California Dreamin'

Hello from Hermosa Beach!

This is my fourth volleyball post in a row. Aren't you excited?!

Well, whether you are or not, I'm out here in California to cover the 2013 USA Volleyball Beach High Performance Championships (or Beach HPC -- not as good an abbreviation as the BJNC had, but I'll take it). For some reason, I thought this trip would be much more relaxed and easier to handle than my trip to Reno. But two days ago I passed out on the couch in my hotel room at around 9 pm and, upon waking up, stumbled into bed at 11. And I still had trouble waking up at 8 am yesterday. In other words, it's the exact same situation.

Well, ALMOST the exact same situation.

I'm also finishing work so late that, by the time I'm finished, I'm so lazy and tired and hungry that I'm going to McDonald's for dinner because it's a) still open, and b) right down the road. Just in case anyone thinks my internship is glamorous (I'm looking at you, Mylan!).

But, just like in Reno, I'm having an awesome time. My official title for this event is "Media Coordinator" -- this is the first time I'm anything other than "intern" and, let me tell ya, it feels good! A coach also called me an SID yesterday, which was pretty awesome.

I'm also really glad I'm getting to meet everyone at the beach office. USA Volleyball technically handles both beach and indoor, but beach has its own office out here and is sort of its own entity. So now I have a USA Beach Volleyball t-shirt and wristband, have met some of the beach players that I've been writing press releases about and have expanded my writing repertoire a little bit.

I also much prefer this:

over a convention center, even if I spend most of my time under the shade of the USAV tent.

What's been neat for me is that, because this is high performance, a good chunk of the kids competing are on either the national team or in the high performance camps. This means that people in the beach office know most of them and can point me in the direction of good stories. BJNC was so hit or miss, but here I'm more or less guaranteed something interesting, like the team that met on Instagram and the girls that won gold literally days after competing in Russia. I will, however, credit myself with finding out about the match that had a set go to 41-39. Is that not insane?! I also got to interview another delightful Canadian team. :)

Between the tall boys and my too-big USAV clothes, I look like I shrunk in the wash.

I should probably go to bed now, since there's still another day of competition that I need to power through. See you on the other side!