Christmas has come early with partnership mixups

ORLANDO, Fla. — Christmas is not for another 24 days, yet this weekend for AVP Central Florida, beach volleyball fans can open their YouTube streams or beach chairs in Tavares and receive the gift for which they’ve been penning letters to Santa for years:

Phil Dalhausser partnering up with Taylor Crabb.

It’s possible, likely even, that this weekend’s AVP Pro Series in Central Florida will mark the only time the two will ever play together, this in spite many in the beach community positing that a Dalhausser-Crabb combination would have made for the best American team for the past five years. We’ll never know, of course, and Dalhausser enjoyed immense success with his good friend and longtime partner, Nick Lucena, while Crabb qualified for the Tokyo Olympics himself with Jake Gibb. Regardless of the inevitable “what could have been” discussions, the tantalizing wait is just one day away, as Crabb and Dalhausser enter the season’s final event as the No. 2 seed.

“Personally I never thought it was going to happen, just because of how our careers lined up,” Crabb said of the partnership (if you can call a one-event pairing a partnership). “But if you ever get a chance to play with Phil, you better say yes. It should be on everyone’s bucket list if you’re any sort of volleyball fan or player.”

A number of players this season have been able to check “Playing with Phil Dalhausser” off their bucket lists this season, beginning with Andy Benesh, who was, interestingly, slated to play with Lucena, in Austin. After a win in Texas, Dalhausser provided a similar bucket list moment for Casey Patterson, who has comically noted, on a number of occasions, that he would play with particular intensity in any King of the Beach event in which he was paired for a match with Dalhausser, in hopes of impressing him to the point of wooing him for a full-time pairing. While that never came to fruition entirely, Patterson played four events with Dalhausser this season, winning in New Orleans. John Sutton, too, a good friend of Dalhausser’s, defended behind the Thin Beast in Denver, Fort Lauderdale, and Manhattan Beach.

But of all the shuffles made by Dalhausser this season — 2022 marks a career-high for partners in a single year for the 42-year-old blocker, not including Hot Winter Nights and King of the Beach events — none have a…