Two Years Off The Sand
After the 2016 Olympic qualifying season, Tri Bourne spent two years away from the sand. The reason was not injury or a scheduling decision — it was an auto-immune disease that forced him to step back from competition entirely and rebuild from a very different starting line.
Those two seasons away reshaped how he approached the game that had defined his life. The court looked different when you had stepped completely away from it, and the sport came back into sharper focus because of the time spent without it.
The Comeback
The return came in August 2018, when Bourne took a gold medal in China — his first World Tour title and the moment that announced his comeback to the international circuit. On August 16, 2018, he competed at the Manhattan Beach Open with partner Trevor Crabb, his first tournament since winning bronze with John Hyden at the FIVB World Tour Finals in September 2016.
Illness kept Tri Bourne off the sand for two years — but he marked his comeback to the World Tour with a gold medal in China. Beach Majorseries · “Golden return for Tri Bourne”
New Perspective
Coming back with a more sound body and a renewed perspective, the goal was never simply to return to the line-up. It was to play the kind of volleyball that a two-year interruption had made possible to think about clearly.
Follow the written coverage of the comeback in In The News, or get in touch through the contact page.
The health section of this site follows the arc of Tri Bourne's career beyond competition: a Hawaii-born professional beach volleyball player whose two-year absence from the sand was spent fighting an auto-immune disease rather than recovering from a routine injury. Rather than framing the story as a highlight reel of wins, the page centers on resilience, the physical cost of elite sport, and the shift in perspective that came from rebuilding from a different starting line. It reads as an editorial chapter, with the same photography-led, airy layout used elsewhere on the site, connecting Tri's personal story to the wider world of beach volleyball and the podcast he hosts, SANDCAST.