Exactly how good are Sara Hughes and Kelly Claes? - Articles

Sara Hughes and Kelly Claes, who will be seniors at USC and haven’t lost a match in college since midway through their sophomore seasons, are building quite a beach volleyball resume. The AVCA and DiG Magazine All-Americans won NorCECA gold in Canada, lost in the championship match at AVP San Francisco and placed third at AVP New York. And then this past Sunday they won the the FISU World University Games in Estonia with a 21-16, 21-13 win over Madison and McKenna Witt, their Arizona and Pac-12 rivals. The 5-foot-10 Hughes, from Costa Mesa, Calif., and the 6-2 Claes, from Fullerton, went 48-0 in NCAA beach last spring, clinching the inaugural championship in Gulf Shores, Ala., with a signature dominant victory. What’s more, they’ve won 73 consecutive college matches. Exactly how good are they? Do they have what it takes to represent the U.S. at Tokyo in 2020? We asked three volleyball experts: Dain Blanton (2000 Sydney Olympic gold medalist, USC beach assistant coach, NBC volleyball analyst); Holly McPeak (three time beach Olympian, bronze medalist, Pac-12 volleyball analyst, 2009 Hall of Fame inductee, the first woman to surpass $1 million in winnings); Dr. Gary Sato (former head coach of the USA and Japanese national indoor teams, head coach of the 2007 beach volleyball at the Pan Am Games). VBM: Exactly how good are Sarah Hughes/Kelly Claes today? How do they compare today with their college peers, and AVP field? What do they need to get to the next level? Blanton: They’ve made tremendous improvement from last...

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