Pro Beach
April 17, 2024
HERMOSA BEACH, California — In the spring of 2015, Mathias Berntsen and Anders Mol, cousins united by blood as much by a hereditary passion for the sport of volleyball, sat down and mapped out the future.
There was much to discuss.
The members of Norway’s senior national team at the time were aging out. After the 2016 Olympic Games, the future of their country’s success would fall on the shoulders of a handful of unproven teenagers, in a federation with little infrastructure and a resume not long with success.
“We sat down and said we have to do something,” Berntsen said. “We didn’t have a system so we said we have to do it ourselves. What can we bring to the world that makes it cool to watch the brand? We sat down and discussed everything.”
Because they were still in high school, the first priority was, of course, the name. What should they call themselves? They tinkered with all things Norway — the fjords, the mountains, the country’s history. After a couple hours of kicking names back and forth, they settled on something a little more fitting for a mascot: vikings.
From here on out, Anders Mol, Mathias Berntsen and the rest of the fledgling Norwegian beach volleyball players would be Christened the Beach Volley Vikings.
A good name.
A strong name.
But it was also just a name. Matters little if there is no success to back it up, no reason to know that name in the first place. So once the matter of the moniker was settled, they turned to a more audacious topic, one that did not take several hours to decide: What did they want to accomplish?
Easy: A gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
“We set the goal in 2015. Me and Anders sat down and said one of us is going for gold in Tokyo,” Berntsen said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We just said we need to do something ourselves here and we put all of our savings in, our parents put in a lot of money, we put it all on one card which was to make it to Tokyo. In five years’ time, we will have a team that was going to win the Olympics.”
It is easy to look back now and see it as borderline obvious. Anders and Christian Sorum have been the best team on the planet since 2018 and have a legitimate argument as one of the greatest of all time, even at just 26 and 28 years old, respectively.
But in 2015? Such ambitions were still the stuff of high school dreams — lofty, grandiose, drifting into the realm of quixotic.
Given its passion for winter sports and its proclivity for success during the Winter Olympic Games, Norway has a surprisingly rich beach volleyball culture. For 15 years, from 1999 to 2015, it hosted one of the most popular events in the sport, a major in Stavanger that awarded its winners the famed Stavanger Sword. The first Olympics to feature beach volleyball as a sport, the 1996 Atlanta Games, boasted two Norwegian teams who finished in the top-10: Jan Kvalheim and Bjorn Maaseide (they finished seventh) and Ragni Hestad and Merita Berntsen, the matriarch of the Mol family who was coached by — guess who? — Kare Mol, father of Anders and Hendrik Mol and up-and-coming Markus Mol.
“There was kind of a culture for beach volleyball in Norway because our best athletes didn’t go for indoor. We don’t have enough players for an indoor team so if you want to make an Olympics, you have to go the beach route,” said Hendrik, who at 30 is the eldest of the Mol siblings. “We were lucky to have the tournament in Stavanger for many years. We got to see the tournament growing up, we said ‘Wow, we want to do this. This is sick.’ That’s where we got our first impressions of beach volleyball as a sport. Without this tournament, none of us would want to do this professionally, to do this dream.”
To dream the dream is one thing.
To see it come to fruition is another.
Berntsen has photo evidence of just how far he and Anders had to go to make their prophetic gold in Tokyo happen. In 2014, when Anders was just 15 years old and Berntsen 17, they received a wild card into the Stavanger Grand Slam. In the first round of pool play, they matched up with Phil Dalhausser and Sean Rosenthal. Their upset bid got off to a rip-roaring start. Playing some of the best volleyball of their lives.
They led 2-0.
Someone snapped a photo of the scoreboard.
“I still have that picture,” Berntsen said, laughing. “It’s funny, you play your idol at such a young age and now you’re the best of the best. It’s cool to see.”
Berntsen can’t help but wonder what might have happened had he and Anders stuck together. In 2016, a year after mapping out the grandest of plans, he and Anders qualified for a satellite event in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, their first major main draw as a team without requiring a wild card.
“Me and Anders were the juniors coming up,” Berntsen said. But the following week, Anders was signed up to play the Klagenfurt Major with Christian Sorum, the most experienced member of the Norwegian youth making their way through the rankings. They had never before played a tournament together, so there was no real reason to think much of it.
Until they made history.
They qualified and went on a Cinderella run for the ages, stunning Russia’s Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Konstantin Semenov, Brazil’s Vitor Felipe and Alvaro Filho, Tri Bourne and John Hyden, and nearly authored another over Canadians Chaim Schalk and Ben Saxton, finishing fifth in one of the biggest events on the beach volleyball calendar.
“A team from Norway?” Bourne remembered thinking of that loss. “Why would you be good at beach volleyball?”
Even Berntsen and Hendrik are left struggling to find a reasonable explanation for the unreasonable success of Anders and Sorum.
“It’s a strange thing,” Berntsen said. “They clicked instantly.”
“It’s not something you can teach,” Hendrik said.
It was all but decided, then, that Anders and Sorum would be one of the Norwegian pairs attempting to fulfill the goal Berntsen and Anders had penned out in 2015, to win a gold in Tokyo. This left Berntsen in search of a partner. No problem. He didn’t even have to explore outside of the family tree to find one. Hendrik Mol, Berntsen’s cousin, was talented, physically gifted, promising, and also in need of a defender.
But there was a slight issue.
Hendrik could barely see.
Hendrik Mol, and a “big battle won”
To a teenage kid in Norway in the early 2000s, playing volleyball in Hawaii was akin to most of us getting a letter from Hogwarts, walking through a wardrobe into Narnia, opening a chocolate bar and finding a golden ticket.
It’s a fantasy. Fun to think about. Implausible to do.
Until, one day at a club tournament in Canada, you meet a kid your age who is committed to play volleyball for the University of Hawaii, a kid whose talent is slightly superior but mostly matches your own.
“I was like ‘Wait, you can do that?’ ” Hendrik said, laughing.
Still, the chances were slim. Maybe not as slim as a letter from Hogwarts, but Hendrik was entering his senior year at Norway’s TopVolley. Most universities would have their rosters filled out by then, recruiting juniors or sophomores, not seniors. There are, of course, worse places for Hawaii coach Charlie Wade to visit than the talent-rich pipeline that is ToppVolley. So when Hendrik sent a highlight reel to the Hawaii staff, Wade wasted little time in coming out to watch him play.
When Wade offered him a spot on the roster, Hendrik had only one question: Where do I sign?
“It was kind of out of nowhere,” Hendrik said. “That’s not something that’s normal, that you can get on a team as a senior in high school. I was really lucky and I started that journey and it was amazing. I was really lucky to play there.”
He slowly integrated himself into the lineup, seeing time as a freshman, starting one match as a sophomore, helping Hawaii to one of its better seasons, a 19-3 start before a back-to-back at UCLA.
“I had a good game,” Hendrik said. “I was starting to feel strong, I felt really good.”
They won both, pushing their record to 21-3. When Hendrik woke up the next day, back on Oahu, he had pink eye. Not an emergency. He’d had it before, knew the usual routine. He picked up some eye drops, dripped a few in, and forgot about it.
When he woke up the next morning, he couldn’t see.
“Complete darkness,” he said. “The eye was glued shut with the same pink eye. I pried it open and I couldn’t look out of it.”
With his functioning eye, he could see that the other was completely white. No pupils. Nothing.
“It was scary,” he said. And sensitive. It hurt to walk outside. Hurt worse to go from expert to expert with no answers. No doctor could figure it out, and amidst that confusion, they all provided the same, wrong answer: try some more eye drops. To the point that Hendrik was dropping in liquid every 30 minutes, some as expensive as $500 a bottle.
“The craziest medication,” he said. “I took it all.”
And when he didn’t, the darkness returned. With no medical professional on the Islands able to provide an answer, he flew back to UCLA, doing one bizarre test after the next, discovering, after a few days, that it was a bacterial infection rare and obscure enough that Hendrik doesn’t even remember the name. What he did know is that his vision would never fully return, to what he now estimates at about 20 percent of what it was.
“I didn’t know if I could even play properly again,” he said. “I was an outside hitter and an opposite and I needed to pass and the way guys serve in indoor, it’s hard to do if you have limited vision.”
He missed the remainder of his sophomore 2015 season, returning home to Norway where he’d relearn how to play the game on the setting that raised him: the beach.
“I relearned how to do stuff with beach because it’s slower than indoor,” he said. “I started to regain confidence in my game.”
For a while at Hawaii, Hendrik had to wear an eye patch, and since he wasn’t playing, he didn’t have to adhere to the strict rules forbidding facial hair. He grew his beard long. Lifted heavier and heavier weights. With that eye patch, swollen muscles, and a long beard, Hendrik began to resemble something of a viking himself.
“The boys loved,” he said, laughing. “I looked badass.”
And then he exchanged his eye patch for clunky, oversized goggles, and the badassery was gone. If he couldn’t look badass, then, he’d simply build it another way. He figured that while it’s awfully inconvenient to lose 80 percent of your vision, the recovery was actually little more than a simple math problem.
“If I have 80 percent less vision, can I get 20 percent stronger?” he said. “Twenty percent smarter?”
He hit the beach and weights that summer, and it paid off immediately, vision be damned. Now stronger, with a higher vertical and hits that sizzled a good deal harder, moving with more explosiveness and fluidity, he started every match as a junior, switching to middle blocker. The next year, he started all 32 matches, finished No. 15 in the country in blocks per set, led the team in hitting percentage, and was named All-American.
“That,” he said, “was a big battle won.”
It was only the first.
“We were aware it’s not normal to do that.”
Many will be surprised by the story of Hendrik Mol’s eyesight, or lackthereof. On the surface, it doesn’t seem to have limited him in any way. When he and Mathias Berntsen began playing full-time on the FIVB — now Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour — they slowly worked their way up the rankings, making the occasional top-10 in a three-star tournament, upsetting teams here, absorbing setbacks there. It was a very normal learning curve, though one made to seem as if there were no curve at all when being compared to the meteoric moonshot of Anders Mol and Christian Sorum.
In the span of a month bridging July and August of 2018, Anders and Sorum won majors in Gstaad, Vienna, and Hamburg, raking in more than $200,000 as a team, flying up the world rankings faster than any team in recent memory, possibly faster than any in history.
“Their rise went fast,” Hendrik said. “They had the skills, the question was just confidence, and that’s something you have to build by beating good teams. We had a more normal learning curve. Usually when you get to your 30s that’s when you begin peaking. Anders and Christian had a freak curve to the top but we’ve been steadily making progress as a team and as long as you’re making progress it’s a lot of fun to play this game.
“We were aware it’s not normal to do that. I’ve never seen another team do that.”
They plugged away, partly obscured by the enormous shadow cast by Anders and Sorum, though the same could be said for every other team on the planet. Fifths in Turkey and Edmonton, a main draw at the 2019 World Tour Finals in Rome, another fifth at the 2020 European Championships — all growth. While it was unlikely for Hendrik and Berntsen to qualify, via points, for the Tokyo Olympics — which had been moved to 2021 due to COVID-19 — it was still possible to do so through the Continental Cup, the competition process by which a European federation is granted an Olympic berth.
In May of 2021, Hendrik and Berntsen were set to travel from their training camp in the Canary Islands to Madrid, which was hosting that phase of the Continental Cup. At the time, negative COVID tests were still required to travel. This wasn’t a problem, as none of the Norwegians were sick or showing any signs of it.
Until Anders tested positive.
As close contacts, this limited Hendrik and Berntsen from traveling as well. They contacted medical staff in Norway, asking if it could be a false positive, if perhaps Anders should test again.
They were told false positives didn’t exist. Impossible. Anders had COVID. That was that. Anders thought otherwise, taking a follow-up test the next morning, a test that showed he was negative.
Too late.
They’d already been pulled from the tournament.
Had Anders re-tested that night, they’d have had time to travel.
“If we had acted fast, we could have competed,” Hendrik wrote on social media afterwards. “I spent ages preparing for that tournament, yet I didn’t ask for a second opinion? I couldn’t believe myself.”
Subs were called in at the last minute to replace Hendrik and Berntsen and Anders and Sorum. Admirable though their effort was, they lost, losing the potential of a second Olympic bid with them.
“Devastatingly unfair,” is how Hendrik described it then.
Yet, like many high performers, he didn’t let a good problem go to waste. He allowed it to reshape how he viewed sports and, by extension, the world.
“Success,” he wrote, “is a culmination of talent, hard work, and a certain reliance on the conditions that will enable it all to happen. One should be prepared for that. Injuries will happen. Pro sports is unforgiving and uncertain. There are things you cannot control in life and that’s OK. Focus no what you can control and let go of anything else. Find other things in life that matter, that’ll complement your well-being. Don’t let your sport solely define you as a human being.
“At the end of it all, I realize that I am healthy, I have been blessed with a strong and supportive family and I am lucky to live in a country of opportunity. There are far worse places in the world to be right now. At this very moment, I have decided to never give a f*** about the Olympic Games ever again. Instead, I will work on stabilizing my level of play so that I can have more fun those four years in between.”
Funny thing, what happened next. You can probably guess.
Hendrik Mol and Mathias Berntsen began playing the best volleyball of their lives.
In 2022, for the first time in history, two Norwegian teams competed in the World Championships. Two events later, Hendrik and Berntsen made their first final, winning silver in a Challenge in Agadir, Morocco. They’d close the season on back-to-back fifths in Elite16s. Two more medals found their way back to Norway in 2023 — bronze in Itapema, silver in Edmonton.
“Those COVID years we were forced to train with Anders and Christian a lot and I think we learned a lot over that period of time,” Hendrik said. “We had a good season in 2019 but it’s like we hit the post in soccer and it goes out instead of going in. But 2022, we started getting confidence. When you start beating teams who are good, there are so many games that go 15-13, and when you start making it 15-13 as opposed to 13-15, that’s the biggest change in the confidence.”
They are currently ranked No. 30 in the world, No. 26 in the Olympic rankings. If the Olympics were to happen today, they’d be the last team in. But remember: Hendrik doesn’t give a f*** about that. Many say it but don’t mean it. Hendrik means it, down to his very core. He cares, yes. But no longer is it everything to him. Such is the perspective of a man who nearly lost his sight, who has seen the weight of an Olympic gold carried by his own brother.
There is no denying that it was a monumental achievement when Anders and Sorum won gold in Tokyo, putting a wonderful exclamation point on the dream Anders and Berntsen drew up as high schoolers in 2015. There is no denying it is the pinnacle of achievement in beach volleyball. No denying it’s a lovely story, Norway — Norway! — winning an Olympic gold in beach volleyball.
It is also a bit of a façade.
In the wake of Anders and Sorum winning gold, when the money should be pouring in, the media tour in full force, the attention lavished upon the sport’s golden boys, the Norwegian federation lost four sponsors.
“It was a weird feeling for our team after the Olympics,” Hendrik said.
The popular Beach Volley Vikings social media accounts slowed to a crawl. A strange lethargy set in, the bill for the burnout, of pushing and pushing and pushing for six years, coming due, with interest.
“A lot of people in our sport are very geared to the Olympics and it doesn’t last that long, it’s just three weeks of joy, fun to be a part of,” Hendrik said. “It’s become a label and it’s almost too big of a thing for athletes in our sport. For me, it took the focus away from having fun, playing and enjoying the sport and being young and having a body that works well. Those small things are the ones that you encounter the most and it should be cherished a lot too. If it turns out you’re that good and you do those little things so well that you make the Olympics, so be it, that’s cool, it’s a nice highlight but if you suffer for those four years leading up to it, that’s terrible, what’s the point?”
The point is to be those high school kids in 2015, talking about fjords and mountains and vikings and legends of Norway’s past and how they could meld it with beach volleyball. It’s dreaming, and seeing, tasting, touching those dreams. It’s traveling the world, playing a game on the sand. It’s discovering a new breakfast burrito spot in Hermosa Beach, a coach who makes songs on the road. It’s the in-between that Hendrik and Berntsen know is the true heart and soul of the game, not the three-week Olympic pedestal upon which it is thrust every four years.
“I could go on a boat in Norway and fish for three months and make shit tons of money but we love beach volleyball,” Berntsen said. “We have passion for it and it’s a nice lifestyle.”
