Kent Steffes, Travis Mewhirter publish beach volleyball book

The book that Kent Steffes and I recently published — Kings of Summer, the Rise of Beach Volleyball — wasn’t supposed to be released last Monday. It wasn’t supposed to be structured the way it is, with the narrative anchored by a single match, the 1996 Olympic quarterfinal between Karch Kiraly and Steffes, and Sinjin Smith and Carl Henkel. It wasn’t even supposed to be named what it is, and Steffes didn’t save it from its original name until roughly draft 15, which isn’t even an exaggeration.

And it certainly wasn’t supposed to be co-written by Steffes himself.

But books are a long process. Change, as I’ve discovered after writing a few of them, is inevitable. And this book is better for every change that came with it.

Really, this book was supposed to be published in 2018, as the first half of my previous book, We Were Kings. Ann Maynard, an editor I hired, saved it. The first half was too underdeveloped, she said. She was left wanting to know more — more about the characters, so rich in life and stories and personality. More about the sport. More about its volatile and brash history.

This, she decided, was two books.

And so it was.

I went ahead with We Were Kings, which has now been out, unbelievably, for nearly four years. As for what was intended to be the first half of that book? It collected digital dust and mothballs, waiting, waiting, waiting for the right opportunity. That opportunity came two years later, presenting itself in a now-well-known, all-capitalized word familiar to most everyone in the world: COVID.

Like you and everyone else, I was terribly bored during COVID. Aside from the three weeks of the AVP Champions Cup, there was little for me to do.

I don’t do well with boredom.

I needed something, anything to write about. A big project. Something to tackle. Anything to provide some sense of accomplishment. At some point during the pandemic, the thought occurred to me to revisit my old notes from We Were Kings, to take inventory of what I had, what holes needed filling, and how, or if, I could turn it into a prequel type of story. I knew I at least had a skeleton, a framework around which to build. Coincidentally, I discovered that, over the years, Tri Bourne and I had accidentally filled some of the holes via SANDCAST, when we brought on legends of beach volleyball’s past in Sinjin Smith, Mike Dodd, Randy Stoklos, Tim Hovland, and Nina Matthies, among a few others. There was…