LONDON — Jen Kessy and April Ross may be the only U.S. beach volleyball duo here at the Olympics without previous Games experience, but they’re no rookies.
They know Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings never lost a set en route to the past two gold medals, so Kessy and Ross picked their teammates’ (and possible opponents’) brains, trying to find the best way to approach this massive tournament.
Watch the American beach volleyball highlights from day 2 at the London Olympics.
Kessy and Ross also know that compatriots Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser came out flat in their Olympic debut four years ago, getting swept by a 23rd-seeded Latvian team despite being the gold-medal favorites. Rogers and Dalhausser recovered to win the gold medal, but their first-match jitters were obvious. Kessy and Ross picked their brains too.
They even chatted up Karch Kiraly, the only Olympic gold medalist in both indoor and beach volleyball, and currently an assistant coach with the U.S. women’s indoor team. The beach legend reassured them they’ve played enough big matches to deal with the pressure they’d find in London, and to “just play your game.”
Once the draw came out and Kessy and Ross saw their first match was against Ana Gallay and Maria Virginia Zonta of Argentina, a team that doesn’t regularly compete on the elite FIVB World Tour, the Americans easily could have looked ahead to their second match against a tough team from the Netherlands.
But Kessy and Ross took no such chances. Having never faced Gallay and Zonta before, they scoured YouTube to find video. And they studied tape brought home by their coach, Jeff Conover, from a Pan American tournament in which the Argentines played.
That thorough preparation resulted in a straight-sets victory (21-11, 21-18).
“We never think someone’s not as good as us or we’re better than someone,” Kessy said after the match. “So we treated them with the utmost respect, as any other team.”
Kessy admitted to some nerves beforehand, a rare occurrence. She doesn’t like having so much time to think before a match. But that won’t get any easier, as the Olympic schedule has every team playing every other day.
Top-level beach volleyball teams are accustomed to two, sometimes three or four, matches in a day at a regular stop on the World Tour. Only once have Kessy and Ross played an event strung out over two weeks with days off in between matches: the 2009 World Championships.
How did they fare there? A gold medal.
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