What do you give the player who has everything?<\/p>\n
Perhaps a chance to go home and get what will soon be Olympic sand between their toes.<\/p>\n
The Week 5 of the AVP League will commence Saturday at Alamitos Beach in Long Beach and conclude Sunday, with four contests per day between the association\u2019s four teams \u2013\u00a0each composed of a women\u2019s tandem and men\u2019s tandem.<\/p>\n
For players like Megan Kraft and Kelly Cheng of the Miami Mayhem (5-3) and Miles Partain of the Dallas Dream (5-3), the opportunity is a chance to practice at the beach volleyball site of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics \u2013 and maybe more importantly, a rare trip back to their Southern California stomping grounds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so excited about getting an opportunity to play at home,\u201d Cheng said. \u201cMy family gets to come, and it\u2019s just really special getting to compete and look up at the stands and see family and familiar faces. \u2026 It doesn\u2019t happen that often because most of our events are international. So never try to take that for granted. Really try to soak it in and enjoy all those little moments.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kraft and Cheng, who both played beach volleyball at USC, are fresh off an FIVB Beach Pro Tour Elite 16 silver-medal performance in Gstaad, Switzerland, on July 5 \u2013 and had to readjust to Pacific Daylight Time, which is eight hours behind Central European Summer Time.<\/p>\n
Despite both being former Trojans, the pairing between Kraft, 23, and Cheng, 30, may seem a bit random \u2013\u00a0in fact, the two only started playing together in January. The former is a four-time NCAA title winner and two-time Olympian who won the 2023 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championship alongside Sara Hughes.<\/p>\n
And the latter is just two years removed from her last collegiate campaign. It\u2019s a big enough gap that Kraft\u2019s teammate was once her idol.<\/p>\n
But chemistry comes with practice, not just theory.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m trying to just soak up that expertise, knowledge and experience that she has, and she\u2019s really been super helpful in helping me grow on the court, but also the mental side of the game,\u201d Kraft said. \u201cShe\u2019s a really intense competitor on the court, but has a lot of fun and a lot of joy.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not inherently a teacher-student dynamic for Cheng either.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe is the hardest working girl I\u2019ve ever met,\u201d Cheng said. \u201cShe is so loyal, so kind, so thoughtful, so down to earth. I\u2019ve just never met somebody like her, and she\u2019s so young. I mean, she\u2019s 23 years old, and just so wise for her age. I forget so often that she\u2019s 23, and I have to remind myself that we\u2019re not the same age.\u201d<\/p>\n
Partain, a Pacific Palisades local who played indoor volleyball at UCLA, also returned from Gstaad, but with a polar opposite outcome.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe (Partain and partner James Shaw) got like last place in the tournament, and when that happens, like you\u2019re out the very first day,\u201d Partain said. \u201cWe did practice a little bit, but it was more a vacation than a tournament.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2024 AVP League MVP is at a seemingly tough point in his career. Partain said burnout from the constant volleyball cycle almost made him quit midseason last year, if not for his then-partner Andy Benesh\u2019s support.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just get frustrated when in season comes around and then the expectation is so prevalent to practice a lot with full volleyball, and I just feel like I get worse and worse and worse,\u201d Partain said. \u201cThis is theoretically \u2018in season,\u2019 but I\u2019m worse than I was when I got here. So I\u2019m very, very frustrated at that because my income and career is tied to my performance, and this has been a repeating pattern over the last few years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Partain is just 24, but he said he feels like an old soul doing everything he can to reclaim his career and leave the sport and culture of beach volleyball better than he found it. It\u2019s apparent he no longer wants to feel like a boxer stuck in the ring.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that\u2019s why Partain decided to team up with 40-year-old Long Beach State alumnus Paul Lotman for the 2026 AVP League after the duo hadn\u2019t played together since 2022 \u2013 the year they won the AVP Atlanta Open.<\/p>\n
Partain\u2019s shift in how he approaches the sport itself is what has renewed his drive.<\/p>\n
After an elbow injury in 2024, Partain ventured into the baseball community after beach volleyball appeared all out of answers for how he should proceed with his recovery. He witnessed how far ahead baseball was of beach volleyball in applying empirical data to training, placing results over tradition and research-driven programs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no advanced analytics of biomechanics, relative to baseball,\u201d Partain said. \u201cSo that\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to hopefully get to and change the culture of the sport. And I want to prove it by. How good I get, and I\u2019m really motivated to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
On paper, Partain and Lotman\u2019s routine of just two max-effort practices a week may seem light, or like that of someone whose playing career is nearing its end \u2013 after all, Partain said that he\u2019s embraced coaching in the last year, especially, as a way to give back and enjoy the sport.<\/p>\n
But make no mistake, Partain \u2013 though he has yet to lock down a partner for 2028 \u2013 has his sights set on the upcoming Summer Games.<\/p>\n
As for what\u2019s to come next in 2026, the Southern California trio won\u2019t be home long \u2013 Week 6 of the eight-week AVP League season will come July 18 and 19 in New York, while FIVB\u2019s next Elite 16 tournament begins July 29 in Rio de Janeiro.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do you give the player who has everything? Perhaps a chance to go home and get what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[15116,158391,21866,7,131,133,132,137,10012,127,136,1092,10992,3533,125696],"class_list":["post-393847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-2028-olympics","tag-avp","tag-beach-volleyball","tag-california","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-los-angeles-county","tag-olympics","tag-sports","tag-top-stories","tag-ucla","tag-ucla-sports","tag-usc","tag-usc-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}