Beach volleyball has always invited me in because it can feel more like California than competition.
From a distance, it looks like something the universe designed for a resort brochure: sand, sun, sunglasses, a little breeze, and somewhere nearby, someone underestimating the sport because the setting does such a convincing job selling the illusion.
Then you get close enough to hear it.
Every point has a language. A call before the ball arrives. A hand signal. A glance after a missed read. A quick correction. A reset. The best teams communicate constantly, and somehow also know when not to talk.
Having daughters who played volleyball, I have spent a lot of time watching that language at work. Great teams anticipate. They adjust. They trust. They learn the difference between movement and panic, which is a distinction many of us could probably use in our own calendars.
Beach volleyball may look casual from a distance, but up close it is precise, exposed, and relentless.
And this spring, LMU Beach Volleyball gave us a lot to watch up close.
The Lions earned the No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament and returned to Gulf Shores, Alabama, for their sixth consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance. They opened against No. 10 TCU, a rematch of last year’s national championship match.
(Photos in this gallery via Getty Images)
That match delivered exactly the kind of drama you would expect from two teams that know what the national stage feels like. LMU won 3-2, with Tanon Rosenthal and Anna Pelloia clinching the dual on Court 1 after a 52-point first set.
That is not a normal Friday afternoon.
The next morning, the season ended in the quarterfinals against No. 2 Texas, 3-1. Ellie Davis and Katie McAlister earned LMU’s point on Court 5, and the Lions finished the year 30-11.
Thirty dual wins.
A sixth consecutive NCAA quarterfinal appearance.
A seventh consecutive WCC championship.
The final AVCA poll placed LMU at No. 7 in the country — a spot well earned. Not a surprise seed. Not a lucky weekend. A national program finishing where national programs finish.
The trophy will have to wait. The standard did not.
When Excellence Repeats
At some point, numbers stop reading like a recap and start reading like a pattern of success.
Seven consecutive WCC championships. Six NCAA Tournament appearances. Back-to-back 30-win seasons. Twenty All-Americans.
This spring, Rosenthal and Pelloia became LMU Beach Volleyball’s 19th and 20th All-Americans, both earning AVCA First Team recognition after helping lead the Lions to another WCC title and another national tournament berth.
That is not a good run. That is a program.
And Coach John Mayer deserves to be named plainly and early here.
Coach Mayer has been with LMU Beach Volleyball from the beginning: 15 years in all, and 11 as head coach. He has more than 250 wins, an AVCA National Coach of the Year honor, and now seven consecutive WCC Coach of the Year selections.
Seven.
In a row.
That seventh straight honor is historic across the conference. Mayer became the first head coach in any West Coast Conference sport to win Coach of the Year seven consecutive times, surpassing six-year runs by Gonzaga’s Mark Few in men’s basketball and Pepperdine’s Michael Beard in men’s golf.
College sports do not reward consistency for long unless the culture underneath it is real. To keep winning anyway takes coaching, recruiting, discipline, patience, and the ability to make excellence repeatable without allowing it to feel automatic.
That is very hard to do.
Coach Mayer has done it.
What the Camera Misses
Beach volleyball presents itself neatly.
Five courts. Five pairs. Ten starters.
That is the visible part.
But anyone who has watched a serious program operate knows the visible part is only the final layer.
There are players who may not appear on the main courts but still shape the team every day. There are trainers, performance staff, student managers, academic advisors, parents, and supporters helping hold the operation together.
That is the team around the team.
The camera catches the final point. It rarely catches the recovery work, the film sessions, the travel days, the academic check-ins, or the teammate who keeps pushing even when her own role is not the one she imagined.
This is where broader leadership deserves credit, too. Craig Pintens, our athletic director, and Ashley Armstrong, our deputy athletic director and senior woman administrator, have helped build an environment where programs like this can grow and sustain excellence. Ashley supervises beach volleyball, women’s basketball, indoor volleyball, and softball. She also chairs the NCAA Beach Volleyball Committee.
Championship-level programs are not built only on the sideline.
They are built through staffing, facilities, scheduling, fundraising, academic support, compliance, recruiting, and a thousand decisions that most people never see.
The best athletic departments make excellence feel effortless.
It is not.
It is organized.
The Other Scoreboard
There is another number we should not miss.
LMU student-athletes posted a 93 percent Graduation Success Rate in the most recent NCAA report, the 12th straight time LMU reached or exceeded 90 percent.
Beach volleyball also recorded a perfect APR score for 2024-25.
So did women’s basketball.
So did softball.
So did women’s water polo.
In other words, the women’s programs highlighted here are competing at a high level and keeping the academic standard intact.
Nobody is storming the court for an APR score. But those numbers tell us something important.
Our student-athletes train, compete, travel, recover, study, and then do it again. When teams compete nationally and keep the academic standard intact, that is not a side note.
It is part of the achievement.
That broader picture showed up again this week at the 20th Annual Iggy Awards, where beach volleyball earned Female Iron Pride honors, Katie McAlister was named Iron Lioness, and Kiana Stevenson received the #MORETHANANATHLETE Award.
At LMU, we do not get to separate the two.
That is the model.
Something Larger
Earlier this year, the NCAA added four new women’s championships and elevated flag football into its Emerging Sports for Women program. Beach volleyball and water polo followed similar paths before becoming championship sports themselves.
That matters because LMU is not only succeeding in established spaces. We are competing in sports where women’s athletics continues to expand and evolve nationally.
LMU women’s athletics is not having a moment by accident.
These programs are building.
Across the Bluff
Beach volleyball is the center of this story, but it is not the whole spring.
Women’s basketball turned a preseason ninth-place projection into an outright WCC regular-season championship. The Lions finished 15-3 in conference play, won 21 games, earned a No. 25 ranking in the final CollegeInsider.com Women’s Mid-Major Top 25 poll, and snapped a 35-game losing streak to Gonzaga.
That kind of season changes how people see a program.
Led by Coach Ikaika Aki ’10, women’s water polo won its second consecutive Golden Coast Conference regular-season and tournament titles, then reached the NCAA quarterfinals. The Lions even opened with a 2-0 lead against USC before falling 10-5 to the eventual national champion.
(And don’t you wish you had this robe?)
For those who know me, aquatics are not a side interest. They are a lifelong one. I was a water polo goalie, which means I voluntarily spent part of my youth taking shots to the face and calling it character development.
I know what that sport asks of athletes. Strength, conditioning, toughness, patience, and a willingness to compete in ways most people never fully see because so much of the battle is happening below the surface.
Our water polo student-athletes showed up, competed, and gave us another reason to be proud.
Softball added its own remarkable chapter. Izzy Jamgotchian earned WCC Player of the Week and D1Softball Mid-Major Player of the Week after a record-shattering weekend against Pacific. She became LMU’s all-time career RBI leader, broke the WCC single-season walks record, and moved into second place in LMU single-season history for home runs and RBIs. Sydney Poole followed with NFCA Division I Top Performer recognition after hitting .500 in the Saint Mary’s series.
The next series at Saint Mary’s was a reminder of how quickly sports can turn, even when the record book does not.
Still, the record book changed. That counts.
And as we head into commencement weekend, it also feels like the right moment to recognize the graduating seniors across these programs. Their college experience was measured not only in credits, but in early practices, travel days, recovery sessions, film study, pressure moments, and the discipline required to keep showing up for both their teams and their education.
That is a version of the LMU experience worth celebrating.
Taken together, this spring says something about LMU.
Point by point, these programs are building something lasting.
What Endures
A season like this leaves evidence behind: evidence that LMU Beach Volleyball belongs on the national stage, that Coach Mayer has built one of the conference’s premier programs, and that our student-athletes can compete at the highest level while remaining serious in the classroom.
It also leaves evidence that great athletic programs are never built by athletes alone.
From a distance, beach volleyball still looks like sunshine.
Up close, it looks like trust. Work. Leadership. A whole team around the team.
In other words, it looks a lot like LMU.
And to the graduating seniors across LMU Athletics: congratulations. Thank you for representing the university with such competitive fire, discipline, and pride.
Go Lions.
—John
P.S. If you see a beach volleyball student-athlete, coach, trainer, manager, Athletics staff member, or one of the parents who made yet another trip, congratulate them. Seasons like this have a lot of fingerprints.
Our Graduating Student-Athletes:
Trevor Algya (BCLA), Men’s Golf
Myron “MJ” Amey Jr (BCLA), Men’s Basketball
Tommaso Baldineti (Graduate, CBA), Men’s Water Polo
London Boyd (CFA), Women’s Water Polo
Jaeya Brach (BCLA), Women’s Beach Volleyball
Ayden Brown (BCLA), Women’s Cross Country/Track
Daniel Bullen (BCLA), Men’s Golf
Leah Burrell (CBA), Women’s Volleyball
Kevin Carney (CBA), Men’s Basketball
Caden Carpenter (CFA), Men’s Water Polo
Kaydence Cortez-Garcia (BCLA), Women’s Soccer
Ky Mani Dade (BCLA), Men’s Soccer
Luca Danos (BCLA), Baseball
Cila David (Graduate, CBA), Women’s Water Polo
Ellie Davis (SFTV), Women’s Beach Volleyball
Sophia DeMattia (Seaver), Women’s Water Polo
Samantha Duwe (BCLA), Women’s Cross Country/Track
Avery Francis (CFA), Softball
Jacob Fried (Graduate, CBA), Baseball
Finn Friedland (BCLA), Men’s Water Polo
Adrien Gameiro (BCLA), Men’s Soccer
Jake Geis (BCLA), Baseball
Daniel Ghiorso (BCLA), Baseball
Lidia Gonzalez (Graduate, CBA), Women’s Tennis
David Gutierrez (CBA) Men’s Golf
Callan Harrington (Graduate, CBA), Women’s Soccer
Rylee Harrington (CBA), Women’s Water Polo
Carly Heidger (BCLA), Women’s Basketball
Chloe Hooker (Seaver), Women’s Beach Volleyball
Savannah Hooks (Graduate, CBA), Softball
Gavin Jacobsen (BCLA), Baseball
Izzy Jamgotchian (BCLA), Softball
Rokas Jocius (BCLA), Men’s Basketball
Jonah Johnson (BCLA), Baseball
Liv Johnson (CBA), Women’s Beach Volleyball
Cristina Jones (CBA), Softball
Nikola Kuraica (CBA), Men’s Tennis
Avery Laine (BCLA), Baseball
Lily Larson (CBA), Women’s Water Polo
Jess Lawson (Graduate, SOE), Women’s Basketball
Kayla Lopez, Women’s Volleyball
Andjela Matic (BCLA), Women’s Basketball
Caitlyn McCulloch (BCLA), Women’s Soccer
Ismail Nieves (Seaver), Men’s Soccer
Alexander Nothdurft (CBA), Men’s Tennis
Lindsay O’Dell (CBA), Softball
Alex Padro Parra (BCLA), Men’s Tennis
Anna Pelloia (BCLA), Women’s Beach Volleyball
Sydney Poole (Graduate, CBA), Softball
Katie Power (CBA), Women’s Cross Country/Track
Paula Reus (BCLA), Women’s Basketball
Richie Rimlinger (CBA), Men’s Water Polo
Abel Romero Corbalan (BCLA), Men’s Water Polo
Nakyel Shelton (Graduate, SOE), Men’s Basketball
Mari Somvichian (CBA), Women’s Basketball
Jordan Sprague (BCLA), Women’s Soccer
Sophia Stephenson (CBA), Women’s Volleyball
Anna Tarantino (Graduate, SOE), Women’s Water Polo
Hugo Tavaras (Seaver), Men’s Soccer
Tanner Thomas (Graduate, SOE), Men’s Basketball
Tanner Warady (BCLA), Baseball
Hayden Washington (Seaver), Women’s Cross Country/Track
Zion Williams (BCLA, Baseball)
Eli Yamanaka (BCLA), Baseball
Kim Zahraj (Graduate, CBA), Women’s Tennis
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