TALLAHASSEE, Florida – Maddie Anderson knew one thing for certain about her life post-graduation from Florida State: She was not going to continue playing beach volleyball.
She was as certain about this as she was about anything in life at that point, mostly because she had already almost quit the sport. Almost called her future coach, Brooke Niles, when Anderson was a senior in high school to announce that she was decommitting from the Seminoles and giving up beach volleyball altogether.
“I almost decided I didn’t want to play volleyball ever again,” Anderson said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, sitting in front of the very courts that she did, indeed, play volleyball on again. “I think I was just in a really — I was so burnt. I was playing so much volleyball. I was homeschooled, so I was doing Florida virtual school on the road, playing in tournaments. Any tournament that was happening, I was playing in it. My sister and I were playing in it, and I really lost my spark. I wanted to quit.”
In the months leading up to her enrollment at Florida State in 2019-2020, she didn’t touch a ball. Took the break she needed to rediscover enough of her love for the game that brought her to Tallahassee to keep her playing for the Seminoles.
It’s likely you noticed the year she debuted as a freshman: 2020. Hard to miss that one. It’s the year the world stopped turning and was flipped upside down and shaken about. For some, that bizarre season of virtual everything, lockdowns, and a world put on pause would be a blessing disguised in the strange clothing of a global pandemic.
It proved as much for Anderson, who despite starting all 13 matches and winning 12 of them told her good friend and teammate, Alaina Chacon, that she wouldn’t play after college.
“I’m not going to play pro,” Anderson recalls telling Chacon. “I don’t want to go to the Olympics. I want to get done with my four years and then have my finance degree and work in finance.”
But that pandemic did happen, and for the first time in as long as Anderson could remember, “it gave me lot of time to think about, you know, is beach volleyball something that I really want to do? Because now my fifth year was also going to be volleyball, right? Instead of having just an MBA year.”
She can’t pick a moment, an exact epiphany in which her spark for the game ignited once more, but Italy seems a proper place to start.
“I kind of like winning”
Heading into the 2022 season, Molly Turner – now Shaw – was 25 years old and fresh off a breakout season on both the AVP and Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour. The year prior, she had qualified for all three AVP’s in the truncated season, claiming a third in Atlanta, as well as her maiden medal on the Beach Pro Tour, a silver in Cervia, Italy, with Terese Cannon. Like any up-and-coming defender, Turner was in a perpetual need for a blocker. A former top-flight talent at GCU, Turner knew just where to look for talented blockers who might be off the radar of other defenders: The NCAA.
There was Anderson, a 6-foot-1 blocker with more than 70 wins in two-and-a-COVID-shortened year at Florida State, who would be coming into the summer season well-trained and having competed the entire season against the best college talents in the country. Turner reached out: There’s a Futures in Ciro Marina, Italy. Want to run it?
Anderson was on vacation with her mom, Marianne, at the time, thinking that would, effectively, be how her summer looked: downtime with family. Vacation. Relaxing. Taking a much-needed breather from the game.
“And then I was like, ‘You know what? Italy would be really cool.’ I’d never been to Europe,” Anderson said. “I need to play some tournaments over the summer. So, you know, might as well do it. So I flew over there, and then we won.
“I was like, ‘You know what, this is actually really sick. This is really fun. I kind of like winning. I kind of like playing on the World Tour.’ Credit to Molly for getting me out there, because that was when it switched for me, was after playing with her.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, this is really sick. I want to do this for sure.’”
The spark was back, a dormant dream to qualify for the Olympic Games – one that began, funny enough, with an aspiration to do so as a gymnast, until she grew to 5-foot-5 at 8 years old and that dream was all but cast off with the clothes she grew out of – alive once more.
After graduating from Florida State in 2024 as the all-time leader in wins (123), business degree in hand, she hit the Beach Pro Tour in what she considers her true rookie season with Brook Bauer. Over the ensuing two seasons, they’d qualify for Elite main draws in Quintana Roo, Hamburg, and Itapema, and take a pair of top-10s in Challenges in Yucatan and Xiamen.
Now, in a poetically full-circle moment, Anderson has reunited with Chacon, her freshman year teammate from Florida State – the same teammate to whom she once confided that she wanted to quit.
There’s no quitting anymore.
Maddie Anderson has her spark back.
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