Trevor Crabb and Tri Bourne, AVP champs, have their swagger back

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — There was something amiss. It wasn’t especially difficult to see that Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb were not the same team who won the 2021 Manhattan Beach Open. That something had gone awry in leading to their plummet from a top 10 ranking in the world at the beginning of the year to where they are now: No. 30. Theories abounded for why the two Hawai’ians, formerly the No. 1 team both on the AVP and in the U.S., were suffering the worst stretch of their four-year partnership, but there was nothing definitive, no tangible reason, for the slump.

Which gave Crabb an idea: “Slap a guarantee on dat ass.”

“It just felt time to do that,” Crabb said on SANDCAST of his guaranteed win at AVP Fort Lauderdale last weekend. “Felt like the right time to give us the extra boost we needed, call it a confidence boost or swag.”

They thrive on a sense of urgency, those two. Problem is, 2022 has provided little in the way of urgency. Prize money has dropped. The Olympic race for the Paris Games isn’t set to begin until early 2023. Compared to the first three years of their partnership, which began at the onset of the Tokyo Olympics qualification — they won their first tournament, a three-star in Qinzhou, China — there was no added pressure to win a tournament. The sense of urgency that had fueled them for the entirety of their partnership was amiss.

“We had an intention to enjoy things a little more this year,” Bourne said. “It’s possible that had a little bit to do with our slow start to the year.”

That intention to enjoy things more backfired in the most ironic of ways: Neither of them were enjoying much of anything about the season. A five-week road trip that included stops in Turkey, the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Italy, saw them finish outside of the top-10 twice. They didn’t get so much as a whiff of a medal. A seventh-place finish at AVP Hermosa, in which they were stunned by 16^th-seeded Jake Dietrich and Hagen Smith, was backed up by a ninth at a Challenger in Espinho, Portugal, where they were summarily dismissed by Italians Enrico Rossi and Adrian Carambula, 16-21, 13-21. It was one of the ugliest matches of their partnership.

“Espinho was brutal,” Trevor Crabb said. “We had just beat Australia in the match before that so we were feeling pretty good and we had a nice big win in a close game. We felt pretty good…