HERMOSA BEACH, California – In the late-afternoon of another sundrenched, mid-July California day, Gabby Bourne stood in the kitchen she had so magnificently renovated, with a question in mind.
“How much longer,” she wondered, “do you think you’re going to do this?”
By “this” she meant SANDCAST, the podcast that was born at the table of her previous kitchen, in Redondo Beach. That maiden episode was recorded just a few weeks after she married and subsequently honeymooned in Bali with Tri Bourne. He was then in the early throes of a mysterious illness that sapped his strength, saw his weight plummet, and took him off the beach, the setting in which he made his handsome living, for the foreseeable future and, potentially, ever.
Without what would be later identified as an autoimmune disease called Myositis, for which Bourne is now an award-winning ambassador, our podcast would have never been. It is impossible to know what my career would have become in beach volleyball, or if I would have ever had one in the sport at all.
SANDCAST is how I was discovered by p1440, who hired me full-time in 2019 and also licensed our podcast for a year.
SANDCAST is how I was discovered by Clayton Lucas, who offered me a tryout to commentate for VBTV in 2022 – a career of sorts I’ve held to this day, calling every World Championship and major event outside of the Olympics since.
SANDCAST is how I built and fostered relationships with a great many of my closest friends.
SANDCAST is how I made my first uneasy steps into coaching, beginning with Bourne and Chaim Schalk at the tail end of their Olympic run in 2024.
SANDCAST is what led me to my current job at Florida State, when I was in part hired by the man, Nick Lucena, who was on staff with me on Bourne and Schalk’s team.
The Mondays we recorded the podcast in its early days at that kitchen in Redondo were once the one day a week I’d get to see Delaney Knudsen as we began dating, the precise midpoint between where I lived in Costa Mesa and where she did in Malibu.
Of the many hats I have worn in this sport – writer, player, commentator, coach, podcaster – SANDCAST is, without a doubt, the one for which I have become the most known.
And, throughout much of the past two years, Tri and I have put no small amount of thought into the possibility of its inevitable final episode.
We’ve always winged the show, from day one.
Neither of us had ever used mics or a mixer prior to recording our first episode, in October of 2017. Neither of us had ever uploaded a podcast or any other kind of audio, nor did we know where to do so. Neither of us had built a company. We simply met for breakfast one day at the Ocean Diner in Hermosa Beach and agreed that starting a podcast would be a fun use of time for him while he healed and a sublime opportunity for me to pick the brains of the best players in the world, at the time I was just beginning to become a somewhat legitimate player.
It turned out to be that and then some.
Throughout nearly a decade of winging it, we have had the grandest of times simply figuring it out.
Never has there been a Wednesday since October 30, 2017 that has not included an episode of SANDCAST. This despite tremendous amounts of travel from both of us, including regular periods where we wouldn’t see each other for months. This despite both of us starting families, and then growing them, and then growing them some more, to the point that our podcast family has swelled to eight, with four of those members being a most-unhelpful age of under six years old.
But when I moved to Tallahassee in 2024, both of us could see the writing beginning to be etched onto the wall.
Soon, we knew, the SANDCAST chapter of our lives might be closing.
We’ve managed, despite the sizable distance between us – and my considerable distance to any professional player aside from Nick Lucena – to continue pumping out episodes and growing and adapting at a considerable rate.
We wondered, though, how long we could keep it up.
We wondered, too, how much we’d want to.
When we started the podcast, I was 28 years old and single, still several tournaments away from making my first main draw. Tri was a newlywed undergoing the most radical shift of his life.
The 28-year-old amateur bachelor I was then is unrecognizable from the 35-year-old father of two I am today.
My passions and interests have changed in a manner just as radically as my life, as have Tri’s.
Do we still love the podcast?
In many ways, yes.
The past July that I spent in California reminded me of all the elements I so adore about this podcast: an hour-plus of uninterrupted conversation with some of my best friends and people I admire, a conversation followed, usually, by a barbecue with our families. Often, as was the case with our family reunion episode, these would go late into the night, well beyond our usual bedtimes, talking story and life, conspiracy theories and big dreams, amidst the occasional outburst from one of our children, who would need walked or rocked or sung back to sleep.
Those elements, though, are gone.
Our studio is no longer, with Tri selling his wonderful house, which so frequently became a home of my own. I have already moved out of California, and Tri is headed South, a healthy distance away from professional beach volleyball and its news and gossip and practices.
It all prompted Gabby — Pod Mama, as she is still saved in my phone – to wonder how much more we have left in us.
To tell you the truth, we’re not so sure ourselves.
The podcast will change, one way or the other.
We haven’t ruled out the possibility it will come to an end altogether here soon.
Next Wednesday will be the first without an episode in 3,230 days.
We’ll take most of the fall off and see where our brains and hearts go.
It feels a bit silly, if I’m being honest, to consider stopping the show now, less than two years away from an Olympic Games that will be a stone’s throw from our podcast’s home. For that reason, and perhaps for that reason alone, I do believe SANDCAST will continue through LA 2028.
For nine years, we’ve been a show that has prided itself and leaned on our evergreen content – longform interviews that could be listened to the day it comes out or two years later and it would still retain most of its value. The most likely scenario I see is that we will shift into more of an event-coverage podcast, recording previews and recaps of tournaments, perhaps snagging an interview here and there, updating on the upcoming Olympic race. I will more than likely provide robust coverage of the Hermosa Open, an event that is as dear to my heart as any in this sport. It’s possible Kyle Friend will be our California correspondent, and Denise Austin our European, and others may join the mix to fill in the gaps Tri and I have created by virtue of our distance from the rest of the beach volleyball world.
It’s also possible none of these things happen.
We don’t know.
Then again, we’ve never known the future of the show.
We’ve flown by the seat of our board shorts from day one through now.
Tri never envisioned SANDCAST going beyond his return to the sand – yet here we are, six years after he thwarted his autoimmune disease, still going.
So while we don’t know, dearest Gab, our lovely Pod Mama, and have never known, how much we have left in us, there is but one element amidst the many changes and adaptations that is certain.
We have not yet said our final shoots.
