Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth set out to “rewrite the script.” They’ve done just that.

HERMOSA BEACH, California — They sat in silence for a moment. A warm and welcome silence that is heavy for all of the proper reasons. A silence we should all most want to feel one day, though only the truly exceptional of us shall ever know.

It was an otherwise sleepy, drizzly Friday in January, a day no one would have marked down as one of any significance on the beach volleyball calendar. Kristen Nuss, Taryn Kloth, and their coach, Drew Hamilton, piled into their Nissan Kicks rental following a meeting at the USA Volleyball offices in Torrance, and they all simply sat for a beat, allowing the gravity of the last hour of conversation to settle in.

They had met with USA Volleyball Director Sean Scott and various other members of the staff. Scott gave them a brief but detailed rundown of this summer’s Paris Olympic Games: here are how many athletes will be attending, that is where the village is located, here are the mockups of the beach volleyball staging, these are your options for transportation. And then he delivered the final bit of news: Their last finish of the season, a gold medal at the Beach Pro Tour Finals, one in which they didn’t even earn any Olympic qualification points, counted as one of the 12 requisite events a team must play in order to qualify for the 2024 Olympic Games.

Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth were going to the Olympics.

They had already known it, from a logical perspective. The point gap between them and Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles, the third-ranked American team, was almost a mathematical impossibility to be overcome. But until Scott informed Nuss and Kloth that they didn’t even need to play a single event this season prior to this summer’s Games, that they had already punched their ticket, they hadn’t yet acknowledged it in their hearts.

So they sat in that little Kicks, the moment growing heavy and warm as a Louisiana summer day.

“We legit can say we qualified?” Nuss asked no one in particular. “What just happened? Did it just get real, real?’ It got real, real.”

It’s real, real: Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, perhaps the most unlikely team in the sport of beach volleyball, a 5-foot-6 dynamo as ferocious as she is diminutive, and a 6-foot-4 26-year-old from a state far more known for its snow and distinctive lack of beaches, are going to the Olympic Games.

And they’ll be doing so as a favorite to medal.

“I’m from Louisiana, I’m small, and I’m going to beat you.”

Unlike many current professionals, beach volleyball was actually a somewhat regular feature of Kristen Nuss’ childhood. Her half-brother, Pete, 19 years her elder, played up and down and all over the southeast in the late 1990s and early 2000s, competing in open tournaments for cash everywhere from Texas to Florida. On Sundays when the AVP Tour was in season, their television would be tuned to NBC, which aired the men’s and women’s finals of whatever tournament the AVP happened to be playing that weekend.

Unlike many current professionals, Nuss never has had — and still does not — a player to which she could compare or model her game.

The runt of the Nuss litter, Kristen is on the receiving end of her parents’ similarly small stature. George and Audrey Nuss passed down many genetic gifts to their children, namely an otherworldly coordination and competitive streak. Height is not one of them. They stand 5-foot-6 and 5-foot-4, respectively, and Kristen inherited every last diminutive genetic component.

“We all joke that I am very proportional. I didn’t get lucky,” Nuss said. “I don’t have long arms or anything. I’m 5-6 in everything.”

Being a 5-foot-6 athlete in a sport where you are required to hit a ball over a 7-foot-4 net, not to mention a blocker reaching much higher than that, has its obvious challenges, though Nuss has found the the worst of them to be that, as she was learning the game, she couldn’t find a single example of another volleyball player that small. Every time she would see a defender who looked to be on the shorter side, Nuss would immediately search her height. And every single time, she’d come away disappointed.

Misty May-Treanor? 5-foot-9. Brooke Sweat? 5-8. Larissa Maestrini? 5-9. Laura Ludwig? 5-10.

Try as she might, Nuss could find no prior precedent.

“Every defender I’d look up who looked a little short was 5-8 and I was like ‘Gosh darn it, there are no 5-6 people out there,’ ” Nuss said. Not only is Nuss the only current example of a player 5-foot-6 or smaller who is competing at the highest level of the sport, she’s one of the only players in the history of beach volleyball to do so.

Of the 100 women with seven professional wins or more in their careers, just four, including Nuss, who ranks No. 56 all-time with 11 victories, stand 5-foot-6 or below. Two — Nina Matthies and Kathy Hanley — played when the court was one meter wider and two meters longer than the current 8-by-16-meter dimensions of the modern era. Being faster, quicker, and more coordinated was a more premium skill than the size that is demanded on today’s more compact playing area. The only relevant comparable is Brazilian legend Shelda Bede, a two-time Olympic silver medalist in 2000 and 2004 who was twice voted the world’s best defensive player and entered the International Volleyball Hall of Fame in 2010, when Nuss was 13 years old.

But Bede never played on the AVP Tour. She never appeared on an NBC telecast.

For all Nuss knew, there wasn’t a single example of a player her height who had accomplished anything of significance.

“I do have a little chip on my shoulder that I gotta do it for all the 5-6ers out there watching,” Nuss said with a laugh.

Those who know her well are not surprised. Not in the least. This is Kristen Nuss, after all, “the best female athlete in the family,” Pete likes to joke.

It is Pete’s perspective on his sister that is one of the most valuable in understanding Kristen. The 19-year age gap between the two put him and Kristen in less of a brother-sister role and more of a close uncle and niece. It was Pete who kept an eye on Kristen, as a baby and toddler, crawl or walk into the backyard and watch him and his buddies playing basketball and volleyball. When she was old enough, she began hopping in with the boys.

“And she was good,” Pete said. “In grammar school, she outpaced all the boys in the mile run as a third grader. You saw the athleticism at a young age.”

It was Pete who coached Kristen’s youth basketball team, one that was mixed with boys and girls. And it was Pete, a competitor himself, who would draw up game-winning plays not for future NFL tight end Foster Moreau, a teammate of Kristen’s, but his little sister, who had this uncanny knack, even at 9 and 10 years old, to deliver when the moment demanded it.

“She could have done anything she wanted to athletically,” Pete said. “She could have played in the WNBA if she wanted. It’s crazy and just a tribute to her athleticism.”

It wouldn’t be the last time she outperformed a future NFL star in an athletic contest. That would come at LSU, the only school Kristen ever wanted to attend.

The only school that gave her a legitimate shot.

It was Pete, a genial, fast-talking southerner, who got into the ear of LSU beach volleyball coach Russell Brock around the summer of 2014. The two had played together for years, from the Fudpucker four-man in Fort Walton Beach to doubles tournaments in Houston. When Pete told Brock he had to take a look at his little sister, Brock “knew where she was coming from so it wasn’t a surprise that she would be great within our program, but you couldn’t have known at the time that she would be one of the best defenders in the world,” he said.

“You could see the things that were special in her and know right away that this kid’s going to be great. But to extrapolate to wherever she’s ranked as a defender, you’d be hard-pressed to say that’s a no-brainer. That’s a huge leap from I just started playing this sport to you’re 5-6 and going to become one of the greatest beach volleyball players in the world.”

Brock knew, from the measurables, that Nuss was going to be a valuable member of the team. Already a proven winner, Nuss won three state championships for Mount Carmel Academy and was a Gatorade Player of the Year candidate. Her height had never been a concern, tallying more than 1,000 career kills, a number surpassed only by her 1,831 digs. She was quicksilver fast and jumpy. Her coordination was off the charts. Her reaction time would eventually become the fastest measured in the entire university, faster, even, than future NFL star wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase. But as Brock quickly found out, it is what you cannot measure with any stopwatch or vertical ladder or shuttle drill that makes Kristen Nuss so special.

“One of the things I’ve always been astounded by,” he said, “is her ability to win.”

Nuss and Claire Coppola, her first partner at LSU, were winning so much in practice before their freshman season in 2017 that Brock figured what the heck, “let’s see how good these kids can be. And they immediately just started winning and beating people they had no business beating. You saw that in a competitive environment that there was no backdown. She doesn’t shy away from anything. She’s going to do whatever it takes and lean into her training and trust what she knows and more often than not, she’s going to pull it out.”

They won 27 matches that first year. Then 31 the next, a season in which they’d be named the first All-American beach volleyball players in LSU history. They upped it to 34 wins as juniors, setting a new program record, and capped it off by winning the USAV Collegiate Beach Championship.

It wasn’t just Coppola whom Nuss would win with. During LSU’s annual pre-season intrasquad Purple and Gold scrimmage, Nuss would “routinely take the player that is most challenged to be great and go undefeated with that player against the rest of the team,” Brock said. “That player had no business to beat the players they were beating, but Kristen had the ability to make that player so much better than she could have ever been on her own, and that’s a special gift she has. And when she can make great players greater, that’s going to give her the chance to get all these wins we’re talking about.

“If it was just the measurables, she would be good but she couldn’t be great. The thing that pushes her over the top are all the things that you can’t put a tape measure on or can’t put a stopwatch on or put a value to. The more you watch her, the more obvious they are, but you will never be able to measure them.”

“She has that mentality where she goes ‘I’m from Louisiana, I’m small, and I’m going to beat you.’ ”

She can even beat you with a 6-foot-4 outside hitter from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who had never before touched a beach volleyball.

Taryn Kloth, and the “stupid street sign” that changed everything

Taryn Kloth has never been to Pebble Beach. Never played one of the most famous golf courses in the world, and that golf course has certainly never hosted a beach volleyball event of any kind. And yet the two disparate sports, and an individual who has never stepped foot on its grounds, are forever inextricably linked.

In the winter of 2020, Kloth, an All-American at Creighton, had a decision to make. Her 2019 season at LSU, her first competing in beach volleyball after a lifetime of success indoors, had been largely miserable.

“I’m used to hitting the crap out of the ball every single time, and then I went to the beach, training in the sand, and I would hit every single ball into the middle of the net or below it, and it was embarrassing,” Kloth said. “I remember thinking ‘These people all think I suck. I know it.’ I couldn’t set a ball to save my life. They were like ‘Square up!’ But I had no idea what that meant. I was so, so unbelievably frustrated my first year. I was mentally overwhelmed and just trying to be OK with where I was.”

She mostly rode the bench, the first time in her life that had happened. When she was on the court, LSU coach Russell Brock buried her deep in the lineup, on court 4, where she finished 18-9, a respectable enough number but not one in which Kloth drew any satisfaction. Worse than those nine losses, she didn’t make LSU’s NCAA Championship roster. That winter, she had to decide if she would take her final year of eligibility on the beach at LSU or turn professional and return to indoor, where teams in Germany, France, and Italy were calling, as was USA national team coach Karch Kiraly.

The choice seemed obvious: “Yes!” she told Kiraly. “Get me out of the sand.”

A friend called, asked her what she was going to do. Something was still nagging in the back of Kloth’s mind.

While indoor was the clear choice, the smart choice, the safe choice, was it the right one?

“I don’t like to quit,” Kloth said. “I’ll do anything to get to where I want to be.”

Sitting out of the NCAA Championships gnawed at Kloth. Was she, the All-American outside hitter, really that bad that she couldn’t make LSU’s starting lineup? Her friend made a simple recommendation: “Go on a walk. Go on a walk with God.”

Off she went, on a cold and frigid stroll in the middle of another brutal South Dakota winter. When she turned off Country Club Avenue, she noticed a single street lit up by the sun.

The street’s name?

Pebble Beach Road.

“I said ‘All right, I’m going to go play beach,’ ” Kloth said. “And it might have been just a stupid street sign, but that was my sign.”

Mike Kloth, Taryn’s father, still chuckles at that memory. A large man bursting with life, Mike defied enough of his own expectations that he knew better to anticipate his daughter doing anything less. Raised on a dairy farm in Nebraska, Mike played basketball for the University of South Dakota, becoming the first in his family to attend college, much less play a sport at university. So while indoor was perhaps the more certain path for his daughter, Mike never attempted to sway her one way or the other.

When Taryn walked onto Pebble Beach Road and told her father she’d be returning to LSU, he nodded, helped pack up their Ford Escape, bought a one-way ticket back, “and it was like ‘Well, here you go, hope the beach thing works out. They’re taking a chance on you,’ ” Mike said. “She’s always been one of those kids who is driven. You never had to dangle a carrot. It was always ‘What can I bite off next? That carrot was good. Give me 10 more.’ It was crazy to think five years ago, the odds of dropping a kid off and saying ‘Yeah, go be good at throwing the javelin.’ She did play volleyball before so that’s probably not a fair comparison but for things to develop this fast in five years, it’s kind of mind-boggling.”

Drew Hamilton, then LSU’s assistant beach volleyball coach, had plans for that 2020 season, plans that only got bigger when Kloth, with a full year of beach training on her legs, returned to the lineup. Since 2017, he had targeted 2020 as the year LSU would win its first NCAA Championship in beach volleyball. With Nuss and Coppola arguably the best team in the United States and an armada of other talents in Toni Rodriguez, Kelli Greene-Agnew, Kahlee York, Ashlyn Rasnick-Pope, Jess Schaben, Sydney Moore, Olivia Powers and Hunter Domanski, among others, they were primed to finally put an end to the Southern California supremacy long held by USC and UCLA.

Out they marched to a 12-2 record, earning the No. 1 ranking for the first time. Everything was in place, just as Hamilton had foreseen. Until a pandemic whose five-letter acronym, COVID, would soon become known worldwide, spread across the globe. The NCAA, like every other sporting organization, canceled the remainder of the season due to COVID-19 concerns. LSU’s NCAA Championship hopes were canceled with it.

“Not to say we would have won, but we were the favorites,” Hamilton said. “Everyone was crushed, and in our final team meeting, I was crying, everyone was crying, it was a nightmare.”

Sometimes, however, it is a nightmare that must precede the dream.

“We want to get insane.”

Drew Hamilton was not one to forge personal relationships with his players at LSU. While he took note of Kristen Nuss’ preternatural ability to dig a volleyball in ways a human shouldn’t, or admired the pace with which Taryn Kloth was learning the beach game, he didn’t pay much attention to their personal lives.

“They were just volleyball robots for me at school,” he said.

So he didn’t notice that Nuss, his court 1 defender, had become friends with Kloth, his court 4 blocker, during the COVID-shortened 2020 season, a truncated year in which Nuss finished 12-2 and Kloth 14-0. With the season finished, school flipped to remote learning, tournaments canceled, and life fully entering a bizarre new phase, Nuss and Kloth turned to the only element of their life that could potentially stay somewhat the same: beach volleyball.

Like anyone else on that LSU team, Nuss and Kloth knew that 2020 had been perhaps their best shot at a national title. They felt robbed.

They doubled down.

In late March, Nuss and Kloth approached Hamilton, knowing the one-word key to his heart. It’s a word he uses to describe the elite of the elite, six letter than can properly sum up the gold-medal winning defense of a Misty May-Treanor, or the jump-serve of an April Ross, or the sixth-sense for all things volleyball of a Duda Lisboa.

Insane.

“Drew,” they told him, “we want to get insane.”

His interest was piqued. Still: To become insane is not a task for the timid.

“Are you sure?”

“We’ll do everything you tell us to do, no questions asked.”

“This sounds fun.”

Hamilton wasted no time, nor did he soften his directives. Their diets at college? Had to go. Their physical composition? Leaner.

Off the court, he designed a nutrition and workout regimen. While the rest of the world was shut inside doing Zoom meetings, binging Netflix and filming at-home workouts to post on social media, Hamilton, Nuss and Kloth would go to Mango’s, a beach volleyball venue and bar in Baton Rouge, and practice. For hours and hours, repping and repping and repping like they had never repped before.

“They changed quickly,” Hamilton said. “Physically, volleyball wise, they were just different people.”

How quickly? By July, there wasn’t a single team in America who could beat them. They traveled to wherever tournaments were being held — Atlantic City, Nashville, Wilmington, Tampa, and New Orleans.

They won every tournament they entered.

When the NCAA granted athletes an extra year of eligibility, Kloth and Nuss decided to return, bringing Hamilton back with them. Now Kloth, once so raw and frustrated she was benched for LSU’s biggest matches in 2019, resembled something of an elite beach volleyball player.

“She changed quickly because the amount of reps and the specificity of everything we were doing and technique and then the gym and the nutrition, she changed a lot physically,” Hamilton said. “She was able to jump a lot better, she got a lot more mobile. By the time they went back, she was playing at a much better level. So much of it is technical aspects that you don’t have to be perfect, but if you can be technically sound enough that nothing catastrophic happens, because when indoor players come out, you can be like ‘whoaaa look what she’s capable of’ and also ‘oh my God, what is that?’ I truly believe just the amount of boring, mundane reps, technically and physically, all the catastrophic just went away. She didn’t need to be perfect, she just needed to be good, over and over again. With her physical attributes, good for her is top tier in the world.”

Nuss had already proven she was top-tier in the NCAA world. With a more refined Kloth at the net, she became unbeatable. That spring, Kloth and Nuss wouldn’t lose a single match on court one. Midway through the season, Nuss — underrecruited, 5-foot-6 Kristen Nuss — would become the winningest NCAA player of all-time.

By NCAA standards, they were certifiably insane.

They went back to work.

“They graduated and we went back to our normal life,” Hamilton said.

It was a life that resembled something out of a wholesome beach volleyball sitcom. Kloth and Nuss moved in with Hamilton and his wife, Mary, and every day became the same, sublime, volleyball-filled day.

“They were living here. I was cooking, making them breakfast and lunch, my wife would make them dinner, it was like family, chillin,” Hamilton said. “It was like having kids or younger siblings, it was a really cool dynamic. It was great, it was super cool. We’d wake up, go the gym, come home and eat lunch, go to Mango’s, watch Ted Lasso or whatever. It was our life. It was cool.”

Three months after graduation, at the AVP Atlanta Gold Series, Nuss and Kloth made their professional debut. It was their first real opportunity to prove that they were more than a college team. It was one thing to run the table in the NCAA, and still another to continue sweeping all of the semi-professional tournaments, as they had done in the early summer of 2021, winning in New Orleans, Huntington Beach, Waupaca, and Atlantic City. But in Atlanta? With every major professional team, save for recent Olympic gold medalists April Ross and Alix Klineman, in the lineup?

That would be the true litmus test.

Anyone who had followed the NCAA season knew they could compete. But there may have only been one person in America who thought Nuss and Kloth had a legitimate shot at winning: Drew Hamilton.

“I knew when they walked out there that no team would be able to stop them from scoring,” he said. “I assumed they would just walk through it because nobody can stop them from siding out, and it happened.”

Nuss and Kloth made quick work of the qualifier, allowing neither team to score more than 14 points in a set. Then they did virtually the same to those in the main draw. They swept third-seeded Sara Hughes and Brandie Wilkerson, upset sixth-seeded Terese Cannon and Molly Turner, authored another over seventh-seeded Megan Rice and Sarah Schermerhorn, knocked out Cannon and Turner with another win in the semifinals, and then shocked Olympians Kelly Cheng and Sarah Sponcil in a rollicking, 21-12, 19-21, 16-14 final that provided the foundation for beach volleyball’s youngest new rivalry.

In eight matches and a single tournament, the AVP world was put on notice: There was a new elite team in America.

Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth were, indeed, insane.

With a new Olympic race set to begin quickly for Paris, and only one summer to test their talents outside of the AVP, it was worth wondering: Could that same success translate overseas?

“Here’s the thing: I’m playing with her.”

There is no way of measuring this, but it is possible that the most well-known term and skill in the sport of volleyball, be it played on a beach or indoors, is the spike.

Kristen Nuss cannot spike.

Not really, anyway. At 5-foot-6, she shoots, dinks, slaps, cuts, carves, pokes, slivers, chisels and finesses her way through matches. The closest professional equivalent in sports may be Greg Maddux, an eight-time All Star pitcher in the MLB whose fastball famously averaged 86 miles per hour later in his career. He couldn’t overpower hitters, as many in today’s MLB do.

He could only be perfect with his precision.

There’s a reason Maddux is an outlier: What he was able to do, with relatively limited physical power, is an anomaly. Anything less than perfect was punished.

There’s a reason there are just two players among the top 60 teams in the world who stand 5-foot-6 or less: No. 2 Kristen Nuss, and Japan’s Asami Shiba, No. 58. The international game of beach volleyball is more physical than that of its American counterpart. The blockers are bigger, the swings more powerful, the game faster. Shots are changeups, not the main — and certainly not only — manner of attack. For Nuss to play her shot-centric game on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, “she has to be perfect,” Hamilton said.

And even Hamilton, whose admiration for Nuss knows no bounds, had his doubts if she could sustain perfection.

“I told her a long time ago that I don’t know if you’re going to be able to do this, but in my opinion this is the only way you’re going to side out at an elite level,” Hamilton said. “You’re going to have to do these very specific things, and you’re going to have to do them over and over and over, and I don’t know if you can, because it’s going to be really hard.”

Don’t know if she can? Kristen Nuss?

How many times had she heard that?

How many times had that served as the ignition to the powder keg of competitiveness within her?

Will Nuss ever win an on-paper, measurable contest with any other beach volleyball player in the world? Never. But what one cannot measure is atoned for with her apparently limitless intangibles, the skills and attributes for which there are no metrics, for which there is just a simple phrase that has become one of Hamilton’s favorite sentences: “Nuss being Nuss.”

“Her mental ability to process, it’s unbelievable. It’s as much mental as physical when it comes to how she plays the game,” Hamilton said. “You can’t teach the ability to do it over and over and over again and to process what’s happening. You have to find someone with the right mentality and mental fervor and go from there. I don’t think you can take someone without her mental ability to process this game. You can’t teach it.”

While Nuss was still at LSU, it was a regular occurrence for Russell Brock to watch a play. Then watch it again. Pause, rewind, think for a moment, and watch it again. A dozen times if necessary and still, he couldn’t fathom how in the world Kristen Nuss had pulled off the magic trick she just did.

“Things like her hand contact, some of the plays that she makes, you have to stop and rewind and go ‘How did that happen?’ That is incredibly unique where she can use parts of her body that you shouldn’t be able to use to create angle and trajectory on balls or just predicting and redirecting balls that come off the tape and go the other way or balls that get blocked and do something crazy,” Brock said. “Her eye-hand control to hit the right part of the ball with the right force for another touch to be made. Offensively, it’s the same thing. Her ability to craft and create is magical, hitting cut shots to the short court from 10 feet off the net. You can’t really teach that, you just have to be able to do it, you have to trust your body to create those opportunities.”

In March of 2022, when Nuss and Kloth made their international debut, at a Futures in Coolangatta, Australia, the world was about to see, for the first time, the immeasurable skill of the measurably diminutive defender. Word had made the leap overseas that there was a talented American pair making its way up the rankings. But when Nuss and Kloth took the court for the first time, eyebrows were raised, more than a few doubts cast into the air.

The future of American beach volleyball was…the short one?

Indeed, the short one.

Just as Kloth and Nuss did at their AVP debut in Atlanta seven months prior, they ran through the field in their international debut, winning seven straight matches and a gold medal while dropping just a single set. Two tournaments later, they’d bring home another gold, this one at a Challenge in Kusadasi, Turkey, where they stunned 2021 Olympic silver medalists Mariafe Artacho and Taliqua Clancy in the finals.

“Generally, the thought process was ‘Yeah they’re good, but once we get enough film on them, once there’s enough information, it’s too hard for them to continue to be as good as they’re going to be,’ ” Brock said. “They have to be so perfect.”

Their near-perfect streak ended in Türkiye: a rash of fifths — five in the final six events of the Beach Pro Tour season — closed their international rookie seasons. With qualifying for the Paris Olympics set to begin in February of 2023, Nuss and Kloth could have played with whomever they chose, and both, at one point, had offers from players who could have been considered the best in the world at their respective positions.

Neither gave it a second thought.

“OK, here’s the thing,” Kloth is wont to say whenever someone highlights her success on the beach, “I’m playing with her.”

And together, they have formed the rarest of combination in the sport of beach volleyball: A legitimate team.

“I wanted to rewrite the script.”

Pete Nuss has been following the AVP Tour for, by his estimate, three decades. He has witnessed, in person, the uninterrupted dominance of Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes. Watched Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos, the winningest duo of all-time, from beachside seats. Heard the trash talk of Tim Hovland and the eerie silence of the subtle killer in Mike Dodd.

Until the AVP Chicago Gold Series of 2023, he had never seen anything like what Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth have done to beach volleyball. A correction, perhaps, is required: Pete Nuss had never heard anything like what he heard as his little sister and her big partner played Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson in the finals for the second straight year.

As the two teams, both ranked in the top five in the world, battled it out on center court, dig for dig, block for block, kill for kill, chants began to rain down: TKN! TKN! TKN!

Pete was floored.

“I’ve been around the AVP for 30 years. I’ve played, watched it, I’ve never seen that,” Pete said. “They’ve never had a team. Karch and Kent, Sinjin and Randy — I was a ball boy when they were playing. They were iconic. But there was no team name. They weren’t branded. You cheered for Sinjin or you cheered for Randy. It was more of an individualized sport. What they’re doing right now, it’s amazing. I was in awe in Chicago in the stadium with the whole crowd chanting TKN.”

Beach volleyball is technically a team sport, but the reality is, it is mostly two individuals temporarily tethered together. Rare is the team that makes a name bigger than the sum of its individual parts.

Nuss and Kloth have done that, and the reasons why are as myriad as they are confounding.

Go through the list of American Olympic medalists, peruse the AVP rankings, and what you will find is a nearly invariable common denominator: Southern California. There is not a single prior precedent for a professional beach volleyball player having massive — or any — success on the international stage while living outside of the confines of the sport’s Mecca.

Nuss was no stranger to that fact.

It’s exactly why she never considered moving.

If she were going to build a career in beach volleyball, she was going to do so from where she was raised: New Orleans, Louisiana.

“Even when I wanted to play professionally, before we even talked about playing together, I always loved to rewrite the script, and the short card comes into that, but I wanted to rewrite the script in that you don’t have to be in California, you can just stay and train wherever you want, you don’t have to constantly train with the top people,” Nuss said. “Taryn always rolls her eyes because I did say at the beginning that I wanted to rewrite the script, and we’ve sort of accomplished that in a way.”

How they have done what they have done, in a state that is passionate about the sport but notably lacking in high-level talent, remains one of beach volleyball’s most vexing topics. Rather than train in Hermosa or Manhattan Beach with and against the best teams in the world, they have stayed in Baton Rouge, practicing with a pair of junior girls, Anna and Ava Koel.

“Kristen is incredibly stubborn, so if she has a goal or a mindset or her mind made up, the more people that doubt that, it’s just going to make her work that much harder,” Hamilton said. “She didn’t want to leave her home, she wanted to stay here.”

Hamilton wasn’t going to leave home, either. If Nuss and Kloth wanted to stay, he’d make it work. In fact, in Hamilton’s mind, and soon Kloth’s as well, there’s an undeniable benefit to being on the beach volleyball island that is Louisiana.

“Kristen wanted to show that you don’t have to go to California, not everybody has the means to do so. Not everyone wants to go there and struggle financially just so they can be there and pursue volleyball,” Hamilton said. “We’ve never understood it because we’ve never had people to compete against. We’re just trying to get better at specific skills and very specific situational things on the court and we can do that anywhere we are, really. If they don’t execute well enough in a game, they come back and we just try to get better at them. It’s one of the things I’m most excited about is that was always her goal. It proved there’s another way it can be done and she’s done that. It’s very exciting for her to prove that.”

Unconventional, to be sure, but is any further proof needed?

Nuss and Kloth exceeded even the loftiest of expectations Hamilton had of them. When the 2023 season, and Olympic race, began last February, he was confident they would qualify for Paris. He just didn’t expect them to qualify in the manner in which they did.

“I thought they would fifth their way there,” he said. “That was my original gameplan.”

And then they went out and won seven medals in 12 events, the most decorated season an American team has had since Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross won nine in 2016. Nuss’ jaw nearly dropped to the floor when she heard the company she was in after their final medal of 2023, a remarkable gold at the Beach Pro Tour Finals in Doha this past December that took them from the doldrums to the mountaintop.

“That is just absolutely unreal,” Nuss said in the moments after their win. “We love, we take so much pride, representing our country, so to be in that category with those names, I think everyone in the beach community knows those names, it’s just amazing. It’s a credit to the work ethic that we put in and our coach back home, thanks Drew [Hamilton] and just all the support we get. Just those names — wow.”

Bigger than the win itself was how, and why, it happened at all. The first two matches of pool play — losses to Brazil’s Victoria Lopes and Taina Silva and Australia’s Mariafe Artacho and Taliqua Clancy — were some of the worst volleyball Nuss and Kloth had played in their partnership. “Bizarre” was the only word Hamilton had for it. In order to advance from pool play and into the playoff rounds, they needed not just a win over the Netherlands’ Raisa Schoon and Katja Stam, Olympians both and a top-10 team in the world, but a drubbing to clinch the second spot on point differential.

The conversation the two had following the loss to Australia was described by both as the hardest of either of their lives.

“One of my least favorite conversations ever,” Kloth said. “It was so scary. Both of us were on edge and neither of us were happy and we weren’t playing well and everything seemed to be crumbling at the wrong time. But you know how in marriage counseling they’re like ‘We’re never going to bring up divorce. We might be having problems, but we’re never going to threaten divorce.’ I’m never going to go to Kristen and say ‘I’m going to break up with you.’ I don’t have that worry and she doesn’t have that worry. We’re in this together and the only way we’re going to figure it out is working through it together.”

It’s why Hamilton, bizarre as Nuss’ and Kloth’s play may have been, was never concerned.

“I think you would be hard-pressed in the history of the sport, at any level, to find two people, when they’re on the court, their only focus is doing their absolute best because they want the other one to be successful,” he said. “I don’t know how or where you would ever find that in our sport, especially at the professional level, and genuinely if something happened to one of them, I don’t believe the other one would continue the sport. They just want to be there to try and help the other one succeed. It’s cool just to be a part of. I can just tell from their reactions after a loss. That just crushes them. The one that plays bad feels terrible because they made the other one lose, and the other one is like ‘I didn’t set her well enough, I should have done more.’ It’s unreal. Never is there finger pointing. When one is unsuccessful, the other is thinking they didn’t do enough to help them.”

That night, after their talk, Nuss pulled out her iPad and wrote a single, declarative sentence: They were going to leave Doha as the 2023 Beach Pro Tour Finals champions.

Two days later, they did, ending a most extraordinary season on the most extraordinary of notes: Sealing an Olympic bid they didn’t even realize they had.

“It’s always about them as people.”

Mike Kloth didn’t get on a plane for the first time until he was in high school. Even then, it was a small trip, Nebraska to Seattle.

“It was this big thing, oh my gosh,” he said. Now here is his daughter, jetsetting across the globe, playing beach volleyball in one postcard destination after another. For all of Taryn’s successes, he only has one simple reminder: Don’t forget where you came from.

Neither the Kloths nor the Nusses need worry.

While success has a long and notorious habit of changing people, it has not done so to Kristen and Taryn.

During COVID, when college coaches were seeking any manner to fill the days with productive time, Ryan Meek, one of Taryn’s  indoor coaches at Creighton, asked if she could do a Zoom with his High Point team.

“At the time, a lot of our girls were like ‘Oh, cool, she’s talking to us’ and weren’t super aware of who she was,” he said. “Then she went undefeated in college and now when I’m talking to my girls about Taryn, they’re well aware of who she is. It’s like watching a band grow up. I knew this indie band who now is huge. When I do talk to her she’s still the same person. That hasn’t changed at all.”

Meek and Kloth still speak occasionally, when their busy schedules allow. Meek will want to know about Kloth, her travels, her successes, the beach world. Kloth will unfailingly shift the conversation back to Meek.

“She’ll ask how my dog is doing,” Meek said, laughing. “She’s one of the sweetest athletes I’ve ever coached. She’s one of those kids who actually asks you how your day was. Most kids think you just live in the gym and you don’t go home and you’re not a person. Taryn would actually engage with you.”

It is that very trait that the world has seemed to take note of.

When Hamilton, Nuss and Kloth were in California for their annual month-long training camp this past January and February, Hamilton was stopped on a number of occasions from fans who wanted to talk about his team. To Hamilton’s surprise, not a single time did someone bring up anything volleyball related. It wasn’t Nuss’ defense they wished to discuss, or Kloth’s sharp angle swings, or their success in 2023, or the upcoming Olympics.

They wished only to commend Nuss and Kloth for who they are as human beings.

“It’s pretty unbelievable that these two random people from across the country sort of won over California in a way, which is mind blowing,” Hamilton said. “People were coming up to me and what everyone says about the girls is ‘Oh my gosh, I love your girls. I saw them here and they did this for my daughter.’ Or ‘They’re just so nice.’ Or ‘They’re so easy to root for.’ Those are the kind of comments that I hear from people. I love that so much. Obviously they’re good at volleyball, but I never hear ‘Oh my gosh they’re so good at volleyball.’ It’s always about them as people. That was the most refreshing, exciting thing to hear. I’ll never forget it. They’re just trying to show that you can do things differently and they’re carrying themselves differently to an extent. The fact that it’s infecting people everywhere, it makes me happy.”

It is easy to see why. Every December, Nuss and Kloth will reach out to the Kenner Community Center, who will provide Christmas wish lists for families in need. To fund the effort, Nuss and Kloth hold an annual beach day, featuring cornhole and various beach volleyball tournaments.

This past year, they raised more than $20,000.

“We just want to keep it going and it brings the community together and we see people who have been following us,” Nuss said. “Just giving back to the community and spending time with them is something we enjoy.”

It is traits such as these that so endears Russell Brock, their coach at LSU. He loves their success, yes. Loves their medals. Loves their wins and accolades and all of the other material trappings that come with it. But what he loves the most?

They’re still the same kids, forever known to their American peers on the AVP Tour as “the LSU Girls.”

“When I think about our program, that’s what we hope for. We hope that when people leave our program, they’re going to be successful in whatever they do, and most importantly, they’re going to be people who reflect well on our program: Those are the kinds of people who come out of LSU,” he said. “I’m super proud of how they play, but I’m more proud of how they carry themselves and how they respond to success. They have to make the decision that that’s going to be who they are, but when your identity isn’t the sport you play, then you have a chance to still remain humble, still remain grateful, still remain approachable, still remain joyful; all of the things you hope will stay really centers around when your identity isn’t a sport. They understand who they are and who their family is and those things that ground them are the things that define them as opposed to their wins and losses and world rank. It’s more impressive that they don’t let that go to their head.”

Now, with an Olympic bid to Paris sealed up, they will be representing more than LSU. Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth will be representing the United States of America on the biggest stage the sport has.

Since that January meeting with Sean Scott and USA Volleyball, it has settled in that such is their new reality: In four months’ time, they will be Olympians.

“Since then,” Nuss said, “in the past couple days, Drew will be like ‘Y’all qualified for the Olympics. Good job. Nice work. Let’s go to practice.’ ”