What do you give the player who has everything?
Perhaps a chance to go home and get what will soon be Olympic sand between their toes.
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The Week 5 of the AVP League will commence Saturday at Alamitos Beach in Long Beach and conclude Sunday, with four contests per day between the association’s four teams – each composed of a women’s tandem and men’s tandem.
For players like Megan Kraft and Kelly Cheng of the Miami Mayhem (5-3) and Miles Partain of the Dallas Dream (5-3), the opportunity is a chance to practice at the beach volleyball site of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics – and maybe more importantly, a rare trip back to their Southern California stomping grounds.
“I’m so excited about getting an opportunity to play at home,” Cheng said. “My family gets to come, and it’s just really special getting to compete and look up at the stands and see family and familiar faces. … It doesn’t happen that often because most of our events are international. So never try to take that for granted. Really try to soak it in and enjoy all those little moments.”
Kraft and Cheng, who both played beach volleyball at USC, are fresh off an FIVB Beach Pro Tour Elite 16 silver-medal performance in Gstaad, Switzerland, on July 5 – and had to readjust to Pacific Daylight Time, which is eight hours behind Central European Summer Time.
Despite both being former Trojans, the pairing between Kraft, 23, and Cheng, 30, may seem a bit random – in fact, the two only started playing together in January. The former is a four-time NCAA title winner and two-time Olympian who won the 2023 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championship alongside Sara Hughes.
And the latter is just two years removed from her last collegiate campaign. It’s a big enough gap that Kraft’s teammate was once her idol.
But chemistry comes with practice, not just theory.
“I’m trying to just soak up that expertise, knowledge and experience that she has, and she’s really been super helpful in helping me grow on the court, but also the mental side of the game,” Kraft said. “She’s a really intense competitor on the court, but has a lot of fun and a lot of joy.”
It’s not inherently a teacher-student dynamic for Cheng either.
“She is the hardest working girl I’ve ever met,” Cheng said. “She is so loyal, so kind, so thoughtful, so down to earth. I’ve just never met somebody like her, and she’s so young. I mean, she’s 23 years old, and just so wise for her age. I forget so often that she’s 23, and I have to remind myself that we’re not the same age.”
Partain, a Pacific Palisades local who played indoor volleyball at UCLA, also returned from Gstaad, but with a polar opposite outcome.
“We (Partain and partner James Shaw) got like last place in the tournament, and when that happens, like you’re out the very first day,” Partain said. “We did practice a little bit, but it was more a vacation than a tournament.”
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The 2024 AVP League MVP is at a seemingly tough point in his career. Partain said burnout from the constant volleyball cycle almost made him quit midseason last year, if not for his then-partner Andy Benesh’s support.
“I just get frustrated when in season comes around and then the expectation is so prevalent to practice a lot with full volleyball, and I just feel like I get worse and worse and worse,” Partain said. “This is theoretically ‘in season,’ but I’m worse than I was when I got here. So I’m very, very frustrated at that because my income and career is tied to my performance, and this has been a repeating pattern over the last few years.”
Partain is just 24, but he said he feels like an old soul doing everything he can to reclaim his career and leave the sport and culture of beach volleyball better than he found it. It’s apparent he no longer wants to feel like a boxer stuck in the ring.
Perhaps that’s why Partain decided to team up with 40-year-old Long Beach State alumnus Paul Lotman for the 2026 AVP League after the duo hadn’t played together since 2022 – the year they won the AVP Atlanta Open.
Partain’s shift in how he approaches the sport itself is what has renewed his drive.
After an elbow injury in 2024, Partain ventured into the baseball community after beach volleyball appeared all out of answers for how he should proceed with his recovery. He witnessed how far ahead baseball was of beach volleyball in applying empirical data to training, placing results over tradition and research-driven programs.
“There’s no advanced analytics of biomechanics, relative to baseball,” Partain said. “So that’s what I’m trying to hopefully get to and change the culture of the sport. And I want to prove it by. How good I get, and I’m really motivated to do that.”
On paper, Partain and Lotman’s routine of just two max-effort practices a week may seem light, or like that of someone whose playing career is nearing its end – after all, Partain said that he’s embraced coaching in the last year, especially, as a way to give back and enjoy the sport.
But make no mistake, Partain – though he has yet to lock down a partner for 2028 – has his sights set on the upcoming Summer Games.
As for what’s to come next in 2026, the Southern California trio won’t be home long – Week 6 of the eight-week AVP League season will come July 18 and 19 in New York, while FIVB’s next Elite 16 tournament begins July 29 in Rio de Janeiro.
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