MANHATTAN BEACH, California — On the morning of August 20, Taylor Sander was done.
There was nothing left in the tank.
The night before, in fact, he was hungry to the point that he inhaled two burrito bowls from Chipotle without a second thought. When he woke up the following morning, bleary-eyed and exhausted, he glanced at his buddy, Tyson, and told him that was it. His run for the 2023 Manhattan Beach Open title was all but shot.
“I can’t do this today,” he recalled telling his friend.
They’re not ones to make it easy on themselves, are they, Taylor Crabb and Sander? Their first AVP win as a team, at the Phoenix Championships in 2022, required back-to-back 15-13 wins in the third set. Their next, in Miami to open the 2023 season, called for a comeback in the second set of the finals after going down 7-14 at the technical timeout.
Why would the biggest beach volleyball title outside of an Olympic gold medal be any different?
They took, as they seem to so enjoy doing, the long road.
In Saturday afternoon’s quarterfinals of the winners bracket, Crabb and Sander fell to Trevor Crabb and Theo Brunner (17-21, 21-16, 21-23) in what holds a fair case as the match of the year, one that had fans lining up all the way to the Manhattan Beach Strand to catch a glimpse of the action. Losing again to the same team that had their number for the previous two years is difficult enough. But in this case, it also meant a third match on Saturday night, a 19-21, 21-17, 15-10 golden hour belter with Chase Budinger and Miles Evans that ended well after the sun set. An old school type of match where the only viewers were the well-lubricated sort who stuck around long enough to watch in person, where it came down to little more than grit, whoever had the stamina to simply keep the ball off the sand for just a bit longer.
But by the time Sander returned to his apartment in Hermosa Beach, wolfed down those burrito bowls, shivered through an ice bath and ached through a series of rollouts to loosen his battered muscles, he figured that was pretty much that. It might have to wait another year — or two or three or four or maybe even never — to get his name on the Manhattan Beach Pier.
“We’ve been known this year as the team that wants to go three all the time, but you can embrace that,” Sander said….
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