Overview:
Katie Spieler and cousin Torrey Van Winden show strong family ties with a seventh-place finish at AVP’s Manhattan Beach Open
Katie Spieler has traveled high and low throughout her life in volleyball.
She ventured into the Austrian Alps to compete in Europe’s 3v3 Snow Volleyball Tour of 2018 — a circuit which also featured frosty forays to Italy, Argentina and even Russia.
Spieler braved the blistering sands of the Arabian Peninsula 10 months later while helping the United States win the gold medal in 4v4 women’s volleyball at the 2019 World Beach Games in Qatar.
She refused to shut down even during the most paralyzing days of COVID-19 in 2020.
Spieler, Dos Pueblos High School’s 2012 Scholar-Athlete of the Year, simply scaled the nearest heights with older sister Cara and danced the pandemic away.
“Not just your average dancing, but on a rock in the mountains,” she said at the time. “And we just loved it because right when we got up there, dancing on our own, all we could hear was the music, nature … and you had this amazing view of Santa Barbara.
“In that moment, dancing on the rock for the first time, I just thought, ‘Wow! This is what life is!’”
It was the start of a roaming dance party that took the sisters and their friends to such rustic, “out-of-the-box” discotheques as a shipwreck.
Spieler always enjoyed twirling to the beat of a different drummer … whether it be tending to the family beehives or to a vat of some home-brewed kombucha.
But her stratospherically free spirit hasn’t kept her from becoming one of the most grounded leaders of the Santa Barbara volleyball world.
Spieler was still living in Hermosa Beach, in the thick of her AVP pro beach volleyball career, when she and Dana Kabashima started the East Beach Volleyball Academy.
“I’d drive to Santa Barbara to coach the club and then drive back down to Hermosa to train,” she recalled. “The club really just grew organically.”
It’s been offering structured training with monthly tournaments for kids age 8 to 18 since 2017. Adult classes are also provided.
“These are things that really weren’t in place when I was a kid,” Spieler said. “I’d just go down to East (Beach) and pick up games — which is something we encourage all the kids to do, as well.
“We have a lot of fun and, obviously, East Beach is gorgeous year-round. So we thought, ‘Hey this is a perfect spot to do year-round beach volleyball.’”
Spieler has directed her latest efforts into rallying the community to persuade UC Santa Barbara to start an intercollegiate beach volleyball program.
She’s already solicited nearly $34,000 in pledges.
“This town is a beach volleyball powerhouse and has a huge support system already,” she told Noozhawk.
“It is the perfect town to have college beach volleyball, and we know UCSB could contend for a national championship in this sport if they get a program.”
Playtime at the Beach
East Beach was a personal sandbox for the Spieler girls and brother Cory. Their parents, Paul and Kathy Strand Spieler, have been fixtures on the local beach scene for ages.
Mom brought them to her pickup games when they were just toddlers.
“She had a group that played together every Wednesday for 30 years,” Katie said. “By the time I was 4 —and could stand and move and contact the ball — I was bugging her to pass back and forth with me in between her games.
“She said I was really into it.”
Kathy Strand Spieler and her two sisters —twins Lisa and Kelly — all played indoor volleyball at Santa Barbara High during the 1980s.
Brother Warren was Karch Kiraly’s teammate on the Dons’ team that won the CIF Southern Section championship in 1978.
Lisa earned All-America honors twice while leading the University of Hawai‘i to successive NCAA championships in 1982 and 1983.
Kelly was a first-team all-leaguer for a Cal Poly team that she helped elevate into the national rankings in 1984.
They both married star athletes they met in college — Kelly to Jim Van Winden, a towering basketball all-leaguer for the Mustangs, and Lisa to volleyball All-American Pono Ma’a.
Katie has been playing on the AVP Tour with cousin Torrey Van Winden the last two years, but pick-up volleyball has been the main event of family gatherings for several decades.
“We have so many cousins that we’d play one-on-one volleyball in my backyard all day long when they’d come to Santa Barbara,” Spieler said. “We still get out there and play in the backyard at Christmas or whenever we get together.
“And it’s not only the cousins, but it’s my mom and her sisters and brother, too. They get out there and play, too … and love it.”
Whiz Kid
Spieler was 8 when she signed up for Jon Lee’s beach volleyball camp. She entered her first tournament a year later and earned the coveted triple-A beach rating by the tender age of 15.
Her game rose to starring heights even though she only grew to be just a shade under 5-foot-6.
She held court, nevertheless, by combining acrobatic defense with a deft passing touch. She has also long confounded opponents with a crafty arsenal of well-placed shots and serves.
Although the CIF didn’t start sanctioning beach volleyball as a high school sport until 2022 — a decade after Spieler’s graduation from Dos Pueblos — she did help the Chargers’ indoor team win the section’s 1A championship in 2009.
She got the Chargers to the CIF-SS semifinals in 2010 and was the senior captain, MVP and star libero of their third-straight Channel League championship team during the fall of 2011.
Spieler also won a gold medal with the Santa Barbara Volleyball Club’s U18 team at that summer’s Junior Nationals.
It was a bittersweet day for DP coach Todd Garrett when she graduated.
“She’s just a joy to coach,” he said at the time. “Katie’s taught me some life lessons and so much about volleyball.”
Spieler played on the beach volleyball team at the University of Hawai‘i. She, like aunt Lisa, won All-America honors twice with the Rainbow Warriors.
Her 102 match victories set the school record. She was nominated for the NCAA Woman of the Year Award in 2016.
She looks back now at age 29 and concedes, “My big dream when I was younger was to play on the AVP Tour, and it’s been so cool that I’ve been able to live up to that.”
Getting Pro-Active
She made that big jump at age 19 in 2014 when she and partner Delaney Knudsen Mewhirter qualified for the main draw at the tour’s marquee event: the Manhattan Beach Open.
She relished their first-round matchup against Kerri Walsh Jennings, already a three-time Olympic gold medalist, and future Olympic champion April Ross.
“We definitely got smoked — I think we broke like 21-12 one game,” Spieler said with a laugh. “But it was a lot of fun to play the No. 1 team.
“It’s the biggest tournament of the year. All the greats are always there, gunning to get their name on the pier.
“I love those tournaments with all the traditions and the big draws that you have to grind through. It’s kind of the old-school feel of the 32-team draw.”
She had climbed near the top of the AVP ladder by 2018, taking third in Austin and fifth in Hermosa Beach with partner Karissa Cook.
They capped that year’s schedule by joining fellow AVP stars Katie Hartong and Allie Wheeler on the European Volleyball Federation’s Snow Volleyball Tour.
They won the Moscow event by sweeping all five of their matches, taking down the hometown Russians in a hotly contested final.
“It was so much fun — I just loved it,” Spieler said. “I actually think the team we had was pretty perfect for the randomness of snow volleyball.
“They were actually making a big push to include the sport in the Winter Olympics (for 2026 in Italy).
“I’m not sure if COVID put a halt to that or whatever, but it really seemed to die out after those four events.”
Homecoming
Her career took another turn two years later when she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee.
“I moved back to Santa Barbara and have been here ever since,” Spieler said.
She returned with a masters’ degree in accounting and a CPA license in hand.
The draw of family, however, took her in another direction.
Spieler chose to join Mom in the real estate business with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices.
“It was very organic in how it grew,” she said. “I’m pretty full time now with her in real estate and I still run the clubs in the afternoons, so it’s a good mix of those.
“My training schedule and playing looks a lot different now, but it was really fun this summer to go play at Manhattan Beach and have a good finish.”
She and Van Winden navigated the grind of Manhattan Beach for a seventh-place finish. They won seven of nine matches — three in the qualifying rounds and four more in the contender’s bracket after losing in the first round of the main draw.
“The first time I played with Torrey was at the Santa Barbara Open when she was 15,” said Spieler, who was 19 at the time. “She had barely played in tournaments on the beach at that age, but from that moment there was an instant chemistry.
“A lot of that is because we’re cousins … and really more like sisters. We’ve grown up really close.
“But our games also work just so well together.”
Van Winden and her older sister, Adlee, who also starred in volleyball at Cal Poly, both moved to Santa Barbara last year.
“Torrey and I get in more training now than ever before, although we don’t necessarily need it,” Spieler said. “Our games just really click.
“She’s tall (6-foot-3) but she has ball control, although I’m obviously trying to set her up on two a lot.”
Going with the Gauchos
They train early in the morning before heading to their jobs. And yet, Spieler still carved out enough time to join Zack Kass in organizing the push for intercollegiate beach volleyball at UCSB.
UCSB officials decided against adding beach volleyball when the NCAA sanctioned the sport in 2016.
A change in both athletic director and women’s indoor coach, however, convinced Spieler to begin her campaign last year.
She enlisted Cal Poly beach coach Todd Rogers — a Gaucho All-American and Olympic beach gold medalist — and UCSB women’s indoor coach Matt Jones to join her in a meeting with Kelly Barsky, the university’s new A.D.
“Kelly’s message was, ‘We don’t have enough resources currently to support our student-athletes like we want so how would we start another sport?’” Spieler said.
“UCSB doesn’t want to see just $30,000 or $50,000, they want to see enough raised that will basically suffice as an endowment for 10 years.”
They are aiming to raise $3 million, although Spieler hopes UCSB would let it get started with a smaller amount and trimmed-down budget.
“Matt’s been super-supportive, saying that he’d let us use some of his indoor players,” Spieler said. “There’s such a crossover there, and I think that could be done pretty seamlessly.
“And then court-wise, I think we could use East Beach. We could use Goleta Beach, too — it has three courts. So there wouldn’t be too much money spent there.”
Spieler brought together all of the Santa Barbara’s heavy hitters in volleyball for a fund-raising event last November.
“It was actually way more successful than I foresaw,” she said. “So many legendary people came out.
“It was just the best feel of old-school players, current players, young kids … It was just this amazing community that came out.
“We all know there’s the support but we’re just struggling a little bit now trying to figure out how to get enough money to present to UCSB, and for it to be so good that they can’t say no.”
French Connection
Spieler watched with personal interest this summer when the sport was featured on sport’s biggest stage: The Olympic Games in Paris.
Cousin Micah Ma’a, a setter and serving specialist, won a bronze medal with Team USA in men’s indoor volleyball.
Former DP schoolmate Miles Evans, meanwhile, won two of the five matches he played with Chase Budinger in the men’s beach volleyball event.
But Spieler is not one to pine over what could have been for her.
“It was just a treat to watch that athleticism and the talent on both sides at the Olympics — it was just through the roof on the beach volleyball side,” she said. “I’m not missing my days in Hermosa or Manhattan, either.
“I’m just stoked to be able to train here with great players around — like my cousin, Torrey — and coach in the community I love.
“I wouldn’t trade my involvement in Santa Barbara for anything.”
Spieler will even sneak off into the local hills “for a dance once in a while.”
The view is pretty nice from her own Mount Olympus.
