Americans Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss are achieving unprecedented heights in beach volleyball — a particularly impressive feat considering they have the biggest height differential in the sport's Olympic history.
Nuss is just 5-foot-6, ten inches shorter than her partner. Kloth is equally unlikely as a beach volleyball Olympian, having hailed from the land-locked state of South Dakota, 1,600 miles and a world away from the hotbed of the sport on the beaches of Southern California. The pair lives and trains in New Orleans, the first team to represent the United States that doesn't have a connection to the Golden State.
In almost every sense, the road that Team TKN, as the former LSU stars branded themselves when they turned pro, has taken to get to the 2024 Paris Games is well off the beaten path.Heading into the Summer Olympics, the pair hasn’t gotten quite the same level of attention outside the sport as their fellow Americans, Sarah Hughes and Kelly Cheng, but they have made a career out of defying the odds. Kloth and Nuss, whose motto is “rewrite the script” (on beach volleyball), have done just that.
Team TKN entered the Summer Games as the No. 2 ranked team in the world behind the Brazilian powerhouse of Ana Patricia and Duda. They kicked off the Group B competition proving they deserve that status.
TKN cruised to a 2-0 victory (21-17, 21-14) over the strong Canadian team of Heather Bansley and Sophie Bukovec Saturday to open up their Olympic run, then followed that up with another 2-0 win (21-16, 21-16) against Australia's Mariafe Artacho Del Solar and Taliqua Clancy on Monday.
No Hollywood screenwriter, however, could have written a believable script about what the 26-year-old Nuss and the 27-year-old Kloth have managed to achieve since turning pro in 2021. The secret seems to be their chemistry as teammates, business partners, roommates and best friends.
“We always say we would both rather give up volleyball than lose our friendship and sisterhood,” Kloth Said
Nuss' Height
Nuss, considered one of the best beach volleyball defenders in the world, is also the shortest player to represent the U.S. in the sport at the Olympics since 5-foot-6 Barbara Fontana did so in the inaugural year of the event at the 1996 Olympic Games.
So, Nuss is used to the double takes she gets from across the net.
“I do have a little chip on my shoulder that I gotta do it for all the 5-6ers out there watching,” Nuss told Volleyball magazine in March.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Nuss led her high school, Mount Carmel Academy to three indoor volleyball and two basketball state championships.
She played beach volleyball in whatever tournaments she could as a teen in a state that wasn’t exactly known for the sport, telling the Associated Press that “we would almost have to beg other teams to play in tournaments so we could have a junior tournament.”
At LSU, opponents quickly learned to stop underestimating her because of her size: With 139 victories, Nuss finished her collegiate career as the all-time winningest beach volleyball player in NCAA history.
Where is Kloth from?
Growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a state where even indoor volleyball didn’t get much national exposure, Kloth led her high school, Sioux Falls O’Gorman, to two state championships and her club team to a national championship.
Kloth’s prowess on the indoor court led to an offer from Nebraska's Creighton University, which she led to four consecutive Big East titles and four NCAA tournament appearances.
Graduating from Creighton, Kloth ended up transferring to LSU to try her hand at beach volleyball as a graduate student. After some early struggles adjusting to a very different game, Kloth helped LSU to a No. 1 ranking during the 2020 season – right up until Covid abruptly ended play and the school’s title dream.
That time away from competition, however, is what ultimately brought the duo together.
“I called Kristin and I asked her if she would train if I came back down,” Kloth told Women’s Health. “And so that's what we did with all of our excess time. We just trained and trained and trained.”
That training helped Kloth and Nuss thrive together in several outside tournaments during the hiatus. They were paired together for LSU’s 2021 season as the program’s top team and dominated over a 36-0 run.
Kloth and Nuss' Journey to the Olympics
After their historic 2021 season at LSU, Kloth and Nuss decided to turn pro, dubbing themselves Team TKN as a combination of the initials in both their names.
For Kloth's 24th birthday that year, Nuss gifted her partner and herself with matching anklets inscribed with the date 8-11-24, the day they envisioned being crowned Olympic gold medalists in three years.
TKN would opt to stay to train in New Orleans instead of heading for California, the standard destination for those serious about flourishing in the sport. Staying in Louisiana would be cheaper and allow them to continue to train with their coach, LSU assistant Drew Hamilton.
Still, all 32 beach volleyball teams that the U.S. had sent to the Olympics to compete for gold in the sport to date featured a connection to the Golden State.
At least until Kloth and Nuss broke that streak.
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Since turning pro the duo became determined to take home a gold in the 2024 Paris Games, but they were starting with zero ranking points, making it hard to qualify for the level of tournaments they would need to have the longest of shots to achieve that goal.
Kloth and Nuss pooled money to enter a tournament in Australia, in March 2022, despite the unlikelihood of success as the last qualifier. They left as surprising champions.
But they didn’t win over critics.
"Former Olympians were on podcasts being like 'Yeah, I don't know how they're gonna do it. They really should probably split up'...It wasn't just like random people. It was very important people in the sport being like, 'I don't know if you guys can do it," Nuss told NBC Sports.
Team TKN didn’t listen.
Instead, they continued to roll and rack up ranking points and titles in 2023. That year, they medaled in seven tournaments, the most in one year since legendary American duo Kerry Walsh Jennings and April Ross in 2016. They capped their year by winning the beach pro tour finals in December, earning them a No. 2 FIVB ranking. Kloth and Nuss notched enough points to represent Team USA this year — with three months left in the qualifying period to spare.
Kloth got engaged earlier this year, but her fiancé knows that wedding planning has to wait until after Paris. The focus, as it has been for the last three years, is solely on bringing home the gold to Louisiana.
“Every single time I listen to the National Anthem, I 100 percent picture myself on that podium with my hand over my heart and seeing that American flag line up,” Nuss said in a documentary the team released in late March, after the news broke.
“Right under the Eiffel Tower,” added Kloth.
