HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — You hate them. You love them. You love that you hate them. You hate yourself for sometimes loving them. You once chanted Never Trevor and might now occasionally catching yourself whispering — not loud enough for anyone else to hear, of course — Forever Trevor. You skewered Tri Bourne for roasting both the AVP and Volleyball World structures on a podcast one day — yet also couldn’t help but give him a standing ovation for a second consecutive Manhattan Beach Open victory this past August.
Regardless of your feelings towards Bourne and Trevor Crabb, the VolleyballMag 2022 Team of the Year, one thing was an objective certainty during this 2022 AVP season: You were going to watch them play. Maybe you’d watch them in hopes of them losing, as the cocky, win-guaranteeing Hawai’ians regularly, and voluntarily, placed metaphorical targets on their sandy backs. Maybe you’d watch them in hopes that those guarantees came true, as another one somehow did in Fort Lauderdale, extending Crabb’s streak to three straight guarantees result in wins.
Maybe you’d watch to see the inevitable trash talk, the occasional shoulder check, the relatively meaningless but always crowd-pleasing yellow card. But, again, regardless of your reasoning: You were going to watch. Viewers tuned in for record-setting numbers — record-setting relative to the AVP’s matches on the YouTube livestream — to watch Bourne and Crabb, and fellow Hawai’ian Taylor Crabb and his sensational partner, Taylor Sander, compete this season.
It was a mercurial one for both Hawai’ian-based teams, a slow-starter with a scintillating finish. With Phil Dalhausser and Jake Gibb both retiring from full-time play — Gibb from all play, Dalhausser from international while also abandoning most notions of gunning for as many AVP titles as possible — the question to be answered this season was who would take their thrones atop the AVP as the most dominant players leading the most dominant teams.
Three pairs emerged, with one common denominator: Hawai’i. Bourne and Crabb, both raised on the island of Oahu, were the only team to win multiple AVP events this season, claiming victories in Fort Lauderdale, Manhattan Beach, and Chicago. They entered the post-season Phoenix Championships as the No. 1 seed. Taylor Crabb, another Hawai’i-raised Outrigger rugrat, one of the most talented defenders of this generation, and Sander, the All-World…
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