The potential for the silver medal that Corinne Quiggle and Sarah Schermerhorn won on a July Sunday evening in Espinho, Portugal, was displayed on a March Friday morning in Tlaxcala, Mexico.
In Mexico, for the season-opening event under Volleyball World’s new Beach Pro Tour system, Quiggle and Schermerhorn, after qualifying by sweeping a pair of Japanese teams, upset top-seeded Sarah Sponcil and Terese Cannon and 13th-seeded Hegeile Almeida and Taina Lima.
Sponcil and Cannon have since won a bronze medal at the Kusadasi Challenger and claimed their first AVP title in Hermosa Beach just two weeks ago. Hegeile and Taina have taken five top-10s on the Beach Pro Tour and are currently the sixth-ranked team in the world.
Quiggle and Schermerhorn had every bit of that potential in them. On July 17 in Espinho, for Quiggle and Schermerhorn’s sixth international event of the season, that potential was realized, as the two won their first medal of the season, falling in the finals to Australians Mariafe Artacho and Taliqua Clancy, 21-19, 19-21, 12-15.
“I’m just so freakin’ proud of the way we battled,” Schermerhorn said. “I had so much fun being out on the court with Corinne. She balled out all weekend long.”
And they did have a long weekend in Portugal. They dropped their first match to Emily Day and Savvy Simo, 15-21, 18-21, and kind of, sort of, broke pool with a 21-18, 21-16 win over China’s Meimei Lin and Xinyi Xia. All that win did, however, was earn them a spot in a lucky loser match with Norway’s Sunniva Helland-Hansen — a Stetson alum — and Emilie Olimstad, which they won, narrowly, 27-29, 21-18, 15-9.
And all those wins did was earn them a berth against an Olympian in the Czech Republic’s Barbora Hermannova and Marie-Sara Stochlova. Another tight win — 21-19, 22-20 — paved the way for a pair of sweeps against Germany’s Sandra Ittlinger and Isabel Schneider and Spain’s Sofia Gonzalez Paula Soria.
Five straight victories, then, was what it took to punch their ticket into their first gold medal match as a team, against one of the hottest pairs on Tour in Artacho and Clancy, who were coming off a bronze in the Gstaad Elite 16 and are the No. 4 ranked team in the world. The silver marks Quiggle and Schermerhorn’s first medal as a team, and certainly the biggest of either of their individual…
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