HUNTINGTON BEACH — If you are a fan of beach volleyball, you’ve likely heard of Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth. And if you haven’t … well, by the end of the summer you could be quite familiar with them, thanks to NBC.
Nuss and Kloth, seeded No. 1 in the women’s bracket going into this weekend’s AVP Huntington Beach Open, are the second-ranked women’s team in the world behind Brazilians Ana Patricia and Duda. They have an enticing back story – a couple of them, actually, with the pairing of the 5-foot-6 Louisiana native Nuss and the 6-4 South Dakotan Kloth as well as their status as one of the few teams on the AVP tour that doesn’t use Southern California as its base of operations.
And they are headed for Paris, as the first to qualify for this summer’s U.S. Olympic team. If all goes as they hope, they should get plenty of time on NBC’s coverage with their performance and their stories and their personalities, and who knows what kind of commercial opportunities might follow.
“That,” Kloth said, “would be amazing.”
“Yeah,” Nuss added. “That’s something I don’t think either one of us has fully thought about.”
This is not an out-of-nowhere story, not any more. The 26-year-olds began playing together at LSU in 2020, “in the darkness of COVID,” Kloth said. Nuss was a Louisiana native, while Kloth had played indoor volleyball at Creighton and migrated to LSU as a graduate transfer in January of 2019.
Since they became a partnership, at the beginning of the 2021 college season, the results have been magic. They finished 36-0 in their final season at LSU. As professionals they’ve won six tournaments on the domestic AVP tour and five in FIVB, or international, competition. In 2023 they won five times between the two, and winning the World Tour finals in Doha, Qatar in December secured their Olympic berth.
They didn’t realize it until a USA Volleyball official told them in January, but Nuss said it didn’t really sink in until “three weeks ago, two weeks ago.”
The combination of tall and short might be a conversation piece, but they’ve made it work. Nuss, who will be the shortest U.S. beach volleyball Olympian since 5-6 Barbra Fontana in 1996 in Atlanta, succeeds with a mixture of pace, guile and scrappiness.
One story compared her to Greg Maddux, the Hall of Fame pitcher who lacked velocity but changed speeds and used pin-point location to get people out. Watching Nuss on the court here Friday, you could see similar characteristics in the balls that she put in just the right places, out of her opponents’ reach.
Nuss said her aunt texts her before every tournament with the same instructions: “Hit it where they’re not.”
“And that pretty much is our sport, and that’s my job,” she said. “But I give all credit to my coach (at LSU), Drew Hamilton, from the beginning. I mean, yes, I am undersized, so you’re not going to see me outpowering anyone. So it is just all about placement and, very court vision and then just being a scrappy as possible on defense, just making it difficult for the other team to score. But yeah, I give all credit to Drew Hamilton for basically turning me into the player that I am.”
Kloth, who had been an indoor All-American at Creighton, had to figure out what transferred to the sand and what didn’t, and she said it took her “probably like a year and a half” to adjust.
“Definitely got thrown into the deep end,” she said. “It was a big challenge. You have to deal with all of the elements. … Yes, it does have volleyball in it, but it is completely different from the normal.”
They didn’t play together initially at LSU, but when they convinced Hamiltion to put them together something clicked. Nuss set an NCAA record for victories with 139 from 2017 through ’21. Both were beach All-Americans in their final season.
“We were just friends,” Nuss said. “And then it kind of turned into a beach volleyball partnership. I think the fact that we started as friends, that’s just how it all began. And now she’s my sister, she’s an adopted Louisianan, she’s adopted into my family.”
How inseparable are they?
“We show up at family events, it’s Christmas and people are like, ‘Where’s Kristen?’” Kloth said. “I’m like, ‘With her family.’”
So, is there an initiation process necessary to be an adopted Louisianan?
“She had to try crawfish,” Nuss said. “However, I peeled it for her.”
“The little eyeballs look at you,” Kloth said.
“She did go to Mardi Gras,” Nuss said. “She experienced a hurricane. She’s been through it all.”
They represent the state on their caps, and they train at a Baton Rouge beach volleyball facility, eschewing the SoCal beach volleyball scene.
“We stayed in Louisiana for a reason,” Kloth said. “We felt like we had a very good support system there. That’s where our coach was. And like Kristen always says, we wanted to rewrite the script, that you don’t have to come out to Southern California in order to make it in the professional world of beach volleyball.”
Nuss acknowledged that there’s a reason SoCal is considered the epicenter of beach volleyball – “The stands are packed and it’s a Friday: This is awesome for the sport” – but she expressed the sentiment that demonstrating you don’t have to be in California to play the sport could be enticing for other athletes from other regions.
“And,” she added, “it’s nice to just kind of be away from everyone.”
If one interview is any indication, their personalities are ideal for the type of featurized coverage NBC is expected to emphasize from Paris. But the competitive half of the equation plays just as well.
Nuss and Kloth ripped through their first matches Friday in the shadow of the Huntington Beach pier, sweeping qualifiers Devanne Sours and Marine Kinna, 21-11, 21-11, shortly after noon and then knocking off Toni Rodriguez and Geena Urango, 21-9, 21-15, in the afternoon. They’ll face Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson in a winner’s bracket quarterfinal Saturday at 2 p.m.
“We think it’s important to refine our game and have people point out the weaknesses, and then we go back to practice and we train and we work on those weaknesses that are exploited,” Kloth said.
The fewer the weaknesses to exploit, the better the chance you’ll remember them after the Olympics have ended.
