Betsi Flint, the Supermom of professional beach volleyball

MANHATTAN BEACH, California — Dawn has not yet broken on the morning of August 20. It is just before 5 a.m., that blurry time where, for some, it is late in the night and, for others it is early in the morning.

This is not an unusual time for Betsi Flint to be awake.

Her daughter, Cora, has never been much of a sleeper, which puts her 7 a.m. match, the earliest you will ever see on the AVP Tour, and Flint’s seventh total of the 2023 Manhattan Beach Open, directly in Flint’s wheelhouse.

Of the six players Flint will play that Sunday in Manhattan Beach, only Flint has changed diapers at 2 a.m., rocked a baby back to sleep numerous times throughout a night, lifted and competed and practiced regularly off of four hours of sleep (often less). Only Flint’s body has undergone the vast changes that come with having a baby, and only Flint has recovered from such a drastic shift, both physical and psychological.

Only Flint, in the deepest sense, knows what she is truly capable of — and make no mistake, she is capable of much.

“I’m a mom, I’m up at 5 a.m. with Cora so I was in my element ready to go,” Flint says. “Thriving. That’s my time, 5 a.m.”

So she heads out into the silent blackness of pre-dawn, into an awaiting tropical storm, prepared to do what few thought possible.

“All of a sudden I have this softness, this sweetness, this tenderness …”

Betsi Flint occupies a rare space in the world of professional beach volleyball: A mom who continues making her full-time living competing. On the AVP Tour, there are only two active mothers among the top-50 ranked players: Flint, and Aurora Davis. Expanding that list to the top 100 adds only two more. The reasons why are numerous, and many of these are obvious, beginning with the astonishing changes a woman’s body undergoes throughout a pregnancy, and the challenging and vexing recovery that comes after, not to mention the small matter of the added responsibility of raising another human being.

Perhaps more complex is what happens to a new mother’s mind: Will the competitive drive that fueled her to become one of the top players in the United States remain, or will it be diminished by a newfound, potentially overpowering maternal instinct?

For some — take Kerri Walsh Jennings, Laura Ludwig, and Agatha as examples, all of whom have enjoyed enormous success since having children — becoming a mom only fueled their drive, the general thinking being that they are now providing for another member of their family who relies exclusively upon their ability to win matches, earn prize money, and continue supporting their livelihoods. Winning could, from that lens, be viewed as doubly important. An extra life depended upon it.

For others, they will discover the edginess they once had prior to having their children has been chiseled and rounded into something softer, a once-hard exterior softened, not all that different from the tables and chairs and walls that will soon become baby-proofed throughout their homes.

“Before the baby I was this intense, fierce competitor. Not angry, but a little feisty. Without meaning to I probably gave a couple staredowns here and there, just having that fierceness, that edge,” Kim DiCello, an AVP champion said in 2019 as a new mother. “After having the baby, oh my gosh this flipped. All of a sudden I have this softness, this sweetness, this tenderness that I had no idea was in me. I don’t think anything else could have pulled it out other than having a baby.”

Flint, who admits she “plays better with that ‘F you’ mentality,” was curious about what impact having a child would have upon that proverbial and perpetual chip on her shoulder.

Would she still be the same killer she was?

“I was really worried about that when I got pregnant, if I was going to lose the competitive drive and just all the physicality,” she said.

There was, in retrospect, little reason to worry. When Flint had Cora in January of 2021, she didn’t slow down a single RPM. She even needed to enlist the help of her husband, Chase, a former basketball player at Loyola Marymount, to put a governor on her. Keep her from jumping back into full-time practice and lifting too soon. To remind her that it might be wise to allow her body to recover from the physical equivalent of major abdominal surgery and an emotional shift for which there is no equivalent.

“I wanted to come back, and I’m pretty determined so I knew it was going to happen,” Flint said. “But I thought it was going to be three months I’d be playing. I don’t know why I had this in my head, but it’s very challenging to be playing at a high level three months post-partum and not super safe for your body either. I came back around five-and-a-half or six months which is still pretty fast but I thought I went about it the right way. Chase was there to hold me back when I wanted to work out early on.”

An unexpected but recurring issue, Flint found, is that there is very little knowledge and education on how professional athletes who become mothers can safely return to sport. At Flint’s six-week post-partum checkup, Flint’s doctor told her she was fine to return to her normal workouts. But “normal” in this case referenced a normal human being, not a professional beach volleyball player who requires explosive vertical and lateral movements and whose body is constantly in strange and uncomfortable positions, lunging here, diving there, splitting and rolling and landing and spinning. When Flint, surprised but encouraged by the doctor’s green light, asked her pelvic floor therapist if she could, truly, return to lifting and practicing as was “normal” for her, her therapist wisely pumped the brakes.

“She said ‘Ah, I know your goals, this is a muscle, it’s not fully healed, you need to learn how to re-engage your core, because you lose your core the last half of pregnancy,’ “ Flint recalled of that conversation. “It was good to have her advising me and slow me down a little bit and it was worth it because my body’s felt great.”

“She’s a killer”

Emily Day had zero expectations when she and Flint rejoined as partners in the summer of 2021. Day, who had played with Flint from 2018-2020, had been competing with Sara Hughes, and after six mostly unsuccessful tournaments decided to split . When Flint told Day she’d be ready to compete in an AVP Next Gold Series in Atlantic City in July of 2021, barely five months after giving birth to Cora, Day hardly expected to win.

They hadn’t practiced once.

Day was flying straight from Switzerland. She told Flint that if anything felt wrong, if anything was amiss, if she felt the smallest twinge, she had no problem forfeiting. They had no plans for anything after Atlantic City, no commitment for the season, just two good friends getting on the court again.

And then they played five matches.

In one day.

In near triple-digit heat and dark and scorching sand that, at best, melted holes in players’ socks and, at worst, turned the bottoms of feet into a minefield of blisters.

“For her to have all of those matches and compete? That’s gnarly,” Day said, laughing. “She was ready to compete.”

When is she not?

There is a word that comes up frequently among Flint’s peers on the AVP Tour when describing the 31-year-old: Intense.

A quiet presence off the court, Flint doesn’t carry herself with the obvious, bombastic intensity of, say, a Trevor Crabb or Taylor Sander or Tri Bourne. There is, rather, a steely, smoldering furnace under the surface, one that can easily go unnoticed until you’re in the box with her.

“It’s tough to put into words,” Day said. “Tell Betsi she can’t do something and she’ll do it 10 times over in your face right away. Just the way that her mindset works and she had her mind made up that she was going to do it and there’s no stopping her once that happened.”

Even April Ross, one of the most competitive women to ever touch a beach volleyball, someone who had competed against Flint for years, was surprised at the depth of her intensity.

“She’s a killer,” said Ross, who coached Flint and Julia Scoles during the 2023 season while she was pregnant herself. “The way she thinks about things in matches that she verbalizes, it surprises me sometimes and that’s awesome. I want to be like that. She’s inspiring me to have a better mentality in certain situations, so I think I learned a lot from her and her intensity and how she applies it. It was really fun to see the way she approaches different situations, scenarios where she’s down, where she doesn’t think she’s playing well, if something pisses her off, it’s no mercy.

“It’s rare on the women’s side, at least to express it the way she expresses it. Who knows what some people are thinking but you can kinda feel it when people aren’t authentic, when they’re bubbly on the surface and you wonder if that’s really how you feel but Betsi, you can tell, she’s out to get you.”

This intensity, that killer instinct, helps explain how Flint was able to not just simply return to the court five months after having Cora, but to not miss a step. In fact, she may have come back even better than the pre-pregnancy version of herself. In Manhattan Beach that August, her second AVP tournament since becoming a mom, Flint and Day finished second, pushing Ross and Alix Klineman, fresh off an Olympic gold medal, to 20-22 in the second set of the finals.

“It was fun being back six or seven months post-partum,” Flint recalled, “and going ‘All right, I can do this.’

“That was cool.”

There is a picture Flint loves from that tournament. The Flints — Betsi, Chase, infant Cora — are off on a side court. Betsi leans over a Monster cooler, her sunglasses propped on her hat. She smiles a beatific smile, one that makes Cora, held by Chase, giggle at her mother. Chase offers the camera a candid, goofy dad look familiar to all dads who have become baby transportation vehicles, one of many invaluable roles Chase will play during tournament days, or any other day, really.

It’s an image of a mom fulfilled, an aspiration realized: Yes, she could continue doing what she loves, what she is world class at, maintaining a family built on a bedrock of love and trust, raising a child the best way they know how.

Yes, the Flints could have it all.

“I’ll cherish that picture forever and every year just taking a picture and seeing how much she’s grown,” Flint said. “That’s a big part of my why is to inspire her to chase her dreams and whatever that will be when she gets older.”

“I wanted them to see me following my dreams”

That’s part of the magic of becoming mom: The bigger picture gets immeasurably bigger. The purpose indescribably deeper.

It’s something only the mothers of children can truly know.

“I wanted to go out there and be an example to my kids,” said Nicole Branagh, a 2023 Beach Volleyball Hall of Fame inductee who competed while mothering a pair of children, Tegan and Will. “I wanted them to see me following my dreams and doing everything I could, working hard, putting in the time, and also be able to know that they’re the most important things.”

Branagh was one of the few examples Flint could look to of women who successfully returned to the beach after having a child. Remarkably, two years after Tegan was born, Branagh won the 2015 Chicago Open alongside Jenny Kropp, the mother of twins.

“Knowing we could compete, we can do this. Showing them that you can follow your dreams. That was my angle,” Branagh said. “I wanted to win but I also didn’t want to waste my practice time. If I was having a stinky practice, I would think ‘OK, Nicole, you’re taking time away from Tegan or Will. Let’s get this going.’ You’re taking time away from being with them so go out there and make it worth it.”

There is zero wasted time with Flint. Of all the women currently on the AVP Tour, only Davis — and soon, potentially, Day, Ross, and Klineman, should they come back in 2024 — knows the value of a minute as much as Flint.

“Practices were get in, get out, and you could see it in the gym, she’d get her lift in and bounce out quick,” Day said.

Fast, yes. But has Flint ever taken a shortcut, used Cora as an excuse to cut out early, even if it might be a fair one? Not once.

“She works so hard and I honestly think motherhood has made her a better player,” Ross said. “It’s very evident that she refuses to make excuses for anything. I know her daughter wakes up super early or wakes up during the night and she just wakes up to practice ready to go, never says she’s tired. Cora will come to practice and want attention from Betsi and she just manages it all so well. It’s really inspiring. I think it’s elevated her game and she demands the same from everyone else: Let’s get the job done, no excuses, put in your time. She’s always been an intense competitor but I think this had just made her even better.

“It was really great to see how [Betsi and Chase] make it work. She’s got to train and she has to lift and get physical therapy and watch video and it’s something that took me all day when I was playing. I was gone from 7 to 5:30 every day and she’s so efficient and Chase is so supportive and just the way that they’ve figured it out — OK, you can do this. It gives me hope that I can do this and we don’t have to maybe spend a fortune in order to get outside help to play this game that oftentimes doesn’t pay very much. That was very cool to see.”

The “secret mom’s club”

The number of mothers on the AVP Tour may look different in 2024. Day is expecting to play after having her daughter in 2023. Ross has not ruled out a return after giving birth to a son. Alix Klineman competed in the World Championships this past October with her newborn, Theo, in tow. All of them, in one way or another, have looked to Flint as a model.

“There’s a secret moms club where we’re all competitive but once you become a mom it’s all cool,” Flint said. “I didn’t realize when I was playing how legit that was or how hard that must have been so it’s cool to respect those moms who have come before me and hopefully I can inspire more people when they decide to start a family too. I’m here for anyone out there who wants to talk. It’s encouraging to see people come back to play at a high level after having kids.”

It’s difficult, yes, but it is those very challenges — the early wakeups, the patience required to navigate unruly moods and temper tantrums, the heartache of missing your child on the road — that have given Flint an edge only select few know. Which is why, on the morning of August 20, the final day of the 2023 Manhattan Beach Open, Flint wasn’t discouraged when she saw 4 on the hour of her alarm clock.

She was thrilled.

An unprecedented 7 a.m. match? After a first-round loss requiring the longest road possible? On a schedule expedited due to an incoming tropical storm?

“That played right into her wheelhouse,” Ross said, laughing. “That was funny. She always mentions how she’s up so early and I see her stories and I was pregnant at the time so I was always tired, waking up half an hour before I needed to be there and I’m looking at her stories and she was activating and rolling out and on her bike all before our 7:30 practice.

“She’s just such an intense player and person, and I don’t think you get that from the outside. She seems like such a sweet person, and she is, but when her back’s against the wall or someone pisses her off, she just takes no prisoners and has no mercy. She doesn’t make excuses. She doesn’t care how tired she is, she doesn’t care if something hurts, she’s going to do what she has to do to make it work.”

Eight straight wins followed that heartbreaking opening round loss, punctuated by a 22-20, 21-13 finals victory over Hailey Harward and Kelley Kolinske. It was Flint’s third straight trip to the Manhattan finals. Against all odds, in a tournament that required her and Scoles to become the first team to come back from a first-round loss to win a Manhattan Beach Open, 2023 was the year she alas cemented herself onto the Pier.

Only Betsi Flint.

“I love grinding,” she said. “I think it is the short-term memory. Nothing matters but this match. Nothing matters but this point and I also love being an underdog so then I thought that I was an underdog at that point where no one believes we were going to do this and we’re going to find a way. We found a way. We did it”

There’s another picture Flint can add to her bank of memories, alongside the one from the 2021 Manhattan Open, her first after having Cora. She’s spraying a Kona Brew at Scoles, who sprays one back. Her eyes are closed, her smile spreading from cheek to cheek. In the bottom left-hand corner, the electric scoreboard shows the final score of the second set, the decisive 21-13 win. It’s a picture that doesn’t include Cora but is a testament to everything Flint wants to show her daughter, and every other new and yet-to-be mother: Yes, you can do this.

You can have it all.