Beach Volleyball | May 23, 2016
Beach volleyball may seem a little foreign—a vacation pastime or weekend hobby—to some of us lifelong Tennessee residents, but to Taylor Mott it's long been a way of life.
Growing up in Dearfield Beach, Florida, Mott cut her teeth playing for fun on weekends before getting serious about volleyball—both the indoor and beach variety—in middle school. Once she did that, her game took off and before long she was off to Ole Miss, where she was a two-time Academic All-SEC selection who got her beach fix back in Florida on the summer minitour circuit.
It's also how she met her husband, Brian, who played club volleyball at Ole Miss.
"There was one sand court in Oxford," Mott said. "KC's Tavern had one sand court and we played a lot of beach volleyball."
Upon returning to Florida as head coach at Flagler in 1999, Mott and her family lived three blocks from the pier in Saint Augustine, playing beach volleyball at night and on weekends. Mott said her kids, Dylan and Merrick, grew up on those courts before coming to Tennessee.
Beach volleyball is also the connection that brought Brian Netzler, Austin Peay's assistant coach, into the fold in 2014.
"My husband played against Brian at Nashville Beach long before I even had a staff position open," Mott said. "Because they both had Ole Miss ties, they made a connection and when Ariel (Apolinario) left a few months later, Brian's name came up and my husband thought he was a nice guy and fun to play with. It's kind of a small world."
So with all that as background, it's small wonder Mott—entering her fifth season as Austin Peay's head volleyball coach and what will be the first year of beach volleyball in program history—is an advocate for APSU's newest sport and one of the fastest-growing NCAA-sanctioned sports.
"I think it's going to become one of the hot sports," Mott said. "There were over 5,000 people at the first championship—I was there and it was very well-attended for its first-ever championship. It's going to grow once people wrap their minds around the idea that it's not limited to schools on a beach setting."
The appeal, to Mott, is easy to see. A sport for all ages, anyone can enjoy playing beach volleyball and the idea of an NCAA Championship on a beachfront setting in early May has to be enticing.
Other than the ball, and even the ball is slightly different, indoor and beach volleyball are totally different games—different number of players on the court, different styles of play, different strategies needed. Over the next few years, as Austin Peay forms its identity as a beach volleyball program, the indoor players will comprise the bulk of the beach roster—a move designed to improve their respective game in both disciplines.
"There's only two of you—you have to be able to pass, you have to be able to set," Mott said. "It forces them to do things the indoor game doesn't make you do. You're going to touch the ball a lot too—on a six-person indoor team, you may get through a whole rotation without touching the ball.
"People talk about beach volleyball as training for indoor, and I think they just think of it in terms of conditioning and jumping and things like that. That's not at all what I see; to be good at beach volleyball, you have to learn to read your hitters and you have to have good court awareness and you have to hit shots instead of just hammering the ball. I think that's going to make huge improvements in our team is just having better court vision and anticipating better by reading hitters instead of reacting. It's not so much about the conditioning when you think of training in the sand."
Mott and the APSU volleyball program hope to see long-lasting success thanks to the addition of beach volleyball. The way she sees it, programs that don't offer both indoor and beach volleyball are going to be left in the dust.
"It's going to keep growing. The indoor programs will start to feel like they're at a disadvantage if they don't offer beach volleyball, so I can see where more will be starting beach programs just so they're not behind the eight-ball."
