Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson won the first women’s Olympic beach volleyball medal in Canadian history when they took silver at the Paris Olympic Games, falling to Brazil’s Duda Lisboa and Ana Patricia Silva in an excellent gold medal match. But that came after they lost twice in pool play and needed to come out of the lucky loser. How’d they turn it around?
As coach Marcio Sicoli says on Wednesday’s podcast: “I went absolutely ballistic” with a focus on only moving forward.
Fun look inside the ropes of Canada’s top beach volleyball team.
SHOOTS!
Author, journalist, podcast host, and broadcaster, Travis Mewhirter has written 4 number-one bestsellers — including Kings of Summer: The Rise of Beach Volleyball, alongside Olympic gold medalist Kent Steffes. He has also written award-winning features, including a package at the Northwest Florida Daily News that earned him Sports Writer of the Year, and a heartfelt story on the late Eric Zaun in Volleyball Magazine, which was an honorable mention in the 2020 Best American Sportswriting.
Following the passing of Eric Zaun, Mewhirter, alongside Jon Mesko and Katie Spieler, founded the Eric Zaun Award, which has raised more than 25 thousand to fund beach volleyball players.
Mewhirter now devotes most of his time to playing and covering beach volleyball, via his podcast: SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, as well as writing for Volleyball Magazine and commentating on Volleyball TV. Mewhirter and Bourne have written two books together: Volleyball for Milkshakes, and Playbook of Champions, both of which were number-one best-sellers.
