It must be the chocolate.
Or maybe it’s the pizza.
Perhaps the black magic of coach Drew Hamilton back home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
That’s what Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth will tell you, anyway, when asked about the secret sauce to their undefeated run at this week’s Paris Elite16. After a 2-0 start to the week, with dominant victories over Italy and Australia, Nuss credited the hot chocolate that has been a popular feature of her “food chronicles” on her Instagram.
After a 21-13, 21-17 pounding over Italy’s Valentina Gottardi and Marta Menegatti in Saturday evening’s semifinals, Kloth smiled that All-American smile, shrugged, and told the crowd that “I like the pizza.”
Indeed, America’s lovable beach volleyball darlings have done it again, marching to their fourth final of the Beach Pro Tour season, winning over a Parisian crowd in the process. They’ve dropped just a single set thus far in Paris, to Germans Laura Ludwig and Louisa Lippmann in Saturday’s quarterfinals. That has been the lone blemish in a tournament in which they have outscored their opponents 223-173 and won six sets by four or more points.
“The secret is just trusting each other, trusting our training, trusting what our coach has been teaching us at practice,” Nuss said. “It really just is the trust we have between each other and our team.”
That trust has led to a season that is the very antithesis of the sophomore slump. Rookies in 2022, Nuss and Kloth struggled to break into the top-tier of the elite teams, closing the season with five fifth-place finishes. This year? They have made more finals than they have finished fifth, as their gold medal match on Sunday morning against Brazil’s Duda Lisboa and Ana Patricia Silva will be their fifth crack at a gold.
Beating the Brazilians is, of course, no small task. After a relatively slow start to the year, no team has been better these past five months than the Brazilians. They are the only team in the world to win multiple Elite16 events, with three gold medals and a potential fourth on Sunday in Paris. It was Ana Patricia and Duda who kept Nuss and Kloth from gold in Hamburg six weeks ago, beating the USA 21-16, 21-17 in their fifth meeting of the season.
In seven career matches against Ana Patricia and Duda, Nuss and Kloth have yet to beat the Brazilians….
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