GSTAAD, Switzerland — It’s a Wednesday in July, and Kristen Nuss and Taryn Brasher are debating the color of a couch in a boutique hotel in Gstaad, Switzerland.
“I swear they were red cushions a year ago,” Nuss says, panning the all-blue couch on which she is now sitting.
Brasher doesn’t weigh into the debate, only laughing, adding: “The fact that we know the furniture of a hotel…”
She trails off for a moment, a sigh of amused resignation, and in the gap between the conversation, it’s easy to wonder: How did this happen?
Weren’t Nuss and Brasher just the LSU kids who were taking the AVP and Beach Pro Tour by storm?
Aren’t they still?
The answer is both yes and no. Their play remains practically vibrating with the joy and youthful vigor as the college stars they once were, even as their ages climb into the upper-20s. They are still, despite being ranked No. 1 in the world by entry points, surprising people, reaching into their bag of tricks and pulling out new ones on a tournament by tournament basis. They have remained America’s Darlings, handling their gargantuan success with a grace and humility that has youth and college coaches pointing to them as the example of what a young volleyball player and team should aspire to be one day.
Yet they have undeniably aged.
Here, on a couch that is no longer red but blue, they made a drive from the Geneva airport in a shuttle driven by a man named Bernie. They knew Bernie, because Bernie had driven them from Geneva to Gstaad before, and Bernie proceeded to drop them off at a hotel in which the young woman at the front desk needed no identification. She simply saw the 6-foot-4 blocker and 5-foot-6 defender walk through the door, Ogio bags in tow, knew them instantly, and handed them their room keys. When they entered their rooms, they unpacked not one, not two, but three fans, baggage packed specifically for Gstaad, because they knew, after three years of experience, that if there is a single flaw to be found in Gstaad, it is that there is no air conditioning at the Gstaaderhof Hotel, which requires your windows to be open at night, and if the windows are open, then the flies enter, and, well, Nuss and Brasher don’t much like flies on their face while they’re sleeping, so they packed three fans to keep the flies at bay.
This is the sage wisdom of a Beach Pro Tour veteran, and before our very eyes, these LSU kids have, make no mistake, become Beach Pro Tour veterans.
And for the first time in their still-burgeoning careers, these veterans can alas take an exhale, enjoy the view from both the literal and proverbial mountaintop here in Gstaad, and finally relax.
“When we first got out, it was all about we gotta get points, we gotta get points,” Nuss said. “This is the first year where Drew [Hamilton, their coach since they were on LSU’s court one] said this is the least amount of pressure, you don’t need points or anything. Just go have fun. At this point we’re just going out – the fact that we get to play beach volleyball is pretty special.”
Becoming the glitch in the system
You wouldn’t know it, not by watching them play, or by interacting with them at tournaments, where they are invariably polite and kind and will pose for picture after picture, but these past four years have exacted their toll on Nuss and Brasher. When they first stepped onto the Beach Pro Tour, as wide-eyed rookies fresh off the reserve list at a Futures in Coolangatta, Australia, in 2022, they soaked in every moment. They made sure to see the local wildlife — the kangaroos and koalas in Australia, the penguins in Cape Town. They explored every beach. They ate the food, met the locals, saw the sights.
They were on the ride of a lifetime.
But after two years, three years, the novelty wanes, the miles add up, the endless jetlagged nights leave you bleary-eyed and weary. The missed weddings, the birthday parties, the graduations and bachelorette celebrations – slowly, a void was building.
“It’s crazy how much it’s changed because at first it was ‘Oh my gosh we’re in Brazil, oh my gosh’ and when you start traveling, and Tri [Bourne] talks about this a lot, it’s ‘I’ve been here,’” Brasher said. “We try to explore new places so it’s still new. When Eric [Brasher, Taryn’s husband] came to Doha with us, that brought me back to that’s what we looked like. That was us two years ago. We have so much to be grateful for. We kind of take it for granted, and then you see that and it helps lock back in that it’s the coolest thing, we get to travel and do all these things.”
They’re sweet, those two. Kind and humble. What you see on social media is what you get. They are unfailingly gracious, goofy, quick to laugh and forever in search of the best restaurant in town. Yet there is an edge to Nuss and Brasher.
One does not become the best in the world without one.
Their performance at the Paris Olympics a year ago has left a sting that will not go away. It is a sting that is as useful as it is antagonizing.
Do you think their run thus far in 2025, with four medals in five events, two of them gold, is an accident?
Think again.
“It took me many, many months to be proud that I was an Olympian,” Brasher said. “I feel like I let the whole country down. I could finally, when I went back to Creighton [where she played indoors], that I could be proud that it actually happened. It leaves a stinger in you. It motivated us even more, because that freakin’ sucked.”
It was nothing tragic, nothing outrageous, that happened in Paris. Nuss and Brasher went 3-0 in pool play, earning, theoretically, an easier path to the gold medal match. But Canadians and No. 4 seed Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson faltered in pool, losing twice. This dropped them into the path of Nuss and Brasher in the ninth-place rounds.
Theirs is a rivalry that is one of the best in the world, and tops on the AVP. Five out of their previous six matches had gone three sets.
This one would not.
Wilkerson and Humana-Paredes were a wholly different team than the one who barely made it out of pool, sweeping Nuss and Brasher for the first time in the history of their rivalry, knocking the Americans out in ninth. When Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes bowed out one round later, and both men’s teams already out, it marked the first time in Olympic history that no USA Volleyball team would stand on the podium.
“It wasn’t the way we wanted it to end,” Nuss said.
She’s a headstrong one, Nuss. For as long as she can remember, her intention in the game of beach volleyball is to “rewrite the script.” To challenge the long-held notion that you must be from or live in California to succeed at the highest levels of the sport. To stand 5-foot-6 in a sport where height is king and side out better than the best of them. In almost every way, she has taken that script, copied all, deleted, and drafted her own. But the final draft has yet to be submitted.
“There’s still something there missing that it’s not completed, that we haven’t re-written the script yet,” she said. “There’s still one more chapter that needs to be written to close that book, so my pocket [on her custom Slunks shorts] has changed to ‘glitch the system.’ There’s little patterns that aren’t exact patterns, just glitches. Our whole point this year goes back to the meaning of our Slunks, going back to our roots, getting back to enjoying the journey and soaking all these tournaments in and these moments. Going into the start of this year, we wanted to prove that it was a fluke, that it wasn’t us.”
They are proving, with every match, that the only glitch was that loss in Paris. Their 23-5 record thus far is the best winning percentage they have ever had on the Beach Pro Tour. They are outscoring opponents by wider margins, losing fewer sets, winning as comfortably as they ever have.
Perhaps most important, they are enjoying this season as much as any. No, they are no longer the kids getting stamps on the passport for the first time in Australia – they are something far greater.
On Brasher’s custom Slunks pocket, she wrote “‘enjoy the process,’ because I do feel like that can get lost, being gone for so long and missing so many things,” Brasher said. “It’s unbelievable the amount of weddings, parties, bachelorettes, everything that you miss and being away from family, I get to see mine twice a year. I want to embrace that I am where I am and enjoy that instead of thinking about the things I’m missing which is really hard.”
One thing that they will never miss is one another on the court. Brasher will not miss Nuss’ upcoming wedding, and Nuss didn’t miss hers. They have become one to the point that, in Gstaad, Brasher actually introduced herself as Kristen, without even intending to as a joke. So while many things have changed, there will forever be one constant: Nuss and Brasher are two parts of one whole, to the point that if Brasher walks into a hotel in Switzerland or Germany or Brazil, and the attendant hands her a key that has Nuss’ name on it, it wouldn’t be incorrect.
Different, yes, but the same.
