The idea for this episode of SANDCAST: Beach volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter came, as most do, on a whim.
Tri had been talking to Wilson, our main sponsor of the show and who also sponsors some of the most talented athletes on the AVP. Wilson wanted to know if we could do a roundtable of sorts: All seven Wilson athletes – Tri Bourne, Stafford Slick, Riley McKibbin, Maddison McKibbin, Casey Patterson, Kelly Reeves, Sarah Sponcil, Irene Pollock – on a single podcast. Adding in my voice as a host of the show, making it eight in total, seemed crowded. A good idea, but a noisy one.
So we came to the next most logical conclusion: How about a gameshow? Every other sport has one. How come we didn’t? Here, right before us, were eight knowledgeable voices who could debate and discuss the sport — and any other topics we might think of — in a fun, logical manner.
Still, eight seemed to be too many, particularly with how laggy internet calls can be. Everyone would be talking over everyone else. It would probably be an unusable disaster — fun, but useless.
Tri and I called up the McKibbins, who are churning out an alarming number of video pieces for Wilson, and asked what they thought. They liked it, expressing similar reservations about the sheer number of people on a single Zoom call. Our first go at it, then, which is today’s episode, would be an experiment, a litmus test. Tri and I, the McKibbins, and Slick, who, we figured, with two young children in a quarantined household should have plenty of free time for an experimental show on beach volleyball.
We decided that I’d come up with the questions, moderate and keep score, similar to Tony Reali in Around the Horn,
You’ll have to let us know how we did.
Like all experimental ideas, we had no real idea what we were doing. We initially started with 21 questions — beach volleyball matches go to 21, you know — with a 2-minute limit on each question. We figured with some banter in between questions, we’d hit the golden 50-minute to an hour mark for the episode. We guessed wrong. But it was fun. After seven questions, we decided to cut it down to just 15, which ended up being 16, because Maddison hated my final question, which I thought was fine but I also didn’t want the show to end, so we indulged one more. The result was a good laugh for everyone.
It wasn’t all serious debate, as you could imagine. Some questions required some thought – How many AVPs will we have this season? – and some were just silly – If you could host a tournament anywhere in the world, where would it be? Some were beach-volleyball centric – Who is the best player yet to win an AVP? – and some had nothing to do with beach volleyball at all – Will the NBA actually host its season at Disney’s Wide World of Sports?
We’d love to know what you think: love it, hate it, doesn’t matter. It was a fun episode to record, and hopefully it’s fun for you to listen to and watch.
