Misty

by Misty May-Treanor

  Besides the frustration of not winning tournaments, another major factor in the breakup of teams is the inordinate amount of time the two players spend together. Being part of a professional beach volleyball duo is a little like a marriage. Day after day, week after week, month after month, season after season, you’re together 24/7. It’s difficult to be that close to someone who isn’t your spouse.

  Interestingly, men and women professional beach volleyball players handle their partnerships very differently. For men, it’s performance first, earning a partner’s acceptance second. For women, it’s all about feeling the connection with your teammate, then it’s about performing. There have been great men’s teams that have played together for years but couldn’t stand each other. For instance, there was a team of brothers at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, Switzerland’s Paul and Martin Laciga, who hadn’t spoken to each other in years. Because every time one made a suggestion to the other, they’d imploded, they figured it was best not to say anything. Zilch. I can’t see that happening with a top women’s team. Female athletes need to feel a connection with every single athlete on their team. They need to have interpersonal relationships in order to feel more free to go out and perform.

  Karch had a great partnership with Ken Steffes, and they won seventy-five tournaments together, and the first men’s Olympic beach volleyball tournament in 1996, but they were very different and spent little time socializing off the court. When Karch did TV commentary for beach volleyball events, he says the things he heard the most, in talking to women players, were, “This year, the chemistry is so great,” or “This year, we’re such great friends.” Karch says he “never gave a crap about chemistry.” All he cared about was whether he and his partner were committed to being the best team they could be.

  Rumors became rampant on the AVP and FIVB tours that Kerri and I were going to break up our partnership. None of them came from us. We heard all of the talk. “I think they should split up.” “Kerri should play with Rachel [Wacholder].” Misty should play with E.Y.” Never mind that there were strong rumors that Rachel and E.Y., clearly the number two U.S. team heading into Beijing, were breaking up, too. (They eventually did in August.) In the meantime, we had other female beach volleyball pros putting bugs in our ears. “If you break up, I’m available.” And we got all sorts of critiques about our play, especially when we weren’t winning as much on the 2006 FIVB tour.

  In addition to all the rumors and behind-the-scenes chatter, E.Y. began putting some pressure on me to play with her. Being a friend of mine, she sensed the tension between Kerri and me. Clearly, E.Y. wanted to win an Olympic gold medal and she saw an opportunity for that. I told Dad that E.Y. had spoken to me about becoming my partner, and Dad, wise to the Kerri-Misty breakup talk, became involved in the drama, too. He’s a driving force in the success I’ve had, but he often loses perspective when it comes to me. He’s very close to it, wrapped up in it, and emotional about it. Instinctively, Dad knew how unhappy and unsettled I was. My aunt Bonnie says Dad has a sixth sense about me, that he can feel my emotions.

  “You have to face your demons,” Dad said. “You have to tell Kerri everything you’re feeling.”

  “But I don’t want to make waves,” I replied.

  “Misty, I like Kerri, I like Dane, I like Kerri’s family, but this isn’t about making friends,” Dad said. “You’re not out there to make friends. You’re out there to win Olympic gold medals. We all want the same thing.

  “You can’t keep making the same mistakes as a team and expect to get over the hump. That’s the definition of an F.A., a future alcoholic: Doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

  Meanwhile, Dad was thinking through all the scenarios, as well as studying the calendar and recognizing that Beijing Olympic qualifying was only a year away. At times, he’d told me that he thought E.Y. was the best blocker on the beach, and he said it actually might be a good decision to partner with her. So he was in my head, saying, “If you change partners, you need to do it now. If you change coaches, you need to do it now. You’ve got to make something happen, Misty, if you want to win another Olympic gold medal.”

  And if all of that drama wasn’t enough, in the early spring, Kerri suffered a miscarriage, and for months afterward, she was in a fragile state. She’d had her heart set on being pregnant the entire 2006 season, and I’d even told her, “Just let me know, we’ll play together until you can’t play anymore.” When the miscarriage occurred, in March or April, Kerri was devastated. Over the course of several months, she’d endured a roller coaster of emotions. First, she’d had to make the difficult decision to put her successful career on hold to have a baby. Then she’d been excited to learn she was pregnant. Finally, she’d suffered a huge letdown when she miscarried. She was confused about why she’d lost the baby. She was angry that she now would have to wait until after the 2006 season, six months to a year, to get pregnant again, and she realized that that couldn’t happen, if we wanted to go for our second Olympic gold medal in Beijing. She’d missed her current window of opportunity for having a baby.

  Now, Kerri admits that, at that point, she “resented” her job. When she miscarried, she says, “everything changed” for her. Her attitude became: “If I’m out here, and I’m not having a baby, and I’m putting all of this on hold, then I need to win. I don’t want to waste my time.” She became incorrigible. In Huntington Beach, for instance, she was overly irritated by a 19–21, 21–12, 15–13 victory over Holly and Nicole Branagh in the third match of the tournament. She’d thought the win was much too tight, and afterward told the media, “This match won’t be out of my head for two weeks.”

  Never mind that we ended up winning the tournament over E.Y. and Rachel. The victory also made me only the second woman to go over the $1 million mark in earnings. (Holly was the first to do it.)

  Today, Kerri says her resentment toward her job and her over-the-top drive for the perfect victory was “a terrible mind-set by me.” Truth be told, her mind-set put a lot of stress on our partnership, and especially on me.

  All of these elements came together to cause the perfect storm, two weekends later, June 9 to 11, at the AVP tournament in Hermosa Beach. I’ll never forget the moment of convergence. We were struggling in the third match, against Tyra Turner and Makare Wilson. I was playing defense, and I asked Kerri to respond a certain way on the court. I don’t express my feelings very much, on or off the court, so I had asked, “Can you just wait on your block a little longer?” Instead of responding with a yes, she snapped at me, saying, “Well, why don’t you just worry about your defense?”

  I wasn’t being critical or accusatory. I just asked her to make a change to help me out. After her response, I shut down completely. I thought, “I’m not going to say anything.” That wasn’t very mature of me, but that was in keeping with my lack of communication skills. Overall, partnering with Kerri had helped teach me to better communicate in real life, but expressing my feelings is still difficult for me. I’m a people pleaser; I go with the flow. Nothing seems to irritate me, and then it builds up and builds up, and all of a sudden, something sets me off, and I’ll lose it. Which is exactly what happened: I exploded on the court. And I kept right on simmering through our match, which we ended up winning, 22–24, 21–19, 15–8, in just under an hour.

  In this instance, my mistake with Kerri was that I’d kept my feelings bottled up inside, for weeks and weeks at a time. Throughout our partnership, I’d never blown up at Kerri. I’d never even come close. This was the first, and only, time. It was a learning experience for me, for a couple of reasons. It taught me to always let Kerri know how I’m feeling, to communicate earlier rather than let it fester. It taught me nobody, not Kerri, not Matt, not Dad, not even my friends, can read my mind. Kerri always asks me, “What do you want to say, Misty?” She tries to pull things out of me. Sometimes, I just don’t know how to say things. I don’t want them to come out wrong. Most important, it also taught me that Kerri nee
ds to be talked to differently from me. I respond to constructive criticism in a very different way from Kerri. She’s much more like a woman, in that her feelings can get hurt. I, on the other hand, am much more like a man, thanks to how Dad always has spoken so frankly to me. I have always been talked to as an athlete, and honest, blunt criticism has always been normal to me.

  That day, things came out the wrong way: I cursed at Kerri, and there were some F— Yous in the box after the game. I know people sitting in the stands heard my tirade. It wasn’t my proudest moment. I was wrong for losing it. When the match was over, Kerri and I sat in the shade, and we talked it all out. What we learned was that, underneath all the rumors and behind-the-scenes chatter about us, our partnership, our playing, and our training, underneath all of the different emotions we’d both been experiencing over recent weeks, she and I both were frustrated with Dane. But we’d been too afraid to say anything about him to each other. In talking about our feelings, we discovered that we both were worried that we weren’t evolving as a team, and that we were fearful we wouldn’t stay on top, or be in the position to win a second Olympic gold medal, if we didn’t continue to grow.

  At various times, Dad had tried to talk to Dane about changing things, but he was very resistant, which caused friction and flare-ups between them.

  “Why do I need to change things?” he’d say to Dad. “They’re the best team in the world.”

  “Because if other coaches take a look at this, they’re going to pick on this thing and that thing, and they’re going to exploit it,” Dad would argue with him. “You’ve always got to make adjustments.”

  In fact, Dad got so fed up with Dane’s inability to grow as a coach and take us to new levels that after my blowup with Kerri at Hermosa Beach, he actually told Liz Masakayan, who coached E.Y. and Rachel, the best way to beat us.

  “Why would you tell me something like this, Butch?” Liz asked.

  “Because otherwise we’ll never see a change, Liz, until they see their noses rubbed in it,” Dad replied.

  “This is what I would do if I were coaching against them,” Dad began, and then he spilled the beans. Afterward, he told me what he’d done.

  Dad recounted: “I told Liz, ‘Serve Kerri twice on her left and then serve Misty. Because Kerri is used to Misty getting served, on the contact of the serve, Kerri always moves to her right. She was an opposite hitter indoors. So if you serve Kerri to her left, she’ll be a step away from it. And only give Kerri two serves in a row each time, because she always thinks they were errant serves, that boy were you lucky. Then, wait a couple balls and go back to Kerri’s left.’”

  I just shook my head at my nutty father.

  “Bring it on!” I replied.

  Sure enough, E.Y. and Rachel beat us in the final.

  Having that blowup in Hermosa Beach and then sitting down together and pouring out our hearts was an important step in the growth of our partnership. It was a big deal for me to finally admit to Kerri that I wasn’t getting what I needed from Dane. In fact, I told her if we were going to continue playing together, we needed to change our coach. She was a lot closer to him than I was, and all along I’d thought if I told her what I was feeling, she might become defensive. Most teams are too quick to break up, but we decided we were going to work through this rough patch together.

  Why would you ever want to break up a team that was on its way to being the greatest combination in the history of the game? With Kerri and me, it was very special. So we recommitted to Beijing, to each other, and to winning a second gold medal. We’d needed to reconfirm our goals, our dreams, and our friendship. We’d realized it was us, just us, together. And we’d recognized we were stronger together than we were apart. At the end of the 2006 season, we agreed, we’d have to let Dane go.

  While Kerri and I might have had different personalities on the court, it was clear, the more we talked it out, that we had the same dreams and aspirations. While we might have had different likes and dislikes off the court, we had the same goals and values. We loved and respected each other. And, there were, and still are, no two better business partners in all of professional sports. From that moment forward, it was: Beijing, till death do us part!

  20

  STARTING OVER

  In the beach volleyball world, every major decision goes through Karch. He is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the sport, the Jedi Master of the sand, reminiscent of the wise, exalted character in the Star Wars universe who teaches Luke Skywalker the ways of the Force. He’s all-knowing, all-seeing.

  Yet, instead of approaching Karch and asking for his thoughts about who we should hire as our new coach, Kerri and I took the bold step of asking him if he’d coach us. We’d been chasing the Legend, so why not learn from him? After all, he was the best ever in the sport. Unfortunately, he had too many family and TV commitments, but luckily he turned us on to Troy Tanner.

  Troy was a member of the U.S. men’s national indoor volleyball team that won the gold medal at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. After the Olympics, he played in an international pro indoor league (Rome, Italy; Zagreb, Croatia; and Osaka, Japan). From 1992 through 1998, he competed in pro beach volleyball, domestically and internationally. While earning his master’s in mass communications at Brigham Young University, he was an assistant coach for the Cougars’ men’s volleyball team for five years and part of two NCAA Championships. Then he spent four years on the coaching staff of the U.S. national men’s indoor team and had been named an assistant coach for that team at the Beijing Olympics. He also was head volleyball coach at Junipero Serra High School in San Juan Capistrano, California.

  Kerri contacted Troy and asked if the three of us could meet when I returned to Southern California for training. Troy was floored by the call—he’d been out of beach volleyball for years—but he agreed to get together, and to better prepare for our meeting, he asked Kerri to send video of us in competition over the past few years.

  In January 2007, Kerri and I met Troy at Huntington Beach, and we talked about our goals, our concerns, and most important, what we wanted from a coach. Troy made the observation that while we were still dominant domestically, we were dipping internationally because the women on the international tour were getting better. He told us we’d have to improve in order to keep beating them, and he said he’d studied a lot of video and had found areas in which we could get markedly better. He proceeded to show us video clips of those female players he thought were the best in the world at using various skills. Then he showed us clips of us using those same skills. Surprisingly, we were inconsistent in many aspects of the game.

  On day one, it was all business, which set the tone of our relationship going forward. Immediately, Troy began working on revamping our game. He wanted to simplify our skills, break them down to the most basic level, and work at a slower pace to make sure that later, at competition speed, they’d be as crisp as could be. I felt comfortable with his coaching technique because Dad always has trained me that way.

  “Here are the mechanics of volleyball,” Troy said, starting with fundamentals. “We can tighten up all of this stuff and become better.”

  Troy thought we were in great physical shape and we had the strongest minds in the game. However, he felt our confidence had been shaken in 2006 by our international losses. He believed that by refining our skills and changing some of our mechanics, as well as having him give us detailed scouting reports of our opponents, we wouldn’t just grow and improve as a team, but once again we’d be in the driver’s seat on the way to a 2008 Olympic gold medal.

  How could we have gotten so lackadaisical about our skills? Maybe because we hadn’t practiced the right things. Maybe because we hadn’t broken down the game as much as we needed. Maybe because we hadn’t analyzed ourselves to see what skills we could improve. In 2004, as we were one of the younger teams, our training sessions had included a lot of playing time. Nothing was slowed down. It was all at competition speed. We didn’t back off and b
reak down each skill. For us, at that time in our careers, that’s what worked. When I was in college, I was used to the same practice warm-up routine every day. It was a progression. You’d start out passing. Then you’d get into team passing. You’d build one skill onto another. Then you’d add a little more, and add a little more to that. That’s what you should be doing on the beach, too.

  Over the next several days, we met with Troy at the beach, studied video, then put his suggestions into action in training sessions. We already saw ourselves making improvement. Having a new perspective on our game, Kerri and I both recognized, was doing us good. Troy, too, said he was happy with how well we were responding to him. I’m a visual learner. I can make adjustments through audio cues, but not as successfully, because I can’t see it or feel it. That was the beauty of Troy’s style: He slowed us down so much that we were able to feel what we were doing. We could watch each other grow and redevelop—not only our game but our team chemistry. Just by slowing things down, by challenging ourselves to develop our skills again, so we each had to focus on the other. It was, “I need to do this in order to make Kerri better, and she needs to do this in order to help me out and make me better.”

  So as we evolved, so did our coaching. At different times, different coaches are the right fit for you.

  “Let’s go forward with this,” we told Troy, a week into the trial period.

  “Okay, we’ve got to put a contract in place because I have to quit my job,” Troy said. “I have to leave the U.S. national team. I have to leave my high school, where I’m still coaching and teaching physical education.”

  We hammered out a two-year deal for Troy that would take the three of us from early January 2007 through the 2008 Olympics. From that point forward, we trained with him four or five days a week in the preseason, and then, because our AVP and FIVB tour schedules were daunting, we trained twice a week during the season. Most of the time, we’d meet Troy at Emerald Bay, a private community in Laguna Beach. There, we had privacy, nobody coming by and asking for autographs during our training. We’d stretch on the sand while watching dolphins jumping in the Pacific Ocean. Once, we even saw a whale. The locals brought their dogs down to the sand and ran along the water’s edge. It was just a nice setting.