The saying “home team advantage” reached new heights with our latest AVP League event in Austin. The city of Austin showed out! This was a huge weekend for the game of beach volleyball and we are so grateful for all the support of the new league format. I will speak for Kristen and myself when I say we were blown away by the fans and walked away with a loss and still felt like we took one of the biggest Ws with our goal to grow the sport!
We went to Austin on Thursday night to kick off the home weekend and make sure the media was well informed as to what was about to happen in the H-E-B center on the first weekend of October. Speaking of media, we were finally able to meet our social media guru in person. As you can tell from what she has does with our TKN social channels, Molly is incredible. She is brilliant, very informed on communicating through media, and able to grasp more eyes on the sport. We are so excited to have her on our team and on top of all of that she is a hilarious and genuine human. We don’t know what you guys thought, but we have been so pleased with her social media strategy!
Friday morning, we were at the arena bright and early as the sand was being hauled into the H-E-B arena to do a couple news station interviews, a podcast, and a couple other segments. We even helped to set up and moved the sand from the excavator to the court by hand, you know southern hospitality! We then ventured to the bougier side of Austin for a lunch with the owner of TIY, our favorite hair ties, to chat about improving our brand and how we can continue to work together. Andrea has been involved in many different ways to give us ideas, input, and always wants to find ways to help us out and keep growing TKN as TIY has done.
After our lunch we made our way back to the hotel to do a little bit of work before volleyball took over the weekend. On Friday night, we kicked off the Austin League event with 50 Austin area adults that came out from about 7-10 to learn, play and have some fun. We truly love to do the adult clinics as well because they are all so enthusiastic and take the feedback so well. They are all out there because they care and want to improve and learn more about the game which creates a magical environment to run a clinic. The energy was outstanding and everyone that came out was super supportive and you could tell they are passionate about this sport. For us, it has become a job for other people beach volleyball is exercise, it’s a happy place, or its simply a place to be outside and hang out with some close friends. Where ever beach volleyball goes.. there is a warm and welcoming community that follows!
We were wiped out and got back to our hotel at about 10:45/11 pm and we had a clinic the next morning at 10 am! At 10 am we rolled up to AJV to see lots of volleyballs flying around the four-court complex. As soon as we brought all the girls in to do an introduction there were 100 eye balls intently watching and 100 ears that were eager to hear from us and our coach Drew. The girls were sprinting back from water breaks, they were sprinting for balls, and making changes in their game. That is the best part and at the end we were able to chat with a couple of them, all of which were planning to come to the league event on Saturday night!
On our way home from the clinic we were informed that our game would be streamed on CBS Sports! That is huge for our sport, however, our we knew our families would be sad that they could not watch it live. We can empathize, but we are trying to grow the sport and with that comes growing pains and that was one of them. The H-E-B hockey arena was ice cold but people were packing in the stands to watch the 4 matches of the day. Our Austin Aces men’s team gave them all a show. I truly believe the home crowd cheers gave Billy and Paul another level of greatness to tap into. There is no way to know but I was getting goosebumps looking around the stadium to see the Austin Ace t-shirts from the clinic participants, TKN shirts, and TKN posters. We felt the love and after our men’s team got the W.. it was our turn. After a very slow start we pushed to three and used the energy from the crowd to pull out a win against a very good opponent. Words can’t describe the feeling of competing with so much excitement and crowd enthusiasm surrounding the lines of the court. We were wiped out from a long day of the clinic, cheering for the men’s team – which warmed us up for our game because we were screaming and jumping around and then we got back to the hotel around 11 pm.
Sunday morning rolled around quickly and we were starving, particularly Kristen and she was ravenous and ready to go. I sprinted around the room to be ready to go grab some food before our Sunday matchups. We had our second meet and greet of the weekend when we arrived at the arena and then lots of games to watch and people to chat with on the sidelines. Then our men’s team did it again! A big W in straight sets and we were up. In just two sets we did drop our match to the Brooklyn Blaze and left with a 3-1 record. However, we left with so much joy about the turn out in Austin, Texas. There were so many invested fans and so many people drove in from around Texas to show support. Our AVP league game could be viewed on CBS sports and we are officially half way through the league. We stopped for some tex-mex and hopped on the last flight out of Austin.
By: Taryn Kloth
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