This feature on Alix Klineman appears in the March issue of DiG Magazine. Read more features in DiG, which include a column from Casey Patterson, Jake Gibb’s prospects on Tokyo 2020, a complete college preview, and more by subscribing online.
Win a tournament?
Was that what April Ross had said, over lunches at the Green Store in Hermosa Beach and the Mac Athletic Club? That, while her and Alix Klineman would have work to do in their new partnership, she was confident they could win, even win one right now?
It’s roughly six weeks later, in a freezing cold hallway in South Holland, and winning a tournament seems maybe a bit grand, that maybe they should have started smaller, that maybe a new partnership might take some time.
Klineman sits on one side, Ross on the other. One hundred or so spectators idle between, waiting for word that, after the fire alarm had inadvertently gone off during the middle of Ross and Klineman’s country quota match in The Hague against Emily Day and Brittany Hochevar, play can resume.
Klineman remembers being down 11-16 in the first set. Ross remembers being down in the second, having already lost the first. The specifics do not necessarily matter, for the narrative is the same: They are down, teetering precariously close to going home without a single dollar or FIVB point to show for it.
Win the tournament?
They couldn’t even win a drill.
Not in the previous six weeks of Jen Kessy’s Funhouse of Volleyball Drills. She’d make them intentionally impossible, Kessy, Ross’s former partner with whom she won an Olympic silver medal in 2012. Ross and Klineman would have to score four in a row just to earn one point, and oh, every time Kessy scored, it was worth two.
Sometimes she’d bring in men to play against them, and the same rules applied, even if the man in question was Casey Patterson, and on one occasion his teammate was Sara Hughes. If Ross and Klineman ever gave her a look, an exasperated ‘Is this drill even possible?’ look, Kessy would smile, tell them she could make it easier if they’d like, knowing full well they wouldn’t. Not these two.
Not April Ross, whose work ethic by now is famous, who hasn’t been able to take a real vacation in years, who has planned them out only to back out at the last second, so conscious she is of the possibility that she might lose a step, that someone else – the Brazilians, the Germans, the Czechs – might be getting better while she is out doing what? Exploring Italy? How would that get her closer to the Olympics? So she’d call off the vacation and get back to work.
In Klineman she found, remarkably, much of the same, someone who would quietly fume when she would lose these impossible drills yet who would never, ever, ask for them to be the tiniest bit more plausible.
“It’s kinda funny because it starts out with her making this gnarly drill and then us refusing to change it because we need to beat it,” Klineman said. “Sometimes Jen will be like ‘It’s ok, I can make it easier’ and me and April are like ‘No we’ll beat it this way!’”
That’s always been Alix.
She’s in second grade now, seething. Her coach for her 10-and-under team won’t let Alix, a middle, rotate into the back row. Alix demands to know why.
“You have to be better than the libero,” coach says.
Alix wonders why she can’t simply be better than the outsides.
Rules are rules.
So there she goes, every day, trooping off to Manhattan Beach, hauling along her second-grade teacher, Ms. Lapour, a volleyball player herself, passing, passing, passing. Eventually all of those reps will pay off in 1,000-plus digs at Stanford, but for now her focus is singular: Pass better than the libero.
“That’s in second grade and I was getting extra reps and trying to be the best,” Klineman said. “If I want something, I will go to any means to make it happen.”
It’s the darnedest thing, this relentless, almost manic, drive. She’s no idea where she gets it from. Her mother, Kathie, alleges she played tennis as a kid, but Alix has her doubts. Her father, Mike, claims basketball, and she believes him enough, though his fire is more suited for debate, pushing the argument further and further “until you stop and say ‘You’re right,’” Alix said, and she doesn’t mean it in a bad way but an endearing one, just a deep curiosity.
Yet somehow Mike and Kathie produced three elite athletes: a son, Max, a former setter for UC Santa Barbara; a precocious, towering middle child named Alix; and the youngest, Maddy, who played outside hitter for UCLA.
Alix surpassed them all.
Not that any of the Klinemans could possibly be ashamed of that – Alix surpassed perhaps any individual in the history of Southern California high school volleyball.
As she grew older, she grew up – up up up, “just always off the charts,” Klineman said. Her size made for natural proclivities in the obvious sports – volleyball and basketball – where height is a supreme advantage. She had given up soccer at a young age, so obsessed she was with basketball. Problem was, Klineman never grew out, all arms and legs, and soon the physicality of basketball became a bit imposing.
By the time she enrolled at Mira Costa High School, all that was left was volleyball, and coach DaeLea Aldrich.
She’s a bit of a legend, Aldrich, dubbed by a number of news outlets as “the matriarch of girls’ volleyball in Southern California.”
In a quarter century at the school, she would win 15 CIF Southern Section titles, 24 league titles, and six state championships. Her final record would stand at 667-76.
This did not happen by chance.
“No slacking off,” Lane Carico, a teammate of Klineman’s at Mira Costa and another Aldrich disciple, “was ever being rewarded.”
Show up late, you’d run a mile. Chew gum, you’d run a mile. No talking. Not when Aldrich said so. Not in her gym.
“It was very discipline-based and it put fear into some girls there. If you were running late your heart is definitely beating faster and for me it taught me so much,” Klineman said. “It just basically shows you that if you work hard you will be successful.”
As Ms. Lapour in the second grade could attest: No one worked harder than Klineman.
“A leader by example,” Carico said. “She was just always doing the right thing.”
By the end of her high school career, Klineman would win 134 matches and lose just 10. She finished with three state championships and three more CIF Southern Section titles. Records bore her name, as did essentially every award there was to give, including the big one: Gatorade National Player of the Year.
She could have gone wherever she wanted. As a junior, she narrowed it down to Texas, Hawaii, Stanford, Washington, and UCLA. She did a round of visits but loved them all so much that she did it again, taking the opposite parent to each school, until she settled on Stanford, because “the more I thought about it and the more it sunk in, I just really realized you can’t go wrong with Stanford,” she said. “At the end of the day it was just ‘How can I not go here? It’s a dream school.’”
Good choice, too. Off the Cardinal went, setting their 6-foot-5 freshman, piling up 32 wins in 2007, losing a heartbreaker to Penn State, the goliath, in the NCAA finals. They’d do it again in ’08, falling in the finals once more to the Nittany Lions though not before Klineman would be named All-America and All-Final Four.
Four times she would be named All-America, becoming one of eight Stanford players in school history to do so. She’d become the Pac-10 Player of the Year and the VolleyballMag National Player of the Year and just the second Cardinal ever to put away more than 2,000 kills.
The plan was straightforward from there: overseas to Italy and Brazil, compete for the United States National Team – which she had in 2008 at the Pan American Cup – become an Olympian.
Yet here is where Klineman’s linear, and astonishingly steep, ascent wobbled. In December of 2013, playing for the Italian Club, Conegliano, Klineman was suspended for 13 months for accidentally taking her mother’s DHEA supplement. It didn’t matter that the USADA had determined the incident was “not intentional cheating.” Thirteen months was the rule.
But she was eligible to return to the U.S. team in 2014 for the FIVB World Grand Prix, where the U.S. took fifth, and she was again a member of the team when the Americans took gold in the 2015 Pan American Cup.
And then the following summer, for the first time since she had been promoted to the national team, Klineman’s phone didn’t ring. She wasn’t invited back.
It was one thing for Klineman to be suspended temporarily. It was another for her to have her ceiling lowered, for the ultimate goal to be stripped. For so long there had always been something more, something higher to strive for.
Without the Olympics, what was left?
“Am I ok with just playing and not having something bigger?” she wondered.
Yet there was something bigger, something that had been there all along, since her days dragging her parents up and down the west coast for CBVAs and AAU tournaments, since begging Ms. Lapour to serve her balls after school and practice.
There was the beach.
And what timing it was.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bdp0DLUgkm3/?taken-by=aklineman10
When Klineman made her professional debut on the beach, scrambling together a partnership with Jace Pardon, Ross was in a career limbo of her own, having split with Kerri Walsh-Jennings prior to the season.
Ross had plenty of time to find a partner for the 2020 Olympics, though even if she weren’t looking for one it would have been nearly impossible for her to not take note of the 6-foot-5 blonde dominating the net throughout the qualifier on May 4.
“I could tell that she had a lot to learn on the beach but I figured she went to Stanford,” Ross said, laughing, “It wouldn’t take that long.”
It took two months.
After three tournaments with Pardon and another with Branagan Fuller, Klineman partnered with Carico, her old high school teammate, sweeping their first four matches in San Francisco to earn a berth into the finals.
If anybody had been surprised by Klineman’s qualifier-to-finals rise in just a handful of tournaments, Fuller was not among them. They had played in Seattle two weeks prior, and while Klineman’s tremendous physical abilities and insatiable appetite for improvement – “She wanted to know what she could do better after every point,” Fuller said. “Even in practice.” – were unmistakable, spectacular, it was her capacity as a teammate that moved Fuller. In the first match of the Seattle qualifier, Fuller had tweaked her back, and in warm ups of the second, she planted awkwardly and it completely went out. Klineman could have been many things – angry at a trip to Seattle potentially wasted, panicky that her partner wouldn’t be 100 percent, sullen that their chances of qualifying had plummeted.
Instead, “she mentally carried me,” Fuller said, and they damn near qualified, losing to Camie Manwill and Maria Clara Salgado, 15-17, in the third set.
“She’s so positive,” Carico said, a trait that Klineman has blended well with a hyper-focused intensity. She didn’t leave a lucrative indoor career for the beach to “fool around and have fun,” Klineman said. “I’ve had a mission since I started. There’s no ‘Oh it’s just practice’ it’s ‘I have to be as good as I could possibly be.’”
As good as she could possibly be. That’s what Ross wondered, at season’s end: Who could she team with to be as good as she could possibly be?
Maybe not necessarily whom she could be the best with right now, but three years down the road, in Tokyo, on the sport’s biggest stage.
Who could she win an Olympic gold with?
Lauren Fendrick had been an excellent partner in 2017, no question about it. Together they had won in New York and made a pair of semifinals despite Ross playing on a balky toe. They had taken second in the World Series of Beach Volleyball and another silver in the World Championships in Vienna.
Among the many individuals she consulted was Phil Dalhausser, whose ability to simplify even the most complicated of matters is one of his finest qualities.
“In the end, it’s about winning volleyball games,” he told Ross. “Just pick someone you can win volleyball games with.”
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She had proven she could win plenty of games with Fendrick – but could she win The Games? One name that had continued to pop up throughout the partner search was Klineman’s, who had pushed Ross and Fendrick to three sets in Manhattan Beach and whose progress from May to the end of the year was astounding. Ross knew that Klineman was a gamble, that she’d have to start over internationally, that she’d be in the country quota, grinding, grinding.
“I had to be ok with it and I had to come to terms with the fact that we’d be in the country quota,” Ross said. “Looking at our potential and what I believed we could become I was ok going through that process with her.”
And so it was that they found themselves sitting in a freezing cold hallway in the Netherlands, losing in a country quota match, Ross staring that process in the face. Nearly 6,000 miles she had traveled, and there she was, sitting alone, refocusing. Down the hallway Klineman was doing the same.
When they returned to the court, it became, “one of those matches where we were so in the zone,” Klineman said. “I don’t really have a sense of time, just ‘We have to do this.’ We pulled out the second [set] and by the time the third set came we were just rolling and I don’t think any team could have stopped us at that point.”
A prescient thought, for no team did. Lithuania had them down, 20-17, in the second set of the first match of pool play when Klineman was struck by something funny. She turned to Ross and said “This is just like practice! We just have to get four points in a row!”
They won that set, 24-22, and every set after that.
“It was a big moment for us, like ‘Wow, we didn’t give up,’” Klineman said. “It was a tough situation and we just fought our way out of it.”
They fought their way out of a similar situation against Brazil’s Agatha and Duda, a win so big that even Klineman thought “Holy shit. We just did that.”
And then they did it again against Russia, and again to Brazil’s Fernanda and Barbara, and again to the Czechs, and one more time, in the finals, to Brazil’s Maria Antonelli and Carolina Salgado, proving Ross, against all odds, quite prophetic: They could, indeed, win a tournament.
They could win one right now.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BdsoeewhVGj/?taken-by=aprilrossbeach
It’s two weeks later, and Klineman is in Corona Del Mar. Ross is out of town, so it’s just Klineman and Kessy. When Kessy played with Ross, they split-blocked, though if one were to stay at the net, it was Kessy, the better, more fundamental blocker of the two.
And so she runs Klineman through a set of drills, blasting balls at her hands on the right side, on the left, hitting cut shots at her block on one side then the other, testing her line, testing her angle. It was blocking that Klineman struggled with most in transitioning from indoor to the beach, fixing her lineup, her hands, her press.
The first time she watched film of her blocking on the beach “I was so disgusted,” she said. “I showed up the next day and I was like ‘I can’t believe it’s that bad.’”
So there she is, putting in the extra work, no different than second grade or high school or college.
Just Alix being Alix. Working. Improving.
Winning.
