Three coaches. Three decidedly different seasons. Three varied measures of success.

And one impossible to miss measure of failure: An NCAA Championship.

John Mayer, head coach of the LMU beach volleyball team, had an undeniably successful season. His Lions were ranked as high as No. 2 in the country, earning that nod in just the second week after an eye-opening debut in Hawaii, in which they upset No. 5 Stanford, four-time defending National Champion USC in the first program win over the Trojans, No. 2 and eventual National Champion TCU, and No. 11 Arizona State. They won a sixth straight WCC Championship, a feat no program in LMU history has accomplished. They made an NCAA final, also a first.

They didn’t win.

Billy Allen, assistant coach at Stanford under Andrew Fuller, had an undeniably successful season. His Cardinal tied a single-season wins record, notching 32 victories while navigating one of the most brutal gauntlets of a schedule in the nation. They won the MPSF Championship, the first conference title in the program’s history, beating USC (twice) and UCLA in the process. They entered the NCAA Championships as arguably the hottest program in the country.

They didn’t win.

I am the second assistant at Florida State, under head coach Brooke Niles and assistant Nick Lucena. We had, by our measures, an undeniably successful season. Our Seminoles set a program record with five freshmen in the starting lineup. With that glut of youth came a glut of question marks. We weren’t sure how they would fare against the top teams in the country, wondering, with some legitimacy, if we’d make the NCAA Championships, something Florida State has done every year in its existence. We made those Championships. Of our 13 losses, only one, to Arizona State, came to a team ranked outside of the top 10. We picked up notable wins over USC, Cal, Long Beach, Texas, three over LSU, and had two swings for the match against Stanford. We climbed as high as No. 5 in the nation. We made the quarterfinals of the NCAA Championship before bowing out to UCLA, playing the Bruins better than we had all year.

We, too, didn’t win.

In an age of championship or bust, it begged the question on our most recent SANDCAST with Mayer and Allen: What defines a successful season?

For some programs – take USC as an example, or the Golden State Warriors during their dynastic period, or Michael Phelps or, famously, McKayla Maroney, whose face on the podium while receiving an Olympic silver medal went instantly viral – anything less than an NCAA Championship can be viewed as a disappointment.

But only one team finishes with that undeniable metric of success.

The rest go into the off-season wondering what could have been.

Or do they?

Misty May-Treanor, she of three consecutive Olympic gold medals and an all-time great in the sport of beach volleyball, spoke to Stanford during the MPSF Championships, “and she framed it as not whether you win or lose, but whether you win or come up short,” Allen recalled. “I was disappointed we finished with a fifth that night [at NCAA Championships] but it really felt like we came up short. It didn’t feel like it tainted our season. It stung, and I think we had a really good opportunity to extend our season a little bit farther, but it felt like we just came up short. The next day, we were recruiting, we went back to work, and it didn’t feel like if we won a National Championship or won the next match – it wouldn’t have changed that much. I look back and I’m just really grateful, and it just gave me a deeper perspective.”

Mayer, too, had his framework of success altered by a giant in the coaching world. One of his first coaching mentors was Marv Dunphy, who studied under John Wooden. Wooden’s “idea of success is peace of mind, doing the best you could,” Mayer recalled. “It’s the essence of ‘If I put everything I could into what I did to try and be at the highest level possible, then I’m a success.’ That idea has influenced me since and that’s what I try to bring to our program. We know there are so many things out of our control and our environments. The results give us feedback to how we can approach things moving forward, how we can evaluate at a higher level. Did we go all in? I think that’s success. We went for it and we swung for the fences. That’s a win.”

There is no doubting each program, from Stanford to LMU to Florida State, went all in, that no stones were left unturned in each respective attempt to squeeze out whatever drops of success were possible in the 2025 campaigns. There is also no doubt that, on a deeper level, each coach, in their own way, left with a win far greater than any championship: the excitement, the thrill, the deep fulfillment on a day to day basis to take the loss, sleep on it, and wake up the next day prepared to do it all over again.

“If [our players] just go through four years here and win a lot of games, it probably wasn’t worth your time,” Allen said. “There’s so many more lessons to learn. NCAAs, once it was over, even a day later, I was already over it and excited to get back to work.”