‘Baby Court Mafia’ making every Manhattan Open final since 2015

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — By now you know the streak. How could you not?

As of two Sundays ago, Trevor Crabb has won three Manhattan Beach Opens in a row, joining a venerated list of just 10 male players who have put their names on the pier in three consecutive years. He let everyone know, too, in the immediate moments following his and Tri Bourne’s victory over Chaim Schalk and Theo Brunner, that he was coming for Phil Dalhausser, the most recent winner of three straight.

Should he win the next, in August of 2023, he’ll likely take aim at the man many consider the GOAT: Karch Kiraly, who won four in a row, in 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993.

So, yes, you know that streak. But there’s one that is perhaps even more remarkable than Crabb’s on his own, one discovered in the latest of hours, at the most fitting of places: the dark and damp and loud and well-lubricated bowels of Shellback Tavern, the diviest of dive bars in Manhattan Beach, California.

Did you know, Bourne texted a group of his friends that night, that every Manhattan Open since 2015 has featured either a Bourne or a Crabb in the finals? Seven straight years of championships featuring one of the three childhood friends, all raised on the now-famed Baby Court of the Outrigger Canoe Club, all of whom at various points in their careers have been labeled, not incorrectly, as the next face of American beach volleyball.

To call that remarkable is an understatement. It’s downright preposterous.

In this booming era of grassroots beach volleyball, in which kids are signing up for clinics and private coaching lessons before they learn the basic geometry by which this game is played, three of the finest players in the United States grew up without any semblance of, as Taylor Crabb said on SANDCAST, “organized beach. We didn’t have clubs, there was no coaching, it was just us going out and screwing around.”

There’s a certain beauty in that, a ruggedness in the home-grown style of play the three of them have learned by virtue of playing all day, every day, at the pseudo daycare that became Outrigger. When Bourne wrote his debut novel, Volleyball for Milkshakes, it was fiction, yes, but like many debut novels, it was loosely based on the non-fiction events that shaped his life. The setting of the book rarely wavers from Outrigger, or the glittering ocean that laps its shores. The tournament at the end of…