Tri Bourne, Travis Mewhirter publish new book: The Playbook of Champions
In February of 2018, Tri Bourne had an idea.
“We can make a Tim Ferriss book,” he said then, “like Tools of Titans, where he takes notes from all the people he’s interviewed and we can make a volley book.”
Bourne doesn’t remember having that idea, which isn’t all that surprising. He has a comical habit of forgetting the score of his own matches, much less off-hand ideas during a podcast five years ago. But something about that comment, made at his kitchen table at his old condo in Redondo Beach while we were podcasting with Brittany Hochevar, was sticky to me. We were barely three months into hosting SANDCAST, our then-new podcast, so I knew it would take a number of years and interviews before we had enough to compile a worthwhile book.
Six-plus years and 300-plus interviews later, we now have a book that I’d say is very much worthwhile.
Playbook of Champions: The habits, routines, and stories of Olympians, champions, and world class athletes is out today. You can get it at all the usual places one purchases books, namely Amazon. It is one of the coolest books that is currently sitting on my shelf, more than half a decade’s worth of wisdom from the greatest players to ever touch a volleyball, distilled into 352 pages.
In those pages, you will find the hysterical and distinctly old school stories of Mike Dodd and Sinjin Smith, Karch Kiraly and Tim Hovland, and you will uncover distinctly new school wisdom from April Ross and Taylor Crabb, Anders Mol and Alix Klineman. You will laugh at the memories of Chris ‘Geeter’ McGee, and perhaps smile softly at the words of Eric Zaun, which seem especially (and maybe surprisingly) wise and prescient now that he’s gone.
It’s a book not just for volleyball players or fans, or even athletes. It is a study of world-class performers, ranging from the players to the coaches to the legends to the entrepreneurs in our lovely little community. Nuggets can be gleaned from the many gold medalists within those pages, such as the winning mindset of Kent Steffes, to men who have never made a main draw, like Ed Keller or Greg Delgado, but who possess a tremendous and unique perspective on life and sport.
It’s a different book from any other that I’ve written. Even to describe it as something I’ve “written” seems wrong, for there is very little original writing in it. I wrote the forward, yes, as did Tri, but the book is 99 percent the words of other individuals who have lent us their time on the podcast. Each player or coach or legend or member of the community — those are the four sections of the book — wrote it for us. I simply needed to pull out their best words and package them. While We Were Kings and Kings of Summer required more creative juice than I knew I had, along with days and months and hours upon hours of reporting, Playbook of Champions asked for simple brute force, somewhat mindless work: transcribing and whittling, transcribing and whittling.
We have now posted 310 episodes of SANDCAST. Over the past two or three years, with this idea forever rooted in the back of my mind, I’ve been going through all of those old episodes, transcribing on planes and in airports, on my couch and in my office, in California and Maryland and Bulgaria and Russia and wherever else there was time that needed killing. I was surprised, with each episode, how much I had forgotten. Easily 90 percent of the episodes seemed like a conversation I’d never had. It was a lot of work, yes, but it was also a source of free education, for volleyball, life, and as a podcast host.
It’s an education we’re excited to present to anyone who wants it, and we do recommend you want it.
Not all of our ideas come to fruition on this podcast. They are many, and the ones we execute on are relatively few. But, like all major projects we’ve attempted, the product, I think, is worth it. Volleyball for Milkshakes — another Tri idea — is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. The Road to Paris has been a blast to create and host and build. Tri’s Bourne on the Beach Vlog gets better with each episode.
The difference, with Playbook of Champions, is the size of the undertaking. Tri might not have remembered ever having the idea, but I knew, given the quality of our guests, what an excellent book it would be.
Now that it’s in my hands — and in the hands of several players and coaches who love it — I can say the wait, the work, the constant transcribing, was worth it. More than worth it.
Even if nobody buys a copy, I just had five years of a free education.
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