HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — Every now and again, maybe once or twice a week depending on the schedule of kids and competition and work, Jake Dietrich will come home from his job as a paralegal at Riot Games and see the glow of his neighbor’s television. He knows what’s on that screen of Theo Brunner’s.
“Who you watching?” Dietrich will ask.
And then Brunner, one of the most avid film watchers in the beach volleyball world, will answer with any variety of off-the-wall matches. Might be examining the defense of Ondrej Perusic, the shoulder of Christian Sorum, the spread blocking style of Stefan Boermans. Might be his own film with Trevor Crabb, or that of his former partner, Chaim Schalk. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really much matter what, exactly, is on that television, because regardless of what it is, Jake Dietrich is going to want to talk about it.
A lot.
“Theo and Joanna [Klironomos, Brunner’s wife] call it getting Jaked because I have a propensity to talk a lot,” Dietrich said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “What can I say? My wife will be texting me, asking me where I am, and I’m out front.”
Brunner’s house isn’t the only site where one can “get Jaked.” It can, for example, be in the medical tent, where the physiotherapists have a good laugh at the hirsute 34-year-old who can bounce from topic to topic so seamlessly and flawlessly that 45 minutes might go by with little back and forth. It can happen, as is the point of such enterprises, on a podcast, where Dietrich’s 132-minute episode shattered the previous record for longest episode of SANDCAST by more than half an hour. There is an easy explanation for his loquaciousness: Dietrich has one of the largest libraries of beach volleyball information from which to pull topics of conversation, anecdotes, and point-and-counterpoints.
Just two weeks ago, he was up all night, texting Charlie Siragusa, breaking down his film from a Futures tournament in Coolangatta, Australia. Then he did it the next week, when Siragusa and Jordan Hoppe were in Tahiti.
“I loved watching all of their games and would text them afterwards,” Dietrich said. “It’s fun to watch the guys you’re playing with who are able to go travel and do all of those things, even if it’s a Futures.”
Dietrich can tell you the scores of a final of an Elite 16 with no…
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