Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk, the American team built “for the long-term”

HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — There was no mincing of words. When Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk were asked how it felt to be on the court together for the first time as partners, at a Challenge in La Paz, Mexico, and an Elite 16 the following week in Tepic, they answered succinctly, and candidly.

“Shit,” Bourne said.

“Terrible,” Schalk added.

But then Schalk laughed, because this is not the first team Schalk has helped build. He knows how it goes. It took Schalk and Ben Saxton, who teamed up in 2013 and would eventually qualify for the 2016 Olympic Games, 22 tournaments to win a medal. By the end of the 2016 season, Schalk and Saxton were ranked in the top 10 in the world. His debut on the Beach Pro Tour with Theo Brunner, in 2021, consisted of a first-round qualifier loss, a 17^th in Cancun, an upset in a country quota, a ninth, another country quota upset, another loss in a qualifier, a 17^th — and then a gold medal.

Midway through 2022, Schalk and Brunner became the top-ranked team in the United States and finished fourth in the World Championships.

These things, both of them know, take time.

“At the end of the day, if you’re building with your partner and you’re working, the best team will get there,” Schalk said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “The interesting thing is, creating the best team is more difficult than you think because it’s so much about chemistry, so much about working together.”

Already, in just three tournaments, there have been moments — “teases,” Schalk called them. They qualified in Tepic, stumping Austria’s top two pairs to do so, coming back in the third set to beat Moritz Pristauz and Robin Seidl, a team who had just won bronze in La Paz the week before. They played the Czech Republic’s David Schweiner and Ondrej Perusic, the current world No. 8 team, to a 25-27, 25-27 loss. They went the full three sets with Sweden’s David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig, the tournament’s eventual gold medalists, and three again with eventual bronze winners Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler. Two weeks later, they won their pool in a Challenge in Itapema, and showed more than a bit of grit in a 21-17, 12-21, 16-14 win over Poland’s Piotr Kantor and Maciej Rudol, a match in which they were down 7-12 in the third set before mounting a stunning run.

Yes, close only counts, as the cliché goes, and…