Beach volleyball season begins: Doha Elite16 main draw for Trevor Crabb, Theo Brunner

On a blustery but beautiful Manhattan Beach morning last month, Trevor Crabb was musing about the finer things in life.

“There isn’t much better,” he said, “than moving from the qualifier straight into the main draw.”

One of the few pleasant surprises in contention? An upgrade from economy to first class. How Crabb’s flight to Qatar for this week’s Doha Elite16 went is unconfirmed, but what is certain is this:

He and Theo Brunner are directly into the main draw.

The previous day, Miles Partain and Andy Benesh withdrew from Doha, the opening tournament of the 2024 season and one of 10 remaining Olympic qualifying events in the race to Paris. That bumped Crabb and Theo Brunner from the top spot in Tuesday’s qualifier and into the main draw, which will conclude with Saturday’s medal rounds.

Now, their tournament will begin not with a pair of single-elimination matches in a qualifier that is of little difference in talent level than the main draw, but the enviable cushion of pool play. They are now guaranteed three pool-play matches, main-draw points, and main-draw prize money. Meanwhile, the two teams attempting to catch them, Chase Budinger and Miles Evans, and Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk, remain in the qualifier — guaranteed nothing.

The Olympic race will not be decided this weekend in Qatar. But Crabb and Brunner could deal a devastating blow.

As it stands right now, Crabb and Brunner are No. 13 in the Olympic standings and second among Americans. Benesh and Partain are so far ahead that when Garrett Springer, a statistics major at BYU, ran a simulation of the next 10 events one million times, Benesh and Partain qualified in 99.9 percent of them. That cushion has, in turn, allowed them to skip events such as this, allowing for a full off-season to recover, both mentally and physically.

The American race, then, has been boiled down to three teams vying for the second Olympic spot. Budinger and Evans are 440 points behind Brunner and Crabb — roughly the delta between a bronze medal and a ninth at an Elite16 — and Bourne and Schalk trail by 840. Springer’s simulation found that Brunner and Crabb have a 56.7 percent chance of qualifying, Budinger and Evans 20.6, and Bourne and Schalk 7.9.

Those probabilities could take a drastic shift this weekend, one of just four Elite16s remaining until the June 9 cutoff date.

It is difficult to overstate the advantage that is beginning in the main draw. To emerge from the qualifier, Budinger and Evans will first have to beat Adrian Heidrich and Leo Dillier, Switzerland’s No. 2 team, and await the winner of — who else? — Bourne and Schalk and Canada’s Sam Schachter and Dan Dearing.

Dearing and Schachter recently finished a California training camp where they routinely practiced against none other than Bourne and Schalk and Budinger and Evans, beating the latter in the same mini-tournament where Crabb was informed he was straight into the main draw.

Such is the small world of beach volleyball and, smaller still, North American beach volleyball.

USA women

The American women’s race for Paris, meanwhile is officially over. Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes punched their ticket via winning last year’s World Championships, and Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth have staked themselves to a point lead so large they cannot be caught. The next four and a half months for both could be considered a competitive preparatory period for Paris.

In Doha, Nuss and Kloth are the top seed in Pool B, which also includes Brazil’s Barbara Seixas and Carol Salgado, and Italy’s Valentina Gottardi and Marta Menegatti. Cheng and Hughes head Pool C, with the Netherlands’ Katja Stam and Raisa Schoon and Brazil’s Taina Silva and Victoria Lopes.

Only Brooke Sweat and high school standout Kennedy Coakley are in the qualifier for the American women. They’ll begin with France’s Lezana Placette and Alexia Richard.

All matches from the Doha Elite16 will be streamed via Volleyball TV (if you want 20 percent off, use the discount code SANDCAST20 at checkout).

Beach volleyball season begins: Doha Elite16 main draw for Trevor Crabb, Theo Brunner Volleyballmag.com.