TALLAHASSEE, Florida – When I told my neighbors that we were heading down to Pompano Beach for a beach volleyball tournament this past weekend, they asked if it was for coaching or for commentating.

I laughed, and told them that it was, in fact, neither.

I was playing.

Oh.

They didn’t know I still played.

I don’t, I assured them. Not really.

But with all this coaching and commentating, every now and again, the itch will strike once a year or two, especially when an event pops up that somehow does not conflict with my coaching at Florida State, or my coaching for the USA Volleyball National Development Team, or my commentating, or podcasting, or my wife and two kids.

This leaves precious few dates.

The Pompano Futures fell on one of those precious few dates. Even better: It was driving distance.

There is a zero percent chance I would have gotten on a plane to fly to another beach volleyball tournament.

But a road trip? With the full family in tow plus a good friend who happens to be my partner?

Sounded fun.

But it still begged the question: Why did I just play the Pompano Beach Futures?

I was asked this many times, both before and during the event. The answer can mostly be summed in a single word.

Play.

It sounded a whole lot like play.

If I had to pick a central theme to define my life as I know it, that is the single word summation: Play.

Coaching at Florida State feels like play.

Commentating feels to me what my son must feel when he charges downstairs in the morning, dumps all his magnetiles onto the floor and begins building bulldozers and diggers and playing with a beautiful, manic fervor reserved almost exclusively for toddlers.

Podcasting feels like play.

Building SANDCAST into a legitimate business with Tri Bourne feels like play.

I used to play beach volleyball on a somewhat fulltime basis, and I treated it mostly like a fulltime vocation. It felt like play for about 9 years.

Around 2023 – not coincidentally, the year Austin was born – it stopped feeling like play, and more like work. I no longer got excited to practice, to compete, to play. I had to muster up the energy to do it, and was relieved more often than not when practice was over. I mostly went through the motions, and it wasn’t any good for anyone in my orbit.

So I mostly stopped, and diverted that energy into my various other vocations that I thoroughly enjoyed and still do.

But on occasion, yes, there is the itch. Not to train. Not to take this game as seriously as I once did. Not to dedicate myself to the craft of competing in beach volleyball.

To play.

That itch was satisfied in Hermosa last year with Andy Benesh, and I was satiated for a full 15 months. When Pompano popped up, and I double-checked all the dates, and figured I could play, I of course called Andy. We’d had a wonderful time in Hermosa, played well, and we could make it a fun little family trip with his new wife Deahna, to whom he married in September at a wedding officiated by my lovely wife.

But they were selfishly on their honeymoon somewhere in Asia, and he spurned my offer to lose a lot of money to play even more volleyball, the inconsiderate bastard.

So I called another good friend I knew was available, in a volleyball sense: Andy’s partner, Miles Partain.

Like Andy, Miles is essentially family to us. Legend has it that Austin is the first baby he ever held, when he cradled him on our couch in Hermosa Beach when he lived with us. Austin still calls him Uncle Miles (he also calls Andy Uncle Andy, and Deahna Hot Aunt Deahna, or Hot Dahnia). Since we moved to Tallahassee, I haven’t gotten to spend much time with Miles, other than a few meals when we’ve been at the same events, namely Ostrava.

It took no convincing or cajoling. Miles was, surprisingly, in.

We double-checked to make sure it wouldn’t hurt his points on the Beach Pro Tour or ELO rating with USA Volleyball, and upon confirmation, we were the strangest one seed of the entire season. (On the Beach Pro Tour, if you are the home country, you cannot lose points or push out a finish playing in a home Futures. This incentivizes top teams to play in hopes that it’ll help draw a crowd in an otherwise lower level event, which is why Anders Mol and Christian Sorum always played in Oslo, David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig and Elmer Andersson and Jacob Holting-Nilsson competed in Malmo, Anouk Verge-Depre and Zoe Verge-Depre and Tanja Huberli and Leona Kernen were in the field in Spiez. It actually works, too, as there were a handful of fans who approached us and said they came down just to watch us, namely Miles, play. So there is that element as well). 

But it still left the question hanging in the air: Why?

Financially, even if we won, which we did, we’d both end up losing money, even on a tournament where we drove – well, I drove, Miles flew to me, hung out in Tallahassee a few days, and then drove and then had quite the adventure back to Los Angeles – and cooked every meal.

From a points perspective, Miles couldn’t gain anything, and I am not going to resurrect my international career.

There were no external motivators to play that tournament.

The answer is as simple and as pure as it gets: We wanted to play volleyball together, for the exclusively intrinsic sake of playing volleyball together.

Plato’s the one who has been credited with a saying I believe to my core: “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

Of the five love languages developed by Gary Chapman, I believe he left out a sixth: play.

Play, I suppose, is just another version of quality time, but play is different than sharing a meal, having a good, long conversation, taking a walk together, watching a movie or show or attending a sporting event.

There are stakes in play.

It is the most efficient vehicle of the highest quality time you can spend with an individual, for it puts you in a position to work towards a common goal. You build something together. All the while, you’re also sharing meals, road-tripping down the 10 and 95 with an infant and a toddler and hero of a wife. You’re seeing how each other live and operate. You’re having deep conversations. You’re walking to and from the venue. You’re in medium to high stress situations where you get to problem solve and puzzle and help one another.

You’re having a damn blast.

It’s easy to forget, when you’re in the throes of an otherwise stressful Beach Pro Tour season, where volleyball is what you do for a living and points and money and partners dominate your mind, that you can just play for fun.

That you can play for the sake of playing.

When Andy and I played Hermosa last year, he said it was the most fun he’d had playing volleyball in a long time. Not because he doesn’t love playing with Miles – he does very much – but because it was so pure. We had no expectations, no pressure, nothing but a weekend with two good friends doing something we enjoy. It was as if we were kids again.

Playing for play’s sake.

After our first day of pool play, Miles expressed something similar, saying what fun it was, and that he wished we even had more games to play that day. He said he might even play some more CBVAs for that exact reason.

Just to play.