Matt Prosser — player, coach, cancer survivor, now volleyball commentator — has come full circle

HERMOSA BEACH, California — In 2021, Volleyball World TV was in search of announcers for the Italian SuperLega to which it had recently acquired the rights. The pool for such talent is not the largest or the deepest; rare is the individual who can both speak eloquently while also being well-versed in a sport that has traditionally had little fanfare in the United States. So when Dustin Watten was charged with recruiting a few, the list of qualities was, essentially: Who can put a sentence together while also keeping up with the highest quality volleyball in the world?

The choice was surprisingly easy: Matt Prosser.

The choice for Prosser to accept was even easier.

“Of course,” he recalled telling Watten, “I’m drooling over here.”

How Watten knew of Prosser’s commentating bona fides is a credit to Prosser’s own initiative. Both Watten and Prosser had competed for Long Beach State before playing professionally overseas. Long Beach is one of the few men’s indoor programs that televises its matches, and given its history as one of the most successful in the country, it can command the audience to do so. Prosser, like many program alum, loved the fact that the school broadcasts its matches. Like many alum, he thought he might be able to add to the product, especially since he came armed with a degree in broadcast journalism from Long Beach State itself, even if he’d never actually used it. Prosser, however, took it one step further: He actually did something about it.

“I just called up Long Beach State and asked if I could come back and do the color commentary for the men’s volleyball team,” he said. “Let me bring some technical aspects to the broadcast.”

That was 2020, arguably the worst time to get into broadcasting sports, as sports, like much of the world, were about to be shut down for the then-unforeseeable future. But it was enough: Watten had been tuning into the broadcasts, hearing now-expert commentary from a man who once made an NCAA final and was named All-American. If Volleyball World TV needed a commentator, there were few better suited for the job than Matt Prosser.

“The broadcasting checks a big box for me in terms of being involved in the game,” he said, and then he did the math: At 45 years old, he’d been involved in the game of volleyball, in one way or the other, for 32 years, beginning in the yard with his father. Now a 6-foot-7 fully grown adult who could be easily confused for a tight end, Prosser wasn’t always built as the sturdy athlete he grew to be.

“I wasn’t a physical kid, I wasn’t strong,” he said. “I didn’t lift weights until I got to college so I wasn’t into the physical contact. As soon as I was able to focus that energy and aggression on the ball, and have a team, and have a net between us, that was the sweet spot.”

As much as his timing for the launch of his commentating career was poor, his timing for discovering the game of volleyball was divine. The AVP was in its heyday, putting on 25 tournaments a year, the finals of which were regularly shown on national TV. Men with names such as Karch and Steffes and Sinjin and Stoklos and Hovland and Dodd were dominating. Indoors, the USA men had won back-to-back Olympic gold medals. It would be easy for a kid in Southern California to feel the pull of a sport exploding up and down the coast — and Prosser felt it.

He’d pore over Volleyball magazine and Volleyball Monthly, cutting out pictures of Sinjin Smith, Randy Stoklos and Ricci Luyties and put them on his wall. He didn’t let his hometown of Ventura, then mostly devoid of volleyball, limit his playing; he found a club team in San Diego, took a lengthy train ride, practiced with the team for a few weeks, and then rejoined them at tournaments. That team won a gold medal for their age group, and “it was around that sophomore, junior phase of high school that I knew I was going to be able to play volleyball past high school,” Prosser said. “Because of that exposure from club volleyball, I was able to get recruited.”

He enjoyed a tremendous career at Long Beach and put together a brief professional career indoors before switching full-time to the beach in 2003, which was more or less possible then, as the AVP would run anywhere from nine to 18 professional tournaments and the top players would regularly eclipse six figures in earnings. But this is Matt Prosser being discussed. Like anything, timing became paramount.

In 2010, coming off the best season of his career, Prosser had partnered with John Mayer, a young lefty with a deadly serve and a casual demeanor that belied his extraordinary gifts. In their third tournament, in Hermosa Beach, they made the finals, logging wins over Jake Gibb and Sean Rosenthal and John Hyden and Sean Scott. They were on the rise, no doubt about it.

The AVP was not.

The next week, the players received a call: The AVP was bankrupt. Season canceled. Sorry.

That was a time of existential angst for the players. The international players would be fine, as the FIVB was thriving, prize money was booming, and sponsors were still strong. But those on the AVP?

“It was crushing,” Mayer said years ago. “I was playing pretty well. Physically I was in my prime. I just remember being crushed and unsure of what to do. I can remember going out the next off-season and not having any schedule and just being out there training and being a little purposeless and not having the same drive. The beaches were pretty empty, it was pretty hard to find games. It was scary and there’s so many guys we lost, and maybe some indoor players would have transferred over but couldn’t.”

Mayer stuck with it, eventually winning the AVP MVP and Best Defensive Player in 2015. Prosser kept one foot in while exploring more stable career paths. He tried his hand at commercial real estate, briefly launched a beach club in south Orange County, coached a high school team, got into medical device sales.

“I still dabbled in volleyball, still played, still coached,” he said. “But it wasn’t the priority.”

But the sport, even in the most turbulent of times, never left Prosser entirely. Even with it not being the priority, he won the only AVP of the 2011 season with Matt Olson and played in at least one professional event every year until 2018 — even through a testicular cancer diagnosis and three rounds of chemotherapy.

It was Eric Beranek, a young, spunky, then 20-year-old defender who dragged Prosser onto the beach, even with a chemotherapy port still lodged in his chest.

“I don’t know what I’m going to be able to give you,” Prosser told Beranek. “I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do.”

In 2017, not much: They failed to make it out of both qualifiers they played, in Hermosa and Manhattan Beach. But in 2018? Magic.

Prosser and Beranek won four straight matches to qualify, upsetting second-seeded Paul Lotman and Derek Olson in the third round. Big for Beranek, who was in just the third main draw of his burgeoning career. Poetic for Prosser, whose second career main draw came in Manhattan Beach in 2004.

“That was a big moment in my life and in my being,” he said. “We were the last match to finish, and it was another outpouring of emotion for me. Being an athlete and focusing on your body so much, when you get told you have cancer and you have to do chemotherapy, that’s a huge bomb being dropped on you and you don’t know what to expect. Going through that chapter and that challenge and adversity, to come back to a level where we qualified, that was a hugely important moment for me and my family and Eric, and it was really a pleasure to be a part of.

“To me I proved to myself I could go through what I had gone through and still play at a place where I was happy with my performance. I will always be grateful for that.”

A few weeks later, he’d win the Hermosa Beach Labor Day four-man, pocketing more in cash than anyone would that weekend at the AVP in Chicago.

“Those two wins for me were a good way to close that chapter of highly competitive volleyball and to continue forward,” he said.

It wouldn’t be for two more years that he’d re-enter the volleyball world as a commentator, and one more after that he’d sign on with Volleyball TV. One year after that, the AVP would request his bona fides on the mic as well.

“The broadcasting piece is so cool to be a part of because when I was younger, I didn’t have any access to this volleyball, watching the world tour, watching professional volleyball from Italy or the VNL, I didn’t see any of that stuff,” he said. “For a tiny bit, it was NBC Universal. Prior to 2010, it was hard to watch volleyball outside of the Olympics or the summer AVP when it was televised back in the heyday. It’s been really fun and rewarding to be back involved on the broadcasting side. I’m sitting watching this volleyball from Italy and it’s an amazing level, or doing the Beach Pro Tour from India or the World Championships from Rome or Mexico, just the streaming platform is an amazing technology that can access millions of people from around the globe. I’m fortunate to be a part of it, and it’s rewarding and a lot of fun.

“I can relate to what the players are going through in certain moments and now I can share broadcasting which is where I offer the biggest value to a viewer. It also allows me to complete the circle at the same time.”

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