Florida State University Women's Beach Volleyball

Entering her 11th season at Florida State in the 2026 season, head coach Brooke Niles has developed the Florida State beach volleyball program into one of the top teams in the country. The NCAA's all-time wins leader, Niles and the Seminoles have played in all nine NCAA Championships, with three runner-up finishes and seven Coastal Collegiate Sports Association (CCSA) conference championships. With six wins over AVCA top-10 teams in 2025, Niles has led the Seminoles to 98 top-10 wins in her tenure. While building a national powerhouse in Tallahassee, Niles has coached 19 AVCA All-Americans, two CCSA Pairs of the Year, five CCSA Freshmen of the Year, and 24 All-CCSA performers. The 2016 AVCA National Coach of the Year, Niles is a four-time CCSA Coach of the Year, including back-to-back honors in 2024 and 2025. In the classroom, the Seminoles have flourished under Niles guidance and annually earns one of the top grade point averages across the Florida State athletics department. In 2025, Carra Sassack became Florida State's first beach volleyball player to win the Elite 90 award, presented to the student-athlete with the highest cumulative GPA at the finals site for each of the NCAA's 90 championships. Niles has coached six CCSA Scholar-Athletes of the Year, 73 ACC Academic Honor Roll recipients and three Weaver-James-Corrigan Postgraduate Scholarship winners. Paige Kalkhoff was an Academic All-American in 2023. Niles was hired as the Seminoles’ beach volleyball head coach on J

Nick Lucena, who has competed in the Olympic Games twice during his playing career, enters his fifth season as an assistant coach for the Florida State beach...

Travis Mewhirter enters his second season as an assistant coach with Florida State for the 2026 season. A seasoned professional beach volleyball player, Mewhirter began his beach volleyball career in 2015 on the AVP Pro Beach Tour in New Orleans. Since then, Mewhirter has finished in the top five of AVP Tournaments on four separate occasions. He also won four medals in the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour while representing the United States. Mewhirter graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in journalism and began his career as a journalist for multiple news sources, where he wrote about collegiate sports. He then discovered beach volleyball in the panhandle of Florida, quickly developing a deep passion for the sport. He moved to Southern California where he could train and write about beach volleyball, eventually joining the AVP Tour. Mewhirter was hired as an assistant coach at Florida State on August 9, 2024. In his first season, he helped lead the Seminoles to a 26-13 record, their eighth appearance in the CCSA Championship match, and a second consecutive NCAA Tournament quarterfinals berth. On February 19, 2025, he launched SandyNoles: An FSU Beach Volleyball Podcast, a podcast covering FSU Beach Volleyball, where he shares insights and conversations with coaches and players. The Baltimore native fused his experiences of playing professional beach volleyball with his background in journalism to publish three books about beach volleyball, multiple stories