MISSOULA, Montana — To ask Chase Frishman to explain what, exactly, his vision for life is at the moment is roughly the equivalent of asking him to hold smoke or grip water.
He has a concept, an idea, and he’s getting closer. He knows it, feels it. With the advent of his Flight School, a traveling beach volleyball camp and clinic series, where he hires two, three, sometimes four professionals to teach their craft around the country — and, this past weekend, Canada — he is nearing the mold of the Japanese concept of Ikigai. It sits at the convergence of doing something he loves, something he’s good at, something the world — a small world, but a world nonetheless — needs, and something he can be paid to do.
How he found his Ikigai has been, as it has gone with much of Frishman’s adult life, a winding and weird and wonderful journey. Flight School wasn’t an idea in 2020. Not much was, as COVID shut down the country, the AVP’s schedule was yet to be determined, and Frishman, who first turned professional in 2016 after a brief stint indoors in Switzerland, had little to no prospects of what to do for work or, in a more general and terrifying sense, life in general.
It wasn’t panic, necessarily, that set in when, in the summer of 2020, he packed up his belongings into his Subaru Outback and hit the road. With nothing else to do, he just figured why the hell not? He had no set return date and only a rough itinerary.
“The trip started out kind of as ‘Screw this, I’m not sitting inside anymore just waiting for my bank account to completely empty. Is the AVP going to give us a call?’ The uncertainty was killing me,” he said then. “That’s when [Eric] Zaun kicks in, and his inspiration of the way he lived his life: ‘Hey, you don’t have to do it this way, there are other ways to go against the grain, there are other styles.’ ”
His first stop wasn’t far, a quick trip to Phoenix where he had set up a clinic at Stealth Beach Volleyball. He didn’t know it then, but Frishman had just stumbled upon his first inkling of Ikigai. Here he could teach his craft — something at which he is exceptional — help others to become better defenders or passers or side out players or whatever it may be, perhaps just an improvement in the mind-body-spirit connection Frishman seeks, and, should he continue to run clinics around the USA outside of…
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