Abby Van Winkle: The rookie whose volleyball career is only up from here

HERMOSA BEACH, California — Beginning in the spring of 2019, it would all be downhill for Abby Van Winkle.

Never mind that she was still just a teenager, a bright-eyed and more than promising freshman blocker for UCLA. Never mind that she was still floating on the euphoria that comes with not just winning an NCAA Championship, but clinching it with a block on court three. Never mind that she could be a successful professional if she so chose, that she could allow volleyball to be her vehicle to travel the world and live what she calls a “fantasy life” on the beach.

Never mind all that.

She’d peaked, right then and there on the sugar-white sands of Gulf Shores, Alabama.

“My parents looked at me after and said ‘This is probably the highlight of your volleyball career. Everything else is downhill from here,’ “ Van Winkle said with a laugh on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “That’s not the case any more.”

No, it certainly is not. While that moment marked the highlight of her NCAA career, it seems but a lovely blip given what she recently accomplished as a professional. In college, she had to beat talented players, yes. But as a burgeoning professional on the AVP and Beach Pro Tour?

She’s matching up with Olympic medalists…in qualifiers.

And winning.

In mid-April, Savvy Simo and Van Winkle made the trip from the Dominican Republic, where they won a bronze medal at Van Winkle’s first NORCECA, to Guadalajara, Mexico, for a Challenge. Van Winkle wasn’t even supposed to be there at all, subbing in on short notice when Toni Rodriguez pulled out with a knee injury. She and Simo were kind of a team, kind of not. They knew, from their time as teammates at UCLA and a handful of one-off events here and there over the ensuing handful of years, that they enjoyed playing together, that they could even be an excellent team. But points rule the world, and Van Winkle didn’t have any, Simo did, and that made committing to Van Winkle as a partner no easy thing.

It took one match for Van Winkle to convince Simo that the risk was more than worth it.

In the second round of the qualifier, they matched up with Switzerland’s Anouk Verge-Depre and Joana Mader, a team who had won the bronze medal in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and are currently on the verge of qualifying for Paris. The Swiss did what anyone would do when playing a team where one player (Simo) has wins over Kelly Cheng and Sarah Sponcil, Mariafe Artacho and Taliqua Clancy, and success both internationally and domestically, while the other (Van Winkle) has a resume still very much in the drafting process. They served Van Winkle every ball.

Problem was, it didn’t work. Over and over did Van Winkle side out, anchoring the Americans to a 14-10 lead. The 6-foot-2 blocker added aces and blocks and flowy transition sets in an offense that looked like it had been fine-tuned for years. In reality, they’d only added the tempo sets two weeks before, in New Orleans with local coach Joey Keener, who watched Simo dig a line shot and just…stand there, running her set directly into the blocker.

“Savvy,” he said in his amused southern twang, “when you dig a line shot, why do you just stay at the pin? You’re so fast, why don’t you run across the court? Abby’s hands are so good!”

Eureka.

“We practiced it for a day and we said ‘We’re just going to commit to this system.’ We still don’t know how far to set it,” Simo said. “She just flings it to me. It was just an hour of experimenting. It was just Joey spitballing.”

It didn’t look like it. There’s something to be said about team chemistry, the intangible bonus that comes with playing alongside someone who just gets you. Van Winkle gets Simo, and Simo Van Winkle. There’s no telling how good they could have been at UCLA, but the 13-1 season they enjoyed in 2020, while a small sample size, is a decent indicator. They integrated what they ran at UCLA four years ago along with Keener’s spitballing and USA Volleyball’s training with Scott Davenport, and in two weeks, it looked more than smooth.

It looked dangerous.

But it was also coming apart.

Mader and Verge-Depre are not Olympic medalists and European Champions by accident. They adjusted, settled in, tied it up at 18-18. This is the point at which most young teams and players fold. A four-point lead had evaporated, the momentum shifted, the tension flipped, the all-world players back in control.

“When they started creeping back in, they were serving me and I started getting so tense,” Simo said. “I remembered thinking they have so much more on the line than we do.”

Simo and Van Winkle are not in the throes of a pressure-filled Olympic race, as Mader and Verge-Depre are. They were in Guadalajara, they said, for experience and fun. So they opened their arms and welcomed the fun, running their new offense cooked up and served with crawfish in New Orleans, saving that first set, 24-22, then winning the next, 21-17.

“It was a great opportunity for me to go because I was subbing in so I was super grateful getting to compete in a Challenge because I don’t have any points so I just said ‘Let’s see what we can do,’ ” Van Winkle said. “When we did win our first going into our second, I was just like well we have nothing to lose, underdogs. I was really confident going into it. I got the nerves, but I definitely felt more confident going into that match than I do most, so that definitely helped.

“It was just, we have nothing to lose. That was my mentality going into it. I just had a really good feeling. I think that was also playing with Savvy. I feel very confident playing with her and just confident on the court, which is really nice.”

She wasn’t confident, however, holding match point at 20-17. She didn’t want to get served. Not at all. But then Simo reminded her of something Keener said in New Orleans. Whenever they begin to feel pressure, “we’ll just look at each other and we’ll say ‘Just be a badass,’ ” Van Winkle said. “It just brings us back.”

They were badass, all right. They qualified, then pushed top-seeded Nina Brunner and Tanja Huberli to three, then did the same to eventual gold medalists Zoe Verge-Depre and Esmee Bobner. No, they wouldn’t win either, but the fact that they contended with every team in the Swiss federation, three pairs ranked in the top-15 of the Olympic rankings? Evidence enough that Van Winkle’s future in this sport is as bright as any 24-year-old’s.

“I’m fully committing to it right now,” Van Winkle said. “I’m giving it my all. When I graduated college I was not ready to be done. I want to keep going. We’re committing to each other and going to just grow. I feel very free right now and it’s the creative side that we can explore. The sky is kinda the limit right now and we’re just trying new things and it’s working out.”

She’s back on the road already, on a flight bound for Varadero, Cuba for another NORCECA. Then it’s onto the AVP, which begins May 16 in Huntington Beach. Simo’s taking a chance on Van Winkle, dropping into the qualifier to play with her old but new partner.

Suffice it to say, Van Winkle’s earned it.

And suffice it to say, Van Winkle’s NCAA Championship sealing block was far from her peak.

“When I won my freshman year, I was like I am doing this forever! I had dreams. It made them feel even more real and that I could reach them,” she said. “I really had all these feelings that I was going to play volleyball for a while.

“I’m living a fantasy life right now just playing volleyball, waking up, going to have fun with my friends. It doesn’t seem like a real thing but it is, and you can make it a lifestyle. You have to put in work to bring yourself up to make sure you can do this for a living.”