About Travis Mewhirter
Hello, friends!
I’m Travis Mewhirter, and I used to say that I’m a writer. I still am, of course, but a career in print media has had to evolve with the times of all things digital, where video and audio are becoming dominant, and the written word, while still valuable, isn’t the best source of exclusive income. But it began with writing, and my first job covering sports at a small, weekly paper in Baltimore County, Maryland. That led to a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Maryland, and subsequent gigs at The Washington Post, Yahoo! Sports, and, eventually, a move down south, where I covered preps and college sports for The Northwest Florida Daily News.
That last gig changed my life in ways I could have never imagined.
It was on the Panhandle of Florida that, at 24 years old, I stumbled upon beach volleyball, at a lovely little bar on the beach called Juana’s Pagoda. An athlete my entire life, I had never before played beach volleyball, and dove into it with a zeal I hadn’t with any sport prior. Soon, I was playing it whenever I could, writing about it whenever I could. Within a year of discovering the game, I moved to its Mecca: Southern California. In 2017, I began covering the sport, first on my own, on this very site, then for VolleyballMag.com, DiG Magazine, and, later, p1440, the FIVB, AVP, and Volleyball World. In October of 2017, I launched a podcast, SANDCAST, with my good friend and Olympian, Tri Bourne. It has since become the No. 1 podcast in the world for sport of volleyball. That put me on the radar to get picked up as a broadcaster for Volleyball World, where I called the World Champs in front of an announced viewership of 133 million people.
So to describe what I do as writing — despite that being a large portion of what I do — no longer really fits, see? I’ve written three books on the sport, all Amazon best sellers — We Were Kings, Volleyball for Milkshakes, Kings of Summer — and publish frequent stories in VolleyballMag.com, which garners more than 2 million visitors per year. Much of this knowledge is due from playing at the highest level, as a professional on the AVP Tour, where I’ve finished in the top five on four occasions, as well as the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, where I’ve won four medals representing the United States of America.
What do I do then? The same thing I’ve always done, really: I write, talk about, and play sports.
All day long.