TWO ON ONE
Crash Course
BEACH RAP: Veteran pro Todd Rogers talked beach volleyball with Tyler Cobian, left, and Quinn Denkensohn, right.
Beach school with Todd Rogers is in session for aspiring sand standouts Tyler Cobian and Quinn Denkensohn By Connor Hastings • Photos: Peter Brouillet
odd Rogers has been playing profes- sional beach volleyball since 1995. A total of 18 years, 78 tournament wins and one Olympic Games gold medal later, the 39-year-old Santa Barbara, Calif., native is motivated for another season of spiking and serving around the world. There may be a hint of gray in his goatee, but there is also plenty of lift left in Rogers’ legs and even more strategy circulating in his brain. A major reason for his enthusiasm is his new partner, the seven-foot Ryan Doherty, an emerging star with a baseball back- ground who Rogers feels he can reach the FIVB Beach Volleyball Tour podium with. Doherty’s potential has infused life into Rog- ers’ game.
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The immediate challenge for Rogers, nicknamed “The Professor” for his cere- bral approach to the game, will be to bring Doherty up to the speed with the rest of the top blockers in the world in time for a
condensed FIVB Tour schedule. Rogers’ main goal for the 2013 season will be to establish Doherty – who has never stepped foot outside the United States – on the international beach volleyball scene. With the beginning of tour- nament competition on the horizon, Rogers was able to sit down with two members of the next generation of beach players, Tyler Cobian and Quinn Denkensohn, in the Santa Barbara area in early March. Cobian and Denkensohn won the USA Volleyball Beach High Performance Championships Under- 17 division in Hermosa Beach, Calif., last summer and racked up many a Quiksilver gift cards playing in local tournaments in the Santa Barbara area. Both high school juniors (Cobian at Ventura High and Denkensohn at Santa Barbara High) were able to get a glimpse into the formation of one the game’s greatest players on a balmy winter afternoon near the campus of Rogers’ alma mater, UC Santa Barbara.
34 | VOLLEYBALLUSA • Digital Issue at
usavolleyball.org/mag
Denkensohn: How’d you get into volleyball? Rogers: My fi rst experience in volleyball was when I was a freshman at San Mar- cos High School. Basically a bunch of my buddies weren’t really into baseball, which was kind of the spring sport at the time, and they said ‘Let’s all go out for volleyball.’ I’d played a tiny bit at La Colina Junior High, but just in P.E. messing around, so I didn’t know the sport at all. So we all went out, we all made the team, me and 10 of my best buddies playing, and it was a lot of fun.
Cobian: What was your experience like playing beach in Santa Barbara? Were you given opportuni- ties like the USA program at that time?
Rogers: There was no USA program at all.
That’s only been started very recently. My fi rst real experience was Jon Lee, my high school coach at San Marcos. He went to all of us freshmen, my whole crew and said ‘If you guys really want to get good at indoor volleyball, you should go down to the beach.’
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