HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — On a warm and breezy Tuesday night in Hermosa Beach, Calif., the litter of beach volleyball road dogs grew just a bit larger. Silila Tucker, a 27-year-old from Hawai’i, and Teegan Van Gunst, another 27-year-old from Georgia, were announced as the winners of the annual Eric Zaun Award.
And so the spirit of the Road Dog carries on.
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Since Zaun’s death in the summer of 2019, 15 players have been named Eric Zaun Award winners, a list that includes Van Gunst’s partner this season, Aurora Davis, who used the bulk of her funds from the award to purchase a flight to Bonaire, where she would win a NORCECA gold medal in 2019 with Allie Wheeler.
Three years later, Davis helped another player become a winner of the Eric Zaun Award. Van Gunst, who played all eight of her AVP events this season with Davis, fit the mold for what we seek in a Zaun Award candidate, which isn’t a complicated mold. Simply put, she got after it, playing in 14 tournaments this season, all but one of which were domestic. The only international tournament she played? A NORCECA in Nicaragua, which she promptly won with Katie Lindstrom. Neither the setting nor surface mattered: She’d win on whatever you put her on, winning the 30th annual Pottstown Rumble — a Zaun favorite — with Davis. She took a career-high on the AVP with a second at the AVP Atlantic City Tour Series, then made another semifinal in Virginia Beach, finishing third. She closed the season just as well, with a third in Laguna alongside Kim Hildreth, an impressive feat given she’d never before played with Hildreth, and stumped a number of elite teams en route to the semifinals.
Her prize money this season ($9,100) more than quadrupled her previous career-high, set in 2019, a total that does not include “unofficial” tournaments such as Pottstown, Laguna, or any of the other AVPAmerica events in which she collected a paycheck. All of that is a long way of saying that Van Gunst’s stock in beach volleyball is on the rise, as is her fellow winner, Silila Tucker.
Tucker’s season had a bit more of a journeyman’s element to it. He played eight AVP’s with three different partners who hailed from three different states: Lev Priima, Pete Connole, Andrew Dentler. He won the Laguna Open with Andy Benesh, dropping just two sets along the way. He, too, set a career-high in prize money, more…
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