How many times had Evan Cory repped out — or attempted to rep — that play, the chase down of the high angle, with nobody watching? Hundreds, minimum. Did it reach the thousands? Only two individuals in beach volleyball would have a guess: Cory and a coach.

That’s what Cory’s off-season looked like, four long and lonely months from January to April: A cart overflowing with volleyballs, a coach, and 90 minutes of the 27-year-old hammering out the weak spots in his game. The weakest? His defense. The aim of the off-season was to transition Cory from being a supreme athlete who played defense to a true defender who could harness his God-given abilities as a preternatural athlete.

It would make, so the theory went, for a hell of a defender.

Entire weeks were spent on footwork. How to run the same defensive call half a dozen different ways. How to set up the shot, the swing, the location he wanted the offensive player to think was open, until it wasn’t.

Throughout the AVP season, and in bursts and flashes internationally as well, it showed. Cory matched a career-high in his first AVP, in Huntington Beach, with Alison Cerutti. He won back-to-back lower level AVPs in Denver and Waupaca, though it’s more than worth noting that in those lower level events, he beat Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander twice, as well as Troy Field and Tim Bomgren, and Seain Cook and Cody Caldwell, all of whom would eventually qualify for the inaugural AVP League.

But in no single event did Cory break through like he did at the Haikou Challenge in China this weekend, where they climbed from the qualifier to the top of the podium. When he and Cody Caldwell qualified, narrowly escaping in three sets in the final round, much celebration was had.

“It’s been a long year and a half of challenge quails,” Cory said. But here lies the challenge of qualifier players: A single-elimination qualifier, against world class competition, is the minimum.

The tournament, if one does seek to move up the ranks internationally, literally only just begun.

He was reminded of that.

On the first day of main draw, Cory and Caldwell pulled in a landmark win, over French Olympian Remi Bassereau and up-and-coming Calvin Aye. Cory and Caldwell were now guaranteed to break pool, despite a sweep at the hands of Italians Marco Viscovich and Gianluca Dal Corso in the second round.

The long road it would be then.

With the new format of Challenge events, second place in pool no longer puts you directly into the ninth-place rounds. Cory and Caldwell would now have to win five straight matches, beginning from the ambiguous round of 12, to claim gold, as opposed to the usual four.

No problem.

“Every game is a grind on the world tour,” Cory said, “and you got two of the best grinders around playing together.”

Grind they did. In three, they upset sixth-seeded Chinese Yanwei Wang and Hongjun Du, then swept Germans Momme Lorenz and Tilo Reitcschel. It was in that 21-14, 21-15 win that Cory made the dig he had repped out so many times, often to so much failure, setting up his line defense just the way he practiced, getting balanced — finally, for the love of God, getting balanced — then exploding to dig a well-placed high angle shot, then exploding some more on a thunderous transition swing, punctuated with a “HIYAH!”

“A lot of work this off-season leads to it,” he said. “So many times I did something where it was like, ‘Wow, we repped that out so many times.’”

Winning, however, is something that only comes with experience, and experience inevitably comes with losing. Cory lost, and lost plenty, in his climb up the AVP and Beach Pro Tour rankings. Along the way, you win a few, then you win some more. It’s a skill no different than, say, digging a high angle shot from a line defense. You just can’t rep it out the same, with a coach and a cart of balls. One must buy the ticket and take the ride, so to speak. He has.

Again, in the quarterfinals, Cory and Caldwell beat Bassereau and Aye.

Once might be a fluke. Two, well — that’s no accident.

A revenge win over the Italians put Cory and Caldwell, unbelievably, in the gold medal match from the qualifier, channeling their inner Bello Brother, where they met top-seeded Australians and American killers Thomas Hodges and Zach Schubert, also 2024 Olympians.

At that point, there was no stopping Cory and Caldwell — even for the physical, bruising, bombing Australians. A 23-21, 23-21 victory left Cory with just two words.

“Statement. Made.”

Indeed. A long-awaited, and much-deserved, gold medal will be returning home, eventually, with Cory and Caldwell. Just as a long-awaited, and much-deserved, silver will be returning with fellow Americans and fellow qualifiers Molly Shaw and Toni Rodriguez. Like Cory and Caldwell, they, too, marched from the qualifier to the finals, settling for silver.

Like Cory and Caldwell, they will make the trip from China to Chennai, India, for another Challenge…and then one more, to Nuvali in the Philippines.

It’s the fourth straight international medal for Shaw, who won a pair of NORCECAs with Chloe Loreen and a Futures in Tahiti. For Rodriguez, who is coming off a win at the inaugural AVP League, it’s her first main draw of the season.

Both will begin right where they began this fall Asian swing: In the qualifier.

Prepared to make another statement.