HERMOSA BEACH, Ca. — Trevor Crabb doesn’t do guarantees anymore. After a spur-of-the-moment, poorly-planned guarantee heading into the 2022 Atlanta Gold Series — which followed, of course, a third consecutive guarantee come true with a win in Fort Lauderdale — Crabb retired from the guarantee game. In the lead-up to this weekend’s AVP Hermosa Beach Open, however, he did offer up a prediction, which is sort of the politically correct version of a guarantee.
“I’m predicting a Crabb vs. Crabb final,” he wrote on social media, a post which was followed, appropriately, by a pair of videos produced by the McKibbin Brothers labeling him as the villain of beach volleyball.
Every sport has its villain, its foil. How many have a villain with the eerie prescience of Trevor Crabb? Eleven days after Crabb predicted an all-family final, the beach volleyball world was treated to exactly that, as Crabb and Theo Brunner met Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander in front of a packed stadium court whose line to get in snaked all the way to the Hermosa Beach strand.
Per usual, the Crabb feast delivered, as Crabb and Brunner won, 19-21, 21-13, 15-10 in an excellent final.
The victory was a significant one for a number of reasons.
Brunner has now won three consecutive Hermosa Beach Opens in which he’s played, dating back to 2018 when he and John Hyden beat Billy Allen and Ryan Doherty in a tremendous final. He skipped 2019 to play the Vienna Major, and it would be Chase Budinger and Casey Patterson who took victory in his absence. Last year, however, he and Chaim Schalk won their first and only AVP as a team in Hermosa, knocking off — guess who? — Taylor Crabb and Sander. One season later, Hermosa would again prove to be the grounds on which Brunner won his first event with a new partner.
“We live in Redondo Beach, and we train here every day, so these are our conditions, this is our sand, this is our wind,” Brunner said. “To be able to play and compete at the high level, like we train every day of every year for the last ten years is awesome.”
Brunner was, statistically, playing at as high of a level as possible. He led the tournament in hitting percentage (.633) by nearly 14 percentage points, finished second in blocks per set (2.57), and hit just 2 errors in 49 attacking attempts. It was his blocking, which was uncharacteristically quiet…
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