HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — As the 2022 AVP Tour season continued through August, the strangest — and most welcome — of streaks somehow continued: There had yet to be a repeat winner on the women’s side of the Tour.
It’s an amazing thing, what happens when April Ross isn’t playing beach volleyball: Everyone else has a chance. Since Donald Sun resurrected the AVP in 2012, Ross has won 33 AVP titles in 48 tournaments, including five straight dating back to July of 2020, the onset of the Champions Cup. When she and Alix Klineman won the Olympic gold medal at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, she cemented her permanent residency in the GOAT Pasture.
Ross’ absence this season presented enormous intrigue as to who would fill her shoes as the most dominant female player leading the most dominant female team.
“it was Misty [May-Treanor] and Kerri [Walsh Jennings] from ’02 all the way up until 2012, and then enter April playing with Kerri in ’16, then April playing with Alix [Klineman] who established themselves as far above the next,” Dain Blanton said on a recent episode of SANDCAST. “You knew if you were to win a tournament you had to go through that team. Usually on the men’s side you had to go through Phil [Dalhausser] or Jake [Gibb]. This is the first time almost on both sides there’s almost a reset: Who’s going to be that guard? Be that team where, ‘OK, if I want to win a tourney, I need to go through them’? It’s a time where everything is settling in.”
Nearly five months later, there has been the slightest of settling, with 24-year-old Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, 25, respectively, who will likely forever be known as the LSU Girls.
Only Nuss and Kloth, our 2022 VolleyballMag Team of the Year, won multiple AVP Pro or Gold Series titles this year, opening and closing the “regular season” with victories in Austin and Chicago. Although the Phoenix Championships were not included when it came to determining our awards, for reasons we’ll list below, Nuss and Kloth dominated all six sets they played, without a single team coming anywhere close to stealing a set off them.
“You just see the look in Kristen’s eyes and she is like: ‘It is go time. I don’t want to have anything touch the sand,’” Kloth said after Phoenix. “And that’s when you go. When Kristen gives you the look, you just go.”
And go they did, as did a number of other young talents emerging as professionals this season.
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