USC strives for the unthinkable: Fourth straight NCAA beach volleyball title

HERMOSA BEACH, California — One mustn’t think about pink elephants.

Tricky thing, that. Once someone mentions something as peculiar as a pink elephant, how are you supposed to think of anything else? Imagine the challenge, then, of Delaynie Maple, Megan Kraft, and USC Beach Volleyball coach Dain Blanton, only instead of a pink elephant, this one is parading around in garnet and gold. It is the one thing they mustn’t think about, and yet it is what’s on the collective NCAA Beach Volleyball mind, the proverbial elephant on the beach: Can USC win four straight NCAA Championships?

Such a feat has never been done before in the young sport, which celebrates its ninth year as an official member of the NCAA. The only volleyball athlete Blanton could recall ever starting four straight years and collecting an NCAA Championship in all four of them is Ricci Luyties, the wildly athletic setter for UCLA who ran the table from 1981-84.

This May, Kraft and Maple can become the second and third.

But thinking of such things does no good. Even Maple’s parents will catch themselves when bringing it up in conversation with their daughter.

“My parents will bring it up and then cut themselves off,” Maple said. “I try not to think about it. I try and just think about each day because if you think about it too long you’d just go crazy about it. That’s something I’ve tried to do the past few years is not to think about it until the week of because you just build it up way too much in your head because it would be so cool to go four for four but there’s so many steps you need to take to get there.”

As it goes with any national-championship aspirations, the steps, indeed, are many, though not nearly that of 2023. USC was considered — and this is still a strange sentence to write — something of an underdog entering 2023. As much as a back-to-back NCAA Champion can be considered an underdog, anyway. The Trojans had lost 13 of their 24 total players, a list that included soon-to-be AVP champions in Julia Scoles and Hailey Harward; Tina Graudina, a blocker who had competed in an Olympic Games; and a consummate winner in Sammy Slater, among others.

“It was definitely a different fall,” Maple said last winter.

Different fall, same spring result: A host of Trojans sprinting into the teal Gulf of Mexico, celebrating their most unexpected NCAA title to date.

“Last year was a grind,” Kraft said. “We weren’t sweeping teams, we were squeaking by 3-2 a lot of the time. We didn’t experience that a lot freshman and sophomore year. It wasn’t quite as close of a match. Having that last season gave us the belief that if it’s close we can still win.”

Indeed, 14 of their 37 matches were decided 3-2, triple that of the previous two seasons combined. And yet, as USC is wont to do, it won plenty, claiming 32 of 37 matches, including the four that mattered most, in Gulf Shores, Alabama. How were the final two decided? 3-2, of course.

It is no accident, no a simple stroke of good fortune, that Blanton, and Anna Collier before him, continues to recruit players who arrive not simply prepared to play, but prepared to win. When Maple and Kraft enrolled for their debut seasons in 2021, already proving they could finish fifth on the AVP Tour, they did so looking not all that different from the women who had already claimed National Championships of their own. Maple finished 26-3 starting on court four while Kraft, mostly one court one with Graudina, won 30 of her 33 matches.

“USC was so fortunate to get these two together,” Blanton said of Kraft and Maple. “They played together at Torrey Pines, won a state championship together, and I don’t think people understand how important it is, the mentality of being a winner, being a champion, when you can recruit someone who already has that type of mentality. It makes it easier for everyone around them.”

It is a nod to Blanton’s recruiting as much as it is to the leadership of the women who preceded Maple and Kraft and those who will succeed them when they become alumni. Maple can still recall, as if it happened yesterday, a practice her freshman season. She hit a cut shot, a perfectly placed cut shot with decent pace, yet Graudina had already pulled into that exact shot, patiently awaiting what, to Maple, felt like a well-disguised attack.

“We learn so much from Dain and [assistant coach] Gustavo [Rocha] but we also learn so much from them,” Maple said of her teammates. “Tina knew that I was doing before I did it. I asked her how she knew that, and picking their brains because they see volleyball at such a different level, and learning from them was one of the biggest things I was able to do those first two years. I learned everything I’ve been trying to teach this team from them.

“I was getting so humbled but I’m getting so much better because I’m getting demolished by these older players. I haven’t been a part of a group where one through 22 want to play, want to be a part of something, want to make it such a special year. Every year we start from scratch. Even though we’ve had a similar outcome, every culture has been super different which I think is really cool, seeing what works for people.”

The culture this year isn’t so much different as it is doubled-down upon. If it is winners Blanton seeks to recruit, he has them in spades. As he has done his entire career at USC, he again hit the transfer portal lottery, hauling in Molly Phillips, a two-time National Champion at Texas as an outside hitter; Ainsley Radell, a four-year starter at Cal; Grace Seits, who went 26-10 for LSU’s court two in 2023; Maddi Kriz, an All-Pac-12 First Team starter for Stanford; and another 6-foot-plus indoor transfer in Emily Fitzner, who comes by way of Indiana. Freshman Ashley Pater, like Maple and Kraft before her, has already proven her ability to win at the professional level, with three AVP Pro or Gold Series main draws to her name.

“We want to play great volleyball and if I recruit the right players and I can get them to reach their potential, the score takes care of itself,” Blanton said. “I don’t shy away from it. We have championship shirts, rings, but we don’t make it the focal point. The most important thing is recognizing it is a new season, there are new players, and you don’t want to talk about how this is the way we do it, this is how it’s done, because every team is different. We lost 12 players prior to last season, we’ll lose probably 8 to 10 this season. It’s a revolving door, college athletics. You have to look at it year by year. If you start looking at past years, it won’t help you.”

It would be undeniably cool for Maple and Kraft, to finish their careers at USC with a sweep of NCAA Championships. But thinking about that garnet and gold elephant won’t help them any more than regaling stories of championships past.

“A lot of us are trying to make the most of our last year,” Maple said. “I feel like every day we talk about it, how you want to be present, how in three months from now we’re going to be USC alumni.”

Potentially one of the most decorated USC alumni in history,

But we mustn’t think about that.