HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — There was nothing wrong with Geena Urango.
She was, as she said on SANDCAST, “able-bodied. I was healthy, I was in shape, yada yada, but …”
But how to explain the fact that Urango, the precocious talent out of USC, the first beach player in the history of the most dynastic program in the sport, the one who made her first final in 2015 in her mid-20s, had somehow dropped from the main draw and into the qualifiers, some of which she didn’t make it out? Her ranking had slipped to the point that she didn’t make it into the AVP Champions Cup in 2020, and finished 13th, 9th, and 17th in the three events in the truncated 2021 season.
“Trying to find that partner that you really gel with is key,” she said, finishing the sentence from above. “The two, three years where I was like ‘Am I ever going to get back there again?’ Being a consistent main draw player and then going back down to the qualifier and not qualifying a couple events, it was mentally really hard for me.”
Yet here she is, after a two-year rut, and her full name, when being introduced on stadium court or the livestream, will forever be this: Geena Urango, AVP Champion. Urango, to the near unanimous delight of her peers on the AVP, who had been expecting this moment since Urango stepped on an AVP main draw court for the first time in 2012, won the Atlanta Gold Series. It marks her first victory seven years after making her first final.
And she did it, in that beautifully ironic way sports tend to go, without so much as thinking about winning at all.
“I went into Atlanta being not outcome focused and I think that was really a difference because I went in with a different type of confidence in myself,” Urango said. “I was like ‘I know what to do, I know what my capabilities are, I’ve trained, and whatever happens, happens. The only thing I can control is my effort and my attitude and my mentality that I have going in.’ It was different for me, that one, for sure, because it was ok if we lost.”
It sounds almost transcendentalist, spiritual in a way, yet it’s genuine. One of the many small changes she made this year was to begin working with a mental trainer again. As she noted, the difference between 2019-2021 Geena Urango and 2022 Geena Urango isn’t physical — although she…
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