The 2025 Beach Pro Tour Best Defensive Player: Kristen Nuss
Honorable Mention
- Victoria Lopes, Brazil
- Cinja Tillmann, Germany
- Melissa Humana-Paredes, Canada
On the eve of the Gstaad Elite, the defending gold medalists, Kristen Nuss and Taryn Brasher, sat down in the lobby and discussed the new goal for the most peculiar team in beach volleyball. They’d already rewritten the script, showing beach fans and future players that, yes, you can be a 6-foot-4 blocker from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and a 5-foot-6 defender from Louisiana, two states with zero natural beaches on which to play beach volleyball, and you can become the No. 1 team in the world.
Their new goal?
To be, as they worded it, a glitch in the beach volleyball system.
Consider that mission accomplished for Nuss, the 2025 Defensive Player of the Year who has now been voted as such in three consecutive seasons.
An unofficial measurement for how elite an athlete is at a particular skill is how easy they make their specialty look. No player, be it male or female, makes defense look as easy Nuss, who simply glided, alongside Taryn Brasher, to another Gstaad cowbell, an undefeated year on American soil, three gold medals, the highest winning percentage of their careers, and a World Championship final.
At just 28 years old, Nuss is already piling up a laundry list of accolades and enough medals and trinkets to fill up her New Orleans apartment.
She has already proven to be a glitch in beach volleyball’s system.
2023 Best Defensive Player: Kristen Nuss
2024 Best Defensive Player: Kristen Nuss
