MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — Take a look at the stats of the 2022 AVP Manhattan Beach Open women’s final, the one between Sara Hughes and Kelley Kolinske, and Kelly Cheng and Betsi Flint.
They’ll tell you everything and nothing about this sport.
View those numbers alone — blocks, errors, digs, aces, hitting percentage — and anyone who understands basic math would peg the same winner, every time: The match must have gone to Cheng and Flint. They led every single category. Hit three less errors, sided out at a clip eight percent higher, tallied three more blocks, four more digs, and five more points.
They led every single statistical category save for the one that mattered most: Sets won.
That number belongs to Hughes and Kolinske alone, as they displayed one of the grittiest, toughest performances on the AVP to date, coming back from being down 13-10 in the third set to win the biggest event on the beach volleyball calendar, 21-18, 11-21, 15-13.
“As a team we’ve been there before,” Kolinske said. “We’ve made some major comebacks in important games. We just know that no matter what the score is we always have a chance because we’re fighters. That was huge for us. It was an awesome comeback.”
Oh, they’re fighters, all right. How else to explain their ability to climb out of a second set that they lost by 10, hit in the negatives, and piled up nine errors — only to reverse course at the exact right moment, when it seemed almost inevitable that the Manhattan Beach Pier would soon bear the names of their opponents?
It’s a numbers-based sport, beach volleyball. All percentages and tendencies. And yet there is no wearable, no tracking device, no statistical category that can measure the heart and gumption shown by Kolinske and Hughes on Sunday afternoon.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dain Blanton said on the livestream.
Surprised? Not Hughes and Kolinske after scoring the last five points of the match.
“We knew we were due,” Kolinske said.
No team in the United States was more due than them.
Hughes and Kolinske had made the semifinals in their previous three AVP tournaments, falling narrowly in all three. In Sunday morning’s semifinal, they avenged a loss in the Hermosa Beach to Terese Cannon and Sarah Sponcil with a 21-19, 21-18 win in Manhattan. Cheng and Flint, already with the New Orleans title in hand and coming off a gold medal at the Volleyball World Hamburg Elite 16, awaited.
It…
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