HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — It has been more than 10 years since Tri Bourne last visited New Zealand, competing on its once-proud domestic tour with Will Montgomery. He couldnât remember the route he took to get there, or how long that itinerary would have taken.
âItâs 10 to 12 hours to Auckland,â Alice Zeimann told him. âDepending on the wind.â
She knows this because, well, Alice Zeimann is the type of person who knows these things. Already in 2023, Zeimann has flown from New Zealand to Southern California to Mexico to Southern California to Brazil to Southern California to the UK and, you guessed it, back to Southern California. She hasnât been home, to Mount Maunganui, a jewel of a coastal city in New Zealand, since she departed for a California-based training camp this past winter. She has no plans on a return flight home, either.
Such is life of a New Zealand professional beach volleyball player: Pack your bags, hit the road, and stay on it until there’s nothing left to play.
âHonestly I just turn up and play,â Zeimann said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. âI feel like this year, I canât think too much about it, Iâm just going to turn up and weâre going to win matches  ⌠We do have a bit of imposter syndrome with it, having the confidence to show up and be like âWe can compete.â â
Zeimann and her partner, Shaunna Polley, are the top-ranked team in New Zealand. If that doesnât sound like much of a noteworthy accomplishment, you arenât entirely wrong. Zeimann and Polley are currently ranked No. 31 in the world. The next Kiwi team? No. 135. And even thatâs not really accurate. After a 2022 season that featured just a single main draw, Olivia MacDonald and Jasmine Milton are no longer playing together. Which makes Zeimann and Polley the only New Zealand women’s team in the top 200.
That limited supply of talent, however, isn’t the only factor leading them to be the top New Zealand team. In 2021, Zeimannâs rookie year on the Beach Pro Tour, the two qualified for the main draw in all six tournaments in which they played. They won a gold medal in Portugal, took a fifth in Bulgaria despite Zeimann requiring an emergency trip and an IV at the local hospital, and closed the season with a fourth in the Brno two-star. By the end of 2022, they were in the main draw of an Elite16 in Torquay, Australia, where they upset Americans Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth. The 600 points they earned as a team in Torquay was the most of their partnership. Anyone watching that match, which was more New Zealand winning it than the Americans losing it would have been forced to reckon with the fact that New Zealand now boasted a legitimately competitive team on the Beach Pro Tour.
âI feel like weâre at the point now where weâre a mid-major team and sometimes we win, more often weâre not on podium. Weâre still in the proving-ourselves phase,â Zeimann said. âI think Americans have a good competitive mentality so easily. New Zealand is the head of the participation award. Itâs hard for us to have a killer mentality, but now itâs becoming more natural. Weâre competitive people, but itâs one thing to believe you can win against some of the teams on tour all of the time.â

The program is, make no mistake, on the rise. An influx of funding led Jason Lochhead, one of the best New Zealand players of all time, to return home to head the federationâs beach teams. No stranger to starting programs, Lochhead once built the Vanuatu federation from scratch, led Chaim Schalk and Ben Saxton to an Olympic berth in 2016 and an eventual top-10 world ranking, and helped Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena to a second Olympic Games as a team in Tokyo. While the menâs portion of the New Zealand federation was set back by the retirement of its most talented blocker in Sam OâDea, the women, with Zeimann and Polley, have an immediate contender to medal on the Beach Pro Tour and qualify for the Paris Olympic Games.
âI feel really fortunate to come into the program, after college, at the right time where Jason was freed up to coach us again and we also got funding from HP Sport in New Zealand,â said Zeimann, a 24-year-old who played indoors at Minnesota and beach at Florida State.
And, of course, just when the timing was perfect, the pieces in placeâŚPolley got hurt. Such is sports. A niggling, in Kiwi parlance, ankle injury proved more than niggling, and the two had to pull out of both Challenge events in Brazil, leaving Zeimann to train on her own with Lochhead, or partnered with her good friend Lisa Reed, or coach Dan Waineraich, or whomever she could find.
âItâs really frustrating for her and the unknowns of the rehab process. For me when weâre overseas itâs pretty rough because you do feel adrift and your whole routine and pulling out of events is rough,â Zeimann said. âWe couldnât play Brazil. I really had to focus on the good things a lot. It wasnât anyoneâs fault. Itâs just the situation. Weâve been lucky the last two years. We havenât had anything thatâs really interrupted our flow.â

Which is remarkable when you think about it. When Polley and Zeimann first hit the road in 2021, Zeimann had only one year of prep on the beach, during the COVID-shortened 2020 season with Florida State. She had zero points to her name. Their first tournament was in Rwanda, a difficult place to travel and compete. Zeimann had no real idea of what life on the Beach Pro Tour looked like and then saw and felt nothing else until they flew home months later, a successful season complete.
âEvery year itâs like that, and itâs getting better, but I definitely learned a lot with not getting sick of each other, how to develop our friendship and professional relationship, how to cope with losing, all of that,â Zeimann said. âThis is our third year now as a partnership and now I know whatâs going on and how to be and what needs to happen.â
Polleyâs ankle is coming along. They will be ready to compete at the Asian Championships June 23-26, in Fuzhou, China. Theyâll be on the cusp of making the Gstaad Elite16 qualifier, as well as the main draw in Challenges in Portugal and Canada. At some point, maybe even in 2023, sheâll return to New Zealand.
âThe days blur together. But itâs just one of those things where you gotta do what you gotta do and Iâm really fortunate to have a great training camp here, great practice partners, great sand, good weather,â Zeimann said. âIt could be worse.â
It could be worse because Alice Zeimann is the type of person who knows that, yes, it could be worse than playing beach volleyball for a living, traveling the world, having friends with couches and extra beds to stay on all over the planet, from Gstaad to Hermosa Beach. Just as she is the type of person who knows that when you leave New Zealand in the winter and donât plan on returning until ⌠winter ⌠things might very well go wrong, and sometimes there just isnât much you can do about those things.
âWherever the wind takes us,â she said of her winding and still very much upcoming 2023 season. âWherever the cheapest flights are.â
