TALLAHASSEE, Florida – We still can’t find the note.
It’s one of my great — perhaps only — regrets of the move my family made to Tallahassee some seven months ago. My wife, Delaney, is one of the most organized people I know, labeling every box, packing our U-Haul with the meticulousness of a high-stakes Tetris game. When it comes to sentimental matters, I am typically decent, tucking notes and pictures I cherish into journals or folders that have stayed with me since high school.
But we can’t find the note.
An ironic thing, too, since the little slip of paper, sealed with an almond butter cup from Trader Joe’s, is what, in an indirect way, led to us moving to Florida in the first place.
It was how Delaney told me we were pregnant with our daughter.
Buried the lede, too, she did. Opened with how much she has loved watching me grow into my role as a father to our son, Austin. How much she enjoys seeing my passion for my work. How I’ve evolved as a husband.
Good thing I enjoy being a father, she continued, because, well, now you get to be one again!
Surprise!
Smiley face.
I love you.
End of note.
It was perfect, as are most things when it comes to Delaney. Our lives, too, at that particular moment, were little shy of perfect to the point of being ludricous. In the four years we had been married, our job titles included professional beach volleyball players and freelance volleyball journalist, neither of which can possibly be considered real jobs. We were, for all intents and purposes, retired.
With another on the way, that, we knew, would change.
It left the question: What do we do next?
Packing up the U-Haul before we left for Florida
***
Delaney’s family is steadfast in their faith, the bedrock upon which a remarkable family of Division I athletes and four now adult kids of the highest character has been built. A popular motif in their household: “God steers moving ships.”
When the thrill of expecting a second child wore off, it was replaced by something I might call terror. My role in our family is to provide.
Given my vocation at the time as a part-time coach, part-time commentator, part-time writer and podcaster, there was no providing for a family of four.
We wouldn’t be able to sustain our lifestyle, and we both knew it. Delaney was mostly unbothered.
Pray on it, she said. Something will present itself.
The universe works in funny ways. Mysterious is the cliche, and I’m a firm believer that cliches are cliche for a reason: They’re true.
Why, for instance, does my mother love Oakberry acai bowls nearly as much as — perhaps more than, depending on the day — she loves her second son? Why was she visiting us in Hermosa Beach in the middle of July of 2024? Why did she feel the need, as soon as her feet hit the pavement of our driveway, to grab her son, grandson, and daughter-in-law and jet straight to Oakberry on the Hermosa Beach Pier — at the exact moment a friend of mine, Nick Lucena, the assistant beach volleyball coach at Florida State, happened to be on a phone call at the Pier? Why had the other assistant, Brook Bauer, inform Nick and his wife, head coach Brooke Niles, just days before that she wouldn’t be returning, that she wanted to focus on competing full-time?
Why did Nick hang up the phone and run over to me, catching up for five minutes before punching my arm and saying “What do you think about Tallahassee?”
A few minutes later, I was on the phone with Niles.
A week after that, God, the universe, fate, coincidence – whatever you want to call it – set the sails of our family’s proverbial ship for Tallahassee, Florida.
I was the new assistant beach volleyball coach.
Me and Brooke Niles/Photo by Andy J. Gordon
***
It’s Saturday morning. A storm rolls over the Gulf of Mexico, clouds purple and bruised with thunder, the sea foamy and angry. With thunder clapping and lightning flashing, sleep eludes me. I don’t fight it.
After 10 years in California, a place devoid of mostly all weather save for sunny and 75, I missed thunderstorms. I sit on the balcony and watch the lightning dance and the heavens rumble, reflecting upon one of the more special, certainly unexpected, years of my life.
I’ve been trying – and failing – to adequately describe what it is I love so much about coaching. Been turning it over, inspecting it, taking a flashlight to it and examining its inner workings. I attempted to describe it on a podcast with Aaron Wexler, John Mayer and Billy Allen, only it didn’t come out quite right. I didn’t yet have it. There was something about it that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Oh.
That was it.
I could put a finger on it. Literally. I could wrap my arm around it. Share a meal with it. Laugh and feel the euphoria of a comeback win with it and the devastation of a disappointing loss with it. I could share buses and planes with it and grab a late-night yogurt bowl with it.
It is, I realize with the subtlety of another thunderclap, real.
So very real.
***
Part of my passion for what I do now with Florida State comes, I’m beginning to understand, as a counter, a balance, to much of what I have been feeling with the career I’ve enjoyed for almost 20 years now. My first job as a writer came when I was 16 years old, compiling high school box scores at a weekly in Baltimore County. It was all print then. Every job I had for the next eight years was, for the most part, real. I, and those who read my work, could pick it up at newsstands or in their driveways and turn the page – make the jump, was the saying then. Interviews I did were largely in person. I’d go watch matches and games and shake hands and make eye contact and all the rest. I forged relationships with athletes and coaches, some of which still exist today. I told meaningful stories.
There was connection with almost everything I did.
In a blink, however, the media landscape shifted radically, and with it the methods by which we consume it. The fast-paced nature of it cut down much of the connection I felt with what I was doing. When I covered the Pac-12 upon arriving in California, I wrote five to six stories a day, mostly SEO fodder in which I didn’t talk to a single athlete or coach. Didn’t get to know anything about them. Didn’t make eye contact, shake a hand, none of it. No, I’d simply take something they said at some press conference hundreds of miles away and spin an easy and mostly useless story about it. I became an aggregation machine.
Gone was the deep work I had come to love as a features writer at the Northwest Daily News, replaced instead with shallow, hollow pieces with which I felt no connection.
The pay was fine, and it allowed me to play beach volleyball anywhere in the country or world, so long as the stories were written and the machine churned on. The tradeoff was worth it then. But as each job and freelance gig led increasingly to chasing more clicks and volume and less about quality and depth, the fulfillment I felt in writing a well-researched feature, capturing someone better than they even know themselves, began to wane.
There was an increasing disconnect I felt between my work and the screens upon which it was consumed. This, of course, is an irony that is not lost on me, as I am the co-founder of a digital media company, SANDCAST, which has been built upon our weekly podcast of the same name. I still do love the writing. I love that Tri Bourne and Daniel Freitas and Kyle Friend and Savvy Simo and the rest of our slowly growing crew is able to fill gaps in the storytelling world of beach volleyball that hasn’t really been done before, not in the manner in which we are doing it. I love that part of our job is to sit down with our friends and share real conversations where there isn’t a phone in the room for an hour-plus. I love that we’ve launched a docuseries we know we’ll lose money on because it’s the type of fulfilling, meaningful work we want to do.
It’s real.
It is also a hobby.
In not chasing the clicks and viral bytes and images upon which the media can be monetized, that career can also not pay the bills. Not yet, anyway.
Florida State does. It is also the realest career I’ve pursued.
The boys on the set of SANDCAST
***
It’s a Thursday in March. We’re leaving dinner in Redondo Beach, California. Took the players to one of my old favorite haunts, Blue Salt Fish Grill, which was, at one point, a near-weekly date-night for Delaney and me. As our 12-passenger van crests the top of a hill, one of our freshmen asks if having a daughter has changed my perspective on coaching a group of young women.
What a question.
I mull it over as the sunset paints the sky in oranges and yellows and reds.
“It’s as if,” I tell them, “I’m getting little snapshots into what she could be like one day.”
A chorus of awws follow. Sappy though it may be, that answer is true, and I’ll consider myself lucky if our daughter resembles many of the young women on our team.
But there’s also more to it than that. As coaches of young women ranging from 18 to 22 years old, Brooke Niles, Nick Lucena and I are, in a way, surrogate parents. We will spend more time with them over the course of the year than they will their actual parents or aunts or uncles or grandparents.
Is there any greater responsibility than that?
Is there a career that can have a deeper impact on an individual than that?
There is a purity in parenting, in coaching, in that they are both human to the core. Every day, I go to work with human beings. We solve problems together. We laugh together. We have difficult conversations together. We share intense moments together on a near-daily basis. We win and lose together.
It is deep in every sense of the word.
It is the antithesis of the shallow and digital direction in which the world is currently hurtling, where we are “connected” or “followed by” or “friends with” or “subscribed” by thousands of individuals we’ll never actually know or see or meet.
“Isolation through connection” is how Jonathan Haidt described it.
That doesn’t exist in the realm of coaching.
We work through problems not through a chat, but in person. We make eye contact, observe one another’s body language. We share moments of immense triumph and crushing devastation. We have laughed, hugged, cried, been vulnerable — many times all in a few minutes.
We’ve learned how each other work, what makes us tick, what we fear and love. Our players dote on my son and my son dotes on them. He will spend more time with them than his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Our players have sat at our dinner table, cracking jokes and talking life beyond volleyball. They know my family and I know theirs. My relationships both with our players and with Brooke and Nick have woven the fabric of our new lives.
New lives that are so very real.
So very deep.
My son, surrounded by his favorite people in the world
***
The storms clear in time for our quarterfinal match of the NCAA Championships against UCLA. Personally, I was hoping for rain. We live in it in Tallahassee. Los Angeles? Not so much.
But the wind dies and the rain quits and an hour later we are out of the tournament, our season over.
What comes next is better than any win we’ve had this season.
One by one, I speak with parents who thank me not for anything I have taught their kids on a volleyball court, or anything my job description entails, but for the relationship I had been able to build with their daughters. How we welcomed them into our home. How they know they are more than players to me, but someone’s daughter, a kid who will go on to far bigger things than a beach volleyball court. How my belief in them instilled a belief in themselves.
It means a lot to them.
It means the world to me.
It’s real.
