Tim Brewster, Kyle Friend, and the most unique relationship in beach volleyball
HERMOSA BEACH, California — How many times had Tim Brewster asked Kyle Friend to play a beach volleyball tournament with him? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty?
They laugh when thinking about the number, the exact total of which remains unknown. The only one that actually matters is the final offer, the one in which Friend, partnerless heading into the 2022 Denver Tour Series, shrugged his shoulders and agreed.
That is the ask, and acceptance, that changed both of their lives forever.
Since 2011 or so, Friend had known he was gay. Took him two years to come out with it. Since, he has become something of a north star to those wrestling with similar decisions, a welcoming ear to listen, a steady voice as one of the few openly gay players on the AVP Tour.
Since he was a teenager, Brewster knew, on some level, that he was gay. Raised in a conservative, Catholic family — and endlessly loving, to be sure — coming to the open acceptance of it was no easy thing. When Friend alas agreed to block for Brewster in the summer of 2022, Brewster was, as he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “figuring me out,” mired in an internal struggle to which few could relate. Kyle Friend could relate.
“Seeing an example of someone who is out and confident and able to do volleyball, I’d never been around that,” Brewster said. “To see somebody like that helped me through a lot of these internal struggles I was having. Obviously I worked really hard and there was a lot of stuff I did to make my volleyball really good but there’s also a mental component, whether it was confidence or being comfortable, it helped my volleyball click. It made a huge difference for me on and off the court. It was cool for me to see that journey.”
The off-court acceptance, both public and private, of who he was and what it meant, would take time. But the on-court freedom that came with playing alongside someone who understood Brewster on a level few, if any, could was immediate. They finished seventh in Denver, good enough to qualify for the Fort Lauderdale Pro Series later that summer. Brewster’s first main draw. Then they qualified again for Atlanta, stunning Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander in the first round for Brewster’s first main draw win, upsetting John Hyden and Logan Webber for another. They’d ultimately finish seventh, and those watching could be forgiven for wondering: Where had this Tim Brewster, the young 20-something who had been losing in qualifier after qualifier, been all this time?
Just waiting for the right person to unlock him.
“All I did was just be myself,” Friend said. “I just sparked interesting conversations and shared stories about myself and was vulnerable. I’ve known Tim for a very long time and I’d seen him play good volleyball, and before we got together, he played that event [in San Antonio in May of 2022] with Andy Benesh, and it was ‘Oh, he’s playing really good.’ There’s definitely been a transition for him.”
He has a penchant for understatement, Friend. A transition? How about a full-on coming of age tale, a bildungsroman on a timeline compressed in a span of six months? Any thoughts of the partnership being the typical flash in a pan, a honeymoon phase enjoyed by new partners with no expectations and no scouting, were dashed as the summer went on and they piled up top-10 finish after top-10 finish, notable win after notable win. In the four remaining Tour Series, they finished top-five in all of them, including making the finals in Waupaca. In Chicago, they’d take down top-seeded Chaim Schalk and Theo Brunner and wind up in fifth, hauling in another massive bounty of Gold Series points. In Tavares, they made their first Pro Series semifinal, their only loss in the tournament coming to Tri Bourne and John Hyden in three.
“It was so rad. It just seemed that first year, we had no expectations,” Friend said. “We were young guns — he was young, I was, uh, something — we were a new team, nobody had expectations for us, we didn’t have any expectations either, we went out there, we competed, and if we won, awesome, but we ended up getting some wins. It was a wild roller-coaster ride.”
As his on-court confidence and performance blossomed for the world to see, so, too, did his off-court confidence — for only Friend and select few others to see. The final acknowledgement came in the fall of 2022, at the Torquay Challenge in Australia. A conversation at dinner proved to be the last milestone marker on Brewster’s journey to self-acceptance. Yes, he had feelings for Friend. Yes, Friend had them in return. It both simplified matters and complicated them to new extremes, inviting the inevitable question: Now what?
There aren’t exactly an abundance of examples of couples who compete together on the AVP and Beach Pro Tours. Lili and Larissa Maestrini may be the only current one. As any couple can attest, playing with your significant other is at once the greatest way to foster a relationship and the fastest to torpedo it.
“It’s funny because early on we were like ‘Let’s protect the volleyball. We’re playing such good volleyball, we need to protect that. We need to be OK stepping away from our off the court.’ So naïve,” Brewster said, shaking his head. “Looking back on it a year and a half ago, crazy that we were saying that, and now we need to make sure we’re taking care of the off the court first because that’s what’s most important.”
It wasn’t that difficult at first. Winning is easy, no matter the dynamic of the relationship with your partner. And win they did, finishing fifth at the 2023 Miami Pro Series, third the next month in New Orleans. But then they fell stagnant, settling for a series of ninths, prompting questions and difficult conversations about how best to move forward: Do you protect the volleyball, or the relationship the volleyball galvanized?
“You have one or two bad matches and you go ‘We should be doing this.’ People start playing better against us, they’re scouting us, they know how to play against us,” Friend said. “Last year, we had Leandro [Pinheiro] all year. It was difficult when we started losing some games and a lot of factors went into that and we handled it as best as we could.”
This is, almost counterintuitively, where dating your partner comes in surprisingly handy.
“It’s an incentive to solve problems quicker so you don’t bring them home,” Brewster said. “Now there’s an incentive to figure it out on the court because it has to stay on the court. It helped us that we played together for six months before the off the court relationship started so we had those boundaries of what the on the court relationship looked like so we know how to keep the two separate. We know how to bind it up and keep it as separate as they can be so they don’t bleed into one another.”
It’s inevitable, of course, that sometimes those problems come home. Volleyball has been a central point of both of their lives for legitimately decades. Friend was a high school standout and a key player for Long Beach State before turning professional indoors and on the beach. Brewster has, as he says, “lived and breathed and ate volleyball” since he was a kid. And again, it’s that deep knowledge of the game, and the new perspective of how small it is in the bigger picture of life, that has not only kept them together, but strengthened the relationship because of it.
“The way I see it, there’s not a lot of trouble on my end. Each one has its own challenges and things we get to work on and work through and we get to know each other better,” Friend said. “We’re living together and it feels very normal off court, it feels easy, normal, safe, great. Now on court, we’re learning to find ways to push each other more. Every emotion that occurs if you’re playing with someone new, you’re not seeing it all. I know exactly what he’s feeling. I know on a swing when he comes back, ‘Oh shit, he’s not happy.’ It makes it fun because we can tap into those things so quickly or clean them up so efficiently instead of talking about it after the match. There’s no wondering ‘Hey at this point in the match, is this what you were feeling? Because this is how I felt.’ Now I see that you’re frustrated.
“Sometimes we’ll have a bad practice and we’ll carry it home. We’re back, it’s fine, that was volley, it’s not a big deal. Anytime you have a bad training or you feel you played poorly, that’s allowed to sit with you for a second, that’s normal, but if it’s affecting your everyday life, this weight, there’s a better way to handle it. The good news is we can share that together. If one of us is down or one of us is up, we can bring each other up.”
When Friend initially partnered with Brewster, he was mildly, almost comically, alarmed at the stress Brewster was under. On the surface, that appeared to be a stress induced from volleyball and competing. Friend knew better. Now? Brewster still has some level of stress — such is a normal aspect of competing. But it’s healthy, a motivator, not debilitating.
“A lot of mindset changed have happened,” Brewster said. “I had this very big revelation that volleyball is super small. It’s super important and a huge part of my life but there’s so much that matters more. Now we’re making sure the off the court is taken care of no matter what, and now we can take care of the on the court and see where that can go.”
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