Dain Blanton looks around some days at practice and, like David Byrne of the Talking Heads, wonders, how did I get here?
He is one of the most surprising gold medalists of all time. No collegiate head coach experience. And yet, here he is, one of the most successful sand volleyball coaches in West Coast history. And he’s only just getting started.
Blanton is entering his fifth season as coach of the Southern Cal sand volleyball team. His team has boasted a 165-15 record over three full seasons; his first season ended 6-5, cut short due to the pandemic. SC has won three straight NCAA championships.
As a coach, he’s a silent leader, pacing USC’s beach courts on Figueroa Street. Sometimes he even takes a seat in the shade to talk to another coach, trusting his players can handle themselves.
“We know if coach is talking to us, it’s big,” Delaynie Maple said. “He sees something.”
The senior has been at USC for all but 11 games of Blanton’s head coaching career and said she has grown as much as a player under Blanton as he has grown as a coach. Throughout all of it, Maple said Blanton has remained committed to molding his players into the athletes and people they aspire to be.
Never having coached collegiately before aside from a few volunteer assistant years at USC from 2015 to 2017, Blanton has stepped into his self-described “dream job” at USC. His commute to work is 20 minutes, his office is 50 yards from the courts and the support he feels from USC is unmatched.
His journey to get there, however, has been far from easy.
Blanton grew up in Laguna Beach around two older brothers who were constantly playing sports. When he was 11, older brother Kurt showed him beach volleyball for the first time.
“I wanted to do everything that they did and compete,” Blanton said, emphasizing the last word.
As Dain got older, he focused his efforts on volleyball and basketball, earning offers from various colleges in both sports. With beach volleyball neither a collegiate sport nor an Olympic sport at the time, Blanton elected to focus his efforts on indoor, joining Pepperdine, a smaller Division I school a little more than an hour up the coast from his hometown.
He chose Pepperdine because of its small-school feel and because of the opportunity to be coached by someone who had been to the Olympics before, Marv Dunphy, who coached the 1988 U.S. men’s indoor team to a gold medal.
As a sophomore, Blanton helped lead his squad to win the 1992 national championship; as a senior, he was named All-American. He still holds the career record at his alma mater for digs per set (2.3); he previously held the record for career total digs (707).
As a player, Blanton held his teammates to a high level of excellence, pushing those around him to improve every day, Dunphy said.
“If a teammate did not meet that standard, there was hell to pay,” Dunphy said. “But it was a good hell. That’s who he was.
“I had to match the standard that he wanted, and he made me a better coach.”
Despite his collegiate indoor success, Blanton always had beach volleyball in the back of his mind. When he wasn’t in class, at practice or doing homework, he was on the sand.
Because of this, he knew he wanted to become an Olympian someday. There was, however, just one problem: beach volleyball wasn’t an Olympic sport yet.
“I didn’t think that I would have the opportunity,” Blanton said, “but I knew that that was the sport I wanted to play.”
Two years after Blanton graduated, beach was added to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
Although he hadn’t established himself enough before the Atlanta Games, Dain started preparing for the next Olympics, joining the Association of Volleyball Professionals tour shortly thereafter in hopes of finding a partner who he could succeed with.
When he found Kent Steffes, winner of the 1996 beach gold, he thought everything was set. But when Steffes announced his sudden retirement in April 1999, Blanton was left scrambling to find a new partner – and fast.
At the same time, Eric Fonoimoana lost his partner due to injury. The only logical thing to do, Dain said, was to try to play together again and see if they clicked.
This was their second partnership. The duo lost all 26 matches they played together less than two years before that.
This time, however, the way they worked together was much different, according to Fonoimoana.
“I was going to find someone where we had good chemistry, and I knew they were hungry to win like I was,” Fonoimoana said. “When Dain was available, I knew he was hungry.”
The duo later defeated Adam Johnson and Karch Kiraly – an American volleyball legend with two indoor gold medals, and Steffes’ beach partner in the 1996 Games – to qualify for the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
“Hey, take a lot of pictures, have a good time,” Blanton recalled being told as he and Fonoimoana left for Australia.
“Basically, what they were saying is, don’t get your hopes up too much,” Blanton said. “But Eric and I had different plans.”
Dain and Eric came into those Olympics ranked ninth in the 24-team field, which essentially meant they “weren’t supposed to be there,” according to Fonoimoana. That resulted in the No. 7-ranked U.S.-team of Kevin Wong and Robert Heidger Jr,. along with the two-standout female American duos, getting most of the media attention. Blanton and Fonoimoana were left to play in the shadows.
“That might have been a chip on our shoulder, but it was more of, like: ‘That’s fine. We have to prove ourselves anyway,’” Fonoimoana said.
Blanton said he and Fonoimoana played “one match at a time, one point at a time,” not focusing on outside noise.
“If we got momentum, we were confident enough that we could beat teams,” Fonoimoana said.
After beating Germany, Norway, the other Americans and Portugal, the unlikely Americans qualified for the gold-medal match and took on the third-ranked Brazilian duo of Zé Marco de Melo and Ricardo Santo, a team Blanton and Fonoimoana had lost to all four times they’d faced off previously.
This time, however, was the only match that truly mattered, and the undersized Americans took it in straight sets.
Dain’s and Eric’s execution that year still stands as one of the greatest Olympic beach performances in history, marking the only time a team seeded outside of the top three has won gold since it became an Olympic sport.
“It was a big surprise to a lot of people, but it was pretty cool to play your best volleyball when your best volleyball was needed,” Blanton said, adding that it was surely the “biggest upset of all time in beach volleyball Olympic history.”
Between Dain’s return to the Olympics in 2004 and coaching at USC, Blanton took a different approach to sport than he was used to: he became a broadcaster.
He started out announcing high school football games before moving up to Dodgers and Angels pre- and post-game coverage. In 2008, Blanton became the Clippers’ sideline reporter. He did that for five years.
Meanwhile, he started at USC as volunteer assistant coach under highly touted head coach Anna Collier.
When Collier left USC after the 2019 season, Blanton knew he had to have the job.
With the volleyball resume that he has, it would have been pretty easy for Blanton to get into coaching in the professional or Olympic ranks. That, however cool it might sound, did not appeal to Dain.
“Coaching one duo isn’t that attractive to me,” Blanton said.
Instead, Dain said he enjoys coaching 15 or more players at a time and enjoys the NCAA beach schedule in its best-of-five format compared to the professional ranks’ straight-bracket format. In addition, he also enjoys being close to home for once in his career compared to the constant travel associated with coaching professionals.
Beyond Dain’s love of the program, his players said the feeling is mutual.
“Having him as a coach is a really special experience because he knows how to push people to be the best people, the best players on and off the court that they can be,” sophomore Madison White said.
The Trojans look to continue their winning ways as they kick off the upcoming season in February.
“It’s just a fascinating sport, and I think that SC is at the epicenter of it all,” Blanton said. “We pride ourselves on being the best organization, and we’ve been able to do it so far.”