HERMOSA BEACH, Ca. — One Saturday a few weeks ago, a family of four woke up at 3 a.m. Mom and dad packed their sleepy children into the car, avoiding the Arizona summer desert heat. They were bound for Hermosa Beach, California, site of, that day, the annual Smackfest tournament, a goofy, co-ed fours event that sells out in minutes. Taylor Crabb plays. So does Troy Field. Geena Urango and Lexy Denaburg and Megan Rice and a host of other sizable names with AVP, even Olympic, bona fides, routinely decorate the field.
This family was making the trip to see none of them, nor did they make it to watch a single point of volleyball.
They parked just after 9 a.m. and rushed to meet Joe and Gage Worsley. They scanned the inventory hanging from the Out of System branded tent, with its now-unmistakable signature pineapple logo, looking for what is quickly becoming gold spun out of recycled plastic: Were there anymore Out of System branded Slunks?
“They got the shorts and went back home,” Joe Worsley, the elder of the two, recounted, laughing. “What? 3 a.m.? You just throw the whole family in the car? People are offering $300 or $400 for our Slunks?”
It still boggles their mind, what Out of System has become. It began how virtually any volleyball media company — the McKibbin Brothers, SANDCAST, Better at Beach — has in the past five years or so, with little to no clue of what in the world they were doing. A few weeks before their official launch as a digital media-type company, at the annual Waupaca Boatride in 2020, Joe called up his old roommate at the University of Hawai’i, Hendrik Mol, as well as the McKibbins, asking for guidance on the best cameras to buy.
“We didn’t even know how autofocus worked until we landed,” Gage said of the Panasonic Lumix G5 camera that he bought without thinking twice or watching a single tutorial. Good timing to figure it out, though, for the Worsleys became overnight sensations that weekend, winning the biggest grass tournament in the world in a style befitting of their Out of System name. In the quarterfinals, against a stacked team of Cody Caldwell, Lev Priima, and Andre Belov, their main hitter, Dalton Solbrig, a former middle with the Worsleys at Hawai’i who has gone onto play professionally in Croatia and Germany, rolled his ankle, a chronic injury that, unfortunately, persists even today. In came their coach, a…
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