GULF SHORES, Alabama – Hector Gutierrez couldn’t have handpicked a better scenario to win his first NCAA Championship.
The TCU beach volleyball coach boasted his most talented team to date, one headlined by the top pair in the NCAA in Spanish Olympians Tania Moreno and Daniela Alvarez, herself the 2025 AVCA Player of the Year. Tied at two wins apiece in the championship dual against LMU, it came down to the top court, where Alvarez and Moreno faced off with Michelle Shaffer and and Anna Pelloia.
Already, Shaffer and Pelloia had done perhaps more than could have been expected, claiming the first set off Alvarez and Moreno, 21-18, giving themselves – and LMU – the breathing room necessary to need only one of the next two sets, should it go to a third, or for one of the other courts to seal it before it came down to court one. By the time it reached that third set, after Alvarez and Moreno won the second, 21-15, TCU and LMU had each claimed two wins.
All eyes, then, turned to Alvarez and Moreno and Shaffer and Pelloia.
“When I saw it went to court one, I said ‘OK, this is it,’” Gutierrez said.
It was fitting, poetic, that it would come down to Alvarez’s court. When she committed to TCU as a teenager in 2020, she was, Gutierrez said, “the first world-class player who decided to come to us. She believed in the future, she believed in what I presented to her, she was the beginning.”
Moreno came a year later, joined by Puerto Rico’s Maria Gonzalez, a world class player in her own right. Then came Hailey Hamlett and Ana Vergara in 2022, Ukrainian Anhelina Kmil in 2023, and Sofia Izuzquiza in 2025. Allanis Navas, Gonzalez’s partner when competing professionally for Puerto Rico, transferred for her final season after three years at GCU.
Finally, after nine seasons – eight if you discount the COVID-shortened 2020 season – Gutierrez had all his pieces in place.
Now he just had to do something he’d never been able to before: Play well in Gulf Shores.
TCU’s Daniela Alvarez (#1) celebrates a block against Cal Poly during the NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship on May 3, 2025 in Gulf Shores, AL. (Photo by Will Chu)
“This is the moment”
It was a recurring motif on the broadcast, how much TCU had struggled on the sport’s biggest stage. The Frogs went 0-2 in 2021 when the tournament was still double-elimination, upset twice in 2022 to Georgia State and LSU after a glittering 39-win campaign, lost just their third match of the year to USC in the 2023 semifinals, and didn’t make it out of the first round in 2024.
All of those massively successful regular seasons – and for what?
“It’s obviously a lot of emotions, a lot of work behind it, a lot of people who believed in the program when we went 0-11 in the first year and here we are,” Gutierrez said. “This is the moment. This is when we needed our team culture, a school behind you, and TCU has that.”
The weight of Fort Worth and, by extension, Spain, descended upon a single set to 15. Experience, it seemed, prevailed, as Alvarez and Moreno jumped out to a 4-1 lead they’d only extend, closing with a commanding 15-6 finish that was punctuated by a court-storming and dancing and tears.
“You don’t find this anywhere else in the world,” Moreno said, a non-trivial statement given she has competed in an Olympic quarterfinal at the base of the Eiffel Tower, in front of 12,000 fans and millions more watching on TV. “What we’re feeling right now just gives me tears, I’m so proud of the program, this team, my partner.
“What TCU has given us, the opportunities, how we dreamed with the coaches, we wouldn’t be here without them. We’re so grateful for them. I don’t have any more words.”
There are, for now, no more words needed. Moreno, Alvarez, Gonzalez, Navas, and Hamlett will leave Fort Worth as the first beach volleyball National Champions in the school’s history, and just the sixth team at TCU to claim such a title. Gonzalez and Navas will return to the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, as will Moreno and Alvarez, who are currently ranked No. 30 in the world. They’ll leave behind a nucleus of youngsters in Izuzquiza, and the pair of freshmen anchoring court five in Stacy Reeves and Deni Konstantinova. Khmil, too, will be back, and a team once built around Alvarez will advance into a new era – one in which they are the defending National Champions.
“This program, this family, has given me so much over the past four, five years,” Alvarez said. “For TCU to clinch the National Championship, it’s surreal. I always said, this team, there’s so many amazing girls, so many supportive staff, having all those girls pushing you to be better every single day, it’s amazing.”
