Canyon Ceman had the fortune — or misfortune, depending on your view of things – of competing against two of the most prolific winners of the past two generations of beach volleyball players: Karch Kiraly and Phil Dalhausser.

Olympic gold medalists – Kiraly won in Atlanta in 1996 on the beach, and in 1984 and ’88 indoors; Dalhausser won in 2008 in Beijing – both Kiraly and Dalhausser can be rightfully considered two undisputed members of beach volleyball’s Mount Rushmore.

To Ceman, they are numbers one and two.

“To me, those are the two GOATs,” Ceman says on this week’s podcast. “I might be domestically biased.”

It isn’t just that they won, which they did in abundance, to the tune of 251 tournament victories, but how.

“Karch dominated you with his brain,” said Ceman, who played against him dozens of times and won at least seven (BVBInfo only begins recording specific matches in 2002). “I played him through a 14-year period. In 1996, he would beat you smashing sharp angle in your face 15 times in a row. The Karch that would beat you in 2007 would do a pokie middle deep because you were going to the Karch angle cut shot. He would just mentally dominate you. It was 2007 and I was playing Karch and Kevin Wong and I said ‘I have no chance. There’s no way I can beat this dude.’”

As for the 6-foot-9 Dalhausser, against whom Ceman went 2-3?

“The only chance you have of beating Phil is if he’s not there mentally,” Ceman said. “With Karch, you never had that opportunity. He was always mentally tuned in.

“Phil dominated you physically, Karch dominated you with his brain.”

It’s a useful explainer for why Kiraly has gone on to have a wildly successful coaching career. He helmed the USA Volleyball women’s team to the first gold medal in federation history at the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games, then nearly made it back-to-back in Paris, taking silver. Now he’s heading the USA men, with whom he won a pair of gold medals as a player, in 1984 and 1988.

Dalhausser, meanwhile, continues to win, and win, and win some more, even at 45 years old. He and Trevor Crabb won both the 2025 AVP League regular season and the AVP League Championships in Chicago, banking $60,000 for the year. He made the finals at the AVP Manhattan Beach Open. It calls to mind the first SANDCAST we did with Dalhausser, in 2019, in which he said “one thing that will never, ever get old is there’s no such thing as winning too much, you know? Money doesn’t motivate me. It’s winning.”

And, alongside Karch Kiraly, he’s one of the greatest winners of all time.