Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

Lord willing, I’ll fly back to Chicago tonight. While I’m in transit, I’m happy to pass the mic over to Rodger Sherman, formally of SB Nation and The Ringer, and currently of Read Rodge, an excellent newsletter on off-beat stories in the sporting world.

I asked Rodger to dig a little bit more into beach volleyball. He returned with a super interesting look at how the NCAA recently sponsoring the sport hasn’t just led to a USC dynasty…but it’s changed the way Team USA is built.

Anybody could see that the 2015 decision to make beach volleyball an official NCAA sport would smooth the developmental pathway for future Olympians. 

“You knew that this pipeline would be absolutely incredible for the United States,” says Dain Blanton, who won gold in beach volleyball at the 2000 Olympics and has coached USC’s beach volleyball team to back-to-back-to-back-to-back national championships. (That’s four in a row, if you lost count.) “You knew that before you could blink an eye, you’d look out at the field and see that every single one of the athletes on the women’s side would be graduates from prominent beach volleyball programs.”

But college beach volleyball hasn’t just produced future Olympic stars—it’s producing full-on Olympic teams. Both of the women’s pairs representing Team USA at the Paris Olympics are comprised of former college teammates who took their pairing to the pros. 

There’s Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, who went undefeated as a pair of beachy Bayou Bengals at LSU before going pro as teammates. (It’s like Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase, but sandy.)  And there’s USC alums Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, who ran off a 103-game win streak while leading the Trojans to back-to-back national championships. 

The decision to make beach volleyball an NCAA sport came 20 years after the sport debuted at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, a move which forever changed the shape of the decidedly unchill Olympics. In the decades since, the games have filled up with more modern like skateboarding and breakdancing, as well as stripped down versions of more traditional sports like 3-on-3 basketball and rugby sevens. (The 2028 Olympics will have flag football and lacrosse sixes.) 

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