Simo. Now, on the back of a third-place finish at the AVPNext in San Antonio, Rodriguez will look to use the home-court advantage of Coconut Beach to land another career-best.
Mackenzie Ponnet, Chelsea Rice
Momentum is everything in sports, and these two have plenty of it. On April 30, they won a CBVA which doubled as a qualifier for AVP Hermosa Beach – the final of the series will be held in Hermosa Beach this weekend, so Ponnet and Rice are out of contention. In San Antonio last weekend, they finished fifth, which was good enough to qualify for their first AVP main draw as a team. The last time Rice was in the main draw, she took a ninth in Chicago with Carly Kan.
Half of Ponnet’s previous six AVP finishes have been in the top-10.
Is another top-10 in the future in New Orleans?
Macy Jerger, Abby Van Winkle
This is the first AVP tournament Abby Van Winkle hasn’t played with a fellow UCLA Bruin. The 6-foot-2 blocker has previously competed alongside Megan Muret, Lindsey Sparks, Piper Monk-Heidrich and, most recently, Savvy Simo. Her first time wading outside of the Los Angeles market went well enough, as Van Winkle and Macy Jerger, a Florida State alum, qualified for the AVP New Orleans main draw via a successful run through the AVPNext in San Antonio. Jerger, a 6-foot-1 blocker, was an All-American in her time at Florida State and made consecutive AVP main draws in 2021, the final of which came in Chicago with Devon Newberry – another UCLA Bruin.
Katie Horton, Brook Bauer
There is a lot of history here for both of these players. In 2016, when Bauer was just a teenager at St. Thomas Aquinas before she began an All-American career at Pepperdine and Florida State, she qualified with Madison Fitzpatrick in the most bizarre AVP qualifier in recent memory. Rain had shortened qualifier matches to sets of 11, 11, and 7, should a third be needed. She qualified, winning all three matches, 11-9, before claiming ninth.
Now she’s back in the main draw, after qualifying via San Antonio with Katie Horton, another Florida State alum who briefly lived in Louisiana. So this team is, in a way, a home team, but also not, as Bauer helped Florida State stymie LSU yet again in the CCSA conference. New Orleans is, if nothing else, a setting with no shortage of positive memories and vibes – and only more to come this weekend.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
If Andy Benesh and Tim Brewster, the eventual champs of the AVP New Orleans qualifier, couldn’t technically qualify, seeing as Benesh was already in the main draw with Nick Lucena, their spot would trickle down to the highest-seeded team in the quarterfinals. And with Chaim Schalk and Theo Brunner skipping for the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour event currently happening in Ostrava, Czech Republic, having previously taken up a spot, then their main draw berth would also trickle down to the next-highest seed in the quarterfinals.
Which would mean…Roberts and Caldwell were in, right?
Right?
Right.
The sketchy math held up, and Roberts, unbelievably, had just qualified for another main draw in a career that has featured nearly 200 domestic events.
He’s ageless, the man, 46 years old, and playing some of the best beach volleyball of his career. It helps, of course, that Caldwell is also playing what is likely the best beach volleyball of his career, hands down. The service pressure the 6-foot-6 former national champ at Loyola Chicago is able to put on teams with nary an error has been an enormous source of points for the two, and his option ability takes much of the heat off of Roberts’ side out.
The heat – the literal one, provided by Mother Nature – has been taken off by the AVP, which has scheduled matches beginning at 2 p.m., going all the way until past 10 at Coconut Beach. Roberts and Caldwell begin with Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander.
Now, for the rest of the qualifiers for AVP New Orleans from the San Antonio AVPNext.
All bow down Lev Priima, King of the Qualifiers, Lord of the Single Elimination, Ruler of the AVP Middle Earth. For the last two seasons, it is a statistical fact that no player on the AVP Tour, either male or female, has enjoyed more success in qualifiers than Lev Priima. It’s now six straight main draws out of the qualifier for the 6-foot-4 Russian, who again made it into the main with Silila Tucker, their second this season. They did so by taking third in the San Antonio qualifier, winning every single set until they ran into eventual winners Andy Benesh and Tim Brewster in the semifinals. The next step for Priima: Make a run through the main draw, so he doesn’t have to continue bludgeoning his way through the crucible of the qualifier.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Rather: Tim Brewster smashed into them, head-on, driving his 6-foot frame 150 miles per hour. Here’s what the limits look like for a kid who hadn’t previously registered any notion of them: Five tournaments in five weekends, roughly 14,500 miles flown, three passport stamps, 25 matches played, one silver medal, one enormous victory.
“I’ve never hurt like this before,” Brewster said. “Yesterday did it for me.”
By yesterday, he’s referencing a very, very, very long Sunday in San Antonio, Texas. It was a day that began at 7:30 in the morning, on an uncharacteristically chilly Texas dawn, with Nolan Albrecht and Ian Bicko. It wouldn’t end until near sunset, four matches later, 12 sets in total, and the biggest victory of his young career in hand, one that finished in a 21-18, 21-18 victory over Chase Frishman and Noah Dyer, and one that was harder earned than anyone could have possibly anticipated.
When Brewster teamed up with Andy Benesh for the San Antonio AVPNext that would serve as both a $20,000 tournament and a qualifier into this week’s AVP Pro Series event in New Orleans, Louisiana, he felt the pressure before he even stepped onto the plane. Benesh was coming off the most momentous event of his career, a win at the AVP Pro Series in Austin, Texas, in which he and Phil Dalhausser shocked the field by winning every single match they played. It was Benesh’s first win, a clear sign that the 27-year-old was becoming the rightful heir to the American blocking throne recently vacated by Dalhausser and Jake Gibb.
And here was Tim Brewster, playing behind that block. Anything less than a win would be, in his mind, a failure.
“It was a little stressful playing with Andy because it’s like: If I don’t win with Andy, it’s like [shoot!]’” Brewster said. “Definitely stoked. It’s different. Definitely relieved. In Cuba [a NORCECA in which Brewster won his first international medal, a silver], I felt like we should definitely medal. It was a good opportunity. Getting a win with Andy was big because there were big expectations there and he had just won Austin. It was a pretty good relief but now I’m stoked about it. The ups and downs are pretty crazy.”
There are few better at weathering the mercurial nature of beach volleyball, the wild swings of emotions and results, than Brewster. For years, he has been so-close-you-can-taste-it to success on the professional stage. In 2018, when he was just 19 years old, he and John Schwengel marched through to the final round of the AVP New York qualifier, losing 18-21, 21-18, 11-15 to Mark Burik and Ian Satterfield. A month later, in Hermosa Beach, they fell in the third round to Benesh and Cole Fiers. Last year, in Atlanta, he and Mike Boag pushed their way into the final round once more, only to lose to Mike Groselle and DR Vander Meer.
It was, as people would say quite often, only a matter of time until the breakthrough finally came, which is as pleasant to hear as it is frustrating.
When would that time be?
“It’s felt like a long time, yeah,” he said.
And if there is anyone attempting to throw an asterisk on this victory, that he was victorious by simple virtue of playing with one of the best blockers in the country, that asterisk can be immediately removed. In the finals, Brewster was mostly left without the vaunted powers of Benesh. At 8-8 in the second set, after winning the first, 21-18, Benesh’s muscles began spazzing into one gigantic lower body cramp.
“It was quads, hamstrings, calves, it was all of it,” Brewster said. “He had six more side-outs in him.”
Benesh had about as many side-outs left in him as he had beers – a legitimate and swift anti-cramping solution – poured into him. Four beers went down, as did those side-outs. But at 15-13, there was no gas left in the tank.
This was Tim Brewster’s tournament to win.
“He got us to 15-13, 16-14 siding out, and he said ‘I’m going down. You have to hit the rest of the balls on two, I can’t jump,’” Brewster recalled. “Then he had the most clutch block. He had one block jump left in him and he got [an angle block] on Chase.
“I think the whole final he maybe celebrated two times. He was dead at the beginning of it, and when the cramping started, he was like ‘Alright, let’s just get through this.’”
They got through it, all right, with Brewster hitting every ball on two to close it out. Benesh promptly took the next 30 to 45 minutes to lay on the ground, seven matches played, seven matches won, the satisfaction of a tournament win putting him to rest, right there on the sand at 210 Beach.
While they were the victors of the 48-team tournament, they were not the only winners, in a sense. Five teams qualified for this weekend’s AVP Pro Series in New Orleans, including Frishman and Dyer, Skylar del Sol and Andrew Dentler, Lev Priima and Silila Tucker, Rafu Rodriguez and Dave Palm, and Adam Roberts and Cody Caldwell.
While Brewster technically qualified for his first AVP, he cannot play in New Orleans, as Benesh is partnered with Nick Lucena. What will he do, then, while everyone else heads down to the Big Easy?
He’ll sleep, for once. Then he’ll sleep some more. And then, as Tim Brewster does, he’ll get back to playing beach volleyball.
Women’s results: Molly Turner and Jessica Gaffney win
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Earlier this week, they boarded a flight for San Antonio, Texas, for a two-day, 48-team tournament that would require a minimum of seven matches in heat that regularly jumped into the triple-figures. Late-night storms didn’t help matters, delaying the evening matches on Saturday to the bleary-eyed hours of the morning on Sunday.
The dilemma for West Coast teams, and particularly Turner and Gaffney, who entered the San Antonio AVPNext as the No. 1 seed and favorites to qualify for AVP New Orleans, was what to do on Sunday night or Monday morning? Do they book a round-trip flight, head back to Hermosa Beach, California, or do they gamble, bet on themselves, and make it a string of one-way flights, from Los Angeles to Texas to Louisiana to – get this – Lithuania, of all places in this beach volleyball-crazed world.
They bet on themselves with a “one-way flight and a carry-on suitcase packed for potentially three weeks,” Gaffney said.
They won big.
For the second consecutive time in 2022, Turner and Gaffney qualified for an AVP Pro Series main draw. They played seven matches and won 14 consecutive sets, beating Hailey Harward and Carly Skjodt in the finals, 21-19, 21-19. There will be no flight changes needed.
Los Angeles can wait. There’s an AVP in New Orleans to play.
“We didn’t even know if we were going to qualify,” Turner said. “I literally would not allow myself to say ‘When we qualify.’ So the start of the trip was so focused on the task of qualifying. We packed enough for three weeks but were trying to just focus solely on San Antonio.”
It served them well, that focus. The tournament was a fully-loaded affair, with veterans and up-and-comers alike joining the field. There were AVP champions in Kim DiCello and Kendra VanZwieten, who wound up in ninth, falling to Abby Van Winkle and Macy Jerger. There were teams who joined Turner and Gaffney in the main draw of AVP Austin in Savvy Simo and Toni Rodriguez, who finished third and will also be in the main draw of New Orleans. There were international medalists in Megan Gebhard, Allie Wheeler, Carly Kan, and Kaitlyn Leary, as well as perennial winners such as Aurora Davis.
In the end, it was Turner and Gaffney, the psychos on one heck of a road trip, who prevailed over all of them.
“Starting it off with a full tournament win was incredible,” Turner said. “Not that I didn’t think it was possible, we just don’t fully know our abilities yet as a team. But this weekend really helped our confidence in knowing how hard we work and how mindful our practices have been that it’s worth it and we are doing something right.”
Joining them in New Orleans will be Katie Horton and Brook Bauer, Simo and Rodriguez – who are on the same itinerary as Turner and Gaffney, heading to Lithuania for a Volleyball World event after New Orleans – Mackenzie Ponnet and Chelsea Rice, Jerger and Van Winkle, and Kahlee York and Gebhard.
“These trips are always fun, but qualifiers are crazy pressure,” Gaffney said. “I feel a huge sense of relief getting the job done in San Antonio. Now we have an exciting opportunity to compete in another Pro Series followed by our first Futures event. Can’t wait to put the work to the test.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Seven of the top 10 seeded teams are different from the previous qualifier, in Panama City Beach, Fla., as are four of the next 10.
The qualifier system might be new, but the bi-monthly qualifier partner shuffle remains the same, whimsical beach volleyball musical chairs it has always been. Below, you will find 10 teams to watch this weekend in San Antonio, which aren’t necessarily the best teams, just talented ones with good storylines who also, yes, have a shot at finishing in the semifinals and punching their ticket to New Orleans.
Skylar del Sol, Andrew Dentler
With the exception of the AVP Champions Cup, del Sol has been straight into the main draw in his last seven AVP tournaments. But with his former partner Ed Ratledge popping around between Casey Patterson and Miles Evans, and Paul Lotman, his teammate in Austin, going back to the young Padawan, Miles Partain, del Sol has been thrust back into the gauntlet of the qualifiers. He’s picked up Dentler, and the two will be a sweet setting, tough serving team, with both packing jump serves that bring pace and accuracy, which will be a huge source of points all weekend long in San Antonio.
Rafu Rodriguez, Dave Palm
It was only a few days before AVP Austin that Rafu Rodriguez knew he was even playing. Mark Burik, with whom Palm qualified in Panama City Beach, broke his foot, leaving Palm in search of a last minute injury sub. Rodriguez was his guy, and although they finished 13th, it belied just how well they played, pushing finalists Troy Field and Chase Budinger in two tight sets, then taking Tim Bomgren and Piotr Marciniak to three. With a tournament under their belt, expect a few things to be smoothed out, and this team to be a dangerous one in Texas.
Mike Groselle, Grant O’Gorman
It was only nine months ago when Mike Groselle made his first AVP main draw, cruising through the qualifier with DR Vander Meer before stunning Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena in the first round. Now he’s partnered with Grant O’Gorman, the No. 2 defender in Canada who narrowly missed out on qualifying for the Tokyo Olympic Games with Ben Saxton.
Not a bad pickup for the AVP rookie.
How much preparation they’ll have had together is likely less than ideal, but still: O’Gorman has played with the best, against the best. They’ll figure it out just fine.
Brandon Joyner, Kyle Friend
There may have been no two individuals who wanted Chase Budinger and Troy Field to skip Austin for the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Challenger in Doha last weekend than Brandon Joyner and Kyle Friend. Had Budinger and Field decided to play in Qatar, it would have opened up an additional spot into the main draw of Austin, which would have trickled to, you guessed it, Friend and Joyner, who finished fifth in Panama City Beach.
The good news is that they proved they could play well enough to qualify, losing a tight three-setter in the quarterfinals to eventual finalists Marty Lorenz and Caleb Kwekel. Should they play that way again, they’ll be headed for beignets and beads.
Chase Frishman, Noah Dyer
You never really know what Chase Frishman is going to do next. One day he’s being named the AVP Rookie of the Year, as he was in 2016, the next, he’s living in a Subaru Outback. One day he’s playing with an AVP veteran in Piotr Marciniak, the next, he’s developing an up and coming talent fresh off the indoor scene in Noah Dyer.
But no matter what Frishman is doing, he’s always doing it well. He and Dyer have played two tournaments this season, finishing ninth in Panama City Beach before winning a tournament last weekend in Belmont Shores. Solid momentum heading into San Antonio, where Dyer, a former outside hitter and libero for Pepperdine, is looking to qualify for his first AVP main draw.
Ian Bicko, Nolan Albrecht
The Cinderellas of Panama City Beach! These two put on a crowd-pleasing show in Florida, upsetting Avery Drost and Eric Beranek in the final match of pool play. This was most unfortunate for Steve Roschitz and Pete Connole, of course, who had the brutal draw of getting Drost and Beranek in the first round, but in the moment, it was a seminal win for Bicko, who has been steadily improving, seeking a signature win. A signature win was had.
They’d fall short of qualifying, but between Bicko’s size at the net and Albrecht’s menacing jump serve, there are no easy points on these two.
Andrew Holman, Adam Hartmann
Of the many – many – teams I watched in Florida, I was left most impressed by these two youngsters. They play such a smooth, sweet style of play that is just dang fun to watch and so very difficult to stop. Their ball control makes them an excellent team in the wind, a Florida signature of sorts, and that kind of play translates well to any weather. Even if it’s hot and rainy and still and muggy in San Antonio, these two will be dangerous.
Alexander Biz, Leor Schiffer
Aside from Hagen Smith and Jake Dietrich, who have won back-to-back CBVAs, qualifying for AVP Hermosa in the process, there are few teams playing better volleyball on the CBVA circuit than Alexander Biz and Leor Schiffer. They have the best arms in the entire tournament, hands down, and when they’re hot, they are scolding, blisteringly hot. This will be the most physical team in San Antonio, hands down.
Andrew Royal, Ethan Elkins
The Florida panhandle is best known for the four-man tournament/bi-annual boozefest on the beach that is Fuds. It is not exactly known for producing an abundance of beach volleyball talent. Yet Royal and Elkins are proving an exception to that rule. They won a tough pool in Panama City Beach before bowing out in 17th, but still, the message was clear: They could beat any team in the tournament, especially when it gets a bit breezy. Elkins is an athletic marvel, with an impressive vertical and a bigger arm, while Royal’s ball control and cheeky on-two and on-one plays are a huge source of points.
Ben Vaught, Tanner Woods
Woods and Stanford libero Evan Enriques became the darlings of the 2021 Seaside Open when they lost in their second match of the tournament, then clawed their way back, winning somewhere around seven straight just to get back to the quarterfinals. It was epic. And, good as Enriques was, much of it was on the back of Woods, who packed a massive jump serve and big swing after big swing in an indefatigable right arm that just could not stop. Partnered with Ben Vaught, a veteran on the sand, this is a talented 41 seed who could upset quite a few.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>A one-way flight is a sure sign of confidence, a single swipe of the credit card that says, in effect: I’m taking another one-way flight to New Orleans on Monday morning, where I’ll be competing in the following weekend’s Pro Series main draw. This wasn’t the case, a little more than a month ago, in Panama City Beach, Fla. home of the first satellite qualifier, which served as both a $20,000 tournament and a qualifier for the Pro Series in Austin, held last weekend. Round trips were the obvious move.
Here, there is no obvious move.
This is one of the tricky travel scenarios created by this new qualifying system, one in which there are exponentially more tournaments to play, more prize money to win – and more flights to take. It’s beautiful, really, a problem beach volleyball players haven’t had in quite some time.
More flights mean more tournaments. More tournaments mean more volleyball. More volleyball means a heck of a good summer.
And the summer is just getting started.
Below are 10 women’s teams to watch in this weekend’s AVPNext in San Antonio. As always, these are not necessarily the 10 best teams – just 10 teams who could play very well, have interesting storylines, or are, indeed, one of the best teams.
Many of the best teams are not included because they were written about in the preview for the Panama City Beach event, or because they are already into the main draw – see: Hailey Harward, who will be playing in New Orleans with Emily Day, which will keep Carly Skjodt from qualifying, even if they win.
Six qualifying spots are on the line in San Antonio, and potentially seven, should Corinne Quiggle and Sarah Schermerhorn remain in Europe to compete in the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Elite 16 in Ostrava, which conflicts with New Orleans. Any team who makes the semifinals will, therefore, qualify for New Orleans, as well as at least the highest pair of teams in the quarterfinals.
Carly Kan, Kaitlyn Leary
Kan and Leary have played three tournaments this summer, making the finals in the AVPNext Panama City Beach qualifier, finishing 13th in AVP Austin in what was Leary’s first main draw, then winning a gold medal in both of their international debuts at a NORCECA in La Paz, Mexico.
Three tournaments, three seminal moments.
They’re back in San Antonio, looking to make it four straight successful events to begin a promising 2022 season.
Aurora Davis, Lydia Smith
And the flavor of the week for Aurora Davis is…Lydia Smith! Davis has an ability like no other to play with virtually anyone and have success with them. In her first tournament with Teegan Van Gunst, she made main draw for AVP Austin and finished ninth, upsetting Megan Rice and Kaya Marciniak.
This will not be her first tournament with Smith. They won Pottstown together last summer, and have played five AVPAmerica events already this season, winning the Rockstar Season Opener as well as SSOVA’s Spring Break Big Money Tour event.
Mackenzie Ponnet, Chelsea Rice
These two seem to be having an intimidating contest with their husbands as to who hits the ball harder, which bodes well for all four. Rice is right up there with Adrianna Nora as one of the hardest-hitting women on tour, while Ponnet brings a little more craft and a veteran’s savvy to the table. She’s been playing in AVP main draws since 2017, with a career-high third in 2018 at the Hermosa Beach Open (fascinating note on that: Ponnet and Sheila Shaw lost the first set of every single qualifier match and ran the table all the way to the semifinals).
Macy Jerger, Abby Van Winkle
Any blocker-blocker pairing is always a crowd-pleaser, and on the men’s side, it seems to be working quite well: Three of the four teams who made the semifinals in AVP Austin were double-blocker pairings, and the winner was comprised of a team, Andy Benesh and Phil Dalhausser, who hadn’t played a single point of defense in their entire professional career.
Perhaps Jerger and Van Winkle can bring the trend to the women’s side. Jerger stands 6-foot 1 and Van Winkle 6-foot-2. Both competed at the highest levels of NCAA beach volleyball, Jerger at Florida State and Van Winkle at UCLA. Both have made AVP main draws. Whether this is a traditional team or not, they’re skilled enough to make another.
Kahlee York, Megan Gebhard
Gebhard has as much momentum as anyone heading into this tournament, with back-to-back semifinals made in NORCECAs in Aguascalientes and La Paz, Mexico. In the latter, she claimed bronze with Savvy Simo for her first international medal. A bronze here in San Antonio would be everything she and York need to move into New Orleans in what would be both of their first main draws.
Madison Shields, Samantha Parrish
While Carly Kan is the leader of the unofficial “Most Underrated AVP Player” award, Madison Shields was the runaway favorite for the unofficial “Most Underrated NCAA Player” of 2022. An indoor convert at Pepperdine, Shields, a 5-foot-7 libero, immediately started on court one for the Waves – as a split-blocker with Melanie Paul, another defender.
How’d that work out?
They both finished All-WCC and All-America. Paul is now off to compete for Germany and, next year, LMU. Shields, who will finish her collegiate career next season at USC, is looking to make her first AVP main draw.
Makenzie Griffin, Skyler Germann
When the NCAA season finishes, the entry lists suddenly become filled to the brim with what I’ve affectionately labeled the “College Mafia” since Zana Muno and Crissy Jones blitzed their way to a third in AVP Hermosa in 2019 fresh out of college.
Griffin and Germann enter San Antonio as one of the top-seeded teams of the College Mafia. While many are just beginning the competitive portions of their season, Griffin and Germann – and anyone else who has competed in the NCAA – are primed, with more than 30 matches at Long Beach State under their belt and full-time training since January.
Katie Horton, Brook Bauer
It’s always a wonder, how an athlete will do when transferring to a new school, new environment, new coach, new team, new culture. Brook Bauer answered any questions there may have been in her only season as a Florida State Seminole, winning 29 matches while losing only 12, named First Team All-American while leading the ‘Noles back to the NCAA Championship.
Now she’s partnered with former Seminole Katie Horton, who is having a fascinating season of her own, hitting a Volleyball World Futures event in Australia this past March, finishing fifth out of the qualifier.
Hailey Hamlett, Kaylie McHugh
Hamlett and McHugh are on the heels of a wildly successful NCAA season at TCU, one of historic proportions for the Horned Frogs, who enjoyed the best season in school history. McHugh finished the year 19-9, mostly on court two, while Hamlett went 21-8, much of which was spent on court three. They finished the regular season together, winning three straight matches on court two over Missouri State, Stanford, and Pepperdine.
Kendra VanZwieten, Kim DiCello
The seeding won’t remain as it is originally listed, with these two sand-baggers coming in at No. 45 on the entry list, but it would have made for a good laugh if it did. DiCello’s maternity points will kick in when the tournament begins, and they’ll be properly seeded at the top, where they belong. And they do, to be clear, belong at the top: In 2016, they won an AVP in New Orleans, which just so happens to be the tournament for which San Antonio is serving as a qualifier.
How convenient.
No matter how much time off either of these two have taken from the game of beach volleyball, they’re still elite players fully capable of making a run through a competitive AVPNext – and deep into the main draw, should they qualify.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Yet, as it had gone during the previous 34 points of the second set of the final match at the annual Clash, it just didn’t matter that the defense knew with absolute certainty where Wood was setting it. It didn’t matter that there was only a foot-wide alley for Nora to swing. A foot may as well be a mile to Adrianna Nora on the grass.
She took advantage, bombing a swing down the line, tagging it no more than 10 feet from the net, well before any defender would have a reasonable chance of touching it, much less digging it.
Nora is one of the few players who can turn volleyball, a sport where the general aim is to get hit by the ball in a preferably controlled fashion, into dodgeball, a sport where you avoid such things at all costs.
That’s the power of the 29-year-old affectionately known as Red.
“Her potential has always been undeniable,” said Pri Lima, who has coached Nora on and off for four years in St. Petersburg, Fla. “She hits the ball harder than most top five teams in the nation, and possibly the top players in the world, in my opinion.”
Hers is an opinion that demands respect. Lima has won eight professional events and is regarded as one of the best coaches in the country, named by USA Volleyball as the Junior Beach Coach of the Year. She’s seen the best in the world.
Nora’s right arm is up there with anyone’s.
“The question was: Can she hit like that consistently?” Lima said. “Back then, the answer was no, but since she has committed to train five days a week, lifting three times a week, conditioning one to two times per week this year, her game has improved at such a rate that no one has any doubt that she can now sustain not only her hitting, but her entire game.”
Nora plays a powerful game, yes, one that makes it immediately evident why she was an All-America honorable mention outside hitter at Minnesota. But her power commands so much attention that it almost belies her athleticism and deft touch. It’s obvious she hits as well as anyone. What goes unnoticed is an ability to move well on a constantly shifting surface, to set her partners where they need it, to pass in the correct spots.
She’s been inadvertently training this athleticism, this all-around beachy skillset, since she was a kid in Stillwater, Minnesota. She played basketball, soccer, softball, was even the only girl on the baseball team for a bit. She tried to play football but her parents shot that down. Which was ok.
It made more time for volleyball.
“I was that kid who would watch videos of the men’s Brazilian team especially and if I didn’t have a partner I would go to the roof and hit it and it would come down at all these different angles,” Nora said. “That’s what my life was. But it was only indoor, never beach. I didn’t know what beach was.”
The beach is still relatively new to her, not in the way grass is. Stillwater is just a few hours’ drive from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, home of the annual Waupaca Boatride. A life playing indoors made her well-suited for the grass, a power game for a power athlete. While she’s still only played 11 AVP tournaments, her AVPAmerica profile is getting deeper and deeper. Already, she’s competed in nine beach tournaments as well as the Clash – 10 in 2022 alone. Only once has she finished outside of the top five.
“This is the first year I’ve really committed myself to a full year of training,” Nora said. “Pri’s always like ‘You’re always gone for a month here and a month there.’ I considered myself a snowbird until this last year.”
This weekend, she’ll be competing again, in San Antonio with Sara Putt. She’ll have a shot at qualifying for her first main draw in AVP New Orleans. On the off-chance the ball is intentionally put into her hands, the defense is more than likely aware of what’s coming.
The question is: Who can actually dig the swing from Red?
Perhaps the better question might be: Who would voluntarily get in the way?
“We’re a good team,” Nora said of her and Putt. “Sara’s fast, and I like to hit.”
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>And while few ever root for the heavy favorites to win, there was also no shortage of individuals with no dog in the NCAA fight who enjoyed every minute of watching the NCAA Championship. Chris Brown was one of them.
Long the director of Hermosa Beach-based CBVAs, Brown had seen virtually every athlete in Gulf Shores compete well before any of them had signed a letter of intent, well before any of them had received their first recruiting letter, well before any of them even knew how to hand set.
“It’s been going on for years now, but watching the girls' National Championship in Alabama, I knew almost every girl,” Brown said. “There are more kids that come up from different parts of the country, but most of them, especially the really good ones, find their way out here and play in at least one of my tournaments. Most of them I know really well and saw them coming up from 10 and 11 years old. That was really fun for me.”
Tournaments, like the Two-Star he is putting on this weekend, are the primary avenue through which Brown is introduced to future stars such as Sammy Slater and Megan Kraft, Devon Newberry and Jaden Whitmarsh, Brook Bauer and Jordan Polo. He gets to see them all, right in his front yard at the Hermosa Beach Pier.
“Kids are trying to work their way up,” he said of the CBVA’s massive exposure to future talents. “This weekend, you’ll see some kids who are super raw, maybe some kids getting their first exposure to beach volleyball, but then also you’ll see kids who have been playing for a long time and are really great players who are looking to win a bid to National Championships.”
This tournament, while the biggest in the country, alongside Two-Star events in Westerly, Rhode Island, and Spring Hill, Tennessee, is actually one of Brown’s smaller ones on the beach. It conflicts with several indoor club tournaments, which actually doesn’t dilute the value of it, but perhaps even enhances it.
“I’ll still have a great tournament,” Brown said. “It’s a great opportunity for some of these teams to swoop in and enter a big tournament and get a bid to National Championships.”
Bids are on the line all over the United States this weekend. Thirty-eight organizations across America – in Oklahoma, Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Colorado, Texas, Wisconsin, Arizona, Massachusetts, Washington, South Carolina, California, New Mexico, New York, and Rhode Island – are hosting tournaments in which there are bids to National Championships on the line.
So if there are a few athletes who might have indoor obligations this weekend?
There’s plenty more with beach opportunities.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>But Angel Dache was, quite literally, born to play volleyball.
On October 3, 1990, Dache was welcomed into the world in Havana, Cuba, the son of a former Cuban National Team player. From that moment on, he, like many others on the island country who were either genetically or physically gifted, was tabbed as a potential prospect for the Cuban National Team.
“You don’t apply for it. They pretty much track you when you’re a kid,” Dache said. “If you’re tall, they’ll reach out to you. Even if your parents never played sports, obviously they follow that track, and that’s not just for volleyball, it’s for every sport. They follow these kids, whether it’s boxing, baseball – if their parents played the sport, it’s just in their DNA.”
When Dache was 10, he was enrolled into an academy-style school in which, as he says, “all they do is eat, sleep, volleyball.” Such was his life for the next five years – eating, sleeping, playing volleyball.
“For five years in a row you say bye to your family and every week you go to school, some weekends you see your family if you’ve earned time, but if you don’t, you gotta stay in school,” Dache said. “All you do is play volleyball, train.”
He never would play on the Cuban National Team. In 2007, when he was 17 years old, by an extreme stroke of luck not far off from hitting the lottery, Dache was able to join his father in the United States, moving to Miami as an awe-struck teenager. He was transitioning from a country that, in many ways, is stuck in the mid-50s, where the cars are all antiques, food comes in rations, and everything is controlled by the government – and landing in one of the most modern cities in the U.S.
“As soon as I landed, just imagine, I thought people were [messing] with me, I went to pee and I didn’t flush the toilet, and the toilet just flushed itself!” he said, laughing at the memory. “I kept looking around. It was the weirdest thing.
“You can imagine the buildings, the nightlife, the beautiful people, it was just insanely crazy. I didn’t really even see the entire city. We didn’t have a lot of money. My dad didn’t have a lot of money to take me places. The little I saw was super different for me.”
But sports are a universal language. Different as Miami may have been from Havana, different as the Cuban academy was from Hialeah Miami Lakes High School, startling as the self-flushing toilets were, volleyball was the same. And Angel Dache was darn good at volleyball.
So good that the University of Mount Olive, a small, Baptist school in North Carolina, offered him to play as an outside hitter. Good enough for teams in Finland and Cypress to sign him to professional contracts overseas. But by the time his contract in Cypress expired, he had played an exceptional amount of volleyball. He had literally been born into a life of passing, setting, and hitting.
Perhaps he was finished.
“I just got tired of being away and decided I may as well play beach volleyball,” said Dache, who moved to Wilmington, North Carolina after finishing in Cypress. “Obviously I wasn’t thinking about what I’m doing now, traveling everywhere in the country, trying to qualify. I was just going to play local tournaments.”
But in 2016, a 19-year-old named Kameron Beans called. There’s an NVL in Columbus, Ohio, he told Dache. Want to play?
Dache did a quick skim of the tournament. He saw that the winner would take home $7,000. He also saw that Dave Palm, a former teammate on his high-performance team, was in the midst of winning a number of the NVLs, one of the best blockers on the fledgling tour.
“I was just looking at the winning money, because I thought I was going to win it all because Dave Palm and I played in rival high schools and the same high-performance team indoors,” Dache said. “I knew Dave pretty well and he was winning a lot of those NVL tournaments, and I said ‘I used to beat on Dave Palm, I can win this.’ I realized pretty soon that wasn’t the case.”
They qualified, a seminal moment for Beans, though, in the moment, Dache didn’t quite grasp the magnitude of what he had just done: In his first professional beach volleyball tournament, he qualified for the main draw.
“I thought it was just another tournament,” Dache said. “I didn’t know much about beach volleyball in the U.S. That was my introduction to my obsession now.”
The beach reinvigorated Dache’s passion for all things volleyball. Now he’s traveling across the country, playing on any surface save for indoor. In college, he was introduced to the grass at the annual Clash, chuckling at the prospect then: “I said ‘That’s a lot of money for just playing volleyball.’ At the time I was young and could jump pretty well and I said ‘Three on three? Nobody can block me.’ Fifteen hundred for first was the most money I ever thought about making. [Heck] yes, I’ll play that every time.”
True to his word, he recently finished second at the Clash, alongside Brett Rosenmeier and Nick Drooker. On the beach, however, he has become a force, “the Cuban Missile,” as good friend and fellow Carolinian Marc Fornaciari calls him. His serve is one of the best on the AVP Tour. Offensively, he has been described by a number of players as “unservable.”
Dache, of course, would never admit to such things. He’s far too humble for that, a trait, alongside his amicability and genuine friendliness, that has endeared him to virtually any volleyball player he meets.
You see, he wasn’t just born to play volleyball. He was born to impact the game in such a way as to improve it in multiple countries. Whenever he returns to Cuba, he doesn’t do so empty-handed. He’ll bring home nets, balls – anything Cubans could use. And they could use a lot.
“If you’re not on the national team, the conditions to play are sad. The balls are all [messed] up, the net, it’s just messed up,” Dache said. “I just gave them old yellow AVPs that I have here that I wasn’t using, and they were the happiest kids you’ve ever seen. They couldn’t stop playing with those balls. Meanwhile, here, if somebody brought it to a tournament, everyone would say ‘Who the heck is this guy? Take that away from the tournament.’ They might even hide it from him. But over there, they don’t discriminate. They play with everything.”
Likewise, Dache will play in everything. Grass or beach. AVPNext or in the main draw. Doesn’t matter to him.
Because Angel Dache was born for volleyball.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>The AVP’s season debuted in Austin, Texas last weekend – the first under the ownership of Bally’s – where Andy Benesh won his first career event, split-blocking with Phil Dalhausser, and young darlings Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth won their second. To the southeast, three American teams were competing in a NORCECA in Varadero, Cuba. To the far east, Sarah Schermerhorn and Corinne Quiggle were fighting to earn a spot in the upcoming Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour World Championships, finishing ninth at a Challenger event in Doha, Qatar.
Weekends like this are soon to be the norm.
Take the weekend of July 20-22 as an example. Beach volleyball will be played in Morocco, Poland, and Belgium. The United States will be hosting a double-serving of beach volleyball, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The AVP will feature a Tour Series event, coinciding with AVPAmerica’s Beach Week, annually one of the most popular events on the juniors calendar. Hotels in Atlantic City go remarkably fast, which would make it a wise move to begin booking yours – be it a player, fan, friend, family, or coach – now, if not today.
Book your spot at the Tropicana!
October 8-9, too, is a busy one. While the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour will hit the Red Sea in Egypt, grass players and fans can make the closer trek to the outdoors-loving town of Chattanooga, Tennessee, host of this year’s Grass Nationals. There’s far more to do than simply play or watch grass volleyball in the “aggressively welcoming” town of Chattanooga – although we do hope you do much of both – including hikes, swimming, new restaurants, and vibrant bars.
This season, though it began for many as early as February, goes deep into the fall. The sport has, after all, become synonymous with Endless Summer for a reason. On November 12-13, AVPAmerica will head to Huntington Beach, California for its West Coast Championships, held just down the beach from one of the state’s most iconic sites at the Huntington Beach Pier, home to Casey Patterson’s famed pier bounces. A number of hotels are available.
Book your spot at the West Coast Championships!
Just two weeks later, AVPAmerica will conclude its final major event of the season back east, in Clearwater, Florida, for the East Coast Championships. Per usual, the event will be held at the Sheraton Key, a waterfront hotel that leads directly to the dozens of courts that will be used for the competition.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Off-site qualifiers, satellite tournaments held at least a week before the event itself rather than a day-long grind the day before, are, as Hagen Smith described it, “game-changers.”
Smith knows well enough. He’s qualified three times via the traditional route, advancing from qualifiers the day before the main draw, and on Saturday he sealed up his first main draw via the satellite route, winning a pair of CBVAs alongside Jake Dietrich. He’ll go into AVP Hermosa Beach later this summer on legs that haven’t jumped and dove and exploded through four matches the day before.
Like nine teams heading into AVP Austin this weekend, he’ll have fresh legs. He’ll know exactly who he’s playing, and when.
For years, teams who have emerged from the qualifiers have been all but sacrificial lambs for the automatic main draw teams who play them in the first round the ensuing day. Years ago, Phil Dalhausser even admitted that a qualifier team shouldn’t expect to win in the first round of the main draw, rather hope to “maybe make them sweat a little bit.”
Meet the nine teams who are going to attempt to do more than simply make teams “sweat a little bit,” the nine who qualified via the Panama City Beach AVPNext qualifier on April 9-10.
MEN
Rafu Rodriguez, Dave Palm
Oddly enough, this team did not play in Panama City Beach. Palm competed with Mark Burik, and the two were excellent, advancing to the semifinals and securing their main draw bid before bowing out to eventual champs Logan Webber and Seain Cook. A little more than a week later, however, Burik broke his foot, leaving Palm to find a suitable replacement.
Rafu is more than suitable. He’s an AVP champion, armed with one of the nastiest, trickiest serves on tour, with the sweetest hands and the sliciest shots. It’s odd that the two haven’t played an official event together, given that they both live in Florida and that Rafu is a phenomenal defender and Palm an excellent blocker. Perhaps Austin will be the beginning of the next big Florida team on the AVP Tour.
Raffe Paulis, Jeff Samuels
In the handful of events that Paulis and Samuels have played together, almost all of them have gone exceptionally well. They qualified together in Chicago of 2017, then again in Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach in 2018. A year later, they finished second at an open tournament in San Antonio – and then promptly took two years off from one another. When they resumed in 2021, they won an open in Clearwater Beach, Fla., finished second at the AVPAmerica Beach Nationals in October, and did enough to qualify in Panama City Beach on April 10. Now they’re headed into yet another main draw, on the heels of three consecutive successful tournaments together.
Silila Tucker, Lev Priima
For the past two years, Priima has established himself as the king of qualifiers. In 2021, only one team made it through all three AVP qualifiers: Lev Priima and Jake Landel. Now it’s four straight for Priima, as he and the quicksilver fast Silila Tucker qualified in Panama City Beach, finishing fifth after an impressive showing through pool play. They complement each other well, with Priima delivering the size and power and Tucker the craft and speed.
Caleb Kwekel, Marty Lorenz
If you have not yet watched Caleb Kwekel play beach volleyball, be sure to tune into the AVP’s livestream on YouTube and enjoy. He’s just 19 years old but is built, as his training partner, Phil Dalhausser, says, “like a grown man.” He flies, and after years of training with Dalhausser and Nick Lucena and Rafu Rodriguez and Piotr Marciniak, he’s not intimidated by any blocker on the AVP Tour. It helps, too, that he’s partnered with a longtime veteran in Marty Lorenz, who plays with such a delightful control and efficiency and is a perfect complement for Kwekel. Together, they run a fun, creative offense, not exactly flashy, but certainly fun to watch.
WOMEN
Jess Gaffney, Molly Turner
Last year was something of a quiet breakout year for Molly Turner, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron to say. She took a career-high third in AVP Atlanta with Terese Cannon and, a few months later, won her first FIVB medal, a silver in Cervia, Italy. Gaffney has not yet had that breakout, but there’s no reason that she couldn’t. She’s 6-foot-1 and still holds the record as the lowest seed to ever emerge from a qualifier when she and Iya Lindahl entered the 2018 AVP Hermosa Beach as the 84th seed in the qualifier and made the main draw.
Her best finish to date? A ninth, in Huntington Beach of 2019.
Her partner for that finish? Molly Turner.
Kaitlyn Leary, Carly Kan
There is no official award for the Most Underrated Player on the AVP Tour, but if there were, Carly Kan would – or should, anyway – be the unanimous selection. She’ll qualify defending. She’ll qualify blocking. She’ll do it split-blocking, too, as she did with Kaitlyn Leary in Panama City Beach, where they made the finals and pushed Brazilians Larissa and Lili Maestrini deep into the third set.
Leary, too, deserves much of the credit for the tremendous finish in Panama City Beach. She was positively excellent, and it was her heavy swings that did much of the work in getting them to the finals. After trying her hand in 10 qualifiers, she’ll be making her AVP main draw debut in Austin.
Toni Rodriguez, Savvy Simo
The beach volleyball year is young, as Austin marks the season-opening event on the AVP Tour. Yet these two are in mid-season form, as both have hit the road hard early, with Rodriguez competing on back-to-back-to-back weekends in Coolangatta, Australia, Panama City Beach, and Itapema, Brazil, where she finished with a bronze medal, a main draw bid, and a win over Brazil’s Fernanda Alves, respectively. Simo, meanwhile, played in her first career international event, a NORCECA in Aguascalientes, Mexico, with Megan Gebhard, finishing fourth. Finally, the two get to settle down a bit, traveling just a few hours south to Austin, where they could easily land a few upsets and compete deep into the weekend.
Aurora Davis, Teegan Van Gunst
Teegan Van Gunst had played 11 AVP events prior to the Panama City Beach qualifier, and all 11 of them were with her twin sister, Annika Rowland. How she’d play with someone who hasn’t shared every second of her life with her was a small question mark, one that was answered in Panama City Beach, when she qualified with Aurora Davis.
Davis is, of course, the perfect partner for someone who is playing with someone new for the first time. There is not a single skill in the game in which Davis is not exceptional, and her temperament allows her to succeed with any type of personality. Davis is coming off a win at last weekend’s Clash, the season-opening event on the AVP Grass Tour, where she played with, you guessed it, an entirely new team.
Carly Skjodt, Geena Urango
Geena Urango is no stranger to beach volleyball success in the south. Her longtime partner, Angela Bensend, is a Texas native, and the two were known as TexMex. What she and Skjodt will be known as this weekend in Austin is yet to be seen – IndianaMex just doesn’t have the same ring – but what is known is that they’re a solid team. Skjodt has one of the biggest arms on the women’s side, and Urango is still very much the same deadly server who finished in the top four in aces on the AVP in 2015, 2016, and 2017.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
]]>Care to count the ways? There are few better places to begin than Urango and Carly Skjodt’s winding journey into the main draw this week at AVP Austin, the first of Skjodt’s burgeoning beach career.
It begins, oddly enough, well outside of the United States, in Doha, Qatar. And it begins a little more than one year ago. In March of 2021, the country of just 2.3 million people was allowing women to compete in beach volleyball for the first time in the sport’s history. Had the Tokyo Olympics not been postponed a year due to COVID, leaving the FIVB scrambling to put on enough events to have a legitimate qualification process, it is a wonder if Doha would have opened up to women at all.
But, again: Such is the new age.
The event went well enough in 2021 that Doha remained welcoming to the women – albeit with dress restrictions, in which they will have to wear shorts, but are permitted, after much deliberation, to wear sports bras as opposed to t-shirts in 2022. It just so happened to be on the same weekend that the AVP scheduled its season-opening event in Austin, Texas.
Urango had no plans of competing in Doha. Neither did Skjodt. Neither, for that matter, did they have any set plans as to what this upcoming season might look like.
“I saw that Carly had been playing overseas [in Portugal] and moved back, and I remember watching some of the grass stuff when her, Delaney [Mewhirter], and Katie [Spieler] played together. I said ‘This girl is a baller,’” Urango recalled. “I was going into the season without any plans in mind; I was open to whatever was going to happen. I spoke to Carly in the winter and she was leaning towards wanting to do it.”
Again, however, this is a new age. The two didn’t actually speak, as one might have done, say, 10 years ago. Instead, Urango, said with a laugh, “I slid into her DMs.”
Skjodt – pronounced Scott – was interested. And how could she not have been? Urango made her first main draw in 2012 when Skjodt was just 15 years old. She was the first USC athlete to receive a scholarship to compete in beach volleyball. By 2015, she was making Sundays on the AVP.
So yes, Skjodt was interested when Urango slid into the DMs this past winter. She just had to figure out a way to get back to California. After four years as a 6-foot outside hitter at the University of Michigan, Skjodt finished her college career on the beach, playing on court one alongside Brook Bauer at Pepperdine. But the pandemic had shut out any up-and-coming talents on the AVP, limiting its field and ensuing two seasons to just three events each, so when Skjodt had an offer to play overseas in Portugal, she took it. Which was all she needed to know that the beach – and, soon, Urango – was calling.
“I knew I was going to play, whether it was for fun or exercise or whatever, but the job I have allows me to play,” Skjodt said. “My plan was just to find a job and then let everything else fall into place, and luckily it has. I knew I wanted to play, and after Portugal, I was worn down, and I thought ‘Maybe I don’t need volleyball anymore.’ And then a month later I knew I did need it. It worked out. It’s exciting.”
It isn’t just a new age for communicating with partners, or women’s rights in the middle east, however. It’s also a new age for the AVP. As the number of beach volleyball players has boomed since the advent of NCAA beach volleyball, the qualifiers have swollen to a size far too big to be held in a single day. Under the new leadership of Bally’s, the qualification system was redone, with AVPNexts, Tour Series, and CBVA series being held as off-site qualifiers. When Urango and Skjodt finished fifth in the AVPNext Panama City Beach event on April 9-10, which served as a qualifier for Austin, they knew that, while they may not have immediately qualified, there was still a chance.
All they needed was for one team to play Doha instead.
“We saw that four teams were still signed up for Doha and were just crossing our fingers after that,” Urango said.
“We’d been crossing our fingers for a few weeks, but as it got closer, it felt like our odds were getting lower,” Skjodt said. “But we just kept training as if we were going to get in, just to be prepared.”
And then, one morning, it happened: Urango had just gotten to her car after a practice when a text message from Corinne Quiggle came in: She and Sarah Schermerhorn were dropping out of Austin to play Doha instead.
Urango and Skjodt were in the main draw.
“I was so confused,” Skjodt said, laughing.
To be fair, we’re all a little bit confused. Things happen fast in this new age, and sometimes it can be a bit strange: partnerships are sealed in DMs, countries are constantly shifting their restrictions, qualifiers are being held weeks in advance of AVP tournaments, text messages are confirming who is and who is not in the main draw.
And Carly Skjodt, who thought she might be finished with this game, is now an AVP main draw beach volleyball player.
~ Travis Mewhirter: @trammew
Photo Credit: Volleyball Magazine
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