A star in the sun: Ponte Vedra's Corinne Quiggle eyes Olympic beach volleyball dreams

Maybe Corinne Quiggle didn't completely know what she was getting into when she began her beach volleyball adventure.

It didn't look like it to Robin Mignerey, then her head coach at Ponte Vedra High School, when Quiggle arrived at the beach for her first encounter with competitive volleyball near the sun, sand and surf.

"She came out to the practice that first time wearing jean shorts and a belt buckle," Mignerey said. "It was like, 'You don't wear that out here.'"

A Ponte Vedra native now taking on the world's best in beach volleyball, Quiggle is making it big now.

A week-in, week-out contender in AVP competition. A chance to represent the United States at the Pan American Games this fall in Chile. An opportunity to advance a little closer to that long-term goal — a berth in the Olympic Games.

Now 26, Quiggle is also officially a champion on the national beach volleyball circuit. In July, she earned by far the biggest result of her career on the sand, taking the championship in Hermosa Beach, Calif.

"To get it in the Mecca of beach volleyball with all those people, it was just kind of like an overwhelming joy," she said during a remote interview with the Times-Union.

But volleyball on the pro tour isn't just a day at the beach, not in a sport negotiating the partner switches, the coaching changes and the sponsorship searches.

Still, for Quiggle, the rewards are worth it.

"I love the travel, I love the people that we get to meet. I think gaining friends and connections from all around the world is a really special part of our sport," she said. "And I also love to compete, so being able to do that for my job is pretty amazing."

THE ROAD FROM PONTE VEDRA

Quiggle began playing volleyball when she was 11, and despite her athletic talents, she didn't make the team for middle school in her first attempt.

Still, by the time she reached Ponte Vedra High School, she was already excelling in the indoor game. As she recalls, that's when Mignerey — herself an accomplished player on the sand — introduced the team to the beach game as part of training for indoors.

"I was a setter indoors, so I was always in the game, but I always wanted to pass, I wanted to set and I wanted to hit," Quiggle said. "Beach volleyball kind of brought that all together for me."

Mignerey said the free-flowing tempo of beach volleyball naturally meshed with Quiggle's skill set.

"You have to be a little more wily and outside of the box [on the beach], and she is definitely that," she said.

The beach volleyball bug didn't take long to lure Quiggle, with a little help from across the Atlantic. She spent much of that summer following the 2012 Olympics in London, where the American team of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings brought home a third consecutive gold medal.

"I was going out in my side yard every day with my mom or my friends, doing everything, just peppering against the wall or having my dad hit balls at me," she said.

Not long afterward, she attended her first beach volleyball camp in Tallahassee and made a rapid impression. There, she received her first scholarship offer from Florida State — a shock for a player still nearly new to the game.

"I was like, 'Whoa, I can do this,'" she said. "It was my first real training and I had no idea what was going on. But I loved the sport so much, I loved the freedom of the sport, how much control you had over each action."

She was building her skills in the indoor game as well, topping the 500-assist mark playing indoor volleyball in both 2012 and 2013 while leading Ponte Vedra into the Florida High School Athletic Association competition regional playoffs.

But by her senior year, the time was coming for a decision. She didn't play her senior year indoors at Ponte Vedra, instead shifting full speed ahead into the beach game and planning to switch coasts to play college volleyball at Pepperdine.

"Once she kind of got a taste for it and put a focus on it," Mignerey said, "she really worked for this."

LIFE ON THE MOVE

During her freshman year at Pepperdine, Quiggle got her first chance to play an AVP event, and she hasn't slowed down in a beach volleyball life on the move.

Just in the past year, there's Brazil and Mexico, South Africa, Morocco, the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. By now, it's almost easier to name the places where Quiggle hasn't played volleyball. She's made stops on almost all continents, ranging from the Dominican Republic to Cambodia to landlocked Switzerland.

"We've been able to see a lot of very cool places and meet a lot of amazing people from countries all around the world," she said. "We have friends everywhere, people that we know from other teams and it's been awesome."

In effect, she's had to become her own travel agent. Unlike team sports like the NFL's Jaguars, athletes in beach volleyball don't have front office staff making the calls on their next moves.

"We handle all of it. We kind of pick out our own schedule. It's very individual for a team. We handle that, we book our own travel, we decide which tournaments we're going to based on if we can get in," she said.

Those words: If we can get in. In her early seasons, that was a challenge, searching for the right partnership and battling for the points needed to get into major events. Those doors started to open after a fifth-place finish in 2018 at Manhattan Beach, Calif., which brought her some much-needed points.

Better results followed, including a couple of third places, one last year in Muskegon, Mich., one this July in Denver. Then came her breakthrough win on July 9 at Hermosa Beach, a sun-soaked California town renowned for its volleyball tradition and passion.

"It was an amazing feeling to win, kind of where we practice every day," Quiggle said. "It's like our home base. My family was there, my friends were there, a lot of our sponsors were there, so we felt love all weekend… to have that reward, where we accomplished one of our big goals, this was a huge accomplishment."

GRINDING ON THE TOUR

In a world of sand and sun, the professional beach volleyball life might seem glamorous from the outside.

The reality on the ground? Not so easy.

"It's something that we love and it's a unique culture and a community," Quiggle said. "But definitely it's a grind."

There's the never-ending hunt for ranking points, and money, and sponsorship. There's the grueling physical demand — Quiggle said a typical peak conditioning routine means two hours daily of practice in the sand, plus three sessions in the gym, all in the quest for warding off an injury that could take it all away.

"You have to be strong, mainly to avoid injury, making sure you stay fit and ready all throughout the year," she said. "Even if you're not in the sand doing your sport and it's the offseason, we're always in the gym."

And there's the money, or for those first breaking into the sport, the lack thereof.

"We train for so long and then we have one tournament to kind of give it our all to a certain degree," she said. "Sometimes you can just have a bad tournament and you lose out and you make pretty much nothing."

While staying in the game, Quiggle said she's also supplemented her income with part-time roles in volleyball coaching. Still, the financial rewards from volleyball pale in comparison to much of the athletic world.

In August, she placed fifth again at Manhattan Beach, among the most prestigious events on the circuit. The listed prize money for that result: $4,500, or less than the lowest-placed golfers making the cut earn at a typical LPGA Tour event.

"It's definitely not an easy sport," she said. "Financially, it's all on you, so you have to find your sponsors. You have to do well in tournaments to make some money, and it's not a lot of money. We're not making the same money as NBA or even women's basketball, women's soccer, women's golf. The prize money isn't anywhere near that.

"You've worked so hard and you put in all this time and effort and money, and then you have a small return or no return or even a negative. So that's not easy to go back to the office and be like, 'All right, I'm doing this again.'"

THE WINNING PAIR

Making it all come together takes teamwork. Sometimes, a partnership on the volleyball court connects perfectly. Sometimes, it doesn't.

"It's kind of like dating, and it can be awkward if something happens and somebody wants to go play with somebody else," Quiggle said.

For the past year and a half, Quiggle has climbed the volleyball ladder alongside a fellow Floridian, Sarah Schermerhorn, a native of the St. Petersburg area. It's a combination that's brought winning results..

"We get along really well, which is a blessing, because if you don't, you spend so much time with that person and you're struggling through ups and downs," Quiggle said.

Although successful players must excel in an array of skills, the standard arrangement in the two-person beach game matches a taller player who's typically more adept around the net with a smaller and quicker teammate. Quiggle, although far from small at 5-10, fits into the latter category.

"She's the blocker, I'm the defender," she said. "There's a lot of skill sets that work into each other, and I think we work really well together and we're really close, so we have a good energy on the court."

EYES ON L.A. 2028

Hermosa Beach was one breakthrough for Quiggle this summer. It wasn't the only one.

In June, Quiggle and Schermerhorn won a 12-team USA Volleyball tournament in Colorado Springs, Colo., claiming the one berth available for the United States at the Pan American Games. That tournament is scheduled from Oct. 20 to Nov. 5 in Santiago, Chile.

"She's big-time now in beach volleyball," Mignerey said. "If you talk beach volleyball, everybody knows her name, and that's kind of cool."

Although traveling the world is now part of the routine for Quiggle, the Pan Am Games will be her first time representing the United States at an international tournament on a comparable scale.

She's made it as high as the top 30 in the world rankings, although based on the numbers, her chances of qualifying for one of the two United States berths at next summer's Olympics in Paris aren't favorable.

Looking behind Paris to the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, on the other hand, isn't far-fetched. Quiggle, who now lives and trains in California, said the chance to play near her Pacific coast home is "definitely on my list of goals."

The Olympics aren't here yet. But with each day of training now, she's working her way closer to an advance taste of the international experience in Chile — and maybe even bigger things to come.

"That's going to be an awesome experience," she said. "[Qualifying for] Olympics is the main goal, and having like a continental Olympics will be a great experience in leading to that direction."

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Ponte Vedra's Corinne Quiggle eyes Team USA beach volleyball chance