TALLAHASSEE, Florida – The Person of the Year Award in beach volleyball is an unofficial one, one I simply continued in the wake of Kevin Barnett and DJ Roueche – former hosts of the erstwhile Net Live – retiring from their post. They had concluded their seasons of the Net Live with a Person of the Year as a way to acknowledge someone who has gone above or beyond what is expected of them in the name of making the sport of beach volleyball a bit better.
The past two winners – Adam Roberts in 2023, Mark Paaluhi in 2024 – have done exactly that. For multiple decades, Roberts has been a one-man pipeline of talent for USA Volleyball, subsidizing the extravagant costs of launching a beach volleyball career, getting rookies experience on the AVP and Beach Pro Tour while removing the costly barrier to entry associated with it. In 2024, Mark Paaluhi noticed the gaping, Hermosa Beach sized hole in the beach volleyball calendar and did something about it, creating the Hermosa Open on a three-year deal that will keep professional beach volleyball in the South Bay for a little while longer.
This year’s winners, the 2025 Beach Volleyball Person (People) of the Year, Razzie Johnson and Anders Kristiansson, did none of these things.
In fact, they did exactly what their job description informs them to do: They coached beach volleyball.
Yet the most important rubric I use to measure this subjective award is impact, how the individual has improved or bettered or in some way lifted the game of beach volleyball.
It’s possible nobody has done this more than Johnson and Kristiansson since Sinjin Smith – and others – pushed beach volleyball into the Olympic Games.
Hyperbole?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Since Johnson and Kristiansson introduced a pair of teenagers named David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig to the Beach Pro Tour in 2019, the shape of the sport and the manner in which its played has forever changed. They took a pair of trends – options in serve receive, and a fast, movement-based offense with trickery and fakes and creative routes – and expanded them in such an exponential manner it would not be wrong to call it an evolution. Jump-sets, once a cute party trick used only in rare occasions and mostly for flash and sizzle and social media engagement, became the foundation of not just their offense, but their transition as well.
As the game went big, bigger and biggest, Sweden went smaller and quick as a hiccup, dominating a world of giants with a blocker who would have been undersized as a defender.
But how would they do in the wind, many wondered?
Or the deep sand, where each extra jump would extract a toll?
Or the heat, where fatigue would set in?
Over and over, Ahman and Hellvig answered each question, winning gold in breezy Montpellier, going undefeated in the deepest of the deep in Dubai, medaling in the extreme heat and humidity in the Maldives.
They inspired legions of copycats, as teams young and old began tinkering with jump-sets and shoot sets and option-heavy offenses. Blockers, which had grown so big that seven-footers were becoming alarmingly normal, began shrinking into a new mold that required yes, some height, but more important, mobility, coordination and a certain bounciness and speed.
If the 14 victories, Olympic gold medal, and, now, a World Championship title does not speak to their impact, let it be this: The worldwide adoption of the Swedish style of play.
The sport has forever changed shape.
Especially at home.
Because for the first time since 2011, when the not-unusual clash of Brazil on Brazil occurred in the World Championships in Rome, there was a civil war for gold in a World Championship. Only this year it was a most unusual clash: Sweden on…Sweden? A country with just north of 10 million people far more known for its prowess in the Winter Olympics than its Summer counterpart would put not one but two teams in the finals, just two years removed winning its first World Championship medal?
“We’re not exactly known as being a beach volleyball country,” Ahman said after a semifinal win over Germany’s Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler in Adelaide.
Now?
It is home to the birth of an entirely new brand of beach volleyball, an electrifying type that has made the sport as entertaining and athletic as it has ever been. It is home to two of the three most dominating teams in the sport, with Elmer Andersson and Jacob Holting-Nilsson claiming the 2025 Team of the Year while also sweeping the Rookie of the Year and Most Improved and Ahman being voted, for the second time, Defensive Player of the Year.
Did Johnson and Kristiansson go out of their way to put on an event, as Kevin Martin did in Newport, or drop millions to make the World Championships the seamless and fantastic tournament it was, kudos of Craig Carracher or Stephen Gaitanos, or invent a docuseries with little potential for return, as Daniel Freitas did?
No. They did their job.
And in doing it as well as they did, they have forever altered beach volleyball.
And for that, they are the 2025 Beach Volleyball People of the Year.
