TALLAHASSEE, Florida – As the 2025 beach volleyball season neared its end, Savvy Simo knew she needed a change.
After 26 events and two years with Abby Van Winkle – the longest she’d ever played with anyone – Cory changed her partner in a mutual split.
Simo even went so far as to change her name.
In October, on a breathtaking beach in Mexico, she married another professional beach volleyball player in Evan Cory, replacing her maiden name, Simo, with her new surname, Cory.
That change was just the beginning.
“I was feeling very defeated after me and Abby split,” Cory admitted on this week’s episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “She wanted to pursue defense and I’m wishing her the best playing with Molly [Phillips]. I just didn’t know where I was at. I had some people reach out and ask to play or train and I felt it in my gut that it wasn’t the right time to make a decision. I just wanted to focus on being married and that part of my life. I just let things play out.”
So, after playing the Itapema Elite in December with precocious sensation Sarah Wood, who was in high school at the time and enrolled early to compete for USC, she waited. Waited for the gut feeling, where she knew she’d be making the right decision, a feeling she hadn’t felt in close to two years. Went back to the drawing boards and took inventory of her current beach volleyball life, down to the training, coaching, strength and conditioning, nutrition, partner. All of it.
It made her wonder: What if she scrapped everything she had been doing for the last two seasons and did the opposite?
“I have a one-up from all these people”
When Cory graduated from UCLA in 2020, she was invited into USA Volleyball’s A2, or developmental, group, the tier below the top talents, the type who win Elite medals. It was perfect. She had a set training group with her peers, excellent – and free – coaching in Jose Loiola, and then Scott Davenport. She had personal training in the USA gym.
She had it all.
Success followed, as her prize money on the AVP increased for three straight seasons and she was a regular in Challenge main draws on the Beach Pro Tour. But in the stretch from 2023-2025, where her results were virtually indistinguishable, “I got to a point where I don’t think I’m gaining anything from this,” she said. “I’m seeing the same girls, playing the same people, and I’m not getting the individual stuff. The last two years of my training I felt stagnant.”
When Devon Newberry called this winter, asking if Cory might be interested in partnering with her for the 2026 season, Cory had something of a radical idea: What if they gambled a bit on themselves? What if they turned down the free training, the coaching, the gym, the access to USA Volleyball’s resources, and built a team custom fit for them?
For Newberry, there was no hesitation.
They hired Dan Waineraich, the longtime coach for Chase Budinger and Miles Evans who formerly assisted with Brandie Wilkerson and Melissa Humana-Paredes during their silver medal run at the Paris Olympic Games. For strength and conditioning, Cory, like her husband, is now working with Greg Herceg, whose business name is, simply, The Volleyball Strength Coach.
“Now that I’ve stepped away from that and I have my own coach, my own strength coach, different nutrition – all these things different from all these other people. It could be placebo, but I have a one-up from all these people who are doing the same thing,” Cory said. “It might not make any difference physically but in my mind, it feels right.”
It feels, perhaps most important, different.
When Cory was training with the A2 group, she long had a nagging thought: If I’m training with the same people, doing the same lifting program, getting the same coaching, going through the same reps, how am I ever going to separate myself from them?
“Once you get further along, you need someone who understands who, who you trust, let’s do this,” Bourne said. “When I was in the developmental stuff, it was the best. I had Jeff Alzina and he had some of the pros and we’d learn from each other. But you gotta build your own team, your own style.”
So she has.
Now, practices she once dreaded, she doesn’t want to leave. Lifts she was once confused as to why she was doing she now has crystalline clarity.
“I had a hard time showing up every day,” Cory said. “I feel very happy with what I’m doing. I thrive in a team setting when I feel like I’m on the same team and pushing each other. This team feels so right and so fun. Now when I show up to practice, I want to go and I don’t want to leave. When I was with USA, I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t having fun. It’s just me and where I’m at in my career.
“I needed some change, and the change I made was awesome.”
