MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — For about an hour on Thursday afternoon, Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb will be teammates one more time. They won’t be in board shorts, or even on the beach, but rather they’ll be together on the iconic Manhattan Beach Pier that overlooks it.
For the second straight year, they’ll smile for the cameras and celebrate with friends and family as a plaque with their names etched into it is placed onto the Pier, recognizing their 2022 Manhattan Beach Open victory.
They’re on different sides of the net for this weekend’s Manhattan Beach Open, which begins with Thursday’s qualifier — you can find the bracket for the qualifier here — and will end in a nationally televised final on Sunday on ESPN2. Yet in splitting, Bourne and Crabb have increased the likelihood of extending one of the more impressive streaks on the AVP Tour: A Hawai’ian competing in the finals of the Manhattan Beach Open.
For seven consecutive years, a Hawai’ian has made the finals of Manhattan. Bourne and John Hyden made back-to-back finals in 2015 and 2016, Trevor Crabb and Sean Rosenthal did so in 2017, and Taylor Crabb and Jake Gibb in 2018.
It was Trevor, in 2019, who finally put his name on the Pier, in the most unlikely of partnerships, picking up a former rival in Reid Priddy while Bourne nursed a broken hand. Then it was Trevor again … and again — three straight Manhattan Beach Open wins for Trevor Crabb, and seven straight finals for the childhood friends who learned the game at the Outrigger Canoe Club. When dating it back to 2001 to include Stein Metzger, Kevin Wong, Mike Lambert, and Sean Scott, a Hawai’ian male has made 17 Manhattan Beach Open finals in the previous 23 tournaments.
If there were odds on such things, they would be heavily skewed towards another Hawai’ian either winning or competing for another title on Sunday afternoon. Trevor Crabb and Theo Brunner, winners of the Hermosa Beach Open, are the top seeds, followed by Bourne and Chaim Schalk. Taylor Crabb is fourth with Taylor Sander.
The Manhattan Beach Open has become less an question of whether or not a Hawai’ian will be on the Pier on 2023, but which one?
Challengers who could end the Hawai’ian reign
The team most likely to put an end to the Hawai’ian dominance in Manhattan is Chase Budinger and Miles Evans. They played arguably the best volleyball of…
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