HERMOSA BEACH BUT ALSO INDONESIA AND ALSO MORAGA, CALIFORNIA — In February of this year, Taylor Sander was playing indoor volleyball in Jakarta, Indonesia.
He hadn’t played indoor in three years.
At that same time, Taylor Crabb had moved his station from Redondo Beach to Moraga, California, where he was the new assistant beach volleyball coach at St. Mary’s.
Aside from a handful of clinics and the typical private lesson on the side common amongst beach volleyball players, he had never coached in his life.
Neither planned it this way.
Neither minded.
It was quite a far cry from what they had been doing for the previous three years of their lives, which was strictly to play beach volleyball together on the AVP Tour and, at times, the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour. But such is the life of a volleyball player, one that requires acute adaptation to a rapidly changing ecosystem and landscape.
It’s a skill few possess better than the Taylors.
“Well,” Tri Bourne said to Sander on this week’s SANDCAST, “I guess you’ve been in the volley world, just different parts of it.”
That, in a nutshell, is the life of a professional volleyball player: You remain in the world of volleyball, but the role – and location – might look different on a yearly, often monthly, sometimes weekly, basis. Sander, still relatively new to this, is beginning to both understand and embrace the volatility.
From 2014-2021, he lived the well-regimented and easily scheduled life of one of the best outside hitters in the world. He played on clubs in Italy and China and Qatar and Poland and Brazil and represented the United States in between. He was compensated well, and regularly, for his efforts, which included a pair of Olympic appearances and a bronze medal.
And then he turned to the beach.
There is little that can be described as regular in beach volleyball.
Tours change, both in owners and format. Rules shift. Prize money fluctuates. When Sander and Crabb teamed up in November of 2021, debuting at a Beach Pro Tour event in Itapema, Brazil, the Beach Pro Tour wasn’t, then, known as the Beach Pro Tour. It was simply the FIVB, operating under a star system.
By 2022, Volleyball World shifted the name and structure of its tournaments.
Their first season on the AVP, in 2022, featured nine tournaments.
Within two years, it adopted a League format with different scoring, different rules, and two traditional tournaments, with new owners running the show.
The one constant in beach volleyball is change.
Sander and Crabb have changed with it.
“It was fun to go back,” Sander said of returning to indoor. “I’m stoked. It went really well, the body held up. That was the thing, going over there, I was like: I don’t know what’s going to happen. It felt really good. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to take care of my body in a good way, so just taking a little bit of extra time to keep the body held together. I actually had no problems.
“I got younger the three years I’ve been playing beach. I was healthy, felt strong, and playing on the beach helped my indoor game and now I’ve got this newfound appreciation for volleyball again and I’m excited to go back to the beach and see how it translates. I was training a lot over there and getting reps. It’ll take a little bit of time to get back into the rhythm of things.”
It took almost no time, really. Sander and Crabb have won three of four AVP League matches, including a 15-4, 15-12 whipping of Seain Cook and Brian Miller that is, to date, the most lopsided win of the year. They followed that up with an upset over Andy Benesh and Miles Partain, the top-ranked USA Volleyball duo who looked, and were, unstoppable at the AVP Huntington Beach Heritage event.
“Me and Taylor are just volleyball players,” Sander said. “We don’t overthink it. It comes back naturally. We’ve had a lot of moments where we haven’t trained in a while so we’ll go out and have fun and compete and we always do pretty well.”
If there is a word or phrase that can properly sum up Taylor Crabb, it would be that: volleyball player.
Wherever there is volleyball, there is Crabb.
Including, of all unexpected places, Moraga, California, at a small Division I school with which he had no previous connection.
But as Janice Harrer prepared to enter her second season as the head coach of the Gaels — “the runnin’, gunnin’ Gaels” as Crabb calls them — she found a pair of brothers at the Outrigger Canoe Club that has shaped many a volleyball player’s childhood and subsequent career.
There were Taylor and Trevor Crabb, two days after Christmas, watching football, and Harrer, a Honolulu native, “just walks up to us and basically offers both of us the job,” Taylor recalled. “I thought about it for a couple days and said let’s talk more about it. Met up at Outrigger and that was it.”
He moved to a studio apartment in Moraga and found, through coaching, both a new appreciation for the game and new ways in which to view it.
“It’s 20 percent coaching volleyball and the rest is a bunch of little jobs: compliance, admissions, all this other stuff,” Crabb said. “Helping people is the cool part, when you can connect with them and help them, that’s the joy of it. The big part of the reason I’m going back is all the girls on the team and the program are so easy to work with. Super respectful, work hard, want to get better at volleyball, listened to what I said, took it to heart. It was super fun.
“I get to break things down more than I would myself, so that’s a cool part. I lived in a studio by myself up there so I’d go in the office, coach, go back into my studio and watch volleyball. I’ve never watched that much volleyball.”
Would there be rust? A drop in level after only being able to jump in with young women at practice here and there, on a women’s net?
Of course not. Because Taylor Crabb is a volleyball player.
He teamed up with Billy Allen, another assistant coach who trains remarkably little, and together they put on the most fun show in beach volleyball in Huntington Beach, split-blocking to the semifinals, where they nearly upset Chase Budinger and Miles Evans.
“A lot of people joke that it’s all mental but a lot of it is. If you psych yourself out, ‘Oh I haven’t been practicing, I haven’t touched a ball.’ You’re already putting yourself in a hole,” Crabb said. “We’ve been playing this game our whole lives. We’re rusty at times but we don’t let that phase us.”
So they’ll continue playing, staying in the wide and whacky world of volleyball, one way or another. Indoor in Indonesia? Coaching at St. Mary’s? AVP League? Big money fours in Houston and Newport Beach? Dirt ball in undisclosed locations around the country? Growing their Celebrity Sideout business to open a new beach volleyball bar in Seattle?
They’ll be there, doing it all.
Because, above all else, the Taylors are volleyball players.
And wherever there is volleyball, there the Taylors will be.
Rick Atwood photo
